Montreal musician pays homage to Hillcrest mine disaster victims

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on August 15, 2024.

Submitted photo - Michael Bruzzese, a Montreal musician and music teacher, is honouring the memory of the 1914 mine disaster victims with a composition called "Hillcrest." Below: Ruins at the Hillcrest mine site are overtaken by growth in this Herald file photo.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

For 189 men, June 19, 1914 was the last day they would step into the Hillcrest Mine. Just two hours after they started their shift that day, a gas explosion ripped through the mine killing them.

The disaster 110 years ago on the edge of the town of 1,000 left 90 women widowed and hundreds of children without their fathers. Many of the killed are buried side by side in a special section of the Hillcrest cemetery where they were honoured in July during a ceremony commemorating the event.

And now the miners are being honoured by a special composition by a Montreal musician who lost family in the mine.

Some of the killed miners also lost other family members including siblings in the disaster.

One was Italy native Nicholas Albanese, a bucker, whose brother Dominic, a father of four children, also was killed.

Nicholas who was born in 1890 in Mammola, Reggio de Calabria, was one of two sons of Francesco Albanese and his wife, whose name is not listed by the official mine disaster website. He is buried in the mass grave at the Hillcrest cemetery.

Brother Dominic, or Dominico, was born in 1882. He and wife Rosa Maria were parents to three sons and a daughter named Angelina. Son Nicodermo died in the Second World War in Ethiopia while Stefano died in 2003. No further information is listed for son Salvatore. The location of Dominic’s remains are unknown but are also believed to be in the mass miners’ grave.

As buckers, the job of the Albanese brothers was “to ensure the coal ran freely from the face where the miner’s dug the coal to the bottom of the chute and into the waiting coal car,” says the mine disaster website.

“The chute was metal and because of the pitch, gravity was used to move the coal down the chute. The coal chutes at the base of the miner’s rooms were blocked by planks to prevent the coal from dropping until a car was placed under the chute. When the mine car was in place, the block was raised and coal filled the car.

“Some times the coal jammed in the chute. The bucker, who was usually well up the chute, released the jam by prodding it with a heavy stick or, more often, by sitting in the chute, clinging to the sides and pushing with his feet in a bucking motion,” says the website.

Michael Bruzzese, a Montreal musician and music teacher, heard about the disaster for the first time last month when the Herald’s story on the disaster reached family members of the Albanese brothers.

His mother Carmela Piazza recently contacted the Herald and said the story started a discussion about family history as well as the sacrifices made by mine victims and their widows, and the poor compensation paid to survivors.

Piazza feels the mine victims should be remembered as Canadian heroes.

Her son is doing his part to ensure they are remembered with a composition called “Hillcrest.”

Bruzzese, who studied at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, said Wednesday in a phone interview he was working on a composition when he heard about the disaster and the mood of the music he was creating seemed to suit it.

“Maybe my parents knew about it earlier but I’d only found out about it a month ago when my uncle sent my dad the article because he had seen our family members’ name in it and then he told us about it,” said Bruzzese of the tragedy.

Before he heard about the disaster, he had started on a composition, working on some new harmonic ideas.

“I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to call it. It was kind of a dark composition. It starts with a kind of a funeral march, the drums are playing a march and there’s these chords happening on the guitar or piano while the saxophone plays the melody.

“And then it kind of turns chaotic and then we enter a new tempo where the musicians solo and the drums play an open solo and it gets free and chaotic again and then we end it off with a march like the beginning,” said Bruzzese.

Once his father had told him the Hillcrest story, “I thought it would be fitting because it kind of matched the vibe of what he told me and with the composition, he said.

One of the Albanese brothers, he believes, was his great great grandfather. He doesn’t know what happened to his family after the explosion.

Bruzzese is a jazz musician who teaches guitar and jazz improv at a private school and a jazz conservatory called the Montreal School of Jazz.

He says he was surprised to hear about the previously known family connection to Alberta.

“It’s very surprising to me.”

He performed “Hillcrest” for the first time at the Mont-Tremblant jazz festival as a quartet recently with guitar, saxophone, bass and drums and he plans to keep tweaking it. Eventually, Bruzzese he wants to record it for his next album as a quintet, adding piano to the mix.

His next recording will be his second, his first “Even When I’m Dreaming” being released in 2022.

Vince Bruzzese, great grandson of Dominic, said Thursday in a phone interview from Montreal his great-grandmother had stayed in Mammola when her husband came to Canada.
“I remember my great grandmother really taking fantastic care of me in Italy just before I came over in ’56. That family was a wonderful family,” said Bruzzese.
The tradition among men who would leave Mammola was they would work at a place for a few years then call the family over.
Bruzzese remembers his dad and an uncle telling him the story of the loss of family members in a mine in Canada.
“I was interested as a boy in listening to it and I always kept it in the back of my mind. And I had mentioned it to my children and my daughter Maria, she’s a lawyer and she loves to keep up to family occurrences and things of that nature” and sent her dad the Herald story on the mine disaster.
Dominic’s family didn’t follow him to Canada because  financially things were a bit insecure and it was right before the war, he said.
Subsequently, Dominic’s son Stefano moved to Toronto. His daughter Angelina, Vince’s grandmother, stayed in Italy where she died. She had some neurological issues and Vince’s dad was supposed to bring her over at one point when the family came over in 1956 but couldn’t because of her health irregularities, he said.