JOHN ARPIN, 70: MUSICIAN

Pianist was the 'Chopin of Ragtime' and a master of all musical
genres

As a composer, his music was heard on Polka Dot Door as well as daily
on Morningside. As a performer, he made more than 60 albums. 'He was
one of those naturals'

LISA FITTERMAN

Special to The Globe and Mail

November 17, 2007

By all rights and the laws of human physiology, John Arpin should
never have been a pianist. His hands seemed too small, with short,
delicate fingers that somehow spanned not only octaves but whole
musical genres, from classical and opera to Broadway, the Beatles and
ragtime.

Couple those hands with an encyclopedic general knowledge of music,
add the gift of the gab, and you had a consummate entertainer who,
over the course of half a century, released
no less than 67 recordings and often engaged his audiences in
impromptu history lessons about what he would play.

"You really felt you were part of a John Arpin performance, rather
than just an observer," said Howard Cable, who gave the pianist one of
his earliest professional gigs back in 1956 as part of a band playing
at the General Motors show at the Canadian National Exhibition in
Toronto.

"I hired him as a sub but soon realized that I'd better keep him on
full-time because he was terrific," Mr. Cable recalled. "He may have
been young but he was confident beyond his years. I don't know how he
was so confident. I remember asking him where he was from. When he
said 'Port McNicoll,' well, I said that I didn't think anyone came
from there. But he was one of those naturals, I guess, destined to
become a star.

GEORGIAN BAY BOYHOOD

John Arpin grew up in Port McNicoll, Ont., where he was the second of
Elie and Marie Arpin's two sons. His parents ran a general store in
the little Georgian Bay town that was once known as "the Chicago of
Canada" for its shipping and grain-handling facilities, and instilled
in their children both their devout Catholic faith (his mother
attended church every day) and their love of music.

Mr. Arpin often spoke of a gift his parents gave him for Christmas
when he was a teenager: a recording of a Puccini opera. At first, he
looked on the gift askance. Opera? For him? To make his parents happy,
or at least keep them at bay, he played it. It wasn't half-finished
before he was
crying like a baby and asking for more.

His introduction to piano was through his brother, Leo, who was 10
years older and started to take lessons when his sibling was still a
toddler. As Leo banged out chords and scales, little John mimicked the
sounds. Soon, he was picking out tunes, displaying an innate
musicality, a
perfect pitch and the sense of storytelling that would help him to
become one of the most beloved and admired pianists of his
generation.

By the time he was a teenager, he'd learned everything he could from
the few piano teachers in the region, and his mother began
accompanying him on long weekly bus trips to Toronto so that he could
continue his studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

"It couldn't have been easy on her," remarked Mr. Arpin's wife, Mary
Jane Esplen. "John's mother had a sensitive stomach and apparently,
she would be sick all the way down and all the way back. But she was
devoted and believed in her son's talent."

Indeed, when her son expressed an interest in becoming a doctor and
even insisted on studying medicine for a short time, his mother was
dead set against it. "You're too emotional to do that," she told him
repeatedly. "You're too sensitive."

In a way, she was right, for Mr. Arpin was not the kind of man to keep
things bottled up inside. He was the opposite of stoic, and had a
tendency to cry at the drop of a hat. "He didn't have to maintain a
strong outer front," continued Dr. Esplen, a clinician and scientist
at the University of
Toronto. "He loved a lot of things that most men wouldn't be caught
dead doing, things such as picking out flowers, shopping for groceries
and even for clothes for me. And he listened. Oh, how he listened.

"You know, he would have made a wonderful psychiatrist."

CONSERVATORY GRADUATION

At 16, Mr. Arpin graduated from the conservatory, continuing his
studies at University of Toronto before embarking on a career during
which the American jazz great Eubie Blake called him "the
Chopin of Ragtime." After his stint with Mr. Cable's band, he began in
the 1960s to perform with his trio and as a soloist in Toronto bars
and hotel lounges; bespectacled and with a Prince Valiant haircut, he
entertained patrons with a repertoire that - besides ragtime -
featured classics,
stride piano, bebop, traditional jazz and film and stage tunes.

In the late 1960s, he joined CTV as the network's music director, and
in 1976, he became the first Canadian to make a "direct-to-disc"
recording, then a new kind of album where the entire side was cut in
one take. RCA producer Jack Feeney explained at the time that such
recordings required musicians who performed perfectly, and that Mr.
Arpin was the perfect choice - "a definitive pianist, one who plays
crisply and with very few mistakes."

Throughout the 1970s, his composition Jogging Along was the theme song
for the CBC radio program Morningside, while "John Arpin Sundays" at
the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg,
Ont., were much-anticipated weekly events over a period of 20 years.

In 1984, he moved to TVOntario as writer, director and performer for
the station's beloved children's program Polka Dot Door. On camera, he
was a natural, interacting with the
stuffed animal characters Humpty, Dumpty, Marigold and Bear with a
childlike wonder, zest and curiosity.

He was always a fixture at concerts and summer festivals throughout
Southern Ontario, and he toured the rest of the world whenever time
allowed, building an international reputation as a consummate
professional who always put his own spin on whatever he was playing.

'KNOW THE LYRICS'

"Know the lyrics," he was wont to say to artists he mentored. In other
words, they had to understand and tease out the story of a piece of
music through the language of cadence and melody, whether or not there
were actual lyrics to follow.

Alongside his own prolific concert and recording career, Mr. Arpin
served as music director and accompanist to both Canadian contralto
Maureen Forrester and to actress-singer Louise Pitre, who made an
international splash in her 2001 Broadway debut as Donna Sheridan in
Mamma Mia! At times, he also acted as music arranger for artists such
as Tommy Hunter and Roy Payne.

His recordings ranged the gamut from ragtime through to the music of
Andrew Lloyd Webber, honky-tonk, spirituals and tango. He did three
albums with Ms. Forrester, an instrumental album that featured the
music of singer-composer Gordon Lightfoot, another of Arpin at the
Opera, The Complete Piano Works of Scott Joplin and seven linked CDs
of popular nostalgic tunes.

Throughout his career, he garnered two Juno nominations, won the 1998
Scott Joplin Award from a Missouri foundation dedicated to the
preservation of ragtime and was awarded first prize out of 450
entrants in the Yamaha Second International Original Concert Series in
Tokyo, this for his
composition Lyric Suite for Piano, Strings and Percussion.

Mr. Arpin parlayed his indefatigable energy into his personal life,
too. An avid collector of sheet music and Nippon china, he often
"You'd never not know that John was in the room for he was always
working it, asking questions and entertaining," said Dr. Esplen, whom
he married in 1990
in New Orleans. "It didn't matter what walk of life you were from. He
was such an authentic presence."

The couple first met in 1986 at a piano lounge in Toronto, when Dr.
Esplen asked him to play several obscure Scott Joplin songs. Their
friendship gradually turned to love and in 1990, they married - he for
the third time - at their good friend Al Rose's home in New Orleans.
As Mr. Rose, the noted jazz historian and impresario, escorted the
bride down the aisle, Mr. Arpin played An Affair to Remember on the
piano.

Dr. Esplen, whose parents owned an antique store, got her husband
interested in collecting Nippon china. He took to it so eagerly that
she sometimes regretted not encouraging him to collect stamps, which
would have been easier to store. "Let me just say that after say the
third or fourth new china cabinet I began to get a little worried,"
she wrote in her blog. "Over the years, we moved on beyond cocoa sets
to tea sets and plates, and humidors, and nut sets and juice
sets and platters and celery sets ... need I say more?"

She was the family accountant, keeping track of purchases and finances
because Mr. Arpin wasn't terribly interested in such things. "He was a
real live-for-today kind of guy," she remarked.

He was a loving father to his three surviving children from his first
two marriages, while his deep faith got him through the tragedy of the
death of a son from SIDS and his own diagnosis a number of years ago
of a rare, inoperable and slow-acting form of intestinal cancer.

For Mr. Arpin, life itself was music, in all its terrible beauty. And
he was listening to it right up until the end, including his own Blue
Gardenia album of Latin tempo songs and one of his all-time
favourites, Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal's I'll Be Seeing You.

JOHN ARPIN

John Francis Oscar Arpin was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Port McNicoll,
Ont. He died at home on Nov. 8, 2007, after a lengthy battle with
cancer. He was 70. He leaves his brother, Leo Arpin, his wife, Mary
Jane Esplen, and his children Bob, Jennifer and Nadine. He also leaves
grandchildren Alexander, Nicole, Kurt and Brianna.