Molly Johnson on arts success in Canada: a French knighthood, a Governor General’s honour ‘but I still can’t really pay my bills’

Feb. 23 was a banner day for Molly Johnson.

The singer, songwriter and ex-radio host known for her powerful jazz vocals and her philanthropy received news of two formal accolades almost simultaneously: a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime artistic achievement and also one of France’s highest honours, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

“I must be old, eh?” Johnson cracked from her Toronto home near the beginning of a wide-ranging Zoom interview.

And while she fully embraced the French knighthood, which she’ll receive on International Women’s Day Wednesday in a ceremony in Toronto — ironically eight days before departing on a minitour of France and Luxembourg — the Governor General’s honour caused her a great deal of consternation.

“It took me almost a month to call them back,” Johnson revealed. “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me, initially, deeply, that here I am in this stage of my career and I still can’t really pay my bills.

“Like, I’m going to France right now and I’m going to lose my shirt. I often get turned down for grants, all the time. It was really difficult at first.”

Subsequent conversations with friends who have also received the honour slowly reconciled her to the idea.

“Tomson Highway was lovely about it, because he’s a bit of an introvert like me, strangely. We like the process; we like making the stuff; it was hard for me to get my head around it. It took a moment. It took three to four weeks, actually, just taking long walks and thinking.”

And part of the hesitancy on Johnson’s part had to do with facing her artistic mortality.

“When you get the Lifetime Achievement Award and you’re turning 63 this year, you start to think about, is this the sign to retire?” she asked rhetorically. “(Blues legend) B.B. King told me, ‘You don’t retire, you just die.’ He actually told me that and that’s what he did: he had gigs booked right through (till the end.)

“And I look at David Bowie’s master class in retirement and death. That was a master class as an artist, what he did. (When Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016, he had released his final album “Blackstar” just two days before,on his 69th birthday, keeping his shocking terminal cancer diagnosis hidden from the world.)

“So, I went deep on it — probably too deep — but I did come around the other side because I really love Canada and I am the only Canadian in the family. My brother (Clark, the actor/director) and my cousin Ron (activist, social worker) were born in Philly; my sister (Taborah, the singer) in Switzerland and my parents are American.”

And Canada has loved her back. These are hardly the first milestones that Johnson has collected during her decades-long career: she’s a member of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

As far as the demand for her creative contributions are concerned, that question was favourably broached when Jeffrey Remedios, president of Johnson’s record label, Universal Music Canada, inquired as to whether she was considering making a new album to follow her 2021 holiday effort, “It’s A Snow Globe World.”

“I looked at him and said, ‘You know I’m turning 63 this year,’” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, you’ve still got a lot of stories to tell. We want to hear them.’”

Some of that demand is due to the respect Johnson has garnered by being inextricable from the Toronto music scene, with stints in notable vehicles like the disco band A Chocolate Affair; her role as backing singer in Billy Reed and the Street People; the standards-driven Blue Monday (featuring Gordie Johnson on guitar and the initial spark of Big Sugar); dance punk multimedia outfit Alta Moda; all-Black rockers Infidels and Johnson’s own jazz-spiced solo work that showcases her splendid, soulful alto … although the siren herself insists she’s more of a pop singer.

The point? She’s evolved artistically before our eyes and ears.

“I think I’ve grown through every genre,” said Johnson. “It’s not so much trying; it’s just living my life and this was what was happening at that time.

“When I started singing jazz, it was at the back room of the Cameron House. And it wasn’t so much jazz: it was American standards. I was truly trying to learn how to write a melody, sitting at a table with a Fakebook (an illegal musician’s bible that contains chord changes to songs, usually from the American Songbook) in front of me, with the incomparable Dave Piltch on bass and Aaron Davis on piano — he was a childhood friend — and we would go through these songs as I was just trying to figure out the structure of a really great pop tune.

“Popular music started with Duke Ellington. It started with Billy Strayhorn. Jazz to me — real, true jazz to me — has nothing to do with singers singing words. That’s pop music. Jazz, to me, is when those guys are improvising: it’s instrument to instrument; sound to sound. It’s a whole different bag and, to me, that is jazz. Get a singer in there, you got structure: a verse, a chorus, a bridge, another verse … that’s not jazz to me. That’s popular music of the day.”

Johnson’s entrance into showbiz came as a Mirvish baby, with she and brother Clark playing childhood roles in several Ed Mirvish-promoted theatrical productions, due to the impresario’s friendship with their parents John and Suzanne — the latter an activist who helped form the non-profit Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), the international development organization that sends skilled Canadians to communities to advance gender equality and improve economic opportunities for youth on four continents.

“With my parents, their friendship with Ed happened because they were all involved in civil rights and what artists were living on Markham Street,” she explained. “They were sort of sparring pals and, being mixed-raced kids in 1960 in Toronto, where there weren’t a lot of Black folks, Ed just starting casting us in his shows.

“It was more for the fun of it. I don’t think any of us thought about it as a career. Ed was doing some pretty serious civil rights shows like ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘Finian’s Rainbow,’ when the white racist mayor wakes up Black. So I think it had more to do with my parents’ politics and Ed’s politics rather than career.”

Mirvish provided Johnson some lasting advice.

“Some of the things Ed said to me stuck with me as a six-year-old,” Johnson recalled. “He’d say, ‘Molly, always look up and sing to the cheap seats, they’re the ones that really love ya.’”

But neither theatre nor, surprisingly, music were her first love.

“I was a National Ballet School girl for many, many years,” she said. “And that gave me incredible focus and discipline and the ability to work through pain, which, you know, served me well in the music business.

“I sort of fell into the music business by default, because I wanted to be a choreographer. I like making stuff. And I didn’t think it was in the cards for me as a young girl at ballet school, so one day I strolled down Maitland Street and one of my big sister’s friends, Shawne Jackson, would play at the Colonial (Tavern.) I’d sneak in the back, get up on the balcony and stare down.

“I watched Shawne Jackson write her own songs and make her own clothes, and I thought that was amazing! Then I’d see Carole Pope also, writing her own songs and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something in that.’

“To be clear, I’m always trying to write original tunes that wrap themselves around the standards I’m doing on any particular record.”

Another revelation: Johnson does not live for stardom.

“It was never about fame,” she said. “As kids in the business, we had learned early on that that was not great and to be avoided, in a way, at all costs. The notion to just be good working people in the culture business was where my brother and I and my sister were at, and I’ve always been that way. We just want to make good stuff.”

Music isn’t the only profession the winner of the 2009 Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album for “Lucky” has experienced. From 2008 to 2013, she hosted “Radio 2 Morning” for CBC Radio Two and she’s also done voice-over work … though not nearly enough, according to her.

“I love voice-over work,” she said. “My mantra has always been, ‘I’ll talk about a hamburger, but I won’t sing about a hamburger.’ So I lost a lot of work that way — I’m just telling you right now.

“That business is up and down. It’s certainly not something that you can kind of count on. But it has helped along the way to pay bills, because, God bless the music business, it doesn’t. For a year, I was Mrs. Sears, talking about dryers and washers and I loved it. My kids were really little and it was a great job, and my kids have consistently dictated the work I do. Being a mom is my best job and my best work.”

There’s also her notable philanthropy: she was at the forefront of the AIDS/HIV fight when she formed the Kumbaya Festival, a musical benefit that lasted four years, was aired live on MuchMusic and raised over $4 million benefiting the Kumbaya Foundation and other charities.

“It’s been the largest fundraiser in Canadian music history,” Johnson said. “I’m enormously proud of that bit of business. We accomplished exactly what we needed to do, which was educate young people about AIDS and HIV, because that message was not going anywhere when I started doing this.

“It was a ‘gay’ disease and, because my mother had spent so much time on the continent of Africa, I knew full well it was not a gay disease. And that was a really rough road, as my gay friends’ friends were dying all over the place. It was clearly impacting in that community first and hellishly so, and we still feel those repercussions.

“That was a remarkable thing we did and it’ll never happen again because, quite frankly, MuchMusic is now in the business of selling Doritos.”

She also takes pride in curating October’s annual Kensington Market Jazz Festival, now entering its seventh year, offering 92 shows in 13 neighbourhood venues during 2022’s edition.

“I absolutely adore my little baby,” she said of the festival. “It’s just wickedly fun. We work through the year on that.”

As for the Chevalier, Johnson said, “France has been really good to me. It’s not that I make millions of dollars in France. I still play the same teeny tiny clubs when I go there.

“I don’t speak French. I don’t make records in French to appease my French fans and I think they quite appreciate that about me. They think it’s quite charming and very true and authentic.”

And she’s also pleased that her sons Henry and Otis will be there to cheer her on when she accepts the Chevalier Wednesday and in Ottawa on May 27, when she receives the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and its accompanying $25,000 cheque.

“Just to share that with my beautiful boys is pretty special.”

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