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JIM HEINEMAN - Spirited away Feb.6/24
Jim Heineman was born and bred in New York City and grew up in the heart of the entertainment industry. His father was William J Heineman a self made man who produced the first major civil rights movie “The Jackie Robinson Story” and helped save United Artist Pictures from “going bust”; becoming the vice president of marketing by the time Jim was born. Jim was the last of eight children and because his mother was ill and therefore hospitalized for two years following his birth; an African American nanny was hired. He spent hours on her knee while she played and sang gospel songs at the piano.
For his fourteenth birthday he asked his father to take him to the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre to see the “Big Rock’n Roll Show” but instead was taken to the “ Big Jazz Show”. The lineup was Miles Davis and the Count Basie Big Band. This first experience of live jazz changed his life forever. With his new fake I.D in hand, he spent his weekends at the New York City jazz “hot spots” like the Village Vanguard, Slugs, Birdland, Village Gate and others, witnessing performances “at the feet of” revolutionary jazz greats such as John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Nina Simone, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley and Charles Mingus to name only a few.
Jim arrived in Toronto, Canada in 1963 and while getting a Liberal Arts degree at the University of Toronto, was the first person to bring live music concerts to Convocation Hall, sponsoring the greats Charles Lloyd, Donald Bird, Rolland Kirk, Sonny Rollins and a young Keith Jarrett, who was a side man for Charles Lloyd at the time, to perform between 1963 and 1966. He won two summer scholarships to study Arabic at Harvard and a summer at Berklee College of Music. He studied three years of music composition and theory with world-renowned musicologist Gordon Delmont , two years of classical flute with Virginia Markson, as well as one year of saxophone with the legendary Jackie McLean.
Jim has performed a wide range of styles. Much of his own music has a strong Latin influence. He has performed with top Latin Jazz bands including Rick Lazar & the Montuno Police,Memo Acevedo & Banda Brava as well as some of Cuba’s well known jazz artist Helario Duran .In 1997 he recorded with the late Tarig Abubakar & The Afro Nubians in the East and West African styles and toured across Canada. In 1998 he performed on Mark Hundevad’s album Spiritual Alignment with the late Rafe Malik of the Cecil Taylor Band in the avant garde style. He continues to play with Mark Hundevad's avant/garde/world beat jazz band Controlled Demolition. He has also performed with many blues artists including world-renowned Willie Dixon, Lonnie Johnson, Koko Taylor, Jackie & Betty Richardson, and Big Miller, and was interviewed in a documentary of Big’s life. He also played with R &B performers Steve Ambrose of the Lincolns, DJ Jones formerly of the James Brown Revue, Salome Bey, Shakura S’aida, Liberty Silver, Divine Brown as well as recorded with Dutch Robinson, former lead singer of The Ohio Players. In 1999 he won a Juno for his performance on Madagascar Slim’s debut album. In 2004 he was featured at the Distillery Jazz Festival with a six-piece ensemble. They performed his and Mark Hundevad’s polyphonic arrangement of Bach Cello Suite No.2 moving through a variety of musical rhythms, receiving a standing ovation for their performance.
Jim managed his own jazz club, The Strawberry Patch, in Yorkville during its cultural explosion in the sixties; employing a future mayor of Toronto as a waitress. He has played at countless spots in the greater Toronto area, including the Cotton Club, the El Mocambo, George’s Spaghetti House, Basin Street, Massey Hall, the Blue Note and the Top of the Senator to name only a few. Inspired by the memory of watching Thelonius Monk’s manager move a grand piano into a “dive”, turning it into the New York City jazz hot spot, the “Five Spot”; Jim and fellow band mate John T.Davis moved John T.’s Hammond B3 organ into the Rex Hotel for an audition. This resulted in a more than 80-week run as the first house band, putting the Rex Hotel on the map as Toronto’s own jazz hot spot. Toronto Star Entertainment Columnist Val Cleary wrote of the Jim Heineman /JohnT.Davis Quartet at the time, “This Band will knock your socks off”( April 1988)
Jim Heineman has been a mainstay of the Toronto jazz scene for decades. His sound and compositions reflect his impressive list of mentors, which include jazz legends, pianist Mary Lou Williams, bassist Ali Mohammed and saxophonists Rolland Kirk, George Coleman, James Moody and others. Jim often introduces fellow musicians Stacie McGreger and Mark Hundebad in his “dream band” as “Canada’s hidden treasures”, but this is no less true of Jim himself; a “musician’s musician who is well known amongst Toronto’s best but little known to the general Canadian public. With 40 years of professional experience, he brings live performance to a world-class level; his compositions, with their rich melodies and emphasis on “groove” have the same lasting power of the great standards of jazz.
Jim managed his own jazz club, The Strawberry Patch, in Yorkville during its cultural explosion in the sixties; employing a future mayor of Toronto as a waitress. He has played at countless spots in the greater Toronto area, including the Cotton Club, the El Mocambo, George’s Spaghetti House, Basin Street, Massey Hall, the Blue Note and the Top of the Senator to name only a few. Inspired by the memory of watching Thelonius Monk’s manager move a grand piano into a “dive”, turning it into the New York City jazz hot spot, the “Five Spot”; Jim and fellow band mate John T.Davis moved John T.’s Hammond B3 organ into the Rex Hotel for an audition. This resulted in a more than 80-week run as the first house band, putting the Rex Hotel on the map as Toronto’s own jazz hot spot. Toronto Star Entertainment Columnist Val Cleary wrote of the Jim Heineman /JohnT.Davis Quartet at the time, “This Band will knock your socks off”( April 1988)
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