YEAR INDUCTED

2017

OCCUPATION

Musician

Written by John Stewart

For a girl who started out singing made-up songs to her hairbrush and her horse in a small voice, Alex Pangman has come a long way.

Her innate musicality caused her to compose songs in her childhood Erin Mills home. She’s ridden all her life so it was natural to serenade the horses while she groomed them.

When musician Mike Walmsley of the Climax Jazz Band heard her singing in the stable, she was recruited for karaoke at the Christmas party. He and other band members lent her Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan records.

At age 14 she was “petrified” in her club debut at the Suisse Marmite (now The Brogue Inn) in Port Credit. It was likely her back, which was aimed at most of the audience that left the biggest impression.

The doctors at Sick Kids insisted singing was good for a girl with cystic fibrosis.

But that’s not why she sang. The music and sound of the era of 78s enraptured Alex. She started singing in the Credit River Jazz band and Hot 5 Jazzmakers and at clubs around Toronto.

When she went to university at U of T’s Erindale College breathing problems forced her to miss 18 months of school. That’s when she made the decision to pursue music full-time, a decision she’s thankful her parents fully supported.

Jeff Healey aided and abetted her early jazz education, producing the first two albums that earned her the title of Canada’s “Sweetheart of Swing.”

She’s recorded 4 more CDs, cooked up a Lickin’ Good Fried side tour of Western swing/country roots music with husband Colonel Tom Parker and haunted summer festival schedules and concert stages. The first song she published earned a National Jazz Award nomination and the last CD she did earned her a Juno nomination.

The teen who hated to ride the “short bus” in high school that confirmed you were different, wanted people to come out to hear her music, not “to look at the sick girl.”

Although the smoky bars eventually stopped her from performing, she only made her condition public because she “had this wonderful thing called a transplant and wanted to help other people get transplants.” She’s an ongoing charitable ambassador who’s recorded a single for Hurricane Katrina victims, done videos for the CF Foundation and made a charming Christmas album, with proceeds to the Trillium Organ Donor Foundation.

Shortly after she opened for Willie Nelson at Massey Hall during the Toronto Jazz Festival, Alex had her second lung transplant.

Those lungs, once down to 33 percent capacity are now up to 94 percent. They sound best when they fill with the echoes of the 20s and 30s that resonate through the essential music that Alex Pangman lovingly saves, replenishes, and champions.

She says thanks – to both the music and the donors who gave her second and third chances to enjoy it – by getting on stage and singing just as loudly as she can.

How appropriate.

That way the gifts that she has received are given back to the world.

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