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Date Posted: 05:40:38 03/30/00 Thu
Author: LUXTON (COPYRIGHTED 2000) PERSONAL USE ONLY
Author Host/IP: spider-ti011.proxy.aol.com / 152.163.194.176
Subject: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE"


Cut to five years ahead, the 1962/1963 school year at St. John’s. It was my Grade Ten year and high school was a whole different game. I heard that the school would be putting on Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial By Jury, and my friend Edd Smith told me he was definitely going for one of the lead parts. I figured if he could, so could I. Guess what, folks...Edd and I BOTH got lead parts. He ended up being the Judge and I got the part of the drunken, philandering young goofball that was being tried.
Upon first scanning the libretto, I realized I had a hell of a lot of work ahead of me. Both Edd and I had huge blocks of dialogue as well as many of the key songs. My linear recall came in very handy while I committed those flowery speeches to memory. Having a lead part in this “huge” production immediately became a status symbol for me.
We spent a great deal of time preparing for the performances. We rehearsed at 8 AM every morning for months, an hour before everyone else started morning classes. We stayed after 4PM for weeks on end, rehearsing and refining and drilling the operetta while all the other kids were out being high-schoolers on the loose.
Mr. Hadfield, our eccentric, clever music teacher at St. John’s, was at the helm of the bobsled for the entire production. It came off pretty well in the final analysis, and the following year when I started Grade Eleven, I automatically went out for the tenor lead in HMS Pinafore.
Before I knew it, I had gotten the part of Ralph (pronounced “RAIF”) Rackstraw. But here’s the twist. The plan was to do four nights of Pinafore towards the end of the school year. For every other lead part but mine, Mr. Hadfield had chosen two people. Each of the two students would have the lead part for two nights. He let me do my lead part all four nights...I was the only one who got to stay out front for every performance. I always thought that was cool, cool, cool.
Besides singing in the Church choir for two or three years, those operettas were the closest I ever came to any kind of voice training. Ever since I can remember I’ve heard this phrase about singing from down in the lungs and not from the neck or throat. Quite frankly, I’ve never understood what the hell that means. Maybe it has something to do with opera or classical vocalizing, but in my universe, you just go for the fucking note. You either get it or you don’t. You’re either on pitch or you’re not. Anyone can sing, but not everyone has people who want to hear them.

Know what I think about singing...? Ninety percent of it is lack of inhibition. I mean, other than a basic sense of pitch and rhythmics, which most people have, the thing most great singers bring to the table is a complete lack of inhibition. They succomb to the moment, and without fear become something or someone else.
Now please don’t read this just one way. Lord knows, I’ve been in enough Karaoke bars to have learned that some pretty rotten singers are constantly willing, even FRANTIC TO “succomb to the moment”. Herein lies the necessity of an audience. When someone has no business braying into a microphone up on a stage out in public, it is the honour-bound duty of the audience either to throw things at this defiler or boo them right the fuck off the stage. No failure here, thank you ! To fail at medicine or law or mathematics or sport is forgivable. But to fail at the business of fantasy...that’s its own death sentence. It’s like Escher’s serpent eating itsself.
Even worse than that, if a person really stinks as a singer and still thinks they’re not bad and talks as if a break of some kind is the only thing standing between them and those Lear jets and passport stamps, you never seem quite able to say the “right thing” or even anything acceptable. Touchy stuff, this singing.
I’m trying to convey the thought of one of our acceptedly great singers getting lost in the moment...Bono...there’s an example. Bono’s voice is an instrument. His mannerisms indicate that he travels when he sings...succombs to the moment.
And if you ever see any of those early black and white film clips of Elvis on stage, I think you’ll see precisely the meaning of “succombing to the moment with a lack of inhibition”. In some ways, singing is acting.
“What are you studying ?”
“ Acting...I’m an actor...”
“So, act like you can sing !”

Concerning lack of inhibition the jazz guys log the most miles. Listen to OM by John Coltrane sometime and then tell yourself that bunch wasn’t out of control that day. I’ve been playing piano for over forty years and I don’t know what the hell they’re up to. I think that in order to end up being an Oscar Peterson type, you have to be playing like Oscar Peterson by the time you’re about eight. David Paich told me that Oscar Peterson had visited his house one time.

David said he was watching Oscar’s right hand while he played and his fingers looked like the wings of a hummingbird. Nice analagy. Oscar didn’t just wake up one morning able to do that. He gave up a lot of other things when he was quite young for that privilege. I greatly envy that level of understanding and artistry, I just never reached the level of sacrifice needed to achieve it. And that may never have been possible anyhow...the world cannot be full of Bill Evanses and Oscar Petersons and Jan Hammers and Keith Jarrets and Kenny Drews...nothing in music would be very special anymore if it were. I know my level of understanding within the mathematics of music and I am beginning to get comfortable with it.
In middle age now I’ve begun to play piano “just for myself” again. I didn’t do that for almost twenty years....only played to motivate songwriting, test sample sounds, make records, etc. I’m feeling like Paul Simon’s guy...

“Thankin’ the Lord for my fingers...”

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Replies:

[> Re: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE" -- MMaypole, 06:09:35 03/30/00 Thu [1] (pm1-47.foxvalley.net/207.252.105.111)

.... I know my level of understanding within the mathematics of music and I am beginning to get comfortable with it.

What is the mathematics of music?


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