Émile Normand

Career Highlights

Émile Normand studied piano, trumpet, and vibraphone in Windsor and Detroit and played in a dance band led by his mother in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the late 1950s he worked in Detroit jazz clubs with Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd, and others.

Normand moved to Montreal in 1960 and was a central figure in that city's burgeoning jazz and studio scenes during the following decade. Normand accompanied many musicians (Nick Ayoub, Pierre Leduc, and Art Roberts, to name only a few) as a drummer and led his own groups (often combining Latin music and jazz) as a vibraphonist in jazz clubs and concerts in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. He was heard in both capacities on CBC radio's “Jazz en liberté.”

Normand was less active in jazz during the 1970s, working instead with the popular performers Georges Dor, André Gagnon, Pauline Julien, Claude Léveillée (with whom he toured in the USSR in 1968), and Monique Leyrac, and playing in theatre and ballet orchestras (e.g. for the Montreal production of Hair in 1970 and for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens on tour in the USA in 1972).

Returning intermittently to jazz in the 1980s, Normand was heard in local clubs and appeared at the Festival international de jazz de Montréal (FIJM): with the Michel Donato Quintet that won the Concours de jazz de Montréal in 1982, with Oscar Peterson in concert with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 1984, and as a member of groups led by Pepper Adams, Mose Allison, and Charles Papasoff in other years.

Normand has composed several pieces for his jazz groups (eg, Rudy and Me, Hustle, Basics Ingredients, Michel's Line, and S.T.P.) and was one of the first musicians in Canada (c. 1960) to play the then avant-garde compositions of the US saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

Normand has interrupted his career on several occasions to work outside of music. As a visual artist he has painted under contract to Eaton's of Canada.

Discography

• Émile Normand Ensemble (1969)
• Trio Pierre Nadeau (1970)