Donna McCurvin and Phil Vassell are behind the Canada Black Music Archives, a website that catalogues contributions Black Canadians have made to music.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
In our collective memory of Canadian music, what will be remembered?
Will we remember people like composer Robert Nathaniel Dett? Will we remember places such as Montreal’s Rockhead Paradise? The two are key in Black Canadian music history, but we seldom hear about them. The Canada Black Music Archives (CBMA), which officially launched in November, aims to keep them, among others, on the record.
The website catalogues contributions Black Canadians have made to music, offering biographies of Black Canadian musicians, in addition to photographs, playlists featuring their music and music videos. Musicians featured run the gamut from more familiar contemporary artists such as Drake and the Weeknd to living jazz legend Molly Johnson to Jamaican-born ska legend Jackie Mittoo. You’ll also find notables such as Portia White, the first Black Canadian concert singer to achieve international fame, and eighties R&B chart-topper Geraldine Hunt. The website also features archived articles from Word Magazine, the urban-culture publication co-founded in 1991 by Donna McCurvin and Phil Vassell, who are also behind the CBMA.
McCurvin and Vassell, who produced the Toronto Urban Music Festival and the TD Irie Music Festival, were inspired to create the CBMA when Word stopped printing in 2013. At that time, Vassell started thinking of ways to make the magazine’s vast archives, which chronicled more than two decades of Black music and culture in Canada, available to the public. The duo was unwilling to leave the magazines to “just be locked up in a filing cabinet somewhere or in our storage unit. It was important to bring that out because I thought the content that we created was just so incredible,” says McCurvin.
Eddie Bullen, left, takes a selfie along with guests at a Canadian Black Music Archives event on Nov. 23, 2023.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
Jay Douglas performs at the Nov. 23 event.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
Prior to the pandemic, the pair had sought out funding for a bricks and mortar version of the archives. Once COVID-19 hit, they pivoted to digital.
The goal of the CBMA is twofold: First, to provide information about Canadian Black music history that people don’t know, because historically, this information has not been comprehensively documented. “I did a recent search on the Halifax archive website, and I just typed in the words ‘Black Music,’ and I only came up with three hits,” McCurvin says. “Of those three hits, one of them was regarding a black box: a Japanese, lacquered box. It had nothing to do with a Black person, it was just the colour of the box. The other was referencing some military-related item, and the other was just a name of a person.”
The second goal of the CBMA is to make access to its information as barrier-free as possible. The archive is free and available to anyone.
The CBMA is a living project whose database only continues to grow. McCurvin and Vassell have appointed an advisory board to help them determine which artists should appear on the site; among its members are editor and producer Del Cowie and former MuchMusic VJ Master T. Though the CBMA leans on the expertise of its staff, interns and contributors to populate the database, it emphasizes its community element and allows site visitors to submit artists for consideration.
McCurvin and Vassell are also seeking to offer a more thorough understanding of the environment in which Black Canadian music history is cultivated. “In addition to artists, we’re also featuring DJs, producers, venues even,” McCurvin says. “It’s not just artists, but people or things that have contributed to the Black music scene in Canada. Even radio shows. There have been some really important radio shows and campus radio shows that helped to build Black music in Canada.”
Both McCurvin and Vassell hope the CBMA will also become a tool that educators at all levels can incorporate into their curriculums to teach more about Black Canadian music history. Says Vassell, “It’s about educating our community and the Canadian community at large about these contributions, hope that people take pride in those contributions and empower the next generation knowing that there’s a significant contribution by Black Canadians.”