Roger Admiral

A man of the keys

With a bounce in his knees

Fingers that pounce

And all but announce

Roger Admiral

is Abracadabrical!

All musicians know this to be true: Satisfaction is one’s career is only possible with assistance. Teamwork Makes The Dream Work. Without an entourage of sympathetic and dependable professionals, career advancement is limited. You need the right people.

Every artist can see the value of a trendy optician, but realistically, there are only two service professionals that deserve our unwavering worship: the repair technician and the artist formerly known as accompanist—𝄆🎹𝄇—the collaborative pianist.

Admiration For The Admiral

The great 𝄆🎹𝄇s are in a class all of their own; discrete, emotionally-neutral, hyper-aware, able to course correct in less than a second.

Able to leap over tall buildings chords in a single bound!

They fix our mistakes, often so seamlessly, that we aren’t even aware we made them in the first place. In these situations, (for the soloist) ignorance is bliss.

One such master of the profession is Roger Admiral, a man who knows exactly when to lift off the piano bench to emphasize a sforzando.

Whenever I gaze upon my coffee stained copy of Muczynski’s Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, I remember the good old days; first when he collaborated with me, and then with my students. How lucky we were.

Probably like most of you, I liked Roger right away. But unlike many of you, I sensed something familiar in his personality; a particular way of understanding one’s place in the world. Because, you see, I know where Roger comes from:

A place to stand,

A place to grow,

Ontari-ari-ari-o…

Ontario Pastoral

Roger is not from Toronto. We must travel further afield. Drive westwards,

Rain on the windshield headed south,

to the flat lands of south western Ontario where cornfields, weathered wood barns and Victorian red brick houses with verandas sit alongside massive greenhouses and white windmills.

Travelling along highway 6 SOUTH from the industrial city of Hamilton to Port Dover, a beach town on the northern shores of Lake Erie, is an established tradition. Construction on the Hamilton – Port Dover Plank Road began in 1839, and opened for public use in 1844. But the stagecoach ride was long and a stop along the way was needed.

Dogs Nest/Dog’s Nest/Dogs’ Nest

Founded in 1851, the charmingly named Dogs Nest became a popular way-point on this route, with two taverns by 1871 and a population of 30.

And it was here in this hamlet, in the mid-twentieth century, that a musician was born.

Today, 154 years after its founding, Dogs Nest (population 20) is a municipal outlier. Unlike Toronto which has hundreds thousands of unresolved issues, Dogs Nest appears to have had only two.

The first isn’t really a problem at all, just a pleasant ambivalence about the hamlet’s official spelling. Apostrophe before or after the s or none at all? It doesn’t seem to matter, at least on the internet.

The second problem is that its official welcome signs, seen as desirable trophies for man sheds, have been stolen so often that the government stopped replacing them. Without a marker, people travelling 6 SOUTH would have no physical proof that they were passing through Dogs Nest. Until now.

It took a visionary and practical committee of seven citizens to establish a seven tonne memorial stone just off the highway at the intersection of Woodhouse Road (Concession 2) and Marburg Road to cement Dogs Nest’s name on the land.

All it needs now is the following tagline:

Birthplace of Roger Admiral.

That’s R-O-G-E-R   A-D-M-I-R-A-L

For urbanites, the idea of coming from a hamlet is almost other worldly; the stuff of fairy tales. (Wow! Do you live in a forest? Are there gnomes?) But the reality is that,

Here on the outskirts of life,

Dreams seldom come true…

Eventually, you have to leave.

SoWestO

Zoom out a bit and the region of south western Ontario presents more opportunities. But we’re still in Who Do You Think You Are? country where being humble and not drawing attention to yourself are cultural markers. As an artist, how can you pedal forward when the culture is applying the brake? If only there was somewhere else…

Alberta is calling me

Home sweet home, it’s where I’m proud to be

Alberta is calling me

Livin’ right I’m feeling free…

Alberta Bound

On the surface, Canadians are surprisingly similar (considering the expanse). After all,

The same sun risin’ over me

is risin’ over you…

But each province is different and when you move, the first shock is the realization that your home province actually has a culture. Up until the switch it was just how things were. Provincial characteristics emerge more forcefully when one set of values contrasts with another.

As Stephen Marche put it in the Globe & Mail, (‘So, you’re from Alberta?’ February 15th, 2025) “Albertans are permitted to be ambitious, they’re not embarrassed about it…They want to build their own lives, at whatever the cost.”

This contrasts sharply with the large swaths of Ontario where you are expected to be modest about your own accomplishments and grateful for your lot in life.

In both cases, nobody says these things out loud. Nor are they taught in school. They are shared, lived values, involuntarily absorbed, quite by accident, whether you agree with them or not.

The story of Roger Admiral is how contradictory cultures can collide and leave their mark.

He, born on the lands of modest expectation, tucked a sense of humility in his belt before travelling to Alberta, a land open to achievement. He left a place that frowns on ambition for one that celebrates it.

Roger Admiral achieved the Alberta Good Life by being humble about his explosive skills. Very few pianists can collaborate with contemporary classical saxophonists like he can—and he would be the last person to make this claim—but it’s true.

Unassumingly Passionate

Roger is an exceptional musician.

But you won’t catch him up on a rooftop, singing his own praises.

Instead, he wins us over by stealth, with fingers scaling the keys, ready to pounce.

In collaborative performance situations he’s never the problem—he’s the solution. Music that would make other 𝄆🎹𝄇s faint bring out his best qualities. He is always equal to the task; the music is never too complex, too technical or too abstract.

His style is upfront and clear. He is a commanding and serious presence on the stage. If you, the soloist, are giving the music everything you’ve got, just behind you to the right, Roger is playing at twice your intensity. His fingers, like Niagara Falls, thunder over the keys until the final cadence.

And yet his real superpouvoir is that everyone wants to work with him. He’s nice to be around because there’s no agenda and no pressure to be anything but yourself. It’s unusual to be liked and respected at the same time; Roger is both.

Western Skies

You may have noticed that I included some lyrics from the Poetry Society for Everyday Canadians, otherwise known as Blue Rodeo.

They sing it—we recognize it.

Better yet, we feel it.

It’s a wonder why Blue Rodeo didn’t snap Roger up when Bob Wiseman left the band. Can’t you just see him in a fancy cowboy shirt improvising on the electric organ—rocking out—in Diamond Mine?

Just take a second and picture it.

Am I right? Or am I right!

The stadium’s loss is the concert hall’s gain, and for purely selfish reasons I’m glad Roger does what he does. We saxophonists know it: He’s one of Canada’s best 𝄆🎹𝄇s.

And although he must pine for field-grown strawberries in the spring and red leaves in the autumn, home is Alberta. Home is the piano bench.

And a hieroglyphic score.