Vic Vogel

Victor Stefan Vogel (August 3, 1935 – September 16, 2019) was a Canadian jazz pianist, composer, arranger, trombonist, and conductor. Biography Vogel was born in 1935 to Hungarian parents living in Montreal. He began playing the piano at the age of five after watching his older brother play. He also taught himself to play trombone (from age 19), tuba, and vibraphone, and to arrange music. At 14, he began working occasionally in Montreal nightclubs, and did a CBC radio broadcast, while repairing cars to earn money. In the mid-1950s he studied piano and music theory with Michel Harvey in Montreal, and took lesson from Lennie Tristano in New York City. Vogel became a full-time professional musician in the late 1950s, and through the 1960s worked as both a sideman and bandleader in nightclubs, and eventually in radio and TV studios. He played in a Montreal big band and later a nonet led by Steve Garrick, and honed his arranging skills by writing for various bands, including Garrick’s and Al Nichols’s. In 1961, he accompanied on piano the Double Six of Paris, for concerts in the province of Quebec, and, in 1966 led a group of Montreal jazz musicians on a tour of Europe organized by Radi