Jim O'Driscoll

Toronto oboist, English horn player and bandleader

Jimmy O'Driscoll worked in one of the busiest corners of Toronto's music trade, where a reed player might take a symphony call in the afternoon and a hotel floor show the same night. His instruments were the oboe and its darker, lower cousin, the English horn, and he doubled on alto saxophone, clarinet and flute. For a few years in the 1970s, CBC put his English horn in the spotlight.

His first professional job was a summer engagement with bandleader Howard Cable in Northern Ontario. From there his work spread in every direction open to a Toronto freelancer. He played with the symphony and with the ballet, and he worked in Dixieland bands, rock sessions and dance orchestras. By 1968 RPM was naming him among the city's leading session players on oboe and English horn, alongside Moe Koffman, Peter Appleyard and guitarist Jim Pirie.

O'Driscoll also led his own outfit. He put together a big band for the Canadian National Exhibition and called it Nice 'n' Easy, and its CNE sets caught the ear of CBC's Broadcast Recordings service. The result was a pair of 45s billed as The English Horn of Jim O'Driscoll, pressed for radio stations and never sold to the public. John Allison wrote the arrangements. LM 150 paired Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes's 'Chega de Saudade / No More Blues' with Gordon Lightfoot's 'If You Could Read My Mind', and LM 151 coupled 'I Don't Know How To Love Him' from Jesus Christ Superstar with Michel Legrand and Alan Bergman's 'What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life'. Both discs carried a broadcast expiry date of February 1, 1973, and CBC later remembered LM 150 as a popular release.

By the mid-1970s O'Driscoll was working for Howard Cable again, this time in the orchestra at the Imperial Room of Toronto's Royal York Hotel. In 1974 CBC recorded the Nice 'n' Easy band for LM 411, a broadcast LP issued the following year and shared with Priscilla, François Guy and Doug Steiger. The 19-piece lineup was stacked with the city's top studio players: Peter Appleyard on vibes, Norm Amadio on piano, Erich Traugott in the trumpet section, Ian McDougall among the trombones, and Bernie Piltch and Eugene Amaro beside O'Driscoll in the reeds. The sleeve called it "good, solid Big Band!" Allison arranged once more and supplied two originals, 'Spunky' and 'Blues For Stan', alongside Andy Razaf and Eubie Blake's 'Memories Of You' and Jerry Jeff Walker's 'Mr. Bojangles'. Herb Johnson produced the session with Larry Morey engineering.

The band's music outlasted the broadcast discs. A live CNE recording of 'What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life' became the wedding song of O'Driscoll's granddaughter, who was born long after he retired and grew up with his records playing in the family home.

-Robert Williston