Vancouver Instrumental

Every episode of The Beachcombers opened with Bobby Hales' big band. Through the 1970s it was the leading jazz orchestra in Vancouver, stocked with the players who filled the city's studios, supper clubs and CBC broadcasts. One Of My Bags, recorded at Little Mountain Sound on September 14 and 15, 1975, is its only commercial jazz album, with all six pieces composed and arranged by Hales.

Robert Arthur Hales was born on August 9, 1934 in Avonlea, Saskatchewan. He started on trumpet at about eight; years before he was born, his grandfather had led a town band. After some early lessons in Regina, the family moved to Chilliwack, BC when he was about 14. As a teenager he hitchhiked into Vancouver to hear Louis Armstrong and his All Stars at the Georgia Auditorium. He finished Chilliwack High School, went to work in a bank, and lasted there only as long as it took him to decide music was the better life. From 1955 to 1957 he studied at Westlake College of Modern Music in Los Angeles under Ollie Mitchell and Dick Groves, in classes that included Herb Alpert, the trumpeter Arnie Chycoski and the arranger Ray Sikora. Westlake is where Hales found himself as a big band writer.

His other school was the Paul Perry Orchestra at Sylvan Lake, Alberta, where he held the trumpet chair for several summers. The leader's son, PJ Perry, was 14 or 15 at the time; the two jammed together, and Perry credited Hales with shaping his playing. Hales met his wife Marj at Sylvan Lake and they married in October 1957. He and drummer George Ursan married sisters from the area, which makes the man behind the kit on One Of My Bags family.

When Hales moved to Vancouver in 1958, the only musician he knew there was pianist Chris Gage. He soon joined Dave Robbins' big band, sharing the trumpet section with Stew Barnett. Robbins took him on as a writer after hearing a big band chart Hales had built on the changes to 'Sweet Georgia Brown', and Hales later called that band "the highlight of my professional playing career." In 1963 he became music director for the Vancouver edition of CBC TV's Music Hop, the start of nearly three decades as a fixture of CBC Vancouver. He led the house band at Isy's Supper Club, with PJ Perry on lead alto, and later at The Cave, where Las Vegas acts such as the Mills Brothers and Mitzi Gaynor came in for ten-day runs. By the last show of each stand the band was very tight, in more ways than one.

Hales formed his own big band in 1965. One of its first appearances was at The Cellar at Broadway and Main, opening with 'Lord Nelson'. On March 17, 1966 the band recorded for the CBC transcription series as The Bobby Hales Band (CBC LM 5), with Barnett, Don Clark and Blaine Tringham among the trumpets, Dave Quarin, Fraser MacPherson, PJ Perry and Wally Snider in the saxes, and a rhythm section of Bob Doyle, Tony Clitheroe and Ursan. Within months bass trombonist John Capon left for Toronto, and a UBC music student named Sharman King took his chair. King stayed for the rest of Hales' career. Through the late 1960s and 1970s the band was heard regularly on the CBC radio series Jazz Canadiana and Jazz Radio-Canada.

In 1972 Hales wrote and recorded the theme for The Beachcombers, the CBC series about a log salvager working the BC coast. King remembered the musicians being paid $63 for the session, and the tape was played so often it stretched and the theme had to be recorded again. 'Funklickity', which would open One Of My Bags, turned up the following year on a CBC transcription disc (LM 283) with Hales fronting a small group.

Most of the players on the 1975 session had been with Hales since the CBC date nine years earlier. Side one holds five shorter pieces, edited down from their concert length so radio programmers could use them. Don Clark takes the trumpet solo on 'Funklickity'. 'Shuffle Scuffle' was written as a showcase for the band's two tenors, Wally Snider and Fraser MacPherson, and King counted it among his favourite recordings. Hales steps out on flugelhorn for 'Talk Trap', Jack Stafford plays the alto solo on 'Fireball', and Barnett closes the side on 'Formula #1'. Al Wold plays saxophone on side one.

Side two is 'Minor Event', a jazz suite in four movements that runs over 22 minutes. Each movement belongs to one player: Oliver Gannon on guitar, Bob Doyle on piano, Dave Quarin on alto and George Ursan on drums. Roy Bull joins the saxophone section for the suite.

The engineer was Geoff Turner, the English-born engineer who designed and built Little Mountain Sound in 1972, the studio that later made Vancouver's name in rock through Bruce Fairbairn and Bob Rock. Dave Bird Sound Productions produced. The album came out on the Burnaby label Center Line, pressed by IRC in Vancouver, with the music published through Hales' own Halestone Music and the band carrying it to buyers by hand.

The same years kept Hales busy on screen. He was music director and arranger for CTV's Rolf Harris Show, scored the 1975 feature Dogpound Shuffle (in which his band appears) and the CBC TV movie The Overlanders, and wrote theme and incidental music for The Manipulators and Leo and Me. In 1977 the big band toured BC and Alberta giving concerts and workshops. From 1978 to 1984 Hales was music director of the Pacific National Exhibition, leading the band behind Frank Sinatra, Paul Anka, Sonny and Cher and Tony Orlando and featuring local singers, Pat Hervey above all. He was also music director of CBC's Timmy's Christmas Telethon from 1977 until it ended in 1998.

Through the 1980s the band worked mainly as a commercial orchestra, backing pop performers and touring Broadway stars at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and playing musicals, dances and conventions. In 1987 Hales took it back into the studio with Pat Hervey for a dance-band album, Bobby Hales Big Band (Artlor Music AR-1985). The sleeve sold it as SWOCK music, big band dance music combining the best of swing and rock. For the closing ceremonies of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics he wrote the suite 'The Beginning of the End'. He also taught at Douglas College.

Hales followed Stew Barnett as president of the Vancouver Musicians' Association, Local 145, a post a line of trumpet players had held before him, and served from the mid-1990s until January 2012. He was inducted into the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame in 1996.

Late in life Hales let Bradford Critchley, who was researching a book on jazz in British Columbia, reissue five of the album's six tracks on CD, paired with CBC recordings of the Chris Gage Trio from 1962-63.

Bobby Hales died on October 15, 2016 in Port Coquitlam, aged 82, a few days short of his 59th wedding anniversary. The musicians who worked for him remembered his arrangements and, just as often, how fast he was with a line. When a drunk on a casual gig demanded something he could dance to, Hales shot back, "Dance something we can play to." He liked to call The Beachcombers theme a medley of his hit.

-Robert Williston