Drake, Paul

Websites:  No
Origin: Montréal, Québec - Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Great cities are not defined by chambers of commerce. A good town has to be felt through its emotional life. Paris, after all, is not just a series of arrondissements: it’s the City of Light. Paul Drake could have reflected on this during his walks to work on rue du Colisée in Paris in 1962. He played the Gaslight Club in those days, direct from the Chez Ernest in Montreal or the Hilton in Athens or the Society Restaurant in London, or was it Jilly’s in New York City, or any number of urbane piano bars around the world where he played happily for a while never feeling quite at home.

Today, Paul Drake is to the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto what Mable Mercer is to the St. Régis and Bobby Short is to the Carlyle in Manhattan—he is a very special kind of institution.

The Club 22 of the Windsor Arms Hotel opened in 1964, at a time when the hotel itself, under the direction of George Minden, began changes that were to make it one of Canada’s great small hotels. Paul Drake had arrived in Toronto from Paris, France, with a new wife from Paris, Ontario, hoping to play the room for a few months. This small ambition turned into thirteen years, and a home if there ever was one.

The room has changed very little over the years—the Francois Dallagret drawings are still on the wall, the lighting is dim in deference to loving couples, Tommy is still the finest bartender in the city, the same waiters approach guests with impeccable tact, and Paul’s regulars, loyal in the extreme, grow in rabbit numbers even he finds hard to comprehend. What we have here is a very special kind of continuity—and continuity is a sure sign of maturity in the emotional life of a great city.

Paul Drake was born in Montreal in 1938. He can scarcely remember the time when he wasn’t an entertainer. Early influences of Johnny Mathis and Buddy Greco led ultimately to the more refined stylings of, among others, Cole Porter, Vernon Duke, Harold Arlen, Jimmy Webb, Peter Allen, Sy Coleman, and Alan Jay Lerner, not to mention Noël Coward and Stephen Sondheim.

In the 50s, he played to indiscriminating audiences in the Laurentians and came to deal with that. Not much later, while working the Beaumont Hotel in Palm Beach, he was approached by Barbara Vanderbilt to play one of her society soirées, and came to deal with that. Since good performers are popular in such circles, he was soon hired away by the Haskells and the Duponts for private parties anywhere between Palm Beach and Cape Cod. Once, he was flown to New York and taken to Wilmington, Delaware in a private railroad car to provide a Dupont gathering with a little entertainment.

Over the years, Paul Drake has come to accept the attentions of Katherine Hepburn, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Judy Garland, Gordon Lightfoot, Maggie Smith, John Lennon, Errol Garner, George Shearing, Prince Constantin and Princess Irene of Greece, and any number of celebrities who have passed through his world appreciatively and with no small amount of respect.

There has been a long measure of good and bad times that has led Paul Drake to his home at the 22. The reviewers like to call him “a seasoned performer.” But the secret of his success is the special relationship his music has to his audience. The 22, much in the tradition of a Manhattan piano lounge, is the kind of room that normally would call for a more fluid and restrained kind of piano than his own. But Paul Drake attacks his material instinctively, even aggressively. He brings to his music the kind of person he is and in this sense Paul Drake’s voice is very much his own.

Somewhere between the emotional intuitions of Paul Drake's performance and the yearnings of his audience is dialogue that on the right night reaches the proportions of communion. He has a talent for bringing many worlds into one room and sharing them with those who want to listen.

Above all, this is an album in celebration of love. Behind even its more despairing moments, there is an irrepressible optimism. The talents of sidemen Pat LaBarbera on sax, Hagood Hardy on vibes, Brian Russell on guitar, Eric Robertson on piano, and the lush strings under Matt McCauley add up to a polyphony that retains the character of Paul Drake at his best. What we have here is a record you can count on being around for a while. Paul Drake has found his place in the emotional life of his city.
-Tom Hedley