Fraser MacPherson discusses his career status.

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Fraser MacPherson discusses the draw to play larger cities.

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Fraser MacPherson discusses his travels through touring.

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Q: “There is a real enclave of B.C. musicians in this city [Toronto]. You must walk into a club and see people that you knew twenty years ago all over the place. What was it that didn’t draw you to Toronto, or to L.A. or to New York?”

A: “Well I was always working. I like Vancouver and then I guess I’m not adventure, adventurous or adventuresome or whatever it is. For about twenty years, I was off and on a night club band leader playing and conducting all the acts that had come up from Las Vegas. The biggest one was The Cave. It would seat perhaps seven, eight hundred people and they would have people ... Well in the, what we might call the Golden Age of Vancouver night clubs in the 60s, we would play for people like Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong would be there and Bassey and Mitzi Gaynor and all those broker act in there for ten or eleven years. Anthony Neely broke his North American ... he had his North American debut there. I would work with anywhere from a quintet on the basic contract up to 28-piece orchestra, for example, for Neely. And you know, all the comics. You know, Jack Carter and Frank Golson and whoever was hot and later the Motown acts like the Supremes and those people, so I was doing that every night and I was very busy with the radio and television work at the time.”