Colin's Blog

This was sent to me by friend and teacher Bob Murphy

2009-02-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome address to freshman class at Boston Conservatory given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory:

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very
good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they
imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be
more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's
remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said,
"You're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were
not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And
they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just
weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little
bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and
entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your
kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with
entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a
little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient
Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and
astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study
of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music
was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden
objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside
our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside
us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for
the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany.
He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a
cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a
place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a
violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these
specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand
prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous
masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why
would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing
music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water,
to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother
with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have
visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people
created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on
survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must
be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope,
without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were
not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit,
an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we
say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached
a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down
at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I
did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on
the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my
hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter?
Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what
happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless.
Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a
piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of
getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I
contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And
then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We
didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we
most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I
saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around
fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America
the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the
Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York
Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first
communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the
beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the
airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that
very night.

>From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part
of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe.
It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our
budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic
need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives,
one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way
for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio
for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it
as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a
film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you
know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make
you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our
conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good
therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no
music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some
really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very
predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of
emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the
wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if
the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40
percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of
moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move
around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so
that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you
imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue
but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right
moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly
the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music
stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the
understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand
concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were
important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it
made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played
for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers,
foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took
place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began,
as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World
War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was
shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the
pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program
notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we
decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out
and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair,
square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in
the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to
tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't
the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the
concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk
about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances
in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed
pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had
to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again,
but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in
an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched
my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes
which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords
so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop
away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about
this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this
memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I
didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came
out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost
pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that?
How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between
internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have
ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect,
somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost
friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is
why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class
when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge
your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would
imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your
emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my
friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and
bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that
is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you
do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician
isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an
entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue
worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a
spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works
with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come
into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I
expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this
planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of
equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a
military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the
religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war
as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is
to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit
together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do.
As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the
ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

CDs I play.

2007-08-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

It's come to my realization that despite owning a lot of CDs and LPs, I invariably go to a select 30 or so most often. These CDs speak to me in some way depending on mood, time of day,etc. This is a very maleable list that grows and shrinks, changes and changes back, and could never be called a permanent "best of" or "all time favourites". It also is by no means a complete selection of the music I like and listen to...merely a list that I go to most often.

So here it is in no particular order:

Dixie Chicks – Home
Johnny Nash – The Reggae Collection
Sarah Vaughn – Live at Mr Kelly’s
Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
Simon and Garfunkle – Wednesday Morning 3am
Gene Pitney – Greatest Hits
The Grass Roots- Greatest Hits
Greenday- Dookie
George Thorogood – Move it On Over
The Beach Boys – Endless Summer
The Beach Boys- Pet Sounds
Donovan – Greatest Hits
Them- featuring Van Morrison
Tito Schipa- The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 and 2
Chet Baker – The best of Chet Baker Sings
Deep Purple- Machine Head
The Cowboy Junkies – Trinity Sessions
Sarah Vaughn – The George Gershwin Songbook Vol. 2
Thelonius Monk – with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
Lenny Breau – Cabin Fever
Tony Bennett – Perfectly Frank
Diana Krall – Steppin Out
The Chieftains – Another Country
Bruce Cockburn – Circles in the Stream
Loretta Lynn – Van Lear Rose
The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan
k.d. lang – Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Roy Forbes – Almost Overnight
Neil Young- Live at Massey Hall 1971
Bill Evans – Jazz Masters 5
KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope
The Beatles – Rubber Soul
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella and Basie On the Sunnyside of the Street.
Ella Fitzgerald - The Best of the Songbooks.

Yep; pretty diverse. I'm sure that I missed some that should make the list.

Rant

2007-07-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

This is a little rant that I posted on Craigslist after getting really tired of seeing ads for musicians to play for free:

As a musician, I get more and more disturbed at the number of open mic, singing contest,jam nights, battle of the bands events, etc. that are popping up everywhere. The disturbing part is that these events are created not to benefit musicians, but rather, to benefit the venue or promotional company putting on the event. Most disturbing are the contests which require an entry fee. Now I have no problem with a venue conducting a jam night if that venue is a regular promoter and host of regular live music, if there is a host band that is paid and if on other nights musicians get paid decently to play. That would be a venue giving back (a little)...allowing amateurs to get a chance on stage. The problem occurs when a venue's only music comes from open mics and jams. That equates to slave labour. Musicians need to practice for hours to be competent enough to truly entertain a crowd; they need to purchase expensive equipment to be able to convey that entertainment. There is a venue in Toronto that has a great jam night every Tuesday, but every other night of the week they host up to three acts a night....all paid with a percentage of the till (20% !)+ the door or pass the jar whichever the band decides. Top pros show up for this jam night along with beginner acts. Top pros don't show up to jams at a venue that isn't a great supporter of live music. ( No it's not as much of a gamble than paying the musicians outright, but it does share the responsibility of getting bums in the seats quite equally between the musicians and the venue.)

Sometimes a venue will promise exposure. This is a crock. Do they have "free food nights" to give their food exposure? This rant is already too long, but....... If a venue doesn't support good professional musicians by paying decently then they only get mediocre talent. Mediocre talent doesn't entertain or attract clientele. The venue then believes that live music is a waste of time and money. And so the downward spiral begins.

Venues: pay decently and the best will make their way to your door. The best will attract customers.....and so on. It's a gamble that takes some commitment...but it will pay off. Live music needs quality, consistency, and variety.

Musicians: Practice. Be good at what you do. And don't accept lousy pay. If you do play for free, make sure that you and your audience are the only ones who benefit...not the venue or promoter. If a venue asks for a discount on their rates if they provide the PA, ask them if they provide a discount if you bring your own dishes. Don't support venues that treat musicians worse than they treat the bussers. Have contracts...they don't have to be complicated... and ensure that the venue knows that a contract protects both parties. Be professional and don't accept unprofessional treatment. Don't be lured by the promise of exposure...exposure to who?

I'm sure that there is more to say, but alas, I'm tired of typing.

Singer or vocalist?

2007-06-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

You might think that they are one and the same. I used to think that. Some of the greatest call or called themselves singers. Some of the most mediocre call themselves vocalists. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Tony Bennett called themselves singers. Some critics have dubbed Ella and Sarah as vocalists but I think that is in reference to their unbelievable grasp of their instrument. Recently I've noticed something curious: young singers (especially jazz singers) calling themselves vocalists.... seemingly to sound more legitimate as an artist. The term jazz vocalist has started to rub me the wrong way, as if it's not important enough to be "just a singer". (I think sanitational engineer.) (A side note: Great violinists often refer to their million dollar Strad, Guarneri, and Amati violins as "fiddles")

Before I start to ramble on more than I already have....

Jazz singers....be singers. Sing the songs. Vocalization is for practice. Singing is for performance, enjoyment , and art. Scatting is fine, but the best scatters were/are not coincidentally great singers. Singing involves more than just notes; it involves interpretation of lyrics AND how the notes and lyrics go together...a monumental task to do it well. The more I learn, the more I realize how ridiculously difficult it is!

Learning vs Performing

2007-02-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

In my last session with Bob we talked about the difference between learning and performing. For you musicians out there, hopefully this helps you as much as it did me. I have been taking piano lessons again and stumbling along. I hear what the music is supposed to sound like, but my fumbly fingers won't make the sounds. Sometimes I get it...sometimes it's a disastrous mangle of cacophonous notes. I have been trying to perform the piece (for myself) before I have actually learned it. Playing in rhythm before my fingers know where to go.

So Bob says: The learning process involves bringing the music in while the performance process involves letting the music out.

......As simple as that sounds, that was a major revelation for me! Who cares what it sounds like when you're learning the piece. Do it slowly. Do it right. Program your fingers to do the right things rather than programming them to make mistakes. Now it doesn't matter if I take 10 minutes to play through one chorus of Autumn Leaves as long as everything is right.

My practicing has suddenly become a process of real learning rather than poor performing.

Learning

2006-09-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

My work with Bob Murphy has been moving along swimmingly. Last week we started to work on some new repertoire which I haven't done in quite a while. I have still be working on writing my own stuff , but it comes in fits and starts. At times the ideas flow nicely but most of the time I get what I think is a great idea...work on it for a bit....then come to a painful grinding halt. The fledgling idea, like the Wright brother's plane, just off the ground, then nothing. So I've got a whole whack of 10 second songs or half written lyrics that need completion. I've spoken to a couple of song writers who tell me that this is perfectly normal and that eventually if you keep going back and addressing the old ideas, the completions will come as easily as the beginnings. It's then when you know that you've got a decent song.

This post was actually prompted by another blog by Morgan Childs "Morjazzum" http://vancouverjazz.com/morganchilds/. Morgan is a fine drummer who I've worked with a couple of times and an eloquent writer. He suggests viewing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2koXVbl-PPg
And describes it as one of the funniest things he's ever seen....I agree.

Enjoy.

Good or just good for their age?

2006-09-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

I admit it; I'm an Idol Junkie. I watch American and Canadian Idol. Sometimes I wonder why as it often frustrates the hell out of me. The latest Canadian Idol episode did that. It featured Tony Bennett as the inspiration for the contestants to sing the standards. Perhaps this hits close to home because of my musical direction for the past few years. Watching these kids try to make sense of these incredibly well crafted songs was excrutiating. Yes, they sang the notes...mostly. Yes they had a great back up band, including Tony's own quartet for a couple of trainwrecks. But, it was amateur talent night...nothing better than you would see from a good high school production. The audience was as enthusiastic as proud parents would be at said production and it was embarressing. The judges weren't much better, forgeting all of their previous advice about making songs yor own or really getting inside the lyrics and projecting emotion to the audience. There was none of that from the contestants and you could tell that they had absolutely no identification with the songs.

Tony Bennett's perfomances were not technically fantastic, but holy crap does that guy own a song! Tony has the incredible ability to make you believe that he's conversing with you spontaneiously in the song...just making up the words as he goes along just like one would in an impromptu dialogue. Now, Tony seems to get better and better at this, but he has had this ability for a long, long time. Which brings me to the title of this blog....

One of the judges kept harping on the young age of the contestants as if that should matter. There is a large part of our North American society that is impressed with the child prodigy. "Wow and he/she is only 4 years old!". Why do we care? Yes, it's great that young folk can pick up on a skill quickly, but is it good or just good for their age? If we didn't know the age of the prodigy would we still be gushing over the quality? I say, with few exceptions,"no". There are the Mozarts and the Frankie Lymons, but for the most part true quality music,music with emotion and understanding,music with honesty and depth takes time and life to develope. A guitarist I worked with, Alan Kingstone, told me that he had to live with a new tune for a few months before he felt comfortable performing it. He could learn the notes quickly enough, but the depth and meaning of the tune needed more time. He needed living time with the tune to gain so much comfort with it that it could seem real and honest not regurgitory. Sax player Dewey Redmond was famous for his improvisations sounding so natural that he must have played them a thousand times before. Dewey Redmond practiced so much that chances are he had played it before and his improv was a natural language rather than a selection of notes.

Great musicians make you forget about the notes. They take you beyond notes and into a realm of emotion and experience, whether it be a conversation with an old friend or an encounter with a catastrophic tragedy; it's not the notes.The notes are part of the language and that language needs life experience to be able to tell a good story.

Being a good musician is not all about singing or playing the right notes. Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan were and are great musicians regardless of there ability to sing the perfect notes. They have the ability to convey something other than the notes. They have the ability to convey life through there music. Now I'm not saying that playing the perfect notes is wrong or even undesirable. What I am saying is that there is an intangible to great music that goes beyond technique and I don't believe that there are many young musicians that have that intangible.

Piano Lessons turned to singing

2006-07-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd started taking piano lessons with Bob Murphy. Well I hurt my hand a bit (no big story..just bad luck)and substituted a singing lesson with Bob for a piano lesson. Also in my last post, I posed the question of how you know if you have talent and if you should dedicate yourself to your craft and sacrifice more stable and conservative pursuits. So Bob prefaced his comments on my singing with the statement that he was known as being very opinionated and that he was not one to mince words. I had prepared myself for the worst when he said something to the effect that I had the potential to be a great jazz singer. THis man has played with Sarah Vaughn so I take his opinion in very high regard. What does this mean? I'm not great now, but with work (and potetially a lot of it) I could be. Hmmm. We started the second voice lesson with the brutal process of recording and analyzing my singing of a tune, assessing it's strengths and weaknesses, and trying again.....brutal and unforgiving. In this process I found and interesting parallel to my wife's progress as a competitive cyclist: as she works on one area of weakness another area of strength suffers. (see her blog http://www.leedarling.blogspot.com/ )
As we worked on my rhythmic weaknesses, the vocal technique and the melodic interest suffered horribly. It truly opens up your mind to how complex music can be. Just when you think you've got a pretty good handle on it someone teaches you something that shows you how little you actually know. wow. I'll try to post some mp3 files of the recordings we do at our lessons to document the progress.

Laila Biali

2006-03-20T17:09:00.000-08:00

I just saw my friend Laila Biali play at the Jazz Cellar in Vancouver with Brandi Disterheft on bass and Sly Juhas on drums. Specila guest was Phil Dwyer on alto and tenor and on piano for one number. Great gig. It was sold out and I could only get in for the second set despite the fact that I know the band. Laila performs mostly original tunes and was voted composer (and keyboardist) of the year at the Canadian National JAzz awards last year. Laila has begun to sing more recently and the inevitable comparison to Diana Krall is made though I think that Laila's composing skills are far more advanced even at 25 years old than Diana Krall's will ever be. Laila's voice is nice and I enjoyed the singing but holy crap can she play piano. You can definitely tell that piano is where her comfort lies and she is able to express seemingly anything she wants effortlessly through the keyboard. Laila was complaining after the gig that she is so busy that she doesn't get to practice anymore, but having last heard her play a year ago, her playing has become even more natural and expressive. I guess that gigging every night, fighting to be fresh everytime is showing favourably in playing.

The rapport that she has with Sly and Brandi is incredible. There were so many subtle nuances that have become part of their ensemble playing that it almost seems rehearsed off a written score. The players react to each other so quickly that only an educated ear would notice the brilliant ease. There was one little 3 bar section during a solo where Laila fell into 3/4 from 4/4 and it took all of a beat and a half for Sly and Brandi to follow and then return to 4/4 together as if they had planned it all along.

It was the first time I had heard Phil Dwyer play live and I was amazed at how much of a Chameleon he could be. At once Michael Bracker then the next minute Wayne Shorter..always tasteful and occassionally brilliant; he's no slouch on the piano either.

If you get to see Laila live you'll be glad you did. She's touring all over at various festivals when she's not playing club gigs in Toronto.

How to buy my CD

2006-03-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

2006-01-12T00:07:00.000-08:00

This is our cat Luigi. He's far less innocent than he looks.