Ian McDougall, a member of the Order of Canada and a renowned trombonist, composer and academic, died on Jan. 26 at the age of 87.Barb McDougall
While in the checkout line at a grocery store, Ian McDougall noticed a young person in front of him purchasing a potato. It was a University of Victoria fine arts student who could not afford more than one lonely root vegetable at a time.
Mr. McDougall, a trombonist who taught jazz studies at the school, thought the situation was untenable and the incident stuck in his head. Years later, when he was retired, he created a fund to help needy fine arts students. The Ian McDougall and Friends Student Assistance Endowment officially launched in 2012. Most on campus know it as the “one potato” fund.
“What it says about Ian is that he was an extremely practical and compassionate man,” said Patrick Boyle, an associate professor of jazz studies at the university. “He was really in touch with people.”
Mr. McDougall, a member of the Order of Canada and a renowned trombonist, composer and academic, died on Jan. 26, in Toronto, at age 87. He was diagnosed with vascular dementia four years ago.
Mr. McDougall won a Juno Award in 1982 as a member of Doug Hamilton’s the Brass Connection.Barb McDougall
His father, musician George McDougall, advised him at a young age to consider the slidable brass instrument. “Play the trombone, son,” he said. “A good trombone player is never out of work.”
True enough, Mr. McDougall’s employment was steady and varied over a long career. As a teenager in the late 1950s, the Victoria-raised prodigy played with bands on the chuckwagon circuit in Alberta and Saskatchewan, providing accompaniment to trick riders, bear acts and bullwhip specialists.
As a brash musician barely into his 20s, Mr. McDougall boarded an ocean liner for England with his first wife in 1960 to explore the music and dance scene in London. An advertisement in Melody Maker magazine led to an audition with Johnny Dankworth, a leading jazzman in a pre-Beatles country where swing was the thing.
On the occasion of Oscar Peterson’s centenary, Canada celebrates its jazz piano giant
He sat in with Mr. Dankworth’s combo at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, today a legendary venue but then a freshly opened basement room in Soho. Passing the audition, he found himself in the touring John Dankworth Orchestra with fellow Canadian Kenny Wheeler and also a young Dudley Moore, soon to be a comedy star but then a talented jazz pianist who delighted his bandmates with outrageous impersonations of opera singers.
Though the gig was sweet, the barnstorming left his wife to care for a newborn mostly alone. They returned to Vancouver to be near family in 1961. Mr. McDougall later said he lost 50 pounds in England because of the cuisine: “The food was so bad, it was unbelievable.”
He toured with Ted Heath, Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman, and in Toronto he was lead trombonist with Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass, a Canadian jazz institution.
He won a Juno Award in 1982 as a member of Doug Hamilton’s the Brass Connection. He played lead on All in Good Time, an instrumental jazz Grammy winner in 1984 for Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass.
Mr. McDougall led his own ensembles in Toronto, Victoria and Vancouver. He retired in 2003 as professor emeritus at the University of Victoria School of Music after teaching and heading its jazz orchestra for 13 years.
On Feb. 7, a concert at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto by the National Arts Centre Orchestra was dedicated to Mr. McDougall. “He was an inspiration to so many musicians and an idol to so many others,” said the orchestra’s music director, Alexander Shelley.
As a soloist, Mr. McDougall explored his instrument’s silky possibilities and romantic associations instead of indulging in high-spirited sounds. Globe and Mail jazz critic Mark Miller reviewed a 1984 concert by a quartet led by the trombonist at George’s Spaghetti House in Toronto.
“Mr. McDougall’s trombone playing is the centrepiece, naturally, and he is an articulate, though not especially assertive, improviser. Note by note, he handles the instrument as easily and cleanly as anyone in the business; tonally, he is a conservative who likes a small, warm and mobile sound and who chooses to avoid the many rhetoric devices that his instrument offers.”
Influential artists the music world lost in 2025
He was known to be direct and self-assured, gruff but generous.
“Ian was the only professor who could swear in front of people and get away with it,” said trumpeter Donny Clark, a bandmate and long-time friend. “He had a great sense of humour, a dynamic personality and he was strong-willed. He wanted to get things done.”
Mr. McDougall was a prolific composer whose The Pellet Suite and The Blue Serge Suit(e) were recorded by Boss Brass and remain part of the Canadian big band canon. Among his other works are 1970’s Tidelines (commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra), 1971’s British Columbia Centennial Suite and 1979’s Mini-suite for the RCMP. His Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra was written for and recorded by Stanley McCartney with the CBC Radio Orchestra in 1984.
Mr. McDougall’s Bells was played at the wedding of the Canadian trumpet soloist Jens Lindemann and pianist Jennifer Snow in 1998, right after “I do” sealed the deal.
“Of all the celebratory brass pieces I could have chosen, that composition was intentional,” Mr. Lindemann said. “It is so filled with positivity and enthusiasm, just as Ian was.”
Neil Swainson, left, Oliver Gannon, centre, and Mr. McDougall on tour in Denmark in October, 2008.Barb McDougall
Ian Walter McDougall was born in Calgary on June 14, 1938, five months after Benny Goodman legitimatized jazz with the first big band concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
He was the adopted only child of homemaker Myrtle (Tillie) McDougall (née Freeman) and George McDougall, who played banjo and guitar in Calgary dance bands.
Their son took up the trombone at age 11 and less than two years later was a member of the house band at Victoria’s Club Sirocco, a “bottle club” where patrons were tacitly allowed to sneak in alcohol.
“The women would come in with a twenty-sixer in their purses, and they put the bottle under the table,” Mr. McDougall told The Victoria Times Colonist in 2003.
TD pulls sponsorship of major jazz festivals, setting off funding scramble
The not insignificant money the boy earned helped pay his family’s bills, with an allowance doled out by his mother.
Blowing his trombone at night, he blew out his knee playing rugby at Victoria High. He studied with trombonist Jack Kraeling. In the late 1950s, Mr. McDougall was a regular participant in the jam sessions held at the groovy jazz club The Scene.
After his whirlwind experience in London, Mr. McDougall established himself as a leading figure on the Vancouver jazz scene while earning a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in music at the University of British Columbia.
He played in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra from 1962 to 1964, led groups for CBC Radio and Television shows, and was a member of the house band under Chris Gage and Fraser MacPherson at the Cave, a nightclub on Hornby Street.
The Cave thrived as the hub of the swish side of Vancouver nightlife. Mr. McDougall backed such visiting luminaries as Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, the Supremes, Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney.
The professional life of a typical Canadian jazz musician is a gig-based existence. Creativity can be stifled playing in service of others. In 1970, Mr. McDougall formed Pacific Salt, a jazz-fusion outlet for the group’s own musical inclinations and compositions. The members, including trumpeter Mr. Clark and others, were among the city’s first-call studio musicians of the day.
Obituary: Clarinet-playing bandleader Phil Nimmons was the dean of Canadian jazz
“Pacific Salt was a therapy band,” Mr. Clark said. “We were busy in Vancouver playing symphony gigs and radio and television shows. Ian wanted a band where we could play what we wanted.”
In 1973, Mr. McDougall moved to Toronto, where he was a member of Boss Brass, a 16-piece jazz orchestra composed of some of the city’s leading jazzers.
One of his own bands, the Hogtown Trumpets, was a crack outfit that in 1984 visited the Ontario Science Centre, where Mr. McDougall was the picture of relaxation with his legs stretched out under the music stand and crossed at the ankles, one foot keeping time against the other. “The pose made the music look a lot easier than it sounded,” wrote The Globe’s Mr. Miller.
Sextet touring in Copenhagen, from left, Ross Taggart (saxophone), Neil Swainson (bass), Mr. McDougall, Ron Johnston (piano), Craig Stevenson Scott (drums) and Oliver Gannon (guitar).Barb McDougall
The advent of synthesizers cut into Mr. McDougall’s radio and television work in Toronto. In the mid-1990s, he told his second wife, violinist Barbara McDougall, that he wished to head back west: “I’ll sell shoes if I have to.”
It did not come to that − Payless’s loss was the jazz world’s gain. Among Mr. McDougall’s recordings were 2012’s Juno-nominated The Very Thought of You (a collection of ballads recorded at Bryan Adams’s Warehouse Studio, in Vancouver) and 2001’s Burnin’ the House Down, a live CD taped at Hermann’s Jazz Club days before the Victoria venue was damaged by a fire one floor above.
Mr. McDougall’s son, Nelson McDougall, managing director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, said his father was dedicated to his family.
“He was very grateful for his own parents and loved them very much despite challenges including a father who was forever changed by serving in the Second World War. This was certainly formative in the importance he placed on being a loving and supportive family man. In fact, it was far more important for him than his career, and he would often tell us that ‘family is number one.’”
Mr. McDougall leaves his wife, Barbara McDougall; and children, Laura Landsberg, Marc McDougall, Joanna Dickins, Nelson McDougall and Donald McDougall.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.