Date of Birth: 26 October 1902 Birthplace: Islington, England Date of Death: 23 October 1976 Occupation: Pianist, Composer
(biography below)
Short bio, by Vanessa Blais-Tremblay: Vera Guilaroff was born in October 26th 1902 in Islington, England. Her parents, Eugene Abraham Guilaroff and Annie Guilaroff (born Snitkin), were both Jewish immigrants from Russia (Belarus and Lithuania) who emigrated to England in the late 19th century and eventually settled in Canada in 1909. Guilaroff had six siblings: four sisters, Olga, Dorothy, Eva and Rita, and two brothers, Theodore and Sydney. Guilaroff took piano lessons as a young child with her sister Olga, who went on to become a well-known classical pianist and piano teacher in Montreal. Guilaroff, on the other hand, started to fill in for silent movie theatre pianist Harry Thomas in 1916, and by 1919 she held a permanent position at the Regent Theatre in Montreal. Guilaroff broadcasted on CFCF and CKAC radio starting in the early 1920s, and continued to participate in Montreal’s entertainment business through the 1920s and 1930s, transitioning from the silent movie theatre to the recording studio in the mid-1920s, to radio broadcasting in the early-to-mid 1930s. She also appears as “musical interpreter” on two Gordon Sparling films: Back in ’22 (1932) and Back in ’23 (1933). Guilaroff often collaborated with percussionist Harry Raginsky, whom she married on June 2, 1925, and with novelty pianist Willy Eckstein as “The Piano Ramblers.” She toured the United States as a vaudeville act with Raginsky in the late 1920s, and with Teddy Foster’s Kings of Swing in the United Kingdom in the summer and fall of 1937. As a pianist, composer, improviser, radio broadcaster and recording artist who enjoyed a musical career of international standing, Guilaroff also currently stands as the first woman to have made a record of popular syncopated music in Canada.
Publication(forthcoming, accepted for publication): Blais-Tremblay, Vanessa. “Vera Guilaroff and the Maple Leaf (in D) Rag: Issues of Historiography, Musical Genre, and Improvisational Agency in the Novelty Style,” Women and Music 23 (University of Nebraska Press), 2019.
Other Resources:
Litchfield, Jack.Willie Eckstein, Harry Thomas, Vera Guilaroff: Three Montreal Pianists from the Jazz Age. Toronto: Jack Litchfield, 2015.
Kidd, James. “Vera Guilaroff: Princess of the Piano.” Record Research 76 (May 1966): 5-6.