Ottawa music impresario Harvey Glatt, who died on Aug. 20, at age 91, played an oversized role in turning the country’s sleepy capital city from a cultural desert into a musically vibrant place.
As a retailer, concert promoter, artist manager, label owner, record distributor and patron of the arts, Harvey Glatt enlivened Ottawa's music scene for decades.Richard Glatt/Supplied
The son of scrap metal merchants, he was a music fanatic who began reading music trade journals as a 13-year-old. In 1957, he co-founded the Treble Clef record store, a retail outlet devoted solely to music at a time when vinyl was typically sold in department stores or distributed by mail through record clubs. The initial shop grew to a chain of 15 locations, earning Mr. Glatt the unofficial title of Sam The Record Man of the Ottawa Valley.
He was a silent partner in Le Hibou Coffee House, an internationally known venue for musicians and poets from 1960 to 1975. The folk-music hub was founded by Ottawa francophone Denis Faulkner. Mr. Glatt also managed the Children (which included a young Bruce Cockburn) and folk singer David Wiffen.
In 1977, he founded CHEZ-FM, the city’s entry into the wave of maverick mainstream rock stations already established in Toronto and Montreal. He was inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2007.
As a retailer, concert promoter, artist manager, label owner, record distributor and patron of the arts, Mr. Glatt enlivened the city’s music scene and for decades was its glue.
“Throughout my career, I received so many phone calls and the first sentence was, ‘Harvey suggested I give you a call,’” said Ottawa booker and talent manager Todd Littlefield. “Harvey was always looking to help and open doors. So many of us have him to thank for where we are today.”
Among his protégées is Debra Rathwell, a Canadian who is the New York-based executive vice-president of global touring and talent at concert-promoting giant AEG Presents. When Mr. Glatt was operating his Treble Clef stores and concert company, Bass Clef Entertainment Ltd, an inexperienced Ms. Rathwell applied for a job as his executive assistant.
“I believe he liked the fact that I read The New York Times every Sunday,” Ms. Rathwell told The Globe recently. “He thought it was unusual and hired me. Then I got into concert management with him. If he hadn’t hired me all those years ago, my story would not have happened.”
Mr. Glatt’s business savvy and bohemian flair instigated an era of grooviness in Ottawa at a time when the city’s only rock star was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
On March 15, 1968, Graham Nash and the British pop band the Hollies played Ottawa’s 2,500-seat Capitol Theatre. Afterward, Mr. Glatt took Mr. Nash to see a nascent Joni Mitchell, who was booked at Le Hibou for a multinight run.
Later that night, Mr. Glatt, Mr. Nash and Mr. Cockburn visited Ms. Mitchell at her Château Laurier hotel room, where they rapped and swapped songs. Eventually the party thinned.
“It was clear something was happening between Graham and Joni,” Mr. Glatt later recalled, “so Bruce and I left.”
Mr. Glatt’s unanticipated matchmaking led to a two-year relationship now regarded as one of the great counterculture couples of the 1960s. The romance was bookended by Mr. Nash’s Our House (an ode to hippie domestic bliss, recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) and Ms. Mitchell’s poignant breakup ballad, River.
On March 19, 1968, Mr. Glatt co-promoted a pair of sold-out concerts by flamboyant rock star Jimi Hendrix, also at the Capitol Theatre. When the guitarist leaned into the crowd from the stage during one of the shows, a woman snatched his floppy leather hat. Fortunately, Mr. Glatt was able to retrieve the funky chapeau.
“Jimi was very upset when he lost the hat, but thrilled when I got it back for him,” Mr. Glatt told The Globe in 2021.
That same night, Mr. Hendrix dropped into Le Hibou, where he sat at a table to capture a set by Ms. Mitchell on his portable Sony tape recorder. Some of the tracks were released decades later on Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971).
Mr. Glatt died in Ottawa of heart failure. He is remembered as a generous spirit and an indefatigable music lover.
A business administration graduate of Clarkson College of Technology (now Clarkson University) in Potsdam, N.Y., he co-produced a Dave Brubeck jazz concert there in 1955.
One of his first notable Ottawa presentations happened in 1958 when he and two partners brought in folk icon Pete Seeger to the auditorium at Fisher Park High School. Some 400 tickets were snapped up at $2.50 apiece. Mr. Glatt and his associates each made a $50 profit on the concert.
In 1960, Mr. Glatt presented Mr. Seeger in a bigger venue, the auditorium of his old high school, Glebe Collegiate Institute. The musician gave him a banjo lesson and exhibited stellar manners while at the Ottawa home Mr. Glatt shared with his wife, the former Louise Jaffee, a New York City-born classical pianist.
“When he stayed with us, Seeger automatically cleared the table after all meals,” he wrote in the Ottawa Citizen upon the folk legend’s death in 2014.
In 1957, Mr. Glatt opened the first outlet of what would become the Treble Clef chain with Arnold Gosewich, left.Bill King Photography
Among the other notable performers Mr. Glatt brought to Ottawa were the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, the Kingston Trio, Led Zeppelin, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Newhart, Anne Murray, and, in 1966 at the Ottawa Auditorium, Bob Dylan.
“His handshake was very cold,” Mr. Glatt later recalled.
The businessman himself was a true original whose own temperature ran much warmer. “Harvey was a bit of a character,” said Bernie Finkelstein, founder of the independent Canadian label True North Records. “But when you worked with him, he was right on the mark.”
Mr. Finkelstein was an investor in Mr. Glatt’s radio holdings that also included stations in Calgary and Smith Falls, Ont. By 1999, Mr. Glatt had sold them to Rogers Broadcasting Ltd. He was appointed to the board of Rogers Media Inc., and named a director of Rogers Broadcasting.
“We did pretty well financially in that deal,” Mr. Finkelstein said.
In 2007, Mr. Glatt, Michael Pilon and Geoff Kulawick’s Linus Entertainment acquired Mr. Finkelstein’s True North Records, a purchase that marked a return to the record business for Mr. Glatt, who had founded Posterity Records in 1976.
Though Posterity lasted only five years, the label released albums by such Canadian artists as Ian Tamblyn, David Essig, Willie P. Bennett, Tony Quarrington and poet Irving Layton.
In 2012, songwriter Alan Chrisman wrote the lyrics to Ballad of Harvey Glatt, a folk song that acknowledged Mr. Glatt’s transformational musical impact on Ottawa.
Harvey’s the Music Man
Who always took a chance
Made us believe we can
And got us up to dance
Harvey Morley Glatt came into this world in Ottawa on March 28, 1934, the first of two children born to Emmanuel (Manny) Glatt and Lena Glatt (née Baker). The parents both worked in her family’s Baker Brothers scrap metal business that was founded in the early 1900s.
As a wily child, he faked tummy aches to stay home from school and listen to the CBC Radio lunchtime variety show, The Happy Gang. In his teens, Harvey played piano in a dance band that held down a residency in Thurso, Que.
“I was 16. I wasn’t legal,” Mr. Glatt said in a 2017 Ottawa Citizen profile. “I was consuming quarts of beer because I thought that made me play better. I was a very mediocre musician.”
Acting on his love of radio, in the summer of 1952, he landed a job as an all-night DJ on the Ottawa AM station CFRA. At Clarkson College, he was an on-air personality on the campus station and also acted as its sports director.
In his third year, he met his future wife, who was in her first year at Potsdam’s Crane College of Music. They would visit New York City, usually stopping in Sam Goody’s flagship record store, a major hub for vinyl collectors on West 49th Street.
The shop inspired Mr. Glatt in 1957 to open the first outlet of what would become the Treble Clef chain with Arnold Gosewich, a former university classmate who would go on to be top executive at Capitol Records Canada and CBS Canada. Mr. Glatt was sole proprietor when he sold the stores in 1979.
For decades though his Bass Clef concert promotion business he presented shows in Ottawa and elsewhere by himself or in partnership with other presenters.
“He made Ottawa a stop for most touring bands,” said music industry veteran Joanne Muroff Smale. “Supertramp − what a great after-party that was at the Glatts’ home.”
Outside of music, Mr. Glatt swam, biked and even took part in triathlons after retiring.
He began experiencing hearing loss in the 1990s. Mr. Glatt and his wife funded the installation of assistive listening technology at the National Arts Centre so people with similar issues could enjoy concerts there. The couple also sponsored recordings of the NAC Orchestra.
They had been married 66 years when Ms. Glatt died in 2022. The family purchased a Steinway concert grand piano in her name that made its debut on the NAC’s Southam Hall stage in 2024.
Mr. Glatt leaves his sister, Esther Harding; children, Margot Glatt, Richard Glatt and Nancy Glatt; and four grandchildren.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the date of Harvey Glatt's passing. He died Aug. 20.
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