An evening with Jackie and Kim

Mother and daughter duo reunite at the Sergeants Mess Hall

It was a family affair as Jackie Richardson and her daughter Kim Richardson shared the stage in the Sergeants Mess Hall at Base31 on Friday night. They started off a cappella with both their voices filling the room, before being joined by Kim’s band of John Sadowy on piano and Karl Suprenant on bass. Jackie last performed on this stage 11 months ago and at the time said she would come back with her daughter, a promise she fulfilled. “My favourite thing to do is to sing with my daughter,” she said. Kim has a well established career as a singer and actor in Quebec, but is less well known in Ontario. They are both acclaimed performers with a handful of Juno awards shared between them. The bond between them was immediately obvious, and it was as much a musical performance as it was a family reunion where laughter was shared and a few tears shed too. They teased each other, cajoled each other, and exchanged exasperated eye rolls, sometimes while holding each other’s hand. The music, too, was full of emotion. After singing Grandma’s Hands, a song Jackie wrote about her mother, they both hugged tightly and needed a moment to compose themselves afterwards. But there was plenty of humour to spread around too, including the upbeat Coco Taylor song Wang Dang Doodle and a song that was ostensibly about furniture but contained many a suggestive double entendre. The songs ran the gamut from the naughty Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On to the ballad for Africville Deep Down Inside, written by Joe Seely and Dan Hill.

The past year has been a busy one for Jackie. She has been active in the Regent Park School of Music in Toronto, something that she has been doing for over 15 years. She has seen her students grow up to become adults, and she was very proud of the fact that one of them recently got a starring role in a classical performance at the Ford Center. She is extremely proud of her daughter and loves to sing with her. “It’s the best experience for me in my whole career,” she said. That feeling is reflected by Kim. “It’s an honour, a privilege and a pleasure to be able to not only sing with her, but to be able to do something that I love so much with her, who loves it as much as I do. So we both have a passion for it and we meet not only on a parent-child level, we meet on a musical level as well. There is respect and admiration for each other when we are performing, especially in songs that we can relate to. The songs that we do together, the duets, we bring so much of ourselves into it that it’s hard not to feel some kind of emotion, whether it’s laughing hysterically or shedding a tear or two.”

Both Jackie and Kim can trace their early musical influences to Jackie’s father, who sang bass and performed professionally. He knew about the hard life that a musician can face, but he told Jackie that if she chose that as a career, he would do all that he could to help her. For Kim, it was her grandfather’s LP collection that stuck with her. “There was this big console and the best place to hang out was to put these records on and listen to one after the other. Just from spending hours and hours a day listening to the music, I wasn’t aware of how much I absorbed until I moved to Montreal in the late eighties and started singing jazz. That’s when it kicked in. All that music I was playing, I was just drinking it in.” Kim has had an extensive and varied career in Quebec. She has appeared in television shows, in theatre performances and has sung with big band orchestras. She was involved in the Montreal Grand Prix and teaches jazz vocals at Concordia University. “I always look for something that will challenge me,” she said. She is also a baker of excellent cheesecakes, and when she performs on the weekends at a jazz club on St. Denis, her cheesecake is on the menu.

Jackie said that her relationship with Kim has its ups and downs and is a journey to travel. Now that Jackie is a grandmother and great-grandmother, she says that she sees snippets in the younger generations that give her a deeper understanding of her own daughter. “Love has always won out, and everything is worth it. There’s truth in our relationship,” she said. Kim continues to look up to her mother. “I am just so in awe of what she does. She does live music, studio music, acting. She can totally captivate an audience. She is a force.”