Of Stars and Strings

Book excerpt: "I'm not a working musician," the legendary Canadian jazz guitarist Sonny Greenwich once declared. "When I decide to play, I play to awake people spiritually. That's the only reason." For that, and for his stirring, distinctively linear style, he was hailed in 1970 as "the Coltrane of guitar players." In truth, though, Greenwich made music entirely on his own transcendent terms in the course of an uncompromising 50-year career that took him from the smallest of clubs in Toronto and Montreal to the Village Vanguard and Carnegie Hall in New York and back. Of Stars and Strings is an engaging study of a rare Canadian original, and a valuable contribution by Mark Miller to the history of jazz in Canada.