Fonds P004 - John Gilmore fonds

John Gilmore was born in Montreal in 1951 and grew up in a unilingual English-speaking family in St-Eustache-sur-le-lac, now Deux-Montagnes, Quebec. His parents were from British Columbia and Saskatchewan. He graduated from the CÉGEP program of Sir George Williams University in 1972. From 1974 to 1976 he lived in Swansea, Wales, while apprenticing as a journalist at The Glamorgan Gazette in nearby Bridgend. Returning to Montreal, he worked as a news desk editor at the Montreal Gazette from 1977 to 1978 and began studying alto saxophone privately with Dave Clark. In 1978 he became a full-time student in the jazz studies program at Concordia University, graduating with a BFA (Music) in 1981. While a student, he produced and hosted a weekly jazz program Now's The Time on Radio Centreville CINQ-FM and began researching Montreal jazz history.

From 1981 to 1986, he worked freelance as an editor and writer, part-time as a journalist for The Canadian Press news agency, and part-time as a sessional instructor in jazz history at Concordia, while researching Montreal jazz history with the help of a Canada Council Explorations Grant. His books Swinging in Paradise: The Story of Jazz in Montreal (1988) and Who's Who of Jazz in Montreal: Ragtime to 1970 (1989) were published by Véhicule Press. In 1988 Gilmore began donating his audio interviews, research materials and papers to Concordia, and over the years has helped facilitate the acquisition of many other archives documenting the history of jazz, improvised music, and nightlife in Quebec. Swinging in Paradise was published in a French translation Une histoire du jazz à Montréal by Lux Éditeur (2009), with a preface by Gilles Archambault and a new afterword by the author. In 2011 he published a second, corrected edition of Swinging in Paradise under his own imprint, Ellipse Editions.

From 1985 to 1991, John Gilmore worked as a journalist for Radio Canada International. After losing his job due to budget cuts, he moved to western Canada in search of work. He lived initially in Canmore and Calgary, Alberta, working as an editor at the Banff Centre for the Arts; freelance as an editor and writer; and part-time as a music programmer and occasional guest host at CBC Radio in Calgary. In 1995 he went to International House, Hastings, England to train as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), earning the Cambridge/RSA certificate CTEFLA. He subsequently taught EFL at International House, Hastings; the University of British Columbia English Language Institute; Vancouver Community College; and a private language school in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In 2000, after a second, personal sojourn in Porto Alegre, he returned to Montreal to begin work on the poetic novel Head of a Man (2011), while teaching EFL adult education evening classes for the English Montreal School Board and working as a sessional instructor for a year in the Education Department at Concordia. In 2005 he spent three months in Greece researching the prehistoric Cycladic figurines for a hybrid book The Broken Notebooks (2018).

From 2008 to 2017 he lived in Berlin, Germany, where he researched, wrote, and translated (French to English), including 8:17 pm, rue Darling (2014) by Quebec film-maker Bernard Émond, and Anarchy Explained to My Father (2017) by Francis Dupuis-Déri and Thomas Déri. While based in Berlin, he participated in writing and translating residencies in Sweden, Latvia, Åland (Finland), and France; taught summer EFL courses in England; and made trips to Montreal to record more interviews with musicians as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia. All of his interviews are preserved in Fonds John Gilmore.

He became a naturalized British citizen in 2010 (while maintaining Canadian citizenship). He left Berlin due to Brexit and resumed living in Montreal in 2018, becoming a community affiliate at the COHDS. Mon pays, c'est la musique, an oral history of the birth of free jazz and free improvised music in Quebec, was published in 2025.