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Nova Scotia musician and instructor Skip Beckwith is being remembered this week as not only one of the greatest players the region has produced, but a devoted friend with whom so many loved to share the stage.

The storied bassist and former instructor in the jazz program at Antigonish’s St. Francis Xavier University was living in on the South Shore in Blockhouse when he died on Wednesday, July 31 at the age of 79, but word of his passing only started to spread through the local music community over the past few days.

Born in Sydney in 1939, Beckwith’s love of jazz blossomed after his family moved to Halifax in 1945. In a 2005 interview with Chronicle Herald arts writer Stephen Pedersen, he recalled starting a band with friends Tommy and Donnie Vickery while attending Queen Elizabeth High School, and the moment that changed his life forever.

“One day we were walking down Seymour Street after a rehearsal at Dal and we heard this music coming from the Phi Delta Kappa frat house,” Beckwith recalled on the occasion of his 65th birthday. “We had to stand on each other's shoulders to see through the window at the side. It was the first time I'd heard jazz.”

Bit by the jazz bug, Beckwith moved to Toronto in the late 1950s, where he studied with Oscar Peterson’s bassist Ray Brown and made his first recordings for RCA Victor with pianist Brian Browne. He established a reputation in the jazz scene that would see him playing bass with Canadian piano greats like Joe Sealy and Oliver Jones. But his main gig through the early ’70s was as music director for Springhill-born superstar Anne Murray, leading her band onstage and playing on her biggest hits from Snowbird through her Grammy Award-winning 1976 album Love Song.

“After six years I got tired of playing commercial music. I’m a jazzer,” he said in 2005. “Anne gave me some land. I took a year off and built a house.”

Beckwith was a key figure in the Halifax jazz revival of the late ’70s and early ’80s, joining saxophonist Don Palmer onstage frequently at Dalhousie University — where Palmer ran the jazz program — and at Spring Garden Road club Pepe’s, which frequently hosted out-of-town headliners with whom they played.

Skip Beckwith holds his string bass at the Dalhousie Art Centre in Halifax in this 2005 file photo.

“Donnie and Skip both being here, and playing as well as they did, enabled me to come to Nova Scotia,” said drummer Jerry Granelli, who joined the pair in the free-wheeling, improvisatory trio Alive and Well. Together they released two albums in 1992 and 2000, and played a reunion show at the 2006 Halifax Jazz Festival.

“They were some of the only people I had something in common with, back in 1986. They were on board, and they thought the trio was a great idea. The thing you have to know about Donnie and Skip is that they were driven by a tremendous love for the music.

“And Skip was a big part of getting the jazz program up and running at St. F.X., he was really the heart and soul of that program, there were so many kids he helped there, and then he brought those kids around me, and the Creative Music Workshop.”

One of those students was Nashville-based musician Rob Crowell, who formerly played with Matt Mays & El Torpedo before moving on to a busy career playing bass and keyboards for artists like Deer Tick and Bobby Bare Jr.

“He’d hang out with the students, and talk about when he was gigging with Anne and what working as a jobbing musician was actually like. A lot of the stuff that I learned from him while having a beer and chatting is what’s served me the best since then.

“Out of all the profs, he’d done less in the way of school and more in the way of working in the real world, and had all kinds of practical lessons, like being easy to get along with and quietly doing your job well without making too much of a fuss about anything. ... He was really good at putting things simply and stressing how you should play for the song rather than get into your esoteric chops. It was about the message of the music and how to make a song actually work rather than feeding your ego.”

One of the best-known jazz saxophonists in Canada, Windsor native Mike Murley, played a show with Alive and Well in 1989 at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, and recalls how Beckwith was one of the main reasons many East Coast jazz musicians were inspired to hone their craft and pursue their careers outside the region.

“He was so important to our generation, and then younger generations at St. F.X. Not just in music, but with his outrageous personality, he was hilarious and so much fun to be around and to play with,” said Murley over the phone from P.E.I.

“And the trio with Don and Jerry, that was something else. Jerry moved to town and really breathed some new life into those guys. And that was really the last time I heard those guys play together, at that reunion show, and they just blew everybody away.”

After teaching at St. F.X. since 1986, Beckwith retired in 2005, after health issues in the early 2000s required frequent hiatuses. In 2015, he made a rare appearance in Halifax at the Halifax Jazz Festival to mark the 20th anniversary of the Creative Music Workshop, which Granelli says wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the young musicians fostered by Palmer at Dalhousie University and Beckwith at St. F.X.

“He got a standing ovation, and I was able to acknowledge everything he’d done,” said Granelli. “It was a really wonderful moment. We got him up there, and he was cursing me and hugging me at the same time, and laughing while we made terrible jokes among ourselves.

“But there was just such appreciation for him, and man, I think that’s what people should realize, that it’s such an important lesson for Nova Scotia to appreciate ourselves and what’s come from here.”