Don Young is a Canadian independent TV writer/producer and filmmaker who has started blogging at The Book of Don.

His blog is a fascinating mixture entries from past journals, interspersed with current posts. Here is a piece of a current post.

I once hired a lawyer to sue Oscar Peterson.

Why ?

He cost me 400,000 dollars, that’s why.

Amidst all the tributes … all the acknowledgments … all the respect - let’s keep in mind that he was one tough, old dude who boycotted the CBC because Life and Times edited a performance of his to keep it inside their TV hour.

Years later (and still angry) he said to me … “You wouldn’t trim a Picasso to make it fit the frame would you?”

Married four times. Distanced from family and friends. Living in a modest middle class home. He may have played like Art Tatum but he negotiated like Sid Vicious.

Here’s how Playback described the show we were going to do together:

Ottawa-based Almadon Productions is swinging into action on a multi-tiered project. “Swing Magic” which celebrates Canada’s legendary jazzman Oscar Peterson. The project kicks off in Ottawa Sept. 16 with a six-city North American tour covering Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

The tour featuring Peterson and his Big Band playing 1940s swing music will be documented for a behind-the-scenes feature called The Will To Swing.

Don Young will direct; Gene Lees will write. The film will tell the personal and professional stories of the artists featured on the tour. In addition to Young’s film, the project will spawn a double live cd, and a commemorative book of tour photos.

Our project collapsed THE MONTH before it was due to start. Not over “creative differences”. Not over music.  

An excerpt from a 2005 email from New Orleans where he was shooting the CTV documentary Music Rising.

I spend the morning with a black Baptist preacher who held a sunrise prayer service. His brother was shot by the National Guard and died in the family home. Nobody knows the circumstances of his death. The family retrieved the body a month after the flood.

In the congregation were nurses who worked at the famous New Orleans ‘Charity Hospital’ - the oldest hospital in America. They told me stories of patients who were euthanized and the terrible panic which ensued in the Intensive Care ward when the flood water swamped the emergency generators and the power went off - in an instant all the respirators and i/v pumps and dialysis equipment went down……in the basement the dozens of cadavers began to thaw… …and many patients in wheel-chairs were trapped in elevators.

On Christmas Eve I rode in a police cruiser with a couple of street hard cops. They told me stories of looting and snipers and had no hesitation to say that they thought the flood was the best thing that had happened in years as it washed all “those people” out of town. The aftermath of Katrina has torn open up the racial fault-lines. People say it’s like the 30s again. Black against white. Only now the black community has guns.