Oliver Jones died in July 2026, at ninety-one. He had been playing piano for almost eighty of those years, and he was still one of the best in the world when he stopped. This page is kept as a record of the night he came to Charlottetown.
He played St. Paul's Anglican Church on Friday, August 19, 2011. The concert was at 8pm. Earlier that afternoon, right after the Gold Cup parade, he led a free workshop in the same room. Both events were presented by The Guardian. The workshop was part of the Chris Driscoll Memorial series and sponsored by Mark's Work Wearhouse.
The trio
Jones brought his working trio to the Island that week. Jim Doxas on drums, Eric Lagacé on bass. The same two players who had recorded Second Time Around with him a few years earlier, the album that won the JUNO for Traditional Jazz Album of the Year in 2009 . Doxas was in his thirties then. He has said in interviews that Jones wanted younger musicians around him, players who could "burn the fire under his butt," as Jones put it. He did not want to coast. He wanted to be pushed .
That trio had been together for years by 2011. They knew each other's moves. A church with acoustics like St. Paul's, a grand piano, a room full of people who had come specifically to hear him. It would have been something.
The career
Jones grew up in Little Burgundy, the Montreal neighbourhood that also produced Oscar Peterson. Peterson was nine years older and lived about a dozen doors down. Jones used to watch him play at church and wonder how those big hands could move so fast without making mistakes . He studied under Peterson's sister, Daisy Peterson Sweeney. He made his first concert appearance at five years old, at Union United Church .
He spent sixteen years in Puerto Rico as musical director for calypso singer Kenny Hamilton, from 1964 to 1980, away from jazz. When he came back to Montreal, he picked up where he left off. He played the Montreal International Jazz Festival every year from 1981 to 1999 . He recorded more than twenty albums. He won two JUNOs, multiple Félix Awards, the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, and was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1993 . In 2023 he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame .
He was also, by every account, a generous man. Doxas said Jones took the time to give master classes wherever they went, to listen to young musicians, to buy their CDs . The tributes after his death all said the same thing. A giant, and a gentle one.
That day
The workshop in the afternoon, right after the parade. A relaxed encounter with a legend, the festival bio called it. Then the concert at eight. A Friday night, the church full, the trio in form. If you were there, you saw something you will not see again. Oliver Jones was one of the last of a line that goes back to the beginnings of this music. He carried it with him wherever he went, and for one night in August he brought it to Charlottetown.
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