Despite mixed reviews and disappointing audience figures, The Voice has started its second series on BBCTV.

This hilarious picture came from their website and eloquently sums up my feelings about the whole ethos of the programme.

My sister Nicola (she who never gives up) posted a comment on my Facebook wall:

“I hate to bring this up again but if you had gone on The Voice this year and just really simply sung a couple of the more esoteric songs from your album like “Where Do You Start?” or “What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life” there is NO WAY they wouldn’t pick you. #JustSayin&I’llShutUpNowAgain”

and later that day…..because she just can’t help herself….

“Or, even better, that Michael Jackson one you did at Steyning Jazz Club….that would get their attention”

Her suggestions are pointless anyway as last year I learnt from a singing colleague who had actually auditioned, that you can’t even sing your own song. You have to choose from a list of pop songs which they give you (I imagine that they are songs which are published by connected artists and record companies).

Last night, for the first time in months we met up and went to our favourite music venue, The Brunswick Pub. It was the weekly Jazz Jam and I got up and sang a song. There were some new punters down there and after I sat down, a silver haired gentleman leaned across and said to me “I know this is not their type of music,  but you should go on The Voice“.

Nicola almost erupted with delight.

For the purposes of clarity, and for those of you who missed it the first time round, I thought I’d re-share my blog post about why I really won’t ever be doing that. Just click on the title below:

My Big Sister Wants Me To Go On The Voice

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

It was 1996 and the Swingle Singers had been invited to return to La Scala, Milan to take part in a brand new opera by Luciano Berio. As a group, we had taken part in the opera Blimunda by Azio Corghi in 1990. This was produced by La Scala, but the performances took place in the Teatro Lirico.

La Scala viewed from the stage

This time we would be performing on the actual stage, where legendary singers like Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas made operatic history. Of course, the music we would sing would be very different from the romantic soaring melodies that made the great composers and singers famous.

The Swingle Singers had been associated with Luciano Berio since 1968 when he wrote his epic orchestral work Sinfonia for the group. I have been fortunate enough to sing that piece many times. By some strange twist of fate, I was asked  to learn it when I was a student at the Guildhall School of Music.

Eight singers were coached by the fantastic high soprano and French language coach Nicole Tibbels, herself a former Swingle. We sang it with the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Hall with Jeremy Lubbock conducting (himself a former Swingle Singer Bass). Two years later I joined the group and sang Sinfonia many times with them, most memorably with Berio himself conducting a VERY fast version with the Concertgebouw orchestra. These days, I perform Sinfonia as a member of Synergy Vocals. In 2013 we have performances in Paris and the Edinburgh Festival and the group have a new recording of Sinfonia coming out soon on Harmonia Mundi, recorded with the BBCSO.

Back to 1996, and the Swingles Singers ‘giving’ their gruppo vocale were contracted for four performances with the option of another two. It was always understood there would be six performances and our total fee would be based on that.

They insisted that we come to Milan for a minimum of five weeks of rehearsals. This seemed excessive as we probably only had about fifteen minutes of music in total! The group had to provide money up front for nine flights, hotel rooms and per diems (daily living expenses), without any advance payment from the opera house. I don’t think many groups would agree to such a risky contract without an advance in today’s financial climate.

“It’s EEEEtaly……It’s La Scala daaaahling……it’s uuuusual” our glamorous Italian agent assured us.

My treasured poster signed by Berio

The opera was called Outis and the title role – which means ‘nobody’ – was sung by Alan Opie, a Welsh baritone who turned out to be great fun to work with. In the story, his character would be killed in various ways at the beginning of each of the five scenes and he would just get up and carry on with his business, whether in a supermarket, on a cruise ship, at the stock exchange or in a Brothel.

The director was Graham Vick and Ron Howell was the choreographer. Our Maestro was the American conductor, David Robertson. We had worked with him before and he was later to prove the catalyst for Synergy’s genesis, our introduction to the composer Steve Reich and he has become a long time collaborator with the group.

Right from the outset, things seemed very Italian.

There was no printed schedule. Every evening, we were telephoned with our call times for the next day. This meant that we couldn’t plan to travel home for a weekend if we weren’t needed on a Friday, as we wouldn’t know that until the Thursday evening.

David Robertson confided in us, that he had sent the La Scala management a schedule by fax before he arrived. He had assured them that it would probably remain the same. Every day the company manager would telephone and ask him whom he needed for the next day’s music call. Every day he would reply in his excellent Italian with the same words, ‘The same as my schedule, thank you”.

Sporting our smart costumes in our La Scala Dressing Room

The day we arrived, we had our first costume fitting. A comprehensive list of every conceivable measurement on our body had been sent a month or two earlier. Our costumes were a set of outfits that wouldn’t be out of place on the set of Mad Men. We had fitted, bouclé, wool dresses with a white peter pan collar and red scarfs tied in a bow. The boys were smart in slim fitting business suits.

The best costume was a white polka-dot lace evening dress with a full circular skirt reaching to the floor.

The following week we were paraded in front of the director Graham Vick, who declared that we all looked far too attractive in our lovely frocks and ordered the poor costume ladies to cut off the skirts at an unflattering mid-knew level. Those of you with any dressmaking (or mathematical) knowledge will gasp at the terrible waste of fabric, as most of the material in a circular skirt is in the bottom half. I often wonder if the fabric ended up as one of the seamstresses’ christening gowns.

Money seemed no object on this production, although you can see in my pictures that like many opera houses, the backstage facilities were something quite different from the spectacular front of house.

The main feature of the set was described to us as a moveable Trojan Horse constructed from 70 TV monitors which, by some miracle of technology, (ahhhhh – how times have changed) would be able to display many individual disturbing images. They could also combine together to display just one huge one. This fabled wonder would arrive at some time nearer the performances and meanwhile, tape on the floor would represent it and we would reverentially tiptoe around it’s void of promise.

Ron the choreographer had the ‘brilliant’ idea of choreographing all eight Swingles as a fifties style doo wap pop group. The box step featured a lot and he did that baffling thing which dancers do, of counting everything in groups of eight. Unfortunately the very difficult music was written in anything but regular lengths of bars or even beats. We all struggled to marry the complicated music of Berio with a dance routine akin to The Shadows.

No matter, we had five whole weeks to perfect our steps.

The other enormous expense was to build a ‘revolve’ onto the La Scala stage. This was a completely raised floor with a mechanism that could turn the stage scenery completely. Quite standard practice nowadays but a big, brave plan in those days.

Unfortunately the engineers building the false floor and the enormously heavy TV Trojan Horse hadn’t consulted each other.

The Trojan Horse

The day finally arrived when they would unveil this wondrous creature and it was wheeled ceremoniously onto stage. Just as the disturbing images started to flash before our eyes there was the sickening sound of splintering wood and the beast crashed through the false floor onto the turning mechanism below.

The up-side was that we were all sent back to the hotel for a couple of days while repairs and reinforcements were made.

One of the big ensemble scenes was set in a sort of hideous bordello. Glass doorways, similar to those found in the red light district in Amsterdam were wheeled on and naked, oiled dancers repeatedly threw themselves against the glass and slid slowly down to the floor, quickly jumping up to do the same disturbing thing over and over again. Funnily enough, there were always a great deal of safety firemen backstage for that scene. Other dancers simulated violent sexual acts around the poor, bewildered mister Outis.

Amsterdam’s red-light doorways

The Swingles were to make an ironic conga-line and snake our way through the scene of debauchery, singing a rhythmic chant of ‘ooh ah, ooh ah, ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh ah’ into our radio microphones.

When he saw the fruits our dance calls, the director Mr Vick thought we weren’t quite bizarre enough and had words with the designer. The next rehearsal we were all handed large red pants in the style of Bridget Jones and just before we entered stage-left we were to drop the attractive garments to our mid-calf and perform our snake dance with this delightful added nuance.

Well, it was La Scala, after all daaaaaaahling!

Killing time backstage at La Scala

On Sundays a lot of restaurants were closed and we asked one of the opera cast for a recommendation for a special place. It was one of the group’s birthdays. He sent us to a restaurant which mainly served meat, which you cooked for yourself on a fire in a nook set into the wall next to each table.  The interesting thing about the menu was that you could choose the type of wood you wanted your fire to be made from. Different wood imparted a different flavour to the meat. We ate at that restaurant whenever we could think of any tenuous excuse for celebration. We had learnt our music before we arrived, so five weeks to perfect our box step was wearing a little thin and it didn’t take much to persuade us. There was a lot of time spent sitting in the backstage bar sitting in our civvies but with our hair backcombed to death.

Time dragged on and we were all looking forward to the performances and the chance to go home. On the technical rehearsal it became clear that some things in the production were just too complicated especially when the opera chorus arrived and the big ensemble scenes had to be drastically simplified. We really might as well have come for the final week and slotted into the now almost static scenes.

My lovely white dress – in the bar!

The four girls were sent to make-up and hair and emerged with a back-combed confection on our heads and make up of white faces, Cleopatra eyeliner and red lipstick. As we left wardrobe, we were handed the pièce de résistance to complete our outfits – a set of glasses which Dame Edna would have been proud of.

During the pre-general, rumours started to circulate that the full time chorus were not happy with their new contracts. We were sent home while they had a meeting. By the dress rehearsal, the atmosphere seemed strained and on the morning of the World Première we were telephoned at the hotel to tell us that they had gone on strike and there would be no performance at all. The next day was always going to be a free day and we spent it trying to find out about the implications for our 4 performance contract and if we would lose one of our performance fees if all six didn’t go ahead. We met a couple of the dancers in the street who told us they had been there for ten weeks with only their hotels provided so were in a worse state than we were.

The day of the second performance arrived and still the chorus were in deadlock. We got a call telling us that the show was cancelled again. The reviewers had left town and the hype surrounding this important new composition by Luciano Berio was dissolving fast.

We spent the evening drowning out sorrows in our favourite haunt and calculating that once all our expenses and Ward Swingle’s percentage were deducted from only four performance fees, the split for the singers would be almost nothing. A six and a half week jaunt to Milan with no wages to pay the bills at home.

There were two days between the second and third performances and on the evening of the first day we received the good news that the première would happen the next day. The other performance would be slotted into another gap and there would be six nights after all. We had a short tech rehearsal in the morning…… just in case we’d forgotten the reset moves and happily made our way to make-up to get our beehives quiffed and our red pants ready for dropping. You might wonder if there would be an audience, and we did too, but notices were posted on the doors of the theatre telling everyone that the show was moved and to come back tomorrow – which amazingly they did! Only in Italy…….

Bernard Holland from the NY Times was obviously happy to be delayed in Milan for a few more days. He described the production in his review which I found archived on their website:

”Outis” makes hamburger of the sequential event. Our hero is killed at the beginning of each of five scenes, but whether strangled, stomped, shot or stabbed, he gets up and goes about his business. The fatal blows, it would seem, are aimed as much at our watches as anything else. The composer’s explanatory essays, a version of the operatic overture, identify the elements of danger, conflict, journey and return — all of which pretty much sum up ”The Odyssey.” They are reordered in every scene, put in different places and given new clothes to wear.

Hectic carnival alternates with colorless simplicity, in particular a rotating monolithic wall against which characters lean as they sing. Elsewhere, an auctioneer inflates himself into a giant balloon. Dangling television screens report from the stock market or leer at us with one blinking, shifting eye. We visit a supermarket checkout counter. A dubious surgeon, saw in hand, removes a leg. A cruise ship, all in white, rocks in a storm; its passengers engage in fistfights.”

Once the run had finally started, we had another particularly nice Sunday off. All the foreign members of the cast went on a day trip to Lake Como and we discovered that it would be Alan Opie’s birthday on the day of the next performance.

One of his big vocal ‘arias’ was sung cowering against a large monolithic wall, which bisected the repaired revolve. As the music went on, the stage slowly turned and he staggered his way along the length of the wall. Just as he reached the end of it, he faced the stage wings where we were awaiting our entrance. The Swingle ladies decided to surprise him on his birthday by making the letters of his name in white fabric and sewing them onto our pants. (In our defense we had a lot of time on our hands). We stood ready in the wings, giggling like schoolgirls as he made his tortured way along the wall. Just as he reached us, we turned our backs to him and on the count of four, simultaneously lifted out polka-dot circular skirts, showing him our huge red knickers sporting the word A L A N, written in white across our four, red-clad bottoms. The truly professional opera star that he was, he managed to hold the pained expression on his face, as the revolve carried him slowly towards the back of the stage, ready for his next gruesome death.

Postscript.

Somehow Robert Kearley, Second Tenor at the time of this adventure, does not feature in my photos – apart from the one sitting in the bar, in which I chose to crop him off, as he’d hate me forever if I posted an unflattering image.  Rob went on to be a very successful opera director and I wonder how much this experience shaped him – or at least gave him an inkling that long holidays in foreign places with endless budgets for indulging one’s directorial whims were a better choice than the itinerant life of a singer.

Rob Kearley

Click on his gorgeous picture to hear him waxing lyrical about his production of Faust for Opera North, which I found on his Agent, Rayfield Allied’s website (and who spookily also represent Steve Reich – it’s a small word).

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

The glamorous view from the first hotel room

Late in 2012, I visited Argentina with the composer Steve Reich and Synergy Vocals to do a series of workshops and concerts with local musicians. We arrived in torrential rain which was soon followed by an unusual spring heatwave of 35 degrees….and a cleaner’s strike – not a happy marriage. We were due to stay for about ten days which was a long time. We have performed the music many times and would usually only arrive for the final days of rehearsals. To make up for this, we had been promised a very nice hotel with a swimming pool on the roof. Unfortunately that was changed by email at the very last minute – the day before we headed for the airport.  When we arrived in Buenos Aires, the replacement hotel was really quite bad (and I’ve stayed in a few dives in my time). To add insult to injury, our luggage had been lost by Iberia on the quick transfer at Madrid, so we had no clean clothes to change into after 16 hours of flying…….

We were a rather tired and grumpy group of singers but after some food and beer our usual good humour prevailed. The next day, after considerable tenacity from Micaela, the very kind team at the British Council (who were paying for some of the workshops) came to our rescue and eventually found us some better accommodation.

Pablo Druker and Steve Reich

By contrast, when we went to the first rehearsal the musicians were very welcoming, well prepared and enthusiastic. Pablo Druker, our conductor for Tehillim and Proverb was excellent – Tehillim particularly is notoriously difficult for the conductor and he took our first rehearsal with organs and woodwind with ease.

I had been to Buenos Aires a few years previously and was pleased to meet some familiar faces, particularly the composer and conductor Santiago Santero who had performed in Berio’s Laborintus II with me.

During the break, I was offered some Jerbe Mate, a traditional drink of Argentina. The dried leaves and twigs of the yerba mate plant are infused with hot water in a small cup, usually made from a gourd, but also from bone or horn. We were told that the drink is sipped through an oboe reed – this was a joke as it is actually a metal straw called a bombilla.

Seeing people on the streets clutching a thermos flask and mate cup became a familiar sight during our time in the city, as the Argentinians love nothing more than stopping to chat with friends and sharing this strange tea.

Sadly, I don’t feel we saw the best of this famous city as it was incredibly hot and very smelly….the rotting rubbish was piled up in the streets. One thing that did impress me though was how people sifted through the rubbish at night and claimed every last thing that could be recycled and sold.

Buenos Aires is a very interesting place. You can see from the scale of the buildings what an immensely grand and wealthy city it once was.

A typical pavement in Buenos Aires

Unfortunately since their financial crash which started in 1999, it appears as if nothing has been fixed or maintained. Once beautiful houses are now dilapidated and the pavements are a death trap.

The people are amazing though, resilient and motivated. Our final hotel was near the cathedral square and every day there was a demonstration of one kind or another. I asked a local what they were demonstrating about and she told me that the people demonstrate when they are angry about something but also when they’re happy too. Every day there was a new demonstration.

The riot police lined up in front of the crowds were a scary sight for me but I was told they were only there for show.

She said that she doubted if a riot broke out, they would actually do anything.

Riot police during a demonstration in Buenos Aires

We were working every day except Sunday, so on our day off, a few of us took a trip out to the Tigre Delta. The hot and sticky hour on the packed train was a really eye opener. We traveled through very poor areas of the city with shacks made from corrugated iron and then, in contrast, past grand country clubs and race courses. Tigre is a place where all walks of life can escape from the heat and grime of the city and take a picnic with friends. We took an amazing boat trip around the Delta to see the summer houses on stilts – both grand and very basic.

Here’s a picture of the the colourful local supermarket:

The local supermarket in Tigre

The concerts and workshops went well and Musical Director Micaela Haslam and I waved off the rest of the group.  We had to stay for an extra day on our own, as we had one final concert of Drumming which only needed two singers.

There was a dress rehearsal with the band in the morning which contained the excellent Uruguayan percussion group called Ensamble Perceumand. Then we headed back to the hotel on the ancient wooden subway.

I was reading in my room and suddenly the air conditioning went off. It seemed that there was a power cut and this carried on for a few hours. Just as it started to get dark the lights came back on. What I didn’t know, was that the hotel had a generator and it was this that was working – the whole of the rest of Buenos Aires was completely without power. The unusual heat for springtime had caused everybody to turn on their air conditioning and the power stations weren’t prepared for the unexpected surge.

It was my turn to come down early to order a taxi to the hall. (We used the underground for rehearsals but as it was very dusty and extremely hot, we took a cab to the theatre for the actual concert). Micaela joined me in reception and told me that she’d just received a phone call telling her that the concert was definitely cancelled as the theatre had no power. She had double checked that there was no chance that it would go ahead and they confirmed that the sound crew had been sent home so no, it would NOT happen.

I did what every self respecting singer would do and ordered a Spanish style gin and tonic and an Argentinian beefburger…..just to ease the disappointment you understand.

No sooner had I drunk my G & T and my plate of food had arrived, when the front desk called Micaela over for a phone call. It was the tour manager asking how soon we could get to the theatre. The power had been restored in that part of the city and they had found a local sound guy to put together a makeshift sound system. The audience were all patiently in the bar waiting for the concert to go ahead.

Micaela rushed upstairs to get changed again and I asked for a paper bag to put my delicious burger into. We hurried out into the dark streets and tried to hail a cab. As we were dressed in our ‘concert blacks’ and there were no streetlights, this proved not only difficult but rather hazardous. The taxi drivers in Buenos Aires drive like maniacs so to venture to the middle of the road and try and hail one is a dangerous sport. In the flurry of running and dodging cars I suddenly noticed that my bag was rather light…..the bottom had opened and there was my burger lying on the road, ready to treat some lucky rat.

9 de Julio Avenue

For those of you who have visited Buenos Aires, you will know that the roads are famous for being very wide with multiple lanes. The drivers swoop from one lane to another with no indication or apparent awareness of the other cars or buses. The previous night, on the way to the theatre, our taxi driver had pulled out across a six lane road. With a horrible grinding noise the clutch failed (or dropped off) and we stalled conveniently in front of a massive truck. The singers in the car all prayed in unison with the driver’s frantic Spanish exhortations to ‘Our Lady of Ignition’ as the lights changed and an enormous wall of cars moved towards us and the truck let out a mighty horn of protest. Right at the last moment our prayers were answered and the battered taxi limped on.

So…..after about fifteen minutes we did manage to stop a taxi and we zoomed to the theatre through a strangely dark city. We headed down to the stage through the audience, who were waiting in the lobby, clutching their beers, seemingly undaunted by the wait.

The musicians wait in the dark

The musicians were sitting shell shocked on the stage and a single sound engineer was busily wiring up a makeshift system using what seemed to be a couple of guitar amps for speakers. The Swingle Singer’s famous sound engineer, John Milner would have famously described such a task as “hewing a sound system out of the living rock”.

We had already noticed that things in Argentina weren’t exactly high-tech anyway. This extraordinary plugboard on stage is a great example.

It wasn’t just a case of turning things on. When the city was lunged into darkness, whole electrical circuits would have been tripped and we were told a specialist technician would have to reset everything the following day – but he had been sent home. Usually for Drumming, every instrument has a microphone in order to adjust the balance, but for this performance, only the singers and piccolo would be amplified. The lighting was down to the minimum and it was a good job we knew the piece so well as it was very difficult to see the music in the gloom.

Another hour went by and eventually we got the go-ahead and trooped off to the dressing rooms while the staff let the very patient audience in. Steve Reich was sitting anxiously at his usual place, behind what was left of the sound desk.

Drumming during the rehearsals

Drumming starts with four drummers playing on tuned bongos.

I’ll try to explain the concept. A single beat is gradually added to, until the whole rhythmic pattern is built up.  The drummers phase. This is where one stays constant and the other one slowly speeds up. There is a moment where the drumsticks buzz in tension as the speeds collide and then there is a marvellous moment where the speeding drummer emerges into the constant speed, but one quaver beat displaced. If it’s a really good phase it can last for a while and you wonder if they’ll make it. This movement is done in both directions. A very complex rhythmic pattern results. One drummer then starts to pick out the simple resulting patterns that emerge from the complex rhythms.

When the drummers have finished they are joined my marimbas and the whole process is repeated with pitched instruments. That’s where the singers come in. We sing the resulting patterns, fading in and out, so it’s hard to know whether we are singing or whether what you can hear is a tune made by the marimbas. We suggest the various simple melodies that can be picked out if you let your mind and ear wander.

In this performance, just as the glockenspiels faded in to start the next section, we put our microphones down, stepped back and suddenly all the lights went off in the theatre.

In any other country, that event would have signalled the end of the concert, but the players, not knowing what to do and also knowing their music by heart, carried on playing the glockenspiels. The green emergency lights did come on over the exit doors, so as our eyes adjusted it wasn’t complete darkness, but very close. Some stage hands were ready with small torches and after other audience members shushed the concerned murmers which were rippling around the room, it became clear that the show would indeed go on.

This is the point in Drumming where I do the whistling part.

I should explain that I’m not the loudest or best whistler, I was just the only person on one particular rehearsal who could make any sort of noise at all. As a result, I accidentally became the whistling soloist. I realised the microphone was now silent and I also knew that the four glockenspiels make a deafening noise as their harmonics build up, so I was in trouble.

We once did a Drumming Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. The Health and Safety people measured the sound levels of the piece and deemed the glockenspiel part to be dangerous for people’s hearing. Every member of the audience was offered earplugs.

I asked Micaela if I should go to the front of the stage to whistle but she didn’t think they would even hear me there, so I went through the motions of whistling and quickly cued the piccolo player to do her part. Then I waved my arms above my head madly signaling the players to move on to the last section.

Happily somebody conveyed the message and the drummers and marimbas carefully felt their way to their instruments for the final section. At this point the emergency lights also failed but members of the audience jumped up to point their mobile phone lights at the instruments.

Voices and piccolo usually do a final round but it was pretty pointless as they couldn’t hear us over the din. In rehearsals, the amazing Uruguayan percussionists had decided to finish the piece by some imperceptible cue which relied on all the players seeing each other. How they all finished together in this state of darkness I will never know. I always think that one of the best parts of Steve Reich’s Drumming is the moment of silence when the very loud instruments all suddenly stop together. There is usually a short moment before the audience break into hearty applause.

This particular night, it was as if the whole room realised what a special and unique musical moment had taken place. There was. what seemed to be an endless silence. Then the loudest, most euphoric reception I have ever experienced. During that rapturous mix of shouting and applause, Steve Reich was slowly guided down the steps from the sound desk by the light of  phones and torches. As he joined us on stage he was visibly moved and moved along the line of musicians, kissing and hugging each in turn. We all bowed and as we stood up, all the lights in the hall came on. The whole theatre laughed hysterically.

I certainly won’t forget that performance of Drumming and I’m sure that the composer, the musicians on the stage and every member of that extraordinary audience won’t forget either.

Ps… My luggage also got lost on the way home too. I had guessed it might as the rest of the group emailed to warn us. I took everything vital in my hand luggage. As I had to go straight from the airport to a rehearsal for my next job, I was secretly pleased. It meant that I wouldn’t have to struggle on the underground with my suitcase and it was delivered to my home in Brighton the following evening.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

“When Cairncross sings “Where Or When,” “Our Love Is Here To Stay”- which opens with her delightful unaccompanied alto voice and features one of Newton’s rare but perfectly-judged solos – or “The Nearness Of You” she makes every word count. Her voice, technically excellent and emotionally engaging, gives each lyric a very personal perspective, as if these are her stories, not just her interpretation of others’ tales. It’s the mark of a great jazz vocalist…….

Imagination and creativity can still produce new interpretations that can go straight to the emotional core of the lyric and straight to the audience’s collective heart. Which is exactly what happens when Cairncross and Newton get together on At Last“

Read the whole review…..

Here’s a recent review of a lunchtime concert we did in Newbury at the excellent Corn Exchange.
A special thanks to all the very welcoming and professional staff at the venue including the Steinway piano tuner….and of course to Derek Ansell for the review.

Jazz – Southern Sinfonia Café Concert
Dave Newton/Chris Hill Duo with Heather Cairncross, at the Corn Exchange on Friday October 19

Singer Adds A Touch Of Spice

“A welcome return by Jazz pianist Dave Newton saw him reunited with bassist Chris Hill and joined by singer Heather Cairncross.

The singer chose some solid standard songs, many of them neglected of late, but all the more welcome in this context for their current rarity.

She began with I’m Old Fashioned, a song that crops up every now and then with discerning vocalists and this version found Heather stretching the notes appealingly as Dave Newton wrapped chords around her and Chris Hill provided a smooth bassline. His sound was warm and woody as he played without amplification, a sure way to bring out the best in the instrument.

Heather Cairnross followed on with I Only Have Eyes For You and The Nearness Of You, both melodic and attractive examples of  quality popular songwriting. The first at ballad tempo allowed Dave Newton to etch delicate filigrees of sound alongside the vocal and his piano solo that followed on was springy and sprightly.

Where or When, another high quality tune, had Heather delivering the lyrics with crystal-clear diction, as Dave Newton accompanied and slipped in a quote from Surrey With The Fringe On Top. A well articulated bass solo came next and then the singer began to scat on the melody line. She told us that Dave Newton doesn’t approve of ‘ladies that scat’ in his band, but he gave her the thumbs up on this occasion and can have no complaints whatsoever about this performance. It fitted ideally the mood and ambience of the band and location, to spice up the reading.

The trio fitted 10 good selections in before Heather Cairncross sang the old torch song One For My Baby as an encore with the boys. Best known as a favourite of both Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra, it was a fitting farewell at the end of a very musical recital where there were no histrionics, no big screech top notes to the gallery, just good music, well played and well sung by a tightly integrated trio.”

Derek Ansell

Newbury Weekly News 25/10/2012

Here’s a nice review in the Autumn edition of The Musician Magazine which goes out to all Musicians Union members:

Class vocals and piano from a singer of note

A pro singer for over 20 years, Cairncross’s career has seen her work home and abroad. Trained at the Guildhall, her initial work was in opera, however within two years she joined top vocal group The Swingle Singers and toured with them for 10 years.  Now respected for her live performances with the likes of Steve Reich and the Monteverdi Choir, she has found time to release this album in the company of award-winning pianist David Newton. Their pairing makes a formidable team. Delivering a range of classics, their interpretations illustrate the timeless quality of The Nearness Of You, I’m Old Fashioned and Remind Me.

A marvellous recording.

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In the RAH backstage lift

I’ve only had two Prom concerts this year. The first one was singing in the offstage chorus for the Monteverdi choir, in the opera performance of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. This was possibly the lowest maintenance Prom I had ever taken part in.  We had a quick run through on the day before the main rehearsal in the hall. Then it was up to the Gods to do our bit – The altos literally had thirteen bars to sing. As is customary, there was the obligatory hanging around in London in the afternoon between the rehearsal and the concert. Because I live in Brighton, there’s not quite enough time to go home and back. I managed to fill the time with some retail therapy and caught up on some emails. Just before the concert, we were taken in a lift to the top tier and, as we were out of sight (apart from the promenaders watching in the top level), we only had to wear black – no concert clothes. Our bit was after about twenty minutes and we didn’t have to wait around for a bow. I was on the train and home by 9.30pm. Result!

Tap Your Troubles Away

My second prom was one of my favourite concerts of the year – The John Wilson Orchestra.
(You can read about my experiences in the Rogers and Hammerstein or the Hooray For Hollywood proms -just click on the links)

For 2012, the programme was entitled The Sound Of Broadway and it was yet another sold-out extravaganza. The BBC Prom website said:

after last year’s celebration of the Hollywood screen musical, John Wilson and his high-octane orchestra – whose technicoloured performances, according to one critic, offer ‘the auditory equivalent of a steam-clean’ – present a tribute to the composers and arrangers responsible for creating the Broadway Sound – among them such legendary tunesmiths as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers and Frank Loesser.

You may remember me writing about when I was struck down with Viral Laryngitis and I had to pull out of the recording of the Rogers and Hammerstein programme. I could barely speak as I croaked my apologies to Christopher Dee, the Musical Director of The Maida Vale Singers. I was so disappointed as, not only had I never cancelled a performance due to a lost voice, but also I particularly love working with John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra. I’d also missed the previous MGM Musical recording, as I was away in Luxembourg doing the opera Carmen with the Monteverdi Choir.

So it was a big relief when Chris emailed me to ask me to take part in this year’s Prom. The first rehearsal just fitted in the day after I got back from the Edinburgh Festival too – how often does that happen?

I wondered if Chris remembered my croaky voice, as he sent me an email not only asking me to sing in a tiny solo quartet in The Lusty Month Of May from Camelot, but also to do a two bar solo as Mother B for the Mame finale.

He eloquently explained in his email: “The character is Beauregard’s mother, who is an old battleaxe. You have to portray the whole of her personality in 2 bars. (Bars 73 & 74) Vocally, I want it raspy, and down the octave. (even more raspy, if possible)”
As Mame is set in the southern states of America, I hoped I could call upon my True Blood training yet again.

Friday morning we all met at LSO St Luke’s for our first choir rehearsal. I got to try out my raspy, battleaxe voice for the first time in public. The quartet was first and that went fine as, although the boys were a long way away, the lovely soprano Kathryn Jenkins (no not THAT Katherine Jenkins!) was close by and I could easily hear her in order to blend. Chris hadn’t announced who was doing the Mother B bars – he just told the choir not to sing there, so it was a bit of a surprise for my neighbours.

It’s a strange phenomena when you’re singing in the choir, knowing that you’re getting closer and closer to those exposed solo moments. My heart beats very fast and once it’s over, you have to get right back into singing your harmony parts as if nothing happened. I confess that my hands always shake a bit afterwards.

We had loads of music to get through that morning, so I never got a chance to check with Chris if he wanted me to change anything. I asked him at the next day’s rehearsal and he said it really can’t be raspy enough – “think Jimmy Durante!” For those of you who don’t know Jimmy – here’s a great youtube clip I found where he explains to the young Sinatra The Song’s Gotta Come From The Heart

The next day we were back at St Luke’s and the whole of The John Wilson Orchestra were there. The problem for the choir during that rehearsal was getting used to the conductor being a long way away and also the breakneck speed at which John Wilson works. There was so much music to get through that we only had time for one chance at each song. There was often a whole page of numbered blank bars to count and then suddenly we were in. It occurred to me that this is what it must be like to be a triangle player – but they don’t have to pitch the notes.

The quartet didn’t go very well as with the band, it was impossible to hear the other singers. It quickly became clear that the only solution was to memorise the eight bars and stick to John’s beat like glue and hope that the others would be in the same place. Scary stuff! Oh well – we’d get another try in the rehearsal the next day. My two bars of Mother B went better – well I just had to make the worst sound I could and hope it would get a laugh – it did from John, so I was happy.

“Sue Me” Seth Macfarlane and Anna Jane Casey

Sunday’s rehearsal was in the Royal Albert Hall and after last minute notes from Christopher, we got a chance to hear the fantastic soloists. This year’s line up was the excellent and familiar Sierra Bogess, Anna Jane Casey, Julian Ovenden and ‘Family Guy’ creator Seth Macfarlane. He had the incredibly difficult patter song We got Trouble but also impressed the choir with his beautiful rendition of Joey, Joey Joey (from Pal Joey).

The moment in the rehearsal when everybody got the shivers, was when Elizabeth Llewellyn sang the duet from Porgy and Bess with Rodney Clarke – such classy singing from them both – so poised and heartfelt. Elizabeth’s high notes sounded as if she had another octave above from which she could have effortlessly chosen any note. Look out for her tender solo Come Home, which is a song that was new to most of us. I found out later that it comes from a musical called Allegro by Rodgers and Hammerstein which received very mixed reviews.

It did run for a few months as following on the success of Carousel and Oklahoma Allegro took $750,000 in advance sales, at a time when the top price ticket for a Broadway musical was only $6! The orchestra accompanied her with a haunting arrangement by Robert Russell Bennett.

During the rehearsals. John Wilson made many of his usual amusing and pithy observations. Here are just a few gems (imagine them delivered in his brilliantly broad Geordie accent):

Press some of your sparkle buttons – if you can find them.

More nimble please.

Strings – this is a full-blooded mezzo forte.

Now don’t rush this – cling to the beat as if your life depended upon it.

Give it some substance. At the moment you can’t really get any purchase on it.

Just do something divine.

Make it sparklier and more switched on.

Keep a grip on it and remove any rushyness.

Strings – Dive into this bit.

Eyes on stalks here because I’m going to do “this”.

Give me your full opulence and gorgeousness.

What you want to do – I want you to glide over the top.

Super fast vibraphone vibrato.

If you’re not careful the chain will come off and we’re knackeramad.

Be glued to the beat – don’t look down at the music – it’s easy!

(To the trumpets after asking them to broaden the final chords of the On The Town Ballet Suite)
It’s a bit ITV – I’m expecting to enter the prize draw – but it’s great!

Last minute notes from Chris

And so we came to the day of the show. I got a text from Chris in the morning saying “Good Morning Mother B, I know you’ve learned your solo line off the book. The telly have asked if you could please lose the book for your solo section and act to the camera (front) for the telly viewers, as the camera will be a tight shot on you – can you sing the following chord in character too?”

No pressure then!

Kath and I had to get there a bit early for make up. I also had to have my microphone pack fitted to my bra (there would be no escape from there!) Emma Kershaw had brought in her enormous selection of Crown Jewels to share with the girls and I shouted out from my chair, begging her to save me something special. I was still being made-up when the other girls descended like magpies. (Yes it WAS a long job, before you say anything!) There’s a picture of all the jewels in last year’s prom blog.

We had to break off from make-up and hair to go to a one hour seating rehearsal at 6.30pm. Here’s a picture of our Kathryn in the rehearsal, before her hair was combed out – sorry Kath! (Although, annoyingly, she does still look lovely).

John Wilson rushed through a few last minute cuts and tricky links. Unfortunately we never did my two little solo bits and I never did know where that camera would be. Oh well – fingers crossed!

We did get to enjoy the fantastic troupe of tap-dancers run through their routine for the surprise encore. The choreographer himself was dancing and as they exited up the stairs, he feigned collapse and called for a Stannah stair lift.

Kathryn Jenkins (our Kath) also had a speaking line in the West Side Story monologue, where she played the mother and had to shout out “Maria” in a Spanish accent at the correct time. It turned out that the script she had been given had a line missing, and when she shouted out “Marrrrria” in the wrong place, it made Julian Ovenden lose his thread. They stopped and Chris quickly discovered the problem and Kath, like the trouper she is, corrected her part and they re-ran the dialogue again and everything went fine – completely not her fault, but it only served to add to the pressure of the one line step-out. I have come to the conclusion that it is far harder than doing a big solo.

All too soon, it was 7.30 and John thanked everybody for their patience and skill in putting together such a complex concert in such a short time. He then made us all laugh when he declared:

“I was walking down the street yesterday and the sun was shining and I thought to myself, this is so much nicer than being dead – what we do is great – you could be digging up the road. Enjoy it!”

The concert WAS great – The orchestra gave their all, and much more. The soloists, of course were fantastic. The five Maida Vale boys (featuring the hilarious Nigel Richards) who stepped out to do Little Tin Box got a richly deserved, huge round of applause. Former Swingle Singer (yes they’re EVERYWHERE!) Lindsay Benson was radiant in his Mame solo and I managed to survive my Jimmy Durante moment – and I really did sound like Jimmy when I listened back on the iPlayer – hopefully I didn’t look too much like him on the TV. There was rather a lot of make up on me by the end – we’ll see!

The sublime Elizabeth Llewellyn (who sang even more radiantly on the night) tweeted after the concert:

@LiztheLyric: On the bus going home. So proud to have shared a stage with some of the best musicians in town

and later on, she wrote in a hilariously undiva-like fashion:

@LiztheLyric: I love my life! In how many other jobs can you be a principal @bbcproms, looking all glam then be eating Burger King anonymous at train stn?

I’m sure that when people see and hear her on Saturday night TV, she is going to become a household name – she certainly deserves it.

For the choir, one of the best comedy moments of the night came when the orchestra struck up the encore – Anna-Jane Casey started singing Tap Your Troubles Away and an elderly couple decided to beat the crowds and make a premature exit, slowly climbing up the middle of the steps where – yes, you’ve guessed it – the staircase where a troupe of fourteen top-hatted tap dancers with canes were about to burst forth – John Wilson’s face was an absolute picture and so was theirs, as they were nearly knocked over by the dancers. I pray that they caught that moment on the cameras for the TV and leave it in.

The BBC News website noticed it and in it’s article the next day wrote: “The event climaxed with Casey performing Tap Your Troubles Away from Mack and Mabel, accompanied by 14 dancers in top hats and spats. Their appearance startled two elderly patrons, whose hopes of making an early exit up an aisle were hindered by hoofers heading in the opposite direction.”

Postscript:

Christopher Dee sent us an email thanking all the Maida Vale singers the morning after the show and shared a hilarious Youtube clip of Seth Macfarlane performing a re-written version of Ya Got Trouble which at the American Writers Guild Awards.

I must warn you that it contains VERY strong but VERY clever and funny alternative lyrics. (Thanks for that gem Chris!)

ps Swingle Singer fans may also spot American born Jenny Fowler (Graham) in the line up of backing singers. She was one of the distinguished guild of top sopranos. Jenny eventually left the group to have twins and is now a very successful singer in LA.

pps Jimmy Durante is not known for his beautiful tone, so either this will be the end of my singing career or the beginning of an entirely new one!

And here’s a clip from the BBC from Seven And A Half Cents sung by Seth and Anna-Jane featuring The John Wilson Orchestra and the Maida Vale Singers.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

The nimble postie presented me with a large parcel which, when I opened it contained a sparkly new copy of Oxford University Press’ sheet music collection of “Popular Voiceworks Volume 2, 28 songs in Jazz, Gospel, R&B, Soul, and Show Styles.”

My involvement with the composers Charles Beale and Steve Milloy began in 2007 in the recording studio of The Royal College of Music.

Charlie had directed the college big band from 2001-2007 and is the current director of the NY City Gay Men’s Chorus. They had both been commissioned to write a collection of songs and arrangements for choir of showstoppers: fun pieces that choirs could use for encores or even for a big finish to their concerts. I had been booked because we would have to cover many different vocal styles. The sheet music volume would come complete with a CD of recordings of the arrangements (as well as band backing-tracks to use). The forward explains that this is so the “singers can actually hear what they are trying to create.”

We rattled through a couple of days of sight reading, singing in every style ranging from Me Ol’ Bamboo, This Little Light Of Mine, Straighten Up And Fly Right through to Dancing In The Street.

Charlie and Steve had assembled a cracking team of singers and my fellow female vocalist was none other than Louise Marshall (better known as a singer from the famous Jools Holland Band amongst her MANY other accomplishments).  One of the men was my old friend from my days in The Swingle Singers, Ben Parry. He is well known for his own published chorale arrangements and is now fabulously important, as he is the Director of the Junior Royal Academy of Music.

The composer and arranger Alexander L’Estrange was singing on some numbers as well as playing upright and electric bass and finally, we were joined on vocals by one of the arrangers and writers, Steve Milloy.  Steve is a renowned conductor, composer, singer and educator in the Cincinnati, OH area of America. He also helped us to recreate the correct vocal style for each number.

Charles played piano and was in the control room to produce the whole recording, along with Steve.

The idea was not only to provide backing tracks and recordings for the choirs to copy the style, but on each song there are exercises and tips on getting a great performance. Both Charles and Steve utilizing their immense experience as choral directors and singers to produce a useful learning tool, which would be great fun to sing as well. We had a blast and. despite a lot of laughter. we got through twenty-eight arrangements in nine hours of recording sessions.

Here are some of the reviews for the first volume:

In terms of genre it’s a delightfully mixed bag, with everything from spirituals to 80s pop pastiches making an appearance. It is packed with useful teaching notes and handy warm-up ideas. For the most part, the arrangements are lovely, and Beale is at ease throwing deliciously scrunchy chords into unexpected corners of well-known tunes, while also getting a lot of fun out of pop numbers like ‘Dancin’ in the Street’.
(Eamonn O’Dwyer, Music Teacher, October 08 )

Above all for the least experienced of choir leaders, this volume could be invaluable . . . No other choral collection that I have seen is as thorough or as helpful in laying out a scheme of exercises for the start of rehearsal . . . Every song is individually prefaced with background information, suggestions for getting started (including specially devised exercises), lists of options for teaching the song and for adapting it to your group’s requirements, danger points, and ideas for performance. In other words, a complete lesson or rehearsal plan is presented for every one of the songs; all this plus a CD of model performances and backing tracks . . . Oxford University Press have, I would guess, produced a ‘pop’ hit.
(Armin Zanner, Classroom Music, Spring Term 08/9 )

Popular Voiceworks is itself a hefty number, ring bound and more than 200 pages long, many of them available to be photocopied. There are also 2 CDs of performances and backing tracks tucked in the back cover. Suitable for use for choirs of age 11 upwards, and with detailed strategies for learning each song that are effectively in themselves lesson plans, this volume will be a boon for teachers and is another remarkable achievement for this series.
(Matthew Greenall, The Singer August 08 )

Has loads of information and additional material about the different genres used in this book to get the most classically-bred singer ‘in the swing’. The recording and performing standards on the accompanying CDs are excellent.
(Sue Anderson, Singing Summer 09 )

When I got an email in September 2011 from the Senior Editor of the music department Oxford University Press, asking if I was free for some dates in early 2012 to record volume two, I was delighted.

Amazingly they managed to get the same team of singers, although Ben couldn’t join us until the second session.

I was a bit worried as we started the morning in a strange makeshift booth in the corner of the studio. I was relieved when we soon moved to the main part of the room, as it was very difficult for us to hear in such a confined space – these arrangements were often full-on, lusty singing and with four of us in a confined space it was LOUD – especially with headphones on. Actually most of the songs had pre-recorded guides or backing tracks for us to work to so we didn’t need to worry about ‘spilling’ onto the band tracks.

The arrangements were eventually split into three sections in the book. Getting Moving, Moving On and Showstoppers. This second volume would include some Country and Western style songs as well and we had to slip into our ‘deep south’ accents. (I KNEW that watching all the series of True Blood would come in handy one day!) I wonder if you’ll be able to recognize my singing on those numbers – my partner couldn’t!

There were lots of up-tempo gospel numbers of course, but added to that were some beautifully simple folk songs as well as high energy disco numbers.  We all had the chance to do some improvising as well. The arrangers had allocated some solo sections and each singer had to switch voice and style constantly throughout the day. We did some overdubbing when there were more than four parts and often I had to sing soprano (which was the hardest part for this died-in-the-wool alto). Alexander, himself a formidable male alto, filled in any notes just too high for me!

I’ve made a montage of extracts from just eight of the twenty eight songs for you, featuring some of my different vocal styles and ranges, just to give you a flavor of the collection, and also perhaps to make you laugh!

It finishes with a very different version of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy to amuse my friends from the Monteverdi Choir before our upcoming tour. Click on the pink arrow and be patient.

Eight Extracts From “Popular Voiceworks 2″

I think it’s another great collection and I hope that it will be as successful for Charlie and Steve as volume one was.

Here’s looking forward to Volume three!

(Click on the links below to buy volume 1 and 2 of Popular Voiceworks)

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

The words are quite charming and I particularly love the final stanza:

I’m old fashioned and I don’t mind it
That’s how I want to be,
As long as you’ll agree
To stay old fashioned with me.

I first came across the song on a CD of the same name, recorded by one of my favourite soprano voices, Margareta Bengtson. I met her many years ago in Sweden, when she was the high soprano of the Swedish a cappella quintet, The Real Group and I was the low alto of The Swingle Singers. Margareta’s soprano voice has an extraordinary quality which sounds both innocent and sensual………

She begins the song (and the album) unaccompanied and then gradually they add a wonderful big band accompaniment. I start the same way on my recording, a perfect fourth lower (although our version is just voice and piano). I credit her version on the sleeve notes of my album as the inspiration for the unaccompanied start.

I’m Old Fashioned was sung by Rita Hayworth’s character in the film You Were Never Lovelier before a dance sequence with Fred Astaire. It was the last time the couple were paired together. Hayworth reputedly had quite a fine singing voice, but in this film (and most others), her singing voice was dubbed on by Nan Wynn.

Fred Astaire wrote about the first time he met Rita Hayworth, in his autobiography Steps In Time:

“My first meeting with Rita was in a rehearsal hall at Columbia Studios. It was upstairs in one of the buildings and, as I recall, the stairway led directly into the large rehearsal room. As I came up the last few steps I gave a hurried glance around, expecting to see Rita, as I had been told she would be there. I didn’t see her and asked one of the assistants, “Isn’t Miss Hayworth going to be here this morning?” he pointed to a remote corner of the room, “Why, yes…..she’s been here for some time.”
There she was. Oh yes – a beautiful sight.
Bob Alton, choreographer on the picture, brought her over and introduced us. I said, “I’m an old friend of your father’s.”

“Yes, I know,” murmured Rita.

I then asked how tall she was as I stood alongside of her….As we stood there, both in flat heels, I was easily three inches taller and I told her I hoped she didn’t have to wear very high heels with me. She quickly answered,

“Oh, no, I don’t have to.”

We then danced around the mirrored room in impromptu ballroom fashion, as I wanted to get an idea of how we looked together.
I kept thinking how extraordinary it was to find myself about to play opposite my freind Eduardo Cansino’s lovely daughter, and I told her so. She laughed.
Rita danced with trained perfection and individuality. She, of course, knew through experience what this dancing business was all about. That was apparent the moment I started working with her.”

Rita resented the studio for never letting her sing on film or helping her to train her voice. She complained: “I wanted to study singing, but Harry Cohn kept saying, ‘Who needs it?’ and the studio wouldn’t pay for it. They had me so intimidated that I couldn’t have done it anyway. They always said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t let you do it. There’s no time for that, it has to be done right now!’ I was under contract, and that was it.”

Here’s a clip of Fred Astaire dancing with Jane Russell in her heyday with the voice of Nan Wynn singing I’m Old Fashioned.

Nan Wynn was a very interesting singer who earned the nickname “molten mama with the lava larynx”.  Her father owned a department store in Wheeling, and the family often visited New York.  When she was only sixteen, a retired producer who was staying at the same hotel as the family, heard Nan singing. He booked her to sing at a vaudeville house in Peekskill, and the owner went on to engage her to sing at his other two establishments. Like a lot of good singers of the time, she honed her craft working as a big band singer and appeared on radio shows like the Hal Kemp Orchestra’s Time To Shine show. She appeared in films such as Million Dollar Baby (1941) often as a nightclub singer. Nan eventually stepped out of the background when she got a starring role opposite William Lundigan in the 1941 film A Shot in the Dark.

Nan Wynn

Her career was tragically cut short in 1949 when she contracted cancer and the surgery to remove a tumor severed a facial nerve and caused her to lose her voice. Nan was very determined and despite medical opinion to the contrary, she regained her speech and facial control by 1955, at which point she was briefly signed to RCA Victor. In 1959 she became involved in the State Cancer Crusade and appeared at the American Cancer Society events for several years.

Rita Hayworth also had a struggle towards the end of her life when her Alzheimer’s disease was mis-diagnosed as alcoholism. She had a history of heavy drinking which confused things. Her daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan (her daughter by her third husband Prince Aly Khan) said:

“It was the outbursts. She’d fly into a rage. I can’t tell you. I thought it was alcoholism-alcoholic dementia. We all thought that. The papers picked that up, of course. You can’t imagine the relief just in getting a diagnosis. We had a name at last, Alzheimer’s! Of course, that didn’t really come until the last seven or eight years. She wasn’t diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s until 1980. There were two decades of hell before that.”

In July 1981, An LA Supreme Court Judge ruled that Rita had to be cared for by her daughter, who bought a flat next door to her in New York, where she arranged the care for her mother throughout her final years. Yasmin went on to become the president of Alzheimer Disease International.

In 1942 when Kern and Mercer wrote I’m Old Fashioned, Johnny Mercer also wrote the lyrics for That Old Black Magic with his long time collaborator Harold Arlen and one of my favourite songs, Skylark with Hoagy Carmichael.

I came across a very interesting documentary made by Clint Eastwood on YouTube, which celebrates the life of Johnny Mercer and is well worth watching.

Johnny Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia and I was lucky enough to sing with the Savannah Symphony Orchestra when I was touring with the Swingle Singers. (Now, sadly, I discover that the orchestra has gone the way of so many and folded due to financial troubles.)

I remember we sang an arrangement of his most famous song, Moon River, but what I remember most, was that we were all suffering badly from jet-lag. In between the rehearsal and the show, I decided to take a nap. Somehow, I got am and pm mixed up on my alarm clock and woke from my deep sleep just in time to realize that it was only half an hour until the start of the concert. I had to throw on my dinner-jacket-trouser suit, (both the girls and the boys wore the same first half outfits at the time) slap on some red lipstick and rush down the street in the steamy, southern heat. I arrived at the concert hall very hot and flustered as the orchestra were actually playing their first number. The rest of the group were panicking and wondering where I was. All a bit too close for comfort!

Johnny Mercer recalled how the older Jerome Kern reacted to the lyrics for I’m Old Fashioned: “We hit it off right away. I was in such awe of him, I think he must have sensed that. He was very kind to me, treated me more like a son than a collaborator. And when he thought I had a great lyric he said, ‘Eva, Eva, come down here’, and he kissed me on the cheek and he said, ‘Eva, I want you to hear this lyric’. Well, of course I was thrilled that he liked it that much, you know. ‘I’m Old Fashioned’, that one was.” (Eva was Jerome Kern’s wife for thirty five years until he died in 1945)

To listen to a clip of my version of I’m Old Fashioned (and the other thirteen songs) just click HERE.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite singers, Tony Bennett, singing I’m Old Fashioned accompanied by Bill Charlap on Elvis Costello’s New Year’s Eve show in 2008.  Watch out for the moment at 0:50 minutes, when Bennett gestures to Bill and he plays a bell like chord to mirror Tony’s emphasis of the the word ‘sings’. Class!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Barry Clare – Just Jazz Magazine, May Edition

“When I think of female vocalist/piano duets, I am immediately drawn to the albums made by Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Smith (‘The Intimate Ella’) and Ellis Larkin Larkins (‘Pure Ella’). For me, these were classics of the very highest order. If your style of Ella vocals are of the Mack The Knife type, these albums may not have been your cup of tea. For me, they rank, alongside the Buddy Bregman albums (‘Sings Cole Porter’ and ‘Sings Rogers and Hart’), as her very best work.

That I mention these Ella classics is a clue to what I am about to write about this wonderful new album from Heather Cairncross and David Newton. I must confess I am completely bowled over. I warn you you now that I might even run out of superlatives in trying to convey my complete and utter delight at this album……..

Heather Cairncross was a complete unknown quantity to me before I listened to this CD. I know I should get out more! Of course, David Newton did already rank in my own list of the very best Mainstream pianists. However, as an accompanist, he just exels. I have written before how the art of the accompaniment demands more than the usual skill of ensemble playing or, at least a different skill. The knack is to give as much support to the vocalist without coming between the vocalist and the song. This collaboration is an object lesson in achieving that balance.

David Newton’s fertile mind produces an easy, continuous flow of ideas and musical figures, adding so much to the vocal. And what about those vocals! Heather Cairncross has a superb, crystal-clear approach to the lyric. Every word is given the right emphasis, every phrase it’s due respect. Her diction is as close to perfection as I have ever heard.

Add to all this a choice of songs, which are some of the very best standards ever written, and the recipe just can’t fail. These are classics by Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Young, Jerome Kern, Vernon Duke, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, plus two songs with lyrics by Alan and Marylin Bergman – what a selection! Another beautiful (but somewhat neglected) song is the last track, Some Other Time, from Berstein’s On The Town.

I am not overstating it to suggest this recording is absolutely exceptional. No ifs or buts, it is as good as any vocal album I have ever heard for a very long time. Just superb!”

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive, unreleased free MP3 track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

When I was selected, I got an email from the young girl co-ordinating the 14 artists, asking me “Please forgive my ignorance but are they all covers, do you have an original?”

The album is all classic standards: love songs. I replied that yes, by modern parlance they were all covers – did that make me ineligible for the CD? It seemed not because happily they placed my song in the first position on the CD which goes out to all industry subscribers of Music Week.

It did make me think about the modern phenomena of the ‘cover’.

Lenneke Ruiten ‘covers’ an aria?

When people sing a Mozart Aria they don’t change the notes or words – the difference they bring to the music is their own interpretation by nuance, use of language, dynamics and ultimately, the colour and tone of their instrument – their own voice.Is that a cover?

In Jazz it goes a bit further – it’s the same song, but the artist will improvise around the melody, perhaps alter the chord voicing, even replace the chords. They will definitely alter the rhythm, probably each time they perform it to put their own feel on it.  Is that a cover?

When I recorded my album of popular standards, at the end of two days we had fifty-four complete tracks to chose from. We chose eighteen and eventually whittled that down to fourteen because of the time constraints of the CD format.  For some songs there were as many as six versions.  Each one was completely different from the previous version. David Newton was driving the changes as the accompaniment, which he improvised on the spot, was very different in feel and musical content. This prompted me to respond with different vocals. In my opinion, his arrangements crossed over towards composition.

So was it technically an album of covers?

I was musing on this phenomena with my bass player Steve Thompson, who was recently asked by a young girl singer at a rehearsal “Is that right?” when she sang the tune of a Gershwin song. “What do you mean by right?” he asked. “Like the singer?” she replied.

How interesting that her idea of the correct version of a song was the singer’s version of a standard song (or cover). This recording went quite far away from the printed sheet music. Does that make the young singer’s new version a cover of a cover? Surely Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra could be said to have recorded the definitive cover versions of many of the popular standard repertoire. I don’t think that makes them less valid or indeed, any less fantastic.

I looked up the definition of the words cover and standard: here are the general and then specifically musical definitions:

Standard: a level of quality or attainment.
A tune or song of established popularity

Cover: put something on top of or in front of (something) in order to protect or conceal it.
Record or perform a new version of (a song) originally performed by someone else.

Wikipedia have a very good page going into depth of the history of the term Cover Version which you can peruse at your leisure.

Originally it referred to a rival version of a recording on another label in competition with the original. The Chicago Tribune described the term in 1952 as “trade jargon meaning to record a tune that looks like a potential hit on someone else’s label.”

Dionne Warwick suffered from that phenomena in the UK as Cilla Black raced to release versions of Burt Bacharach songs before Warwick’s record company could release her version. Most noteably Anyone who had a heart, which went to number one. Warwick famously said “I told her that You’re My World would be my next single in the States. I honestly believe that if I’d sneezed on my next record, then Cilla would have sneezed on hers too. There was no imagination in her recording.” Indeed Black did recorded “You’re My World” shortly after that meeting but it was not released as a single by Warwick. (It did eventually appear on the 1968 album, Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls.)

There are of course many examples of cover versions becoming more successful than the originals. Whitney Houston’s 1992 version of I Will Always Love You was originally written and recorded in 1974 by Dolly Parton. You don’t hear  Dolly complaining though, as she would have reaped the rewards by publishing the song.

Which leads me to the reason NOT to record cover versions – the hefty MCPS/PRS bill which you have to pay to manufacture the CDs. For my first one-thousand copies printed, the bill was over £560 – and that was with 250 promotional copies that were exempt from a licence fee.

Incentive indeed to write your own standards and let other people do the covering!

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When: Sunday 27th May, 2012 at 8pm

Closing the Brighton Fringe for the Brunswick Venue is David Newton – the current holder and ten times winner of Best Pianist (British Jazz Awards), joined by internationally – acclaimed Brighton based songstress Heather Cairncross for an unforgettable evening of classic love songs taken from their brand new album At Last.

They will also be joined by some surprise guests and have some great new numbers too!

Come on down and join us!

Tickets are £10 (£8 concessions) and are available online from the fringe website or on the door if we’re not sold out – come early!

“A remarkable example of empathy and understanding…as near to perfect as you’re likely to get.” Walter Love Jazz Club (BBC Radio Ulster)

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

In over twenty years as a professional singer I am proud and lucky enough to be able to say that I have never cancelled a concert or session because of my voice. There was that one time when I forgot my passport and was deported on the Eurostar by a policeman armed with a machine-gun. This Saturday, my winning streak was over. I’ve had the odd croak at the end of a cold, sometimes due to coughing, but I’ve never completely lost my voice.

It started with a funny feeling on Tuesday – all you singers out there know about the fear that accompanies that ominous feeling or taste in the back of your throat. It went on to develop into an uncomfortable pain when I swallowed with a tenderness on the sides of my neck. On Thursday I went to school to teach singing – I don’t have a particularly onerous workload and usually one or two of the little darlings don’t show up and this was what happened that day.  Unusually, I felt a bit vocally tired by the end of the day and gladly went home for a cup of tea. Then the doorbell rang and there was a new pupil with her Dad, which in my concern about my voice, I had completely forgotten about. EEK!

I quickly set up the piano and started by demonstrating a really simple three note exercise on an ooh vowel. I literally couldn’t get my chords to come together. What the poor girl must have thought I don’t know? – here she was having a consultation as to whether she should have lessons with a woman who couldn’t even sing two consecutive notes. I struggled on but was so very grateful when the lesson was over. By the time my partner arrived home I couldn’t make a sound.

I was very scared.

As is usual in the life of a freelance singer, apart from teaching, I hadn’t had any singing work for a couple of weeks.  Saturday would be the first recording session I had done for a while and I was looking forward to it immensely. It was for the CD of the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, which I had been lucky enough to sing in a concert at the BBC Proms with The John Wilson Orchestra.

My dirty gypsy make-up for Carmen

dirty make-up for Carmen

I’d missed last year’s recording of the MGM musicals because I was dirtied-up as a gypsy in Luxemberg. I was taking part in a revival of Carmen which the Monteverdi Choir had originally done at the Opera Comique in Paris. Christopher Dee the Director of the Maida Vale Singers had very kindly asked me to do the Prom in 2011 and following on from that booked me for this upcoming recording.

The day later on the Sunday, I had a six hour rehearsal with The Monteverdi Choir in preparation for two concerts on Thursday, which would be recorded live and patched the next day. The music was J S Bach’s  Ascension Cantatas. The last in the series of their epic Cantata Pilgrimage.

I hoped that I would wake up on Friday and my voice would be recovered but looking at my throat in the mirror the next morning, it was clear that I was not going to be able to sing for some time – let alone talk. It was a livid red colour.

I rang my doctor’s surgery and croakily persuaded the receptionist that I HAD to see the doctor. Maybe there would be some miracle injection that he could give me? A shot in the dark I knew, but I was desperate. She took pity on me and squeezed me in at 3.30pm. The doctor examined me and I croakily explained that I had some important things coming up – He said that there was nothing he could do. It wasn’t an infection, so antibiotics wouldn’t help. It was viral laryngitis and rest was the only thing I could do – maybe my voice would come back by the middle of next week.

AAARRRGGGHHH (shouted silently and internally, obviously)

In an attempt to lessen the last-minute inconvenience, I rang a talented colleague to check if she was working on Saturday and then armed with a willing replacement’s phone number, I called Chris and left a brief croaky message, briefly explaining and asking him to call me asap. Chris is a busy singer himself, and called me back in between sessions, later that evening. He was very understanding and had actually had a call that week from another alto who had originally been asked, but had been busy. Her concert had been cancelled and she had called Chris on the off-chance that a place would come free.

You see, everybody wanted to do this job – it was the bog-standard pay rate for a session, but there’s something about John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra that all the musicians love.  The enthusiasm and understanding he has for the music, always mean that it’s a job I always feel both privileged and excited to be a part of.

I was relieved that Chris could fill my spot so easily as I know, with the very little vocal fixing I’ve done, what a difficult and time consuming job it is.  Believe me, the last thing you want is a call from a singer at the eleventh hour.

It’s always very sobering though, to see how dispensable we are as singers.

Coincidentally, I recently read Ruth Elleson’s excellent blog called Croce e Delizia al Cor, where she comments on opera singers who cancel shows because of troubles with la Voce. Ruth was prompted to write, after she saw that the comedienne Sarah Millican (@SarahMillican75)  had announced apologetically on Twitter that she was ill and was having to cancel a gig.  The next day Sarah hilariously tweeted again: “Oh and to those saying ‘man up’, can I just say this is the first tour show I’ve cancelled due to ill health in over 220 shows. So f*ck off.”

Ruth describes her blog as “the ramblings of an opera addict” and the article is entitled Perspective. It eloquently explains why most Opera Singers never cancel unless they absolutely can’t possibly sing. The two main reasons that I worry about are that as a self employed person, if you don’t sing,  you don’t get paid and also, you can piss off the people that hire you. I’ve written on many occasions about the precarious nature of my profession and how easy it is to inadvertently do just that and to find you’ve dropped off a fixer’s list.

I’m praying that by cancelling the first time in over twenty years, I won’t have done irreparable damage.

Of course I looked up my condition online and found this sobering advice:

“If you are a performer such as a singer, it can be a difficult decision as to when to start singing again. Singing too early, when symptoms are easing, may prolong the hoarse voice longer than if you rest it fully until symptoms have completely gone. There is no easy answer as to the earliest it is safe to sing without doing any more harm. A professional singer may wish to consult a speech therapist if a crucial decision is to be made about an important singing engagement.”

On Sunday I had no choice, I gritted my teeth and armed with a thermal cup and lots of lemon and ginger teabags and a pot of Manuka Honey (hey – it might be no good for viral infections but it tastes delicious and is reassuringly expensive!), I headed off to the Warehouse.

There was no escape as Sir John himself (not generally known for his patience with illness) was standing by the entrance door and greeted me with a big smile and demanded “how are you?” I croaked that I would sit at the back of the room so as not to pass on the lurgy to the other singers and certainly not sing, but would make notes and listen to the rehearsal and hope to recover by the concerts.

Boy – that was hard. The first choir only rehearsal of any project is the time when he places us all under the microscope and takes the music and our singing apart in minute detail. It’s always grueling but also exhilarating. Once the orchestra arrives, we are much further away from the conductor, so these choir rehearsals are vital and personally, my favourite part of any new MCO project.

In the break, my colleagues came up and asked me why I wasn’t singing and (trying not to talk too much) I explained. A tenor and a male alto both scared me by saying they had previously had the same thing and it had taken a long time to recover. Both had eventually gone to an ENT specialist as they were convinced they couldn’t sing any more. Both had been told there was nothing wrong and had miraculously recovered their voices the next day. This reminded me of  my final year at the Guildhall. I had sung through a sore throat in the week of my final recital and various competitions. Once I recovered, I had developed a funny clicking sensation when I swallowed. When a voice specialist looked at my chords he declared there was nothing wrong apart from slightly inflamed tonsil roots, which he could burn off with dry ice if I liked. He also said that when he offered that treatment his patients usually got better. The next day I woke up and the clicking had gone.

We’re a delicate lot, us singers, with rather vivid imaginations. I’ve always thought of myself as having a robust voice and good health. I’m trying very hard to believe that this is a small blip in the history of my otherwise healthy singing career.

I thought I was much better today but a good friend just telephoned and when I picked up and said “Hello?” she answered “Sorry, I must have the wrong number”.

Positive thoughts and sssshhhhhhhh!

Now I KNOW that you all have some comments to share on this topic! SO please get busy venting them in the comments box below – your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

When I say she ‘wants’ me to go on, I mean she is subjecting me to a Chinese water-torture style drip, drip, drip of persuasive comments.

When she first suggested it, my blood turned cold.
I flatly refused to entertain the idea and even resisted watching the show, but I finally caved in and fired up the iPlayer to see the latest episode, which turned out to be the final blind audition round.
I watched it so that I could check what I had assumed was correct so that I could eloquently explain to her why it was definitely not a good idea for me.

A week ago, I posted a small comment on my Facebook status: “Finally watched The Voice @NicolaCairnX insistence. Only actual technical vocal critique was when Tom Jones said “it was a bit pitchy” hmmmm”

This seemed to invoke strong feelings amongst my friends, (some of them singers) and a lot of them felt compelled to comment, either loving or hating the show. I suppose this is a testament to its success. To be honest, I was a bit nervous of writing about The Voice as I got into trouble early on in my blogging career.

I wrote an article called Susan Boyle And Dreaming The Dream Of Being Discovered
which caused a flurry amongst her American Fan Club. One fan even threatened to report me to Simon Cowell and get me sacked from the recording session. I tried to explain in the follow up article that I was actually a fan of Susan’s success but was worried about the false impression that TV talent shows give to the public – that all you have to do to be a good singer is to be discovered – you don’t need to work hard, train your voice and develop your musical craft.

The BBC have been searching for a new format for Saturday night family viewing to rival the popularity ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent and the X Factor. The Voice has been a tremendous success. On the official BBC website for The Voice it says “Four of the biggest names in music are looking for incredible singing talent to compete for the title of The Voice UK. They will be chosen purely on the quality of their voice.”

The concept of the blind auditions is brilliant telly. The judges sit in big red chairs facing the audience, only turning to see the contestants when they hit the big red button which lights up the chairs, declaring “I want you!” Too late if they are too old/fat/ugly for OK magazine success – the judges have declared their bid on the singing voice alone! Then the singers get to choose their judge from those who have said yes – revenge at last!

The words “I want you” ironically illustrate the driving need within singers to be liked and wanted – hence putting themselves through this torturous process.

That final show seemed a bit unfair to me for some contestants who, in my opinion, were quite good. Three of the judges had already filled their quota, so judge will.i.am held out, despite some strong performances: in fact he rejected a ‘real incredible singer’ just before Jazz Ellington sang. Apparently he needed to “follow his gut “(in his words, the voice of his mother?). Jazz was and is really good. He is a music teacher who has been inspiring children and choirs for years and has clearly done a lot of work on his voice before being discovered.

I was left feeling a little unclean, as the whole final selection felt choreographed for maximum emotional effect. Hey – it worked – it made me well up – but then I howled at the John Lewis Christmas Ad.

The dramatic voiceover of the beginning of the series, promised The Voice was “a singing competition unlike any other because it puts vocal ability FIRST”

Tom Jones summed up the very thing that really worries me about the way singing is presented to the public now, when he declared on the video: “It’s all on the strength of the voice.”

Now please don’t get me wrong, a powerful singing voice is a wonderful thing. For me, (and for many of my colleagues) it’s only half the story. Somebody who has control over that power is so much more thrilling. Somebody who can use that control to deliver a full dynamic and emotional range with their powerful instrument is my ideal. That’s something to study, practise and strive for.
The audition rounds were certainly interesting. It was gratifying that people who certainly didn’t look like the media’s image of a singer managed to get through on their voice alone. (Still some hope for us middle-aged, slightly rotund ladies then Susan?)

For me, it all went horribly wrong in the following round. The singers were put into pairs to battle it out in a mock-up of a boxing ring.

Have a look at this video about the preparation for the “battle” between Becky Hill and duo Indie and Pixie. The two girls are rightly concerned that they are being portrayed as backing singers for Becky – who has a style and sound rather like Joss Stone. Judge Jessie J says in the film “you think because you’re not getting BIG moments you’re not getting moments  – you ARE, it’s just the way you sing them”.

The girls carry on trying to push their chest voices harder and higher in an effort to compete, until one clutches her throat in pain and Becky, for whom the chosen key is ideal, blows them out of the vocal water. The duo was originally picked for their complementing voices and harmonies (which involve the much neglected skill of listening to pull off successfully.)

In this ‘BIG VOICE’ battle environment, the pair never stood a chance. Talking about coach Jessie J, Indie (I assume it’s Indie as she’s always on the left, in the style of Ant and Dec) complains “she kept saying, don’t be intimidated by Becky’s big voice, but WE have big voices, we just haven’t had a chance to show it”

Jessie J explains in her introduction to the sing-off : “Indi and Pixie have to make sure their nerves don’t make them sing out of tune ‘cause as soon as they don’t listen to each other, it’s……horrible.”

She’s got that right – but when young singers are trying to force their voices to be BIGGER than they actually are, listening and good tuning goes out of the window.

Another interesting contestant was Ben Lake who has already had success playing God in Jerry Springer The Opera. (Coincidentally I sang on the cast recording). I subsequently read in an interview from the online Kingston Guardian: “I was nervous at the audition because there is so much to lose – singing is my life and you don’t want the judges to tell you you’re rubbish. I had a great fear of that. But I went on The Voice for exposure. It is a tough business and a constant struggle. Some people have asked me why I was auditioning when I already have work, but I struggle as much as the next man to put dinner on the table.”
He doesn’t say in that interview if his audition is successful as it was just before the broadcast and he’d signed a contract of secrecy. Unfortunately Ben didn’t get through, perhaps because his sound is a bit too classical for the pop-orientated panel of judges. However, he has certainly harnessed the publicity from his appearance on the show and has a CD for sale on his website. He has the video of the audition and the strap line “From BBC 1′s The Voice UK” and has presumably had a big increase in his visitors and hopefully sales – a heartfelt good luck to him!

All music to the ears of my marketing guru sister – these are some of the persuasive arguments that Nicola has skyped me recently:

drip….

Heather: (in an effort to get her to JUST STOP!) I think, having looked at various clips of the voice, that it would be really pointless me entering as they definitely favour the BIG voices – great to see another live band on the BBC though, with Steve Sidwell (Robbie Williams’ brass arranger) on trumpet – AND they’ve certainly chosen the best musicians rather than hiring a load of pretty boys pretending to play.
Nicola Cairncross: and you don’t have a big voice?!!  I’m really NOT trying to talk you into it (yeah right) but my favourites (and the country’s it seems) are the ones who can do great things with their voices – Ruth Brown, Tyler James and Adam Isaacs sailed through.  Check their vids on my blog.

drip….

Nicola: You keep saying it would be the end of your career if you didn’t get through but you also say your career will end soon anyway. (I admit I have said that before as the singing business for women is very ageist). I also think that just getting through to the auditions, then the live shows would be amazing exposure (would drive LOADS of traffic to your site / youtube channel) and might lead someone to sign your album.  I feel you have nothing to lose and everything to gain but I totally understand how you feel after the wave of negativity on your timeline.  It would take a very brave woman to say “you know what? F*** it, I don’t care what you losers all think!”

drip…

Nicola: and have you heard what all the mentors are saying to the one’s getting knocked out? will.i.am said – and I believe him – “me and my team are always there for you”

drip…..

Nicola: they love the ones with soul best – and you certainly have that in spades LOL
Nicola: I’ll shut up now

Her final try this morning which provoked this article:

drip…..

Nicola: I read this: “Obviously will.i.am is pleased to have got Tyler James on his team for The Voice UK, but the coach has publicly revealed that he doesn’t know why Tyler James is competing on the show because he’s already on his way to being a big star. The Voice hopeful was picked by the Black Eyed Peas rapper as one of the final five contestants during last week’s battle round, and this weekend he will be going up against the other nineteen singers during the live stages. However will.i.am isn’t worried, admitting to the Radio Times: “Tyler is an artist, a true star. And I don’t even know why he’s in the competition because he has albums out and I’m a fan of them. He’s great and hats off to joining the competition when you have a career already.”

So that’s a comfort – will.i.am (who comes across as a really nice man) will admire me for trying, in spite of me having a singing career already. The trouble is, as one close singer friend said when I told her Nicola wanted me to enter “If you go on that show, it will be the death of any serious work.” A male colleague, early on in his music-college career, had success on one of these tv talent shows as a member of a popular group. They were subsequently dropped by their management and record company and it has taken him years to be taken seriously again by his classical peers.

I suppose it might be a bit different for me, as I’m much further on, have always mixed up my vocal styles and been fortunate enough to have some level of success. Maybe I’ve not got so much to lose as a young singer.

Apart from my professional reputation – such as it is.

As I watched Ben Lake on The Voice auditions, my heart went out to him. Nobody pressed their big red button – even when he gave them his BIG high notes. My thoughts were mostly how humiliating it would be if I stood there, the announcers told the viewers that I had been a professional singer for over twenty years and then I sang my heart out for 90 seconds and nobody chose me – nobody thought my voice was good enough, or I just didn’t have that extra something that moved people with my singing – or my voice just wasn’t BIG enough!

On live prie time television – exposed as a musical fraud at last – every musician’s nightmare.

My friend Lynne eloquently commented on a guardian article about The Voice, which I posted on Facebook:

“Unfortunately the reality is, to sell music you have to join the game.. not liking how it works does not help .. you have to find a way to play “sell yourself”, like it or not and know that if you are talented you have to surrender to the game… or have a gimmick, know someone to back you … it has always been that way. It just depends if you want to make a living out of it or not (selling your own stuff) or work for others. We all have this problem, no matter what industry it is, not just the music business. Who can find the most quirky way to get traffic and have a product that has testimonials of support, recommendation from others that the sheeply like.. grrrrrrrrrr!”

Lynne – I applaud the use of the word ‘sheeply! and loudly echo the “grrrrrrrrrr!”

Nicola replied to the exact same article:

“Oh please! So there is absolutely NO WAY I can persuade you to enter then?”

drip…..

Nicola: It would take a very brave woman to say “you know what? F*** it, I don’t care what you losers all think!”

Heather: I just don’t think I’m that brave.

Now I KNOW that you all have some comments on this topic! SO please get busy venting them in the comments box below – your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

As a postscript, I probably wouldn’t do anything brave without the encouragement/badgering from my sister, who’s enduring blind belief in my talent always pushes me on to better and more creative things. Thanks Nicola – I love you…….

and now please  SHUT UP ABOUT THE BLOODY VOICE!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

“Third in this trio of Jazz Ladies is Heather Cairncross. I suppose the simplest form of delivering a song is with the unaccompanied voice but here is the beautiful simplicity of voice and piano. Heather, in the accompanying notes, gives a delightful explanation of how and why the album was made with herself and David Newton, whom she has known and recorded with previously. Just the two of them and the result is a remarkable example of empathy and understanding; and with Andy Cleyndert part of the production team the result is as near as perfect as you’re likely to get. Interesting to see how this recording fares when awards for 2012 come along. This is The Nearness Of You.”

(Walter Love-  Jazz Club – Radio Ulster 15/04/2012)

Amusingly (although I must admit I wasn’t very amused when I first read it), this is the exact opposite of the short but rather dismissive review I got in Jazzwise magazine:

“The ex-Swingle Singer vocalist performs at the highest level in the concert hall and pop arena but these Broadway renditions fall short of the mark”

All very interesting and it certainly goes to prove that everybody has their own musical taste and opinion and you definitely can’t please everyone.

Why not Click Here to have a listen to the extracts from all fourteen songs from the new album and let me know what you think in the comments box below. Your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Not long after I left the Swingle Singers, I went to a party where I met the jazz bass player Alexander L’Estrange. Alex is married to the soprano Joanna Forbes. Joanna joined the group just before I left and later went on to be the musical director. Alex played bass on the group’s anniversary tour, as well as writing many fine arrangements for them. We had a chat and when he asked me what I was going to do next (I’d been a member for ten years), I told him I had no idea, but would like to rekindle my love of singing jazz. I hadn’t sung in that style since I left The Guildhall some twelve years before.  A week later, I got a call from Alex asking me if I would like to sing at a dinner in an Oxford College with a jazz pianist friend of his called Thomas Pilling. I worked hard to get together a pad with the charts of the songs I knew and headed off to Oxford feeling terrified. Was today the day when I would be discovered as a musical fraud? (I am assured by my colleagues that no matter how successful you are, you will always still feel that fear).

After the first set, we sat down to eat our first course. Tom asked me who else I sang with and I had to confess that, at the time, I wasn’t singing with anybody. He really encouraged me to pursue it and we went on to work together over the years that followed. I was pleased to discover today that Tom and Alex have published some jazz sheet music together published by Boosey & Hawkes. (click on the image)

One weekend, Tom came down to visit me in Brighton and we recorded a version of Taking a Chance On Love in my hallway. He split the sounds on his keyboard and it really sounds like it’s played by a bass player and a pianist – it was in fact Tom playing both at the same time. The mood is quite dreamy and that’s reflected in my singing. I remember that I was still suffering from a broken heart at the time!

Have a listen to that version of the song which I recorded with Thomas Pilling in 2001:

Taking a Chance On Love, was written by Vernon Duke for the singer Ethel Waters who starred in the ground-breaking Broadway musical, Cabin In The Sky. The show had an all-black cast including Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong (Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess had paved the way, as it had featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers.)

Whilst Duke was working on score with lyricist John Latouche, they decided that they needed a new song for their star, Ethel Waters. The story goes that Duke remembered an old song that he had written years earlier with Ted Fetter and was originally entitled Fooling Around With Love. (Ted Fetter started life as an actor and was a first cousin of Cole Porter and later went on to write additional lyrics for some of his songs).

After getting permission from Fetter, Latouche revised the lyrics and the song became Taking a Chance on Love. It was completed only three days before the first night. Vernon Duke wrote in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, ‘If ever a song stopped the show, but cold, it was Taking a Chance on Love.’

Cabin In The Sky opened in the Martin Beck Theatre on October 25, 1940 and closed on March 8, 1941 after 156 performances.

Lena Horn as Georgia Brown

In 1943, MGM released a film based on the stage musical and it also starred Ethel Waters as Petunia along with Rex Ingram as Lucifer Junior. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (who played Jack Benny’s valet on his radio and tv show) took over the role of Little Joe. In the original stage version Little Joe was played by Dooley Wilson who went on to portray Sam, the famous piano player in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart film, Casablanca.

Lena Horne played the temptress Georgia Brown in her first and only starring role in an MGM musical. Louis Armstrong was also featured along with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. Here’s the trailer for the film:

Click here for a link to a YouTube video of Ethel Waters singing the song in the MGM film.  I couldn’t embed the player as they had disabled the facility. There’s some wonderful tap dancing from Eddie Anderson on the clip as well!

When I was researching the songwriter Vernon Duke , I found out he was also known as Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky. He was a successful Russian composer who led an interesting dual life in music .

Vernon Duke

Vladimir was born in 1903 into a noble family in Parafianovo in Belarus (which was then part of the Russian Empire). He spent his early years studying music in Kiev but his family were forced to flee from the civil war in 1919 and they had to stay in Constantinople as refugees. They finally obtained American visas and sailed steerage class on the SS King Alexander to New York arriving on Ellis Island in 1921. He was befriended by George Gershwin in 1922 and encouraged to shorten and ‘americanize’ his name. (Gershwin had done the same thing as he was originally born Jacob Gershowitz). ‘Vernon Duke’ went on to write many popular songs collaborating with lyricists such as Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn.

His songs include April in Paris and I Can’t Get Started and he wrote both the words and music for Autumn in New York. He is best known for Taking A Chance On Love.

As a classical composer the young man went to Paris in 1924 and collaborated with ballet impresario, Serge Diaghilev. His first piece Zephyr and Flora was staged by the Ballets Russes in their 1925 season. The composer Sergei Prokofiev described it as full of “superior melodies, very well designed, harmonically beautiful and not too ‘modernist’.” The two composers became good friends and continued writing to each other until 1946 when it became too dangerous for Prokofief, who had returned to Russia against his friend’s advice. Vernon moved between London and Paris until his return to America in 1929 where he continued to have success in both genres of music. He died on January 16, 1969, during an operation for lung cancer in California.

Have a listen to the new Album version of Taking A Chance On Love

This new version, recorded with David Newton is much more perky. We sing the whole lyric through with no piano solo. I confess that I’m well and truly in love again now and you can hear the optimism in this version. Feel the fear and do it anyway! Vocally, it’s interesting for me too. Although Tom’s version was recorded eleven years ago, my voice doesn’t sound very different. The older recording is a bit more covered in sound – on a technical note my soft palate is quite low in places. I think my vocal production is a bit more ‘direct’ now as I’ve been singing a lot more coloratura in the past few years (which means singing fast runs of notes). Vocal medicine has been provided, care of Mister JS Bach. I think this has made my voice much more flexible and forward placed. Teaching has helped too – analysing other singer’s technique has certainly improved mine.

I actually like both versions and found it really interesting hearing them both back to back – I hope you will too!

To listen to extracts from all fourteen songs from the new album, Click Here

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

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Last week I was on the bus from Cuenca in Spain to Madrid Airport, driving through thick snow (!) when I got an email. I was supposed to go on a tour to Moscow leaving on Easter Sunday but the email said the trip was cancelled at the eleventh hour. I’d never been to Russia so I was a bit disappointed – mostly I was concerned as we may not get paid a cancellation fee. Secretly, I was relieved as this past moth has been non-stop.

I’ve not written a blog post for quite a while (much to my sister Nicola Cairncross‘ consternation). I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had a clear space in my head to think of something interesting to write about. Normally I do a singing job that reminds me of an anecdote from a previous tour. Perhaps somebody mentions a place or incident which triggers me into writing. Those of you who have read my blogs before will know that stopping writing once I start is my main problem.

In the lead up to the release of my first solo album At Last I had plenty to write about, as the physical process of getting it out there was a voyage of discovery. I tried to document it in order to help anyone else out there that was going through the same process.

Leading up to the Launch Party, I had left a couple of weeks free in my diary to do all the jobs that might need doing. One night I received a phone call from a fellow alto (of the male variety) called David Bates. About three years ago he founded a marvellous new group called La Nuova Musica which he conducts. They were about to do a series of concerts of Dixit Dominus by both Vivaldi and Handel. The music would then be recorded at Air Studios in London (owned by the famous George Martin who produced the Beatles). A singer had let him down and he needed a last minute replacement. David and I had met in the Monteverdi Choir and he is always great fun to work with.

Being a freelance singer is a tricky business. Some things are in the diary for over a year beforehand – solo concerts with orchestras for example. More often tours are ‘penciled’ which means you have a period penciled in your diary but it is very likely to change and is certainly not confirmed. It’s a constant juggling act trying to fit in conflicting projects. Of course, rather like buses, jobs all arrive at the same time. It’s a constant round of begging for NAs (days when you’re officially not available) for diary clashes and spending ages on the internet trying to find trains or flights to get yourself from one country to another in time for a 10am rehearsal.

Another problem about being a freelancer is that you’re always worried that this will be your last job and you stare at big white spaces in your diary for the year ahead and wonder how you’ll ever pay the mortgage. Work does seem to come in at the last minute, but the past two years have been rather lean as the recession bites into Arts funding. This is particularly noticeable in countries like Italy and Spain where the Euro crisis is hitting hardest. The people there love classical concerts and we have traditionally toured a lot there. The other fear – which has proved to be a very real one, is that if you have to say no to a couple of jobs then you slip off the radar of that particular fixer.

All this meant I felt I couldn’t say no to David. He was in a spot and I wanted to help him out and I was also very keen to be involved in this vibrant new group and to see him in action as a conductor. The old fear of saying no kicked in and I accepted.

When he emailed me the schedule, I realised there were quite a few morning only rehearsals and time-consuming traveling to Cambridge and Harrow to be done. I live in Brighton and the train prices vary from £13 for an off peak travelcard including the underground, to nearly £45 if you have to get into London for 10am. If there is only one morning rehearsal in a day, then the train fare can wipe out almost all of the three-hour rehearsal fee (which is approximately £63). This usually evens out if you take the tour as a whole, but it certainly doesn’t live up to the glamorous, well-paid perception of being a professional singer.

So that left me with my Launch party preparation time cut down. I then received an email from a film fixer, asking me if I could do two sessions on the day before the Launch for a new film about Snow White called Snow White and the Huntsman. There are two films about Snow White coming out soon as, apparently, ‘Fairy Tales’ are the new ‘Vampires’ in Hollywood!

I accepted, but a couple of days later the fixer came back and offered me another two on the actual day of the Launch. I bit the bullet and said no, but was very mindful that the fee I was losing would have easily covered the venue hire, bar bill, sound engineer and musician’s wages. Ouch!

In the same month, I also had a few solo engagements to spice things up. A Duruflé Requiem, a Mahler song cycle with orchestra and a Mozart Requiem; as well as other miscellaneous sessions including one for the tenor Russell Watson’s new CD and a recording charting the life of poet John Clare! The week of the party, I also had to sing at a benefit for my friend Lynne Hazelden’s Cancer treatment.

The following week I was heavily involved with another concert I was doing for a another friend.

A few years ago, Dee Palmer was commissioned to write a Cantata to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the ill-fated night of 1,000 bomber raid on Nuremberg in 1944. Ninety six British aircraft were brought down by enemy action, resulting in a huge loss of life. On a personal note, KM-C was the 44 Squadron call sign of one of the Lancaster bombers lost in the raid. The pilot was Dee’s cousin. I had attended the premiere at the Arundel Festival where it was performed by a Tenor soloist, orchestra and an amateur ladies chorus.

I jokingly said to Dee, whilst congratulating her after the performance, that all it needed was an alto solo towards the end to sooth the audience after the harrowing depiction of the raid. Dee took me at my word and wrote just such a solo. Somehow, at dinner one night, I volunteered to fix a professional choir for the second performance and also (foolishly, for I had no idea of the enormous task) to check and revise the existing score, copy the new aria and print the parts for choir and orchestra. I had some experience of the score-writing programme Sibelius, as I already do my jazz charts with it but I have never done an orchestral score. What was I thinking?

The Monteverdi Choir were invited to sing at Windsor Castle to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Queen Mother’s death. Of course that was the very same day as Dee’s Cantata so I had to turn that one down.

I also had to fit in a trip to Guildford to be interviewed by Joe Talbot on BBC Radio Sussex as well as sending out press releases and invitations to the Press trying to publicise the CD Launch, not to mention trying to drum up all the guests. (Click on the link to listen to the interview).

I got back from the Snow White session about one in the morning. Later that day, I went down to our old stomping ground, the Brunswick Pub where we were holding the party. I wanted to do it there as I hoped I could get a good crowd and my friends could come. Nicola was streaming it live on the internet on Ustream so that people who couldn’t come could watch – also we’d then have the video to use later. (Click on the link to watch the video).

David Newton arrived from Bath and we had a quick sound check while both sisters, Nicola and Sarah tried to sort out the technical stuff – all went swimmingly at the launch and over eighty people turned up. I sang five songs and declared the CD open for business on iTunes, Amazon and even Argos online – though not the catalogue disappointingly. The thought of queuing up with my little blue pen and waiting for my number to claim my CD had tickled me when I discovered it on their online website. It was a really fun night shared by all my friends and supporters which went without a hitch (amazingly) and the next day I was head down and straight into copying and printing music for Dee’s Cantata.

Another week went by fitting copying around trips to London for jobs (annoying other people on the train as I worked away on my computer dropping large sheets of Dee’s A3 handwritten manuscript). Wednesday night after three hours printing out the parts at my long suffering partner’s work (thank heavens for the use of their double sided printer!) Dee and I sat and stuck together all the band parts so I would have a day to check everything – which was good as I spotted a few mistakes and had to re-print pages. When the concert day on Friday came, I spent the morning looking at my aria and the choir parts. I’d been so busy with all the other preparation that I simply hadn’t had time to practice the Cantata and my singing had taken a bit of a back seat.

At eleven thirty, I delivered music stands and parts and stood at the church entrance with my clipboard, checking the choir in and handing out scores – I hoped I’d remembered everything, even checking the parking machine prices for the choir. In fact, the notices on the machines had been altered the previous night in preparation for prices going up the following Monday – so that caused a bit of confusion. My good friend and Monteverdi Choir colleague, Katie Thomas was conducting. We had an hour for the choir call to cover the geography of the piece and correct some mistakes in the choral scores. The girls all went off to lunch and Katie started rehearsals with the orchestra.

She had a huge amount of music to get through before we could start on the Cantata. The first half had a great mix of pieces including Dee’s excellent arrangements of Mars (from Holst’s Planet Suite), Warlock’s Capriol Suite, Intermezzo (from the 1939 Ingrid Bergman film Escape to Happiness) and finally The Warsaw Concerto (from the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight). Dee was playing the fiendish piano solo in this piece and it had a great deal of rubato in the solo part so it was a tough job for Katie to keep everyone together.

When she reached the parts in the rehearsal that I had copied, I was on eggshells – trying to hear any mistakes, so that I could quickly correct them for the musicians. We’d did have a sticking mistake on one movement and the brass had each other’s parts. I leapt up when I saw the Trombone wasn’t playing and it sounded like the horn was playing in the wrong octave…..fortunately I had the parts in the extra set which I had printed just in case. They swapped music and it was quickly sorted out, but it did mean that Katie had to waste valuable time going back. I understand now what a really difficult job the copyists on big films have – working through the night to get revisions done and being responsible for mistakes in parts that can cost a huge amount in studio time.

My choir ladies and tenor Tom Raskin were brilliant and I had one run-through of my aria before Katie had to crack on to get to the end of the Cantata. The percussionist wasn’t happy and when I tried to placate him and ask if there was anything I could do to help him, it turned out that his main problem was that he was struggling to see the music. The light in the church was not very good in the place he had set up. I quickly drove home to get him a couple of clip lights and to get changed and was back before the beginning of the first half. We managed to rig up the lights on some microphone stands and we were ready to start.

There was a good audience and the first half went off without a hitch. Katie did a great job conducting and held the concerto together magnificently. After the interval we started the Nuremberg Cantata and later as I stood up to do my solo, I thought “blimey I’m a bit too tired to do this”. I think the lesson learnt is EITHER sing OR copy, fix and stage manage – being responsible for all of those things is just too much if you only have one rehearsal to sort everything out.

We were all mighty glad to get to the end of this mammoth concert and after collecting the music and stands, went for a celebratory drink to the pub. Some bright spark suggested we go to a late night Jazz club run by a good friend of ours from The Brunswick Jazz Jam, Paul Richards. Katie had her parents down from Wales and we all piled into the club. There was a fabulous singer called Zee Gachette who started off her second set declaring that we were all going to get up and dance – who were we to argue? The Welsh contingent stormed the dance floor and we finally got home very tired but happy at 3am.

If you’ve got this far – well done! – When I started writing I had no idea what I was going to talk about – ironically the original title was Writer’s Block! What I really wanted to say was that I’ve come to that difficult point in a creative project.

You have the idea, it takes months to bring it to fruition, all the hard work pays off and you finally launch your CD. Then I’ve been left with a creative lull and also, I find, some feelings of self doubt.

As sister Nicola was very clear in an email to me in the week after the launch. The hard work starts now. She advised me to print out a notice to pin on the wall in front of my desk which reads: “no, I’m sorry I can’t do that, I have an album to sell”

Obviously I have to make a living, prepare for tours, learn music, teach etc. Alongside that I have to organize my time better and re-focus to make time to concentrate again on my own project. Not let myself be distracted.

Launching this album is rather like having a baby. It can be a bit difficult to conceive, hard to hold onto, carry and give birth to. Everything leads up to the excitement of that moment and then suddenly you’re sitting at home with that strange bundle thinking what the hell do I do now? You love it, but not everybody else will. From now on is the really hard work.
As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.
I love to hear your comments as well so please leave me a message below – your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

I took this recording from the radio but unfortunately there were a few cracking noises on the playback. I hope that won’t spoil your listening. It runs on at the end, as some emails and calls came in. Just click the pink arrow.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential. I love to hear your comments as well so please leave me a message below – your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

If you would like to buy the album, you can do that here and enjoy exclusive bonus tracks.

You can also join in by watching and commenting / sharing on Heather’s page on Facebook.

If the video below doesn’t play, visit our Ustream channel here >>>

Streaming by Ustream

My first view of Venice from the water

Occasionally in the life of a touring singer, there is an opportunity to extend a work trip to include a few days holiday. When I get the preliminary schedule for a tour, the first thing I do is to see if there is a chance to ‘opt out’ of the inevitable London Heathrow flight and book one from Gatwick Airport.

I live in Brighton, so it’s only half an hour on the train to Gatwick whereas Heathrow involves an hour and ten minutes on the train, then a long underground ride – not to mention the struggle down the stairs through the crowds with your suitcase at Victoria Tube station. If it’s one of those hideous, early check-ins (that seem to be the norm now) then it can be almost impossible to get to Heathrow at 7am without staying in London the night before – expensive and awkward.

We were due to go to Ferrara for the first leg of a tour in February 2012, which would then take us to Tenerife and Gran Canaria. The group would fly from there to Barcelona and finish off the tour with a concert in Madrid. It was a programme of Schumann with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The Monteverdi Choir had been invited as guests along with our conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

We finished rehearsing on Thursday evening, and the choir would fly to Venice early on Monday morning and from there, be taken on the bus to Ferrara. I noticed that the soloists were going to Venice on Saturday and asked if I could tag onto that flight – the office said yes, but I would have to pay for the extra night’s hotel in Ferrara. It was probably cheaper than staying at Heathrow and would avoid the early wake up call, followed by a rehearsal in Italy so I was tempted…….but then a brilliant idea popped into my head.

My partner had never been to Italy – what better than to arrive in Venice by boat in the romantic mists of winter? I quickly looked for flights and found that we could get a easyjet flight on the Friday morning and then I could come to the airport with him on the Monday to meet the group for the tour, as he flew home.

I checked this was ok with all parties and posted a plea to my well-travelled friends on Facebook; asking for recommendations for accommodation in Venice. The indomitable Rebecca Taverner (who runs Capella Nova in Glasgow with her husband, the conductor Alan Taverner) turned out to be Venice Tour Guide Straordinario and I duly duly awarded her the Spaghetti Dell’Oro award for services to Italian Holidays.

The bed and breakfast she recommended was off the beaten track and when I went to their website it looked charming and was very reasonable – somebody else recommended looking on TripAdvisor and it turned out, that the same place was rated very highly there too. With flights and rooms booked, we couldn’t wait to go – A guide book and a novel based in Venice were given as stocking presents at Christmas to get us in the mood.

As February approached the weather forecast in England threatened snow and I groaned as I remembered the nightmare journeys which I had to undertake during  the previous winter for another Monteverdi Choir tour. (Click here to read that article). We were due to fly on the Friday, but snow was forecast for Sunday and Monday. If we could just get there then the only problem might be that we would be stuck in Venice and couldn’t fly home – Che Fortuna!……Apart from the fact that my flight home was booked for the Wednesday and if the group didn’t get out then I might have to sing the alto line all on my own in Ferrara – not very satisfactory for the audience, and worse – not get paid – not very satisfactory for the bank manager – and who would pay for the hotel and all those Italian meals in Venice?

Friday finally arrived and R and I got the train to Gatwick. I checked my luggage on but he only had carry-on. As we walked past the business security point , a man ushered us through – this never happens when I’m on my own! After a coffee, we walked to the gate and found that we were right at the back of the queue. The airline made an announcement appealing for passengers to check in their hand luggage to make more room in the cabin of the plane. As we had to wait for my case anyway, R went to the desk and gave them his small suitcase. (He just hadn’t wanted to pay for luggage in the hold.) They ushered us forward and we went on the plane first – for being so helpful!

When we arrived into Marc Polo airport we had to exchange our printed Venicelink ticket for a real one,  so I headed off to do that, whilst the bags were coming off the plane. As instructed, I went at booth 71, but the man there told me that we had to exchange it on the Quayside.

As we left the airport, we encountered the biting, freezing wind for the first time. We waited in the queue for a good ten minutes before we got our new tickets and we huddled in an open barge where we would eventually get onto the boat. Half an hour later and we were absolutely frozen, despite a full-length padded coat, thermal vest, fleece and scarf and ski gloves.

When I arrived in Venice for the very first time, I remembered a large boat with open sides where you could stand outside if you wanted. I had a picture of this in my mind when I pre-booked the boat online – I wanted R to see the beautiful city as we approached from the lagoon – a wonderful memory for me (See the picture above).  When the boat finally approached it was more of a motor cruiser and we had to go down into the lower deck. Great for warming up but the windows were covered with salt and ice so you couldn’t really see out much. I have to say I was a bit disappointed for him, but we had bought a 72 hour boat pass so there was plenty of time to explore.

We got off at San Stae – the stop before the Rialto Bridge and easily walked the few passages and bridges to look for the hotel. The light was just going but the magical colours of the city could still be seen. I had also asked my facebook friends for restaurant recommendations and a Trumpet player sent me this picture – the truth was out – that most of the rehearsal is spent deciding where lunch would be! As we walked from the boat, that very restaurant was on our way, so I popped in and reserved a table in my best Italian……the proprietor asked what time we would like to eat and I said eight, eight thirty expecting him to pick a time. He replied in Italian, “eight or eight thirty – see you later” which made me smile. Welcome to Italy!

We arrived at the tucked away passage that housed the door to the residenza Ca’Bonvicini and were greeted warmly by our host and told that, as their best room was available, we could have that one for no extra charge. He explained their map which had their favourite, six restaurants marked – The one we had booked for that evening was at the top of the list! I love it when a plan comes together.

He explained about the Venice boat and ferry system and I showed him the boat ticket we had bought on the internet. Unfortunately it only worked on boats for that particular company, and didn’t include the hop on ferries that went everywhere. It seemed it would have been better to buy an airport transfer then buy a local boat pass at the Rialto bridge. It seemed I had made a mistake and the landlord was cross on my behalf – as we intended to walk around the city anyway, it seemed a small problem. It only remained for us to choose a time for our breakfast to be delivered to our room the next morning– heaven!

Having dropped off our bags, absolutely delighted with our room, we wrapped up warm to explore the City by night for a couple of hours before going to the restaurant. It was magical, mostly because there didn’t seem to be many people there. When I had come the time before, it was teeming with crowds of tourists. When we’d woven our way though to St. Mark’s square, it was practically empty…..we quickly walked across to see the gondolas on the water and the Doge’s Palace, but the icy blasts of wind drove us back to shelter.

We popped into a dark little bar with low ceilings and ordered a beer and red wine and decided to share one of their home made mini pizzas, as we were really hungry. It was hot when it arrived and really surprised us. Tiny, wild mushrooms, prosciutto, garlic, herbs and the best mozzarella. Whether it was because we were so cold, or it was the first thing we ate together in Italy, I don’t know, but it was one of the most delicious things we ate that weekend.

Wandering round those picturesque passages took me back to another memorable time in Venice. I was in the Swingle Singers and we arrived on the boat during a heaving, hot August. We were due to sing in a live television show recorded at a studio some way from the city. At the time, the group had a very glamorous, blonde, Danish agent in Italy.

You can see her here on the water taxi talking on her mobile phone – which was revolutionary in the early 1990s.  On the right s the musical director at the time, Jonathan Rathbone. On the day of the recording we all headed off in shorts and sandals as it was very hot. We took our costumes for the rehearsals and show and expected to come back to the hotel before heading out to eat. All went well that day and as we left, the producer told us we were invited to a reception. (Our agent had forgotten to tell us). Always glad of a free meal, we climbed onto our water taxi and headed off to what seemed like a very grand palazzo.

The doorman looked horrified at what we were wearing and wouldn’t let us in. Eventually somebody came and ushered us into a side room, where we had to stay in disgrace as the party went on in the very grand room next to us. Our tenor, Andrew Busher was the only person who had long trousers on and was allowed to go to the buffet and bring us back some food to eat. Whilst there, he made friends with the operatic mezzo soprano who was a rising star at the time and who had also sung in the television programme. We actually had a fun time as we werehen we left to go back to our hotel, she stood on the quayside and sang an aria to us (but mostly to our handsome tenor!)

In 2009 we were to encounter that amazing singer again, as she sang the title role of Carmen with the Monteverdi Choir in a production at the Opera Comique in Paris – some twenty years later.

Back on my romantic weekend in Venice, we had some wonderful meals and had a great time, but often got chilled through to the bone. Here I am wrapped up against the cold. We even got chilled whilst walking around the Doge’s palace, which was inside but unheated. As we crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the dungeons, I really understood the terrible plight of those prisoners as they huddled in the freezing, damp cells waiting for their death.  This must have been something of a relief after the conditions, not to mention the torture they endured.

On the last day it was still bitterly cold but the sky was very bright. We took a trip to Murano for lunch. Here is a picture I took of the island of Isola di San Michele where the Venetians bury their dead. I loved the way the driver of the small boat passing by was checking his mobile.

We took another long boat ride around the city to arrive into St. Mark’s Square the way I had remembered it all those years before. We were happy, but absolutely frozen, as we stood out on the open deck of the ferry to take in the glorious view of the city. I was amused to be greeted in St. Mark’s square by a canvas covering a building regaled with the enormous image of George Clooney – another beautiful national treasure!

It was Sunday and I heard by text that due to snow in the UK, the soloists had waited at Gatwick for seven hours for their flight to Venice – they never arrived in Ferrara until 1am on Monday.

I mused that I had definitely made the right choice as we headed back to Osteria Moceniga for our final meal.  and the next day, I decided to catch a train instead of waiting at the airport for the choir, as their plane kept getting delayed as well. I kissed R goodbye and got off the boat at the extraordinary 1930s station, the only Modernist building to face the canal.

I bought a first class ticket for only 11 euros (well after all , I was used to being upgraded now) and in an hour and a half, after a beautiful ride through the snowy countryside; I was having lunch in Ferrara.

We certainly have a wonderful job sometimes!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.
I love to hear your comments as well so please leave me a message below – your email address is private and won’t appear with the comment.

Some twenty years ago, Andy and I had arrived from America, but we’d endured the journey from hell to get there…….We’d been on a long tour with the a cappella group, The Swingle Singers. We always did an Easter and Christmas tour to the States as part of the Columbia Artists Concert Series. The tours would take us across the whole of the United States, to venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to a high school gymnasium in the middle of North Dakota. They involved long hours spent traveling on our private greyhound bus as we weaved our way across that enormous country. We took with us a large amount of sound equipment, all housed in heavy, silver and black metal flight cases. Every afternoon we would arrive at the venue and the whole group would unload the flight cases and help our engineer to set up the sound system. After the concert, we would change from our stage costumes into our jeans and pack up and load the bus before we could head wearily to our motel bed. I was a wiz at winding the long electric cables (as Andrew Cleyndert will testify in my article on the album recording day) and to this day I am a very useful addition to a barge holiday!

The original plan was to tour for four weeks, then take the Easter weekend as a holiday – either in America or some members would fly home to see their families. Then we would continue on the tour for another three weeks.  At the end of the previous year, we received a last minute request to sing the vocal parts in a concert of the Berio Sinfonia with the Tenerife Symphony. This fell smack bang in the Easter period which we had allocated for the break. We all discussed what we should do and decided that we could fly the partners out to Tenerife and combine a little holiday in the sun with the concert.

We had to fly to Tenerife via Madrid but we started our journey with an early flight from Dallas to New York. We arrived at 6am for the first flight and all went well. When we arrived in New York, we had to collect all our luggage as we had to complete customs for the sound equipment before we could re-check it in. We were told the plane to Madrid was delayed by a few hours, which might jeopardise our connection. Luckily, we managed to change airlines and get an earlier flight. This meant an epic journey with trolleys of heavy equipment and nine suitcases along the service road from one terminal to another. (It would have been impossible to transport the flight cases on the shuttle without the trolleys.)

 We eventually managed to get to the other terminal and despite many kerbs and much tired banter and laughter, we got our customs forms sorted and boarded the flight. “Oh dear” exclaimed one of the sopranos as she watched the man driving the luggage buggy (which was piled high with our flight cases) fail to brake in time. As if in slow motion, he collided with the plane. After a very long wait, the stewardess announced that we would all have to disembark and wait for another plane to be located.  This spelled disaster for our Spanish connection.

Finally, we boarded the new plane and set off, not knowing what would happen in Madrid. Jet-lagged and rather grumpy, we got off the plane and walked into a scene of chaos. Apparently, the cleaners in Madrid had decided to go on strike and we had arrived quite a few days into it. Rubbish, drifts of dust and detritus had accumulated in every corner. The cafes and bars had stopped serving, so we couldn’t get anything to eat or drink and the toilets were indescribable. When we managed to pick our way through the rubbish to the Iberia help desk to try to get another flight to Tenerife, we were informed that every flight was full because of Easter. Worse than that, because we had changed airlines, Iberia had no responsibility to put us up in a hotel.

We were already so jet lagged and beyond tired that it was hard not to break down in tears. All our partners were waiting in Tenerife for us – not to mention the Symphony Orchestra we were booked to sing with as soloists. It seemed hopeless. The only chink of hope they could offer, was for us to wait at the gates for the departing flights to Tenerife and hope somebody wouldn’t turn up. Perhaps we could get a last minute standby place? For nine people?….I think not.

As well as the airport being very hot with the air thick with dust, there was also nowhere to lie down – the floor was filthy and we had been warned that the rubbish situation meant that there were now a problem with rats!

A few hours later we waited hopefully at the gate and just as it closed the stewardess told us there was room for two people. We decided that our musical director Jonathan Rathbone and our sound engineer, John Milner should go. They could talk to the conductor about tempos and answer any musical questions and John could sort out the technical requirements. We waved them off hoping that we would be reunited soon. Many hours later, after a couple of flights had left we were losing hope. After much banter and charming of the Iberia staff, they took pity on us and closed the flight ten minutes early and we all piled on, mightily relieved to leave that filthy place.

These were the days where smoking was allowed and unfortunately, to finish off our journey, we were all sitting in the back rows – next to the chain smoking Spanish stewards. We were joyously greeted at the arrivals gate by our partners, who’d come to the airport on our bus.  My boyfriend declared when we were alone that, although it was good to see me, I had smelled and looked BAD. A sort of “trampy ashtray” was how he described me.

Nowadays both Madrid and Tenerife airport are modern temples of glass and marble – a tribute to Spanish design. As Andy and I boarded the bus, we were both pondering the twenty-some years that had passed since the last time we arrived in the Canary Islands: how life had changed and the many concerts we had sung together in the intervening years.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

We talk about how I got started in music and in particular how I started singing jazz before moving on to tell the story of how the album came about and got recorded in the way it did.

This was ready for the big review/radio mail-out which I was intending to do on Monday. When the welcome words “ready” were uttered from the hallway, I rushed out to help carry all my stuff downstairs. Not used to a gallant roadie, I saw that he had gathered up the speaker and cable bags. I laughed, grabbed the remaining music stand and we loaded up the car.  We drove for about an hour to get to the village and the aforementioned gallant roadie carried the speakers and bags in. (I could get used to this!) I kissed the lovely guitarist Mr. Thompson who is normally my talented bass player (perks of the job) and we joked and laughed as we set up. I reached for the bag containing my Music Pad (where I keep all my charts and lyrics) and to my horror, I realised that it wasn’t there. ‘Don’t panic Cairncross – it must be in the car’ I reassured myself and ran outside to check……..

NOTHING!

We were due to play for an hour and then two later sets of 40 minutes. Two hours and ten minutes of music and I had no charts for my guitarist and no lyrics for myself as a safety net.

I was almost sick on the spot – how dreadfully unprofessional!

“Do you have any charts?” I desperately asked Steve. “No”, he replied, “you always bring them.” If I made my roadie drive home to get them then he could get back for 9.30 – we finished at 10.30…..“Don’t be daft” reassured Steve, “we can do this!”

Now I had no doubt that HE could indeed do it – he has an amazing knowledge of chords and songs built up from many years in the business. I, on the other hand don’t actually do unprepared jazz gigs very often. I have spent hours on Sibelius writing out charts in my key so that what I hear is mostly what I expect. This is to make it as easy as possible to sing well and also to have a good stab at scatting. (improvising over the chords with vocal syllables, imitating an instrument).

To add to the trauma, a good friend and colleague from the Monteverdi Choir and her opera singer husband had come over specially to have dinner. They also wanted to hear our Duo with a view to booking us for their own village pub event. She has an extensive knowledge of the American Songbook and has been known to correct my lyrics in the past. They were already ensconced at the table directly in front of where I was set up to sing.

This was it – With this spectacularly unprofessional memory lapse, I was finally to be discovered as a musical fraud. Something all my colleagues, no matter how successful, all admit to dreading and dreaming about. After all these years in the business – TODAY was the terrible day.

Actually now I think back, this wasn’t actually the first time I’d forgotten something vital.  There was another notable, unprofessional memory lapse when I was in the a cappella group The Swingle Singers. We were due to travel to Holland for a concert on the newly opened Eurostar to Brussels.  As it was just an overnight trip, I had packed my small wheeled suitcase and popped my passport in the zipped pocket on the front. Later that evening, my then boyfriend arrived home and announced that we needed to take a bigger case as we had to take some CDs for sale at the concert. I transferred the contents and the next morning we arrived early at Waterloo to check in. (This was before the Eurostar moved to the splendid St. Pancras International station).

I went to check in and suddenly remembered that I had left my passport in the other case. I decided to go back on the underground to get it and get a later Eurostar and everybody convinced me that I didn’t need to do that. This was of course the casual days pre 9/11 and security was much easier then. The bass told me that he’d been on a trip the week before and the trumpet player had forgotten his passport and there was no problem at all. No checks in Brussels – you just got off the train and went through the gate.

SO….we got on the train (no checks at the UK end) and everybody teased me during the journey that I wouldn’t be allowed in.

Unfortunately that day there WERE border control guards and we sheepishly explained that I had forgotten my passport and were just there for a night to do a concert. Our Dutch agent was there waiting and he came over and explained. He showed them the contract with my name on and I showed them my credit cards. We even had five, different Swingle Singers CDs with my photo and name directly underneath. All to no avail. We had unfortunately come up against the most intransigent border guard in Europe.

It didn’t help that the UK had recently implemented an opt-out to the Maastricht Treaty stopping unchecked entry into the UK and meaning we had to show our passport to travel across Europe. This guard seemed to delight in making an example of me on behalf of his spurned European brotherhood. I was led away to the border control office where I was to be held before being sent back to the UK. Somebody lent me a mobile phone (early days for those too!) and the rest of the group went off to set up and rehearse. Our agent reassured me he would sort everything out  and told me not to get on that train home. I waited….and waited. After a couple of hours I suddenly had a brainwave. There was a photocopy of my passport in our office. I could call our administrator and she could go into the office and fax it to the border control office.

They said yes – if she could do that then I could go into the country. I called our agent and waited excitedly, staring at the fax machine. Half an hour later it whirred into life and the guards crowded round. The main guard turned round with a stern look on his face and showed me the fax. The photocopy had been taken in colour and during the faxing process, my face had become almost black. I couldn’t be recognized from this image so they couldn’t let me in. A frantic call to our agent reassured me to hang on – help was definitely on it’s way. The Dutch Embassy had been informed and they would sort everything out.

What I haven’t told you, was this was also the day that the group had hired a company to make a promotional video. We’d decide to invest some thousands of pounds to try to sell our live show to theatres in Holland and Belgium. Without me, the eight part vocal arrangements would be a little lacking, not to mention the sparkling choreography! If I couldn’t get into the country, it would be a disaster. Two hours later and no news from the Embassy and the guards decided enough was enough. I was dispatched to the next train to London with a guard sporting a machine gun (a little excessive I thought). Right up to the moment when the doors closed, I wouldn’t sit down in case a last minute reprise from the Dutch Embassy would magically arrive via the borrowed mobile phone.

Sadly, it never came and when we were on our way the train guard came round to ask for passports and I burst into uncontrollable sobs. “Oh dear – it must be you that forgot your passport” he commiserated.

It was the only concert in ten years as a Swingle Singer that I ever missed – not even one for a sore throat! I’ve never seen that video with the rest of the group valiantly filling in my solo bits and papering the gaps in the harmony – I’d really like to!

So here I was, sitting in a country pub in Sussex looking at the hours ahead of me, wondering what on earth would happen. Fortunately, mobile phone technology has moved on rapidly and only a month ago I had put two .pdf images of my repertoire list with all my correct keys onto my phone – just in case I was ever asked to ‘sit in’ at a gig,  I thought it would be helpful to know the keys that I prefer to sing songs in. Good jazz-singers who perform gigs like this all the time, usually know their keys off by heart, or should. I wrote about choosing songs and finding the right key for you in a previous article. I know quite a few but certainly not over two hours worth.

“We can do this” assured Steve. So that’s what we did – I looked at the list, picked one I thought I could remember the words to and told him the key – he got a blank look on his face for a couple of minutes while he mentally scanned the chart and off we went. The worst moment was after the second song, where I’d got in a pickle with the order of the verses and could only see the hours of humiliation stretching before me. Simon and Garfunkle were both sitting on my shoulder singing “Hello Darkness My Old Friend” and I was utterly convinced I couldn’t do it. I shook myself, got a grip and picked The Very Thought of You. It’s a song I’d sung in the Glen Miller Memorial Orchestra hundreds of times and one that I definitely knew the lyrics of so we were soon back on track. After a couple of sets Steve and I had our meal and talked about the whole culture of modern day jazz musicians. With the advent of the iPhone most jazzers have the Real Book app at their fingertips.

This is the electronic version of the famous album of chords as recorded by the greats. You can pick a song and transpose it at the touch of a button. Steve reminisced how as a youngster he would do gigs with older musicians who would call out tunes in any key and you just had to play them – a fantastic, if terrifying, training ground for players. It meant that you soon gained knowledge of the core repertoire and a deep understanding of the harmonic language of Jazz. Nowadays, you so often see musicians huddled around a phone – this surely must inhibit the greatest skill that a musician should cherish and strive for – LISTENING to the rest of the band. Steve did have his iPhone but only looked at it a couple of times, just to remind himself of few corners for my more eclectic song choices with their spurious keys.

The audience were unaware of my agony and during one Beatles song, we vamped for a while as I tried to remember the second verse – we asked the people near to us and none of them could remember it under pressure – suddenly, it popped into my head and we were off again. One gentleman (clearly unaware of the vicinity of said boyfriend) pressed his bearded cheek to mine and whispered, slightly lasciviously into my ear ‘You’re too good for this joint!’ as he left.

I’m sure that I lost a few years from my life during that evening, but as we packed up at the end, I was curiously elated. I actually knew more than I thought and without the stricture of my familiar charts, Steve and I came up with some really lovely things – listening and working together. Thank goodness he was there to help me through. When being congratulated (and apologized to) by my mightily impressed boyfriend, Steve told him that most singers don’t turn up with charts, they just give him their keys. He quipped that the sadly recently departed, Joe Lee Wilson used to shout out a tune and then say “Any damn key!”

Back at home, the music bag was innocently waiting for me, nestled under the washing rack. Having re-read this, there also seems to be a cautionary tale about the distracting influence of boyfriends in the singing workplace……

Here’s the wonderful Joe Lee Wilson (1935-2011) doing what he did best:

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

The song is by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart and when I asked David Newton if there were any songs he’d particularly like to record, this was one of the ones he suggested. I was very happy to learn it, as I knew the Doris Day and Andre Previn version, from their wonderful 1962 album called Duet.

In late 1961 they met for the first time and found, according to liner notes, that they shared a love for “sodas, animals, and ballads.” The result was an intimate, stripped-back version of songs – a sharp contrast to the lush Hollywood arrangements which Doris is usually associated with. Two years before, Previn had made a similar record with Dinah Shore, called Dinah Sings Previn Plays/Somebody Loves Me, so he was the obvious choice for such a project.

The song comes from a musical called By Jupiter, which opened on Broadway at the Schubert Theatre in June,1942. It was the most successful of the shows written by Rogers and Hart, as it ran for 427 performances. It was also the last show they wrote together, as Lorenz Hart died in 1943. He was only 48 and succumbed to pneumonia after a long period of heavy drinking and depression. He died only a few months after By Jupiter had finished its Broadway run. After his death, Richard Rogers went on to form another successful writing partnership with Oscar Hammerstein.

David wanted to try the song, as he had written an arrangement incorporating the theme from the original music he wrote for a play.  He had previously worked as a music writer for the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the home of playwright Alan Ayckbourn. ( I’ve being trying to get Dave to do some guest blogging about that show but as yet he’s being a bit bashful – I’ll update you if I can persuade him to spills the beans).

Here’s a bit of his piano solo to tempt you:

In our version you can hear that theme woven into the original song. I really like the recording, but when we had to lose five songs from the original eighteen, I decided not to use Nobody’s Heart for purely lyrical reasons. It just so happened that most of the songs were out and out love songs and Nobody’s Heart is a bit more nonchalant. The lyrics include ‘nobody’s heart belongs to me” and “nobody writes his songs for me” and proclaims “Who Cares?” implying, in my opinion, “not I!”

It didn’t seem to fit with the feeling of the album which is a celebration of love. As it seemed a shame to bury the recording forever in the Cairncross vaults, we hit upon the idea of giving it away as a free MP3 download to anybody who joined my VIP Mailing List. This is actually my birthday message, so instead of getting one, I’m giving you a gift!

It’s easy – just click on this link and enter your Name and email address. You then receive an email where you just have to click the link to confirm your interest.

So why not get your free copy of Nobody’s Heart HERE. Hope you enjoy it – Happy Birthday!

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The CDs had arrived and I had to decide the best way to send them out. This involved a fair bit of time spent on office stationary websites (so that wasn’t really a hardship if you remember my previous article). Cardboard envelopes seemed the best way for single CDs –  Amazon use those for delivery – they’re not padded, but because they’re so rigid I hope they’ll do the job. I will also wrap the CD in the delivery note for extra protection.

Here’s what I plumped for, weighing 36g and costing under 20p per envelope. I also found a very good adjustable cardboard mailer specially for up to 8 cds in the temple of stationary that is Staples (any excuse!). It costs quite a bit more per unit but is really sturdy when you have to send out a few cds at a time. (click on the pictures to buy these products). I tootled off to the post office with various combinations and amounts of CDs in both cardboard mailers and bubble-wrap envelopes. I had the options weighed and bought a stock of stamps. That’s the posting sorted, I hope.

I’d already downloaded the PPL software so that I could register the tracks and then add those tracks to the ‘product’ – that’s the CD – so that when a song gets played on the radio, a fee will be paid to PPLUK to pass on to the musicians who played on the album – that’s me and Dave! We are both members already, so we didn’t have to join. Visit this page on the PPL Website to find out how to do all that. When I finally pressed submit, I got an error message (I’m on a MAC) but the track status was SENT. I called one of the very helpful team and he explained that this was a technical glitch for MAC users and if it said sent then it would be ok. Unfortunately there is a bit of a backlog in entering information so we can’t check for a couple of months(!)

I’ve already submitted the dreaded MCPS form and we paid the invoice to licence the songs that we’d recorded in order to manufacture 750 CDs. This came to over 500 pounds – ouch! We have 250 promotional copies that we didn’t have to pay any licence for. It’s enough to make you take up writing songs!

When you send out your promo copies for review, the 250 CDs have to be clearly marked with “promotional copy – not for resale”. MCPS guidance states that this must be embossed on (or included on a sticker affixed with heavy duty glue to) the jewel box, case or sleeve before the copy is distributed. You can stamp them with an ink stamp but the pre-loaded ink stampers worked out at over £50. The rubber stamps with ink pads seemed very messy, so I plumped for one-colour sticky labels which I ordered from the excellent website stickylabels.com. They were easy to design on the template and cost £15.95 for 500, arrived quickly with a handy cardboard dispenser. So now I have a sticking job to do.

After a business meeting with my modern day Prince Esterhazy (Tom Chapman) and my accountant (and partner, which is very handy in a situation like this), we decided it was best to set up a company to administrate the sales of the album. For tax purposes, I am a self-employed musician, but as we talked about the various ways to to account, it just seemed simpler for tax purposes to keep things separate from my earnings from singing work. So after a nifty bit of form filling, with the press of a computer button BearPawMusic is a limited company – all seems very grand to me. Here’s the logo for the company that I designed. I found a photograph of an indentation of a polar bear’s paw, selected all the shadows and then inversed the selection and copied that. I did a little bit of tidying up…..You can of course see it on the actual CD.

I assumed that if I registered all the information on MCPS and PPLUK then somehow, magically the information would appear on the CD when you put it into your computer. A friend emailed me to tell me that when she had done just that, my name didn’t come up, or more importantly, any track titles. On further investigation I found that you had to register the details yourself on www.gracenote.com. Why does nobody tell you all these things?

It’s actually very easy when you actually know you have to do it (!). There is an excellent FAQ page on their website. I did it directly from my iTunes programme. I put the CD in and it tried to ‘access gracenote’ – no information there.  I then entered the correct title on each track. I  selected them all (command A), and in the File menu I chose ‘get info’ (Command I). I’m doing this on a MAC so have a look on the FAQs for iTunes on a PC. You can then fill in the Album Title, Artist and Genre and it will paste it into all the selected tracks. Then select all the tracks again and go to Advanced in the iTunes Menu and select submit CD track names. Easy! A few days later check this is done by putting in the CD and in the Advanced menu select Get Track Names. This will clear what’s in your computer’s memory and get the information from Gracenote – and so can all your cd customers around the world.

If you’d like to personally test out my Gracenote competency you can order one of the new CDs HERE

Happy Listening!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP list page on the pink navigation bar. You also get an exclusive unreleased track as a reward! Don’t forget to click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

The Christmas Market in Munich

Whilst I was sampling a hot glühwein at the Christmas market in Munich, five large boxes of cds were delivered to my sister Nicola’s house in Sussex.

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I was on tour with the LSO and Monteverdi Choir, blasting out Beethoven’s Ode To Joy (in German) with Sir John Eliot conducting. The CD is the culmination of a lot of hard work and it marks the end of years of waiting for me. We were hoping to have it for sale well before Christmas, but various technical hold-ups meant that we were later than we’d hoped.

No matter, it’s here and you can finally buy the finished product.

The great news is that we’ve also been accepted by a major distributor, who will launch the CD early in 2012. It will then be available in shops and online at iTunes and Amazon. Meanwhile, we are selling directly from my website and offering exclusive extras which will only be available for people buying directly from us.

During Christmas in Sussex, we will no doubt raise a glass to Tom Chapman who so generously funded the project. To David Newton who played so wonderfully on the recording days and provided me with a glorious canvas to sing on. To Andrew Cleyndert, who’s musical ears, technical know-how and attention to detail made us end up with such a great product. To Graham Black who was so patient with all my last minute tweaking of the design. To Steve Watson who was there to rescue us with the elusive answers for all our technical WordPress questions. To Wayne McConnell for taking such a lovely picture for the cover  – how DID he do that? To the Thomas girls (Katie and her mum Julie) who did endless editing and proof reading and had to listen to my latest idea for the album or moan on about the latest hitch in production. To all my friends (you know who you are), who encouraged and supported me.

I will of course raise a large glass of dry white wine in honour of  my sister Nicola Cairncross, who drove the whole thing along. From that summer day two years ago when she bullied me into building this website and starting to write this blog in order to promote a product that only existed in our imagination; right through to waiting in at home all day yesterday to take delivery of the finished article. Her marketing expertise and tenacity is second to none and this certainly wouldn’t have happened without her.

Now we’ve got the album, we intend to use that website to spread the word to all those people around the World who would never have known about my voice.

Phew – it sounds like a Miss World acceptance speech!

Enough yattering from me – you can BUY THE CD HERE (sound of distant heralding trumpets) and if you download the MP3 version you will even get an exclusive bonus track jokingly entitled the tiramisu version of the title track at last, which is sure to get your toes tapping and give you a ‘pick you up’! There are also extracts from all fourteen songs for you to listen to on the sales page.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

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I’ve talked a little of why I chose to record “Where Do You Start?” in my post about Finalising The Artwork, but when I began to research the song further, I uncovered the writers’ wonderful love story. The music is by Johnny Mandel and the lyrics are by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The Bergmans both grew up in Brooklyn, but they never met until they moved independently to Los Angeles for work. The catalyst for their meeting was the composer Lew Spence. Alan was working with him in the morning and Marilyn was his afternoon collaborator. One day, Lou decided to introduce the two lyricists and a marriage and working partnership that has lasted for over fifty years was born.

Some of the many songs they have written lyrics for, include Nice ‘n’ Easy, The Windmills of Your Mind, Yellow Bird and How Do You Keep The Music Playing? After The Way We Were and You Don’t Bring Me Flowers the Bergmans cemented their long working partnership with Barbara Streisand, when they collaborated with her on the Academy Award winning score of Yentl, with music by Michel Legrand. It was also with Michel Legrand that they wrote the lyrics for What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? – which is also on my new CD!

When David Newton asked me if I knew the song Where do you start? he suggested I listen to Shirley Horn’s version. The song features on her 1992 CD called Here’s To Life. Johnny Mandel, who wrote the song, had won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocals for the album (on which he also conducted the orchestra). He also wrote A Time For Love which features on the same CD. Click on the album cover to hear Shirley sing Where Do you Start?

But it was Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s story that fascinated me most of all. I found a great link which you can listen to here, where the couple are interviewed by Terry Gross on an excellent radio show called Fresh Air, produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by National Public Radio.  There are some great insights into their working relationship with Sinatra!

Here’s a clip for you to hear my first version in D major.

Now here is the version we did at the end of the second day in F Major, when I was so warmed up that D major was far too low for me. Notice how the colour of my voice in the higher key gives the song a completely different feel. More wistful than world-weary perhaps? Andrew Cleyndert made me sing the beginning in both keys, swapping back and forth and when I asked him why, he explained that he was so surprised at the difference a minor third can make that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. You can also hear very clearly how Andrew was working on the general sound of the tracks by the later versions, adjusting the ratio of the voice to piano and also varying the levels of the different microphones he had placed in around the instrument.

The first version is the original, basic mix that he sent to me on the three cds containing over fifty takes for me to choose from.  I think you’ll agree the final version sounds much more rounded – and there is also a higher general level. For me the performance is much simpler and stripped back – I was still finding my way at the beginning of the first day and obviously Dave and I were working more as a team after we’d finished recording 18 songs.

Talking of interpretation, I found this video of Bea Arthur (famous for the American sitcom, The Golden Girls). I really like what she does with Where Do You Start?  but it’s much faster and more angry and resentful than the way I had understood the song lyrics to be – interesting!

I’ll leave you with the beautiful Kenny Rankin version that I heard in that Paris record shop, the voice and lyrics that made me stop and listen. I bought the CD on the strength of that one song.

This is the place to ask questions, give me some comments or feedback on the album – just use the “Leave A Comment” box below!

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I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!

Here’s a sneak preview from our recording. Depending on your browser, if the player won’t play then click on the text link here to listen.

Play Our Love Is Here To Stay >>>

In 2007 I was asked to put a programme together of Gershwin for the Arundel Festival. I came up with the idea of taking his songs on a musical journey around the coast of South America, fusing the familiar tunes with exciting Latin colours and rhythms. We had a great time coming up with the arrangements and I did a lot of reading and research about Gershwin.

One of the best books I read was called Fascinating Rhythm (The collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin) by Deena Rosenberg, which really gave you a feel for this extraordinary man. It’s available in the UK now and here’s a link to get hold of it.

How I Fell In Love With “Our Love Is Here To Stay”

On the night of the Gira Con Gershwin concert, I sang this song “Our Love Is Here To Stay” as the encore. I can still remember the way I felt singing it at the end of this most enjoyable collaboration. Joss Peach (piano), Steve Thompson and I had put so much time into preparing the programme. I also felt I had developed a closer connection to the composer who had written so many wonderful songs. I explained this in my announcement and asked the audience to consider all the songs that were never written because of his untimely death.

The song was written by George and the lyrics by Ira for the score of the movie The Goldwyn Follies, which was released in 1938, shortly after George’s death. The song is performed in the film by Kenny Baker. The movie is not generally thought to be any good but Gershwin did win an Oscar for the musical score.

The song was originally titled It’s Here to Stay and then changed to Our Love Is Here to Stay and was finally published as Love Is Here to Stay. For years, Ira Gershwin said that he wanted to change the song’s name back to “Our Love Is Here to Stay, but felt that it wouldn’t be right since the song had already become a standard.

Here’s a clip from the original film with Kenny Baker singing – at the end he sings a top B natural!

It is generally thought that this was the final song that Gershwin wrote before his tragic death. In early 1937 George wrote to his cousin, “Henry, this year I’ve got to get married” and he wrote to his friend Mabel “Perhaps this year will see both of us finding that elusive something that seems to bring happiness to the lucky”. On July 11 of that year, he died from a brain tumour.

S.N Behrmann wrote about him in the New Yorker (in 1972)

“Thinking over the people I have known, it strikes me that George stands almost alone among them for possessing an almost non-existent quality: the quality of joy. Pessimism, melancholia, depression are a dime-a-dozen; joie de vivre is the rarest phenomenon in the world. Thinking back on George’s career now, I see that he lived all his life in youth. He was 38 when he died. He was given no time for the middle years, for the era when you look back, when you reflect, when you regret. His rhythms were the pulsations of youth; he reanimated them in those much older than he was. He reanimates them still.”

On the Album I sing the verse unaccompanied and then David joins me for the chorus with an easy swing feel. This is how I usually perform it live and the words of the verse always strike me as very pertinent to the world today – as relevant as they would have been back then. Somebody once even asked me if I had written the verse as they didn’t know it existed and assumed the words to be contemporary.

The more I read the papers
The less I comprehend
The world and all its capers
And how it all will end
Nothing seems to be lasting
But that isn’t our affair
We’ve got something permanent
At least, in the way we care…..

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

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looks harmless enough?

A strange request you might think, and it certainly made me think. It looked like a small, harmless, white and pink worm. It had been taken from the lump that had just been removed during surgery and put in a clear jar in a saline solution.How could something so small and innocuous do so much damage to the human body?

Press Play To Listen Instead

My friend Lynne came to live with me in my spare room in 1999. I had just left the Swingle Singers after ten years and with no work on the horizon my savings were dwindling fast. I advertised for a lodger and nobody who came seemed suitable to share my home with, until Lynne arrived. She was a bouncy, happy person, full of life. We chatted about her career as a film and tv background artiste (or Extra, as they were called back then) and she seemed ideal. I agreed that she could move in the next weekend and off she went back to London.  Lynne rang me in the week and somehow managed to convince me that it was ok to bring her house rabbit called Rex (who’s hutch would be in her room!), two budgerigars and four canaries that she liked to let fly free and an octagonal fish tower. She even got me to agree to have the fish tank in the sitting room and there we all lived in the Hove Menagerie for a couple of years.

Lynne regularly got up at 5am to travel to London in her little car for a long day’s filming on TV shows like Holby City, The Bill, East Enders and Judge John Deed. She was featured in many big films most notably Star Wars. There is even a playing card with her character on it – Kari Neth, the only female pilot!

In her spare time Lynne had worked for The Hunger Project on a global level and also brought courses to the UK to help children and teenagers to learn skills that helped them to communicate better and be more confident and happy. She eventually moved out from my flat to go on an extended trip to Australia and New Zealand and when she came home, bought a flat nearby and we remained firm friends.

Not long after this, Lynne developed a severe allergic reaction to mercury & amalgam in her fillings and despite this being confirmed in a patch test at Guy’s hospital, her fillings were removed without full protection. She ingested the very thing that she was so allergic to. The bubbly energetic person was reduced to somebody who endured great pain and overwhelming fatigue. Other people would have curled up in a depressed ball and given up, but Lynne had an idea for a project that she could work on from her bed, via the Internet, to keep herself positive. She went on to create something extraordinary.

Despite her life being changed irrevocably by her illness, Lynne had become passionate about the cause for World Peace and shining a light on all the people who do good things in the world. She set up a website called www.PeaceInOurLifetime.org. Her dream was to allow people to declare that they stood for Peace. They could then download their Certificate for Peace with their personal number on it. (They didn’t even need to give an email address!) They could print it out, use it as a screen saver and even put it onto a mug or a tee shirt. A simple gesture, but Lynne’s thinking was that if she could get one billion souls on this planet to say “Yes, I stand for Peace” then there could be a shift of World Consciousness: rather like the concept of the butterfly’s wings altering the course of life.

This movement has grown into a yearly concert that happens all over the world and is broadcast live on Peaceday.TV. Many huge global organisations including Peace One Day, Peace Jam (10 Nobel Laureates working with youth), Pathways to Peace, Humanity’s Team and Imagine Peace have collaborated with her. Lynne was made a Goodwill Ambassador for The Goodwill Treaty for Peace and Fellow of The Peace Research Institute for her efforts in promoting peace and raising awareness of Peace Day. Her Facebook group alone has 25,000 members. All this, from a bedridden body, that is still fighting the poison that laid her so low.

A year ago with the help of regular thermal imaging photography, Lynne was diagnosed with Grade 3 aggressive ductal carcinoma – breast cancer. It was caught very early and most people would have opted for a simple lumpectomy followed by a course of Tamoxifen and radiotherapy.

Starting To Search For An Alternative Treatment For Cancer

Because of Lynne’s already compromised health, she took the brave decision to have her whole breast removed, a belt and braces approach, so she could avoid the follow-up treatment for cancer which might effect her health still further.

An amazing team at the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead led by Mr Zammit and plastic surgeon Mr Boorman, removed her breast and built her a ‘bionic boob’ from her stomach’s fatty tissue and muscle. The results were extraordinary and Lynne was slowly recovering from the enormous operation when somebody turned around quickly in a queue, hitting the breast reconstruction with their elbow. A small lump developed and the hospital thought it was perhaps scar tissue or fat necrosis. It became red and inflamed and eventually with persistent persuasion from Lynne, she had an ultrasound and a small needle biopsy. The results came back that the cancer had returned in the reconstruction – almost unheard of, in fact it had only happened once in the history of the hospital.  Lynne was once again faced with the prospect of more treatment for cancer, a daunting prospect.

After a full body scan it was found that the cancer was not in her organs but there was a lump in her lymph nodes low down on her chest wall near to the new lump. The next step in the UK treatment for cancer would be for Lynne to have a lumpectomy and have the lymph node removed. Once that tissue was analysed, she would probably be given a course of radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Because of her previous and on-going ill health, Lynne felt this aggressive treatment for cancer might simply be too much for her body.

Did You Know There Is ALREADY An Alternative Treatment For Cancer (But Not In The UK!)

Did you know there are cancer cures available already in ISRAEL and in trials in the USA? That in the UK there are already complementary medicines available that can considerably reduce the side effects of the current treatment for cancer ?

After a lot of research, Lynne discovered two ongoing programmes that might not only offer her an alternative treatment for cancer but also address the underlying health problems caused by the allergic reaction. One of these is Dr Burzynski‘s groundbreaking work in America that has reached the final stages of FDA approval. It’s a gene-targeted therapytreatment for cancer that gives a much more refined medicine, specifically targeted for your particular genetic make-up and cancer. It is having extraordinary results.

Watch this video to find out more about this treatment for cancer : http://www.burzynskimovie.com
You can watch the whole movie here: http://vimeo.com/24821365

The other option for treatment for cancer is at The International Center for Cell Therapy & Cancer Immunotherapy. http://www.ctcicenter.com

CTCI provides groundbreaking treatment for patients with cancer or non-malignant diseases. Some of the treatments are provided in Israel, and others are provided in other locations, in accordance with local regulations. This specialised treatment for cancer include a broad range of personalised immune therapies, oncolytic virus therapies, and tailored drug regimens with reduced toxicity.

Their personalised approaches aim to rehabilitate and/or regulate the patient’s immune system, or to introduce donor immune-system cells, to effectively fight disease. It includes regenerative therapies developed by CTCI for treatment for cancer, neurological diseases and other conditions correctable by bone marrow or adipose-tissue-derived stem cells. This would not only help treat Lynne’s cancer but would also help her to regain her health that was compromised ten years ago by the devastating allergic reaction to mercury and amalgam.

Both these clinics would require a lot of money to pay for the treatment for a UK resident. Lynne wasn’t comfortable to ask for that money for herself, so instead she has embarked on a campaign of information, trying to bring these programmes for treatment for cancer to the UK for NHS trials, so that so many more people could be helped.

If many cancers could be cured in the early stages by targeted gene therapy, then surely it would be an enormous saving of NHS funds. The very expensive (and not very effective) current regime for treatment for cancer of multiple operations and huge blasts of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, has very poor results.

For Lynne, typically undaunted by the huge task, raising awareness and funding would be a far more attainable goal, as it would be a universal cause people could identify with. Cancer has touched almost everybody nowadays, at some stage, within their circle of friends and family and anyone who has watched anyone suffer through the existing treatment for cancer would surely be willing to help in the search for alternative methods?

For the clinic in Israel to be able to develop personally tailored treatment for Lynne they needed a piece of the malignant tumour. You’d think that would be an easy request but it soon became clear that it was like asking for the moon. Lynne’s surgeon told her that he wouldn’t mind in theory but the Brighton and Hove Hospital trust was very clear that it could not allow their surgeon to give her a piece of the tumour to send to Israel. It was a piece of Lynne’s own body but she wasn’t allowed to have it under the NHS guidelines.

The surgeon suggested that perhaps she could get it taken by a core biopsy at a private clinic before the operation and Lynne and I spent a very frustrating four hours (me listening on skype, so I could write things down) as she was talking to people all around the country, trying to make this happen. The clock was ticking and it needed to be done before Lynne’s upcoming surgery because once the tumour was taken out and discarded, the chance would be lost. We literally went all round the country in phone calls with everybody saying no, or no it couldn’t be done before the operation, until we were sent back to a Brighton clinic at the end of my road! Lynne explained to the receptionist what we needed to do and we were put through to the secretary of  – yes you’ve guessed it, Lynne’s own surgeon who was too busy operating to do the biopsy privately before her surgery. This was all very confusing and frustrating. Lynne was almost defeated and also very upset by this point.

The only thing we could think of was to try and appeal to the Chairman of the NHS Trust, so Lynne looked up his name on their website and called. She brazenly asked to speak to his personal assistant. She tried to tell her story but because it was very long and convoluted I could sense that the lady on the other end of the phone wasn’t really understanding. I interrupted and said to Lynne “Just tell her that it’s simple – we need the trust to give the surgeon permission to give you a piece of your own tumour in a test tube with saline solution for you to keep frozen for possible further treatment options.” The PA said ok, now she understood – she would try. That afternoon Lynne got a call telling her that permission had been granted but somebody would have to take the sample from the hospital and be responsible for freezing it.

She then set about trying to find a courier company to transport the frozen sample to the clinic in Israel. Again, it seemed an impossible task. These restrictions are set up for legitimate reasons I imagine. To regulate what happens to human tissue and the enormous ethical questions surrounding it. After many emails back and forth and many out and out ‘No, absolutely not possible’ replies, I’m sure many people would have given up.

One email said “Unfortunately we can’t assist in this matter and can offer no solution. It is a World Wide Security directive issued that states we or any other courier company cant accept shipments from private individuals”. This did not deter Lynne, who wrote back asking if one of her doctors or clinics treating her could set up an account, then would it be possible? A few emails later and things started to move. Eventually, on the day of the surgery, we received an email saying that it would be possible. It was too late to ship it straight from the hospital, so somebody would still have to pick it up and freeze it for safe keeping until it could be transported.

On the day of the operation we set it up so that I was to receive a text from another of Lynne’s friends who had taken her to the hospital. The text would tell me when she had actually gone down to the operating theatre. I would drive to Haywards Heath Hospital and sit outside the theatre and wait for the sample. Ideally, I had to get it to a freezer within an hour. I felt an enormous responsibility to get this right. I have a nickname that is ‘Mrs. Clumsy’. What if I dropped it – or there was a traffic jam – or the car crashed?

Lynne had bought a new freezer, just for this purpose, a couple of days before and I was at her home on the morning of her operation to receive the delivery. She hadn’t realised that you had to let the new fridge settle for 8 hours before you could turn it on. so it would have to come to my freezer first. All this went to plan and the nurse came out in the corridor, calling my name and holding the clear pot. Fortunately it was actually made of plastic, so that ruled out any clumsy trips on my part, shouting out “Nooooooooo” in slow motion. She wished us luck and I popped it in my handbag and went to pay for my parking. I drove straight home, took this picture and put it in another plastic box in my freezer. I pressed the fast-freeze button and heaved a sigh of relief!

The operation to remove the new lump and a couple of lymph nodes went well and today Lynne is coming home. I will take the frozen sample to put in her new freezer in a plastic bag in a thermos flask, surrounded by frozen peas to ensure it doesn’t defrost on the way. Then, when it is safely delivered, I can breathe a sigh of relief that my part is completed.

Of course, this latest operation is only the start of Lynne’s journey. She has to raise a lot of money to continue her chosen course of treatment. I have no doubt she will do amazing things, connecting people and transforming no into yes along the way.

SO…..yes, Lynne needs money for her own treatment for cancer and Yes to Life has kindly offered to help with publicising her campaign and has set up a JustGiving page. On a much wider level she needs help to bring the trials to the UK to possibly save millions of lives here.

Lynne has set up a Cancer Community (rather like a small Facebook) on ning.com where you can join in the debate and share any knowledge you have about alternative treatment for cancer .

cancercurechoices.ning.com

You can interact, post articles and even make a profile page for your own particular interest – because the amazing thing about human beings is that in the face of great adversity we can come out fighting – for our friends and loved ones, but most of all, for our life.

Please CLICK HERE TO HELP LYNNE if you would like to donate however small or large an amount you can afford.

 
Lynne has a JustGiving page set up to collect money through the charity Yes to Life. All donations made through this page will be used to help fund her treatment for cancer in the kindest and hopefully most effective way for Lynne.

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

You might remember in my first article on this subject that it was very unclear which order you had to do things. Manufacture or Licence.

MCPS clearly stated on their website: If you’re not a record company you need to apply for an MP2 License and the process is as follows:

1. Customer fills in application form.
2. They send an invoice (within 10 days of receipt of application)
3. Customer pays invoice (within 28 days)
4. Manufacture of product can begin

When I tried to do this I was stopped at the first hurdle by questions on the form that I just couldn’t answer.

When I got home from tour, I telephoned a manufacturing company. I explained that I was trying to find out the best way to do things correctly and could they advise me? I told them that my understanding was that I would have to purchase the MCPS/PRS licence before a company would manufacture the CDs but I was finding it hard to fill in the MP2 form. The man was very helpful and told me that because of that very situation, they could manufacture CDs without all the licences in place but I would have to sign an IPR form.

IPR stands for Intellectual Property Rights and would basically mean that I would sign a form stating that I owned the recording and had obtained the necessary licences. A bit like an accountant making you sign a disclaimer, saying that although they had prepared the accounts, you were wholly responsible for the information and figures provided.

I found an IPR form online.

This form states “Licenced content requires proof of licencing for replication”. So, even if the form was signed in order to shift any licensing  misdemeanours to the customer, if the customer didn’t have the rights to make the CD, including having paid for the PRS/MCPS licence to be granted, then it all seemed a bit dubious.

I called the MCPS Licensing department to get further advice. I told them I was trying to fill in the MP2 form but didn’t have some of the information required. Was it possible to leave those bits blank, as long as I knew the manufacturer details – They told me that yes, it was possible.

So I went to the form and tried to leave the barcode box blank and it DID let you go to the next page.

By the way: to get to the actual form you need to follow these steps:

1. Visit PRS Website

Click on the drop down menu in the We’re Here For Music Users section and select physical product.

Click go and then select the CD & Vinyl link on the next page

Click on Retail Audio Products: AP1 and AP2 Licences

Click Apply Now on the AP2 Licence and accept the terms and conditions…..you’re into the actual form – remember to save as you go along because if you are inactive for 40 minutes (zzzzzzzzz) it loses the information you’ve entered.

You can read the guidance notes for completing the form (which are nice and clear – well done MCPS!)

Ok – so I’m in the form and I immediately notice a column for ISRC numbers – what the hell are those? I looked back at my emails and remembered that Andy had suggested that, as I was a PPLUK member, I could set myself up a record company on my member profile. Once I had that information then the manufacturers could generate a catalogue number for the CD and I can put that on the MCPS/PRS form.

I had done just that and realised that I already had the genesis of the ISRC number. I just didn’t know how to get the damn things for each track…..did they have to be different or was there one code for the whole album?

I called PPLUK and the always helpful staff came to my rescue. They explained that I needed a number for each individual track.

The ISRC number which PPL had created for me was : GB – 4B4 – 11 – 00001

The first part of the code is the country – straightforward.
The second part is my personal code – 4B4 = Heather Cairncross
The third part is the year of production – 2011
The last part is a bit more detailed. Each of my tracks would have a rising number:
track one would be  GB – 4B4 – 11 – 00001
track 14 would be GB – 4B4 – 11 – 00014.

If I was to release another album in the last week of December (heaven forbid) the numbers would carry on – so track one on the album At Last: The Revenge Of the Altos would be
GB – 4B4 – 11 – 00015. If that album was delayed (I can’t imagine how that would happen…!) and came out in January then track one would be GB – 4B4 – 12 – 00001

Hallelujah! – So I can now finally fill in the MCPS form – oh no – wait…. 40 minutes has elapsed while I’ve been researching all this and my form has re-set itself

ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!

Unfortunately there seems no way to save your form and then come back to where you got to in the process. (Not so well done PRS!)

Clearly this blog topic needs a part three.

to be continued…..

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

An old friend Graham Black, who is now the Art Director for the Economist magazine’ More Intelligent Life amazingly agreed to help design the artwork. He managed to squeeze all my content into an eight page booklet. Once we decided what the cover was, I had to choose what I would put in it. Some artists print the song lyrics. As all the songs are well known and easily available on the web, I decided not to do this. I had emailed David Newton asking him for a paragraph – I actually meant for him to write a CV about himself. Instead he wrote very kindly about the actual working process. This made me decide to tell a little of the story of how this CD came about and more importantly for me, I tried to explain my concept and aims: explaining why we had recorded the songs in one take.

Now he’s finished the layout it’s up to me to spot final typos and mistakes. I keep leaving it and coming back for another look and every time I do, I spot something new. It’s amazing – the brain’s capability for filling in missing words and correcting things – you just don’t see them!

Before I sent the final draft to Graham, I asked a few friends to work as proof readers (thanks especially to the Thomas family!) I re-wrote it many times trying to cut down my verbose writing style as much as I could. Then I had to do a short version of my CV – after over 20 years in the business that was very difficult. David managed his brilliantly – but then it was announced that he has been awarded Best Pianist at the British Jazz Awards for the TENTH time, so we had to amend the ‘final’ version at the last minute!

Then it was the track list with timings and details of the composers and lyicists and finally the ‘thank you’ list. I certainly enjoyed that bit but it’s secret for now!

So here are our cd comments:

David:

When it came to choosing my favourite eighteen from the fifty-four tracks that we recorded over two days, I had to do rather a lot of listening and the more I listened, the more I realised what an incredible singer Heather is. It was one marvelous take after another. To be frank, if it wasn’t for me dropping clangers here and there, this could have been a boxed set.

The songs on the album were all written by people who knew exactly what they were doing and so effectively, that most of the hard work was already done. All we had to do was a bit of interpretation and personalisation to bring it all to life.

Heather also, I discover, has a very rare quality when it comes to phrasing. She has a Sinatra-like ability to hold a note for ages and then finish the line without having to take an extra breath. For me that’s sheer technical artistry and that kind of attention to detail is just one more reason for you to enjoy her marvelous singing.

One of the many wonderful attributes of the Great American Songbook is the flexibility most of the songs have. One can completely re-harmonise and bury the melody so that the listener has to dig deep to find it, or as in our case, celebrate the composers’ art but add a few surprises so that you don’t quite know what’s coming next.

Heather:

“During a recent gig at Steyning Jazz Club, I had to announce that we had three different CDs for sale during the interval. They featured, in turn, the pianist, the bass player and the drummer. Despite many years as a professional singer, I had never made a solo album.  A good friend and loyal supporter, Tom Chapman, was in the audience that night and a week later he announced that if it was just a matter of money that was stopping me, then he would like to pay for me to make that album.

Once I’d got over the shock of such a generous offer, I realised that after years of dreaming about exactly what I would record, I had to make a choice and get to work. The year before I’d had an idea for a lavish production, which would involve many of my talented colleagues. Now, with the actual means to go ahead, I realised that I wanted to do something much simpler: to record a collection of my favourite love songs. The nagging question at the back of my mind was – how could I do better than all the many wonderful versions by the great artists?

The answer was that I probably couldn’t. I could only try to sing them as honestly as possible, drawing from all the years of vocal and life experience that I had: to sing them as me.

This personal approach was really important as I spend my professional singing life creating and recreating very specific styles and sounds to order. I have made a career as a sort of vocal chameleon, a voice for hire. I work in an industry where advances in technology mean that music is recorded and spliced together to deliver performances that seem absolutely perfect. It’s very hard to find a singer who can reproduce, in a live situation, the sound that the producers can manufacture in the studio.

I decided I would try to record the songs in one take: one complete performance, recorded in the same room as the pianist, so that the musical connection between us was complete. Scarily, this would leave no room for correction afterwards. We would both have to deliver something special at the same time.

This, of course, is the way the great singers we all know and love would have recorded when the songs were originally written. There are a few albums I cherish which I wanted to emulate: The Intimate Ella with Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Smith, Duet with Doris Day and André Previn and Together & Together Again with Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.

I once had the privilege of singing on a Christmas album with Tony Bennett. Unusually, the orchestra and small group of backing singers were all together in Abbey Road, Studio 1, with Mr. Bennett placed in the middle – no screens or separation. Any mistakes he might make would be very expensive. We rehearsed each song a couple of times and then the producer announced, “We’re ready for you Mr. Bennett”. He stood up and delivered a perfect performance. The conductor corrected a few things and we went for another pass. This take was completely different from Tony and equally as perfect. It was a glorious lesson from an artist in total command of his instrument, style and interpretation – a lesson that has stayed with me.

My choice to record in this way meant that I needed a pianist who would be open to that challenge. David Newton was the obvious choice. We had worked together on a concert of his Jazz Song Cycle Portrait Of A Woman and on other gigs, but we had never recorded together.

I rang Dave and explained my idea and he seemed really interested in what I wanted to do. He suggested we recorded at the pianist Ronnie Smith’s house, where he had recently made a trio recording engineered by the excellent bass player, Andrew Cleyndert, who had produced a piano sound that Dave really liked. Against the odds, we managed to find two days together when we were all free. With fewer than two weeks to prepare, I was thrown into a flurry of activity, choosing songs and preparing charts for Dave to use as a starting point.

I wanted to include songs that I had sung for years, which held special memories and meaning for me. David asked me if I knew the song “Where do you start?” He knew Shirley Horn’s version. I was surprised and thrilled. About ten years ago, I had been wandering through a record store in Paris when I heard a song playing which made me stand still and listen. I used my limited French to ask who the artist was. The assistant told me that it was Kenny Rankin who is an American singer-songwriter. I bought the album on the strength of that song and taught myself to play it on the guitar. I had no idea that the song had become a jazz standard.

The unaccompanied start to I’m Old Fashioned is a tribute to the version by Swedish Soprano Margareta Bengtson, who has an album of the same name. I met her many years ago whilst she was a member of the Swedish a cappella quintet, The Real Group, and I was a member of the Swingle Singers. Margareta’s soprano voice has an extraordinary quality which sounds both innocent and sensual. The three key changes we used in The nearness of you are the same as those on the James Taylor/Michael Brecker album.  For me, the moment when James sings ‘Oh yeah’ in your ear, you sigh and know that everything will be alright; I couldn’t imagine it any other way. Everything else was my response in the moment to the beautiful canvas created by David’s playing.

As Ella Fitzgerald famously said, “I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns”. Our performance is hopefully an amalgamation of everything we have ever heard and loved.

I hoped that we would manage to record twelve songs during the two days – an ambitious goal but we could always schedule other days later if we didn’t manage it. On day one I only listened back to a couple of phrases to check for balance. I was determined not to micromanage my singing as I didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of the performance. By the evening, we had managed to record seven songs. The next day we were flying. We recorded another eleven and even went back to the first song to do an alternative version in a different key. I was enjoying myself so much that I could have carried on for hours and my voice wasn’t tired at all.

A few days later Andrew sent me three CDs with fifty-four versions of the eighteen songs to choose from. As I listened, I wrote down the track number and made notes. Surprisingly, making the choice was a simple task. I was listening carefully to the overall vocal and piano performance but also trying to find the most honest interpretation. A few days later Dave called me to compare our choices. Amazingly, he had chosen exactly the same versions. The hardest task was to decide which songs not to include!

So here it is, at last. I hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it.”
As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

Remember that I love to read your comments so feel free to comment in the box below this post.

I visited the MCPS/PRS website and managed to find the relevant pages (which were not immediately obvious), so I thought I’d write about the process to help other musicians. I, like many of you, don’t have a record company to take care of the details.

If you write your own material then you need to register that you own the songs and then you can exempt yourself from having to pay a license fee. Their website explains

“MCPS songwriter, composer and publisher members have the right to set up an exclusion of their own record company from royalty collection arrangements.”

If you record songs that you haven’t written and are still in copyright, like I have, then you have to pay a percentage of the price which you intend to sell the CDs. This is payable at the point of manufacture.

The good news is that on the first run they allow you to make 250 in a run of 1000 units as ‘promotional’ items which excludes those units from the license fee. This is great news because the reality is that you need to send out as many copies as possible to reviewers and venues to try and promote yourself. The website explains:

“You are entitled to a promotional quantity in order to promote the record. The allowance for promotional copies is 25% of the first manufacture. You will be allowed to manufacture this quantity royalty free. The allowance will be available where 500 or more copies of the product are being manufactured. The maximum is 400 units per format for a single and 250 per format for albums. If you wish to benefit from this option, you should tick the appropriate box on your application for Licence (AFL). If this option is chosen, the record’s packaging must be prominently marked ‘PROMOTIONAL COPY – NOT FOR SALE’. Promotional copies which go over your allowance must be licensed under the AP4 licensing scheme.”

I had been told that you had to obtain the license before a company would manufacture your CDs but when I started to fill in the form, I didn’t get very far as I needed to know these things:

1. The catalogue number
2. The bar code
3. The manufacturer’s name and address
4. Exact track length
5. The song publishers for each title

So, it seemed you needed to choose a manufacturer first and answer those points.

Fortunately for me, Andrew Cleyndert (who has his own record company Trio records) was at the end of a phone call to advise me. I realise that we don’t all have that help, so when I get home from tour, I will call up a CD manufacturers to see if it is possible for a civilian to get that information before applying for an MCPS/PRS license.

If you’re not a record company you need to apply for an MP2 License.

The website states in it’s FAQs that the process is as follows:

1. Customer fills in application form.

2. They send an invoice (within 10 days of receipt of application)

3. Customer pays invoice (within 28 days)

4. Manufacture of product can begin

So the website seems clear that the License must be obtained before manufacture but I found that you couldn’t fill in the form without information only obtainable from a manufacturer. Confusing!

MCPS say “You will need to issue your releases with a catalogue number for identification purposes. This can be whatever you want it to be, however we do advise you to try to make it unique to you e.g. MNPCD1 as opposed to CD1 as it will be easier to find.”

I am a member of PPLUK, which is an organization that collects revenue from radio play and distributes the money back to the musicians who have registered as playing on particular recordings. Andy advised me that I could set myself up a record company on my member profile. Once I had that information then the manufacturers can generate a catalogue number for the CD and I can put that on the MCPS/PRS form.

This is all a bit more tricky than I first thought!

I’m on tour with the Monteverdi Choir at the moment, writing this on the bus from Groningen to Schiphol airport in Holland where we fly to the Pisa Music festival in Italy.

It seems I need to make a few phone calls to get to the next step. I’ll keep you posted with my progress……..

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When you’ve finished making an album you have to ‘Use The Force’ to get the CD noticed.
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My sister (and marketing wiz) Nicola Cairncross and I have been racking our brains to come up with contacts – no matter how distant or tenuous, to try and spread the word. I started by approaching a good friend to send a copy to a well-known pianist/composer to ask for a quote for the cover. Hopefully, with her personal cover note, we may be lucky.

My inclination was to wait until the CD was actually manufactured, so that it looked more professional, but Nicola was keen to get it out there and believes that people in the industry like to be in at the ‘ground level’. She thinks you have to try to make them believe that you’re sharing a wonderful secret, that they are lucky to be party to. Like most musicians that I know, I’m a bit rubbish at self-promotion and always feel awkward about approaching my colleagues. Nicola, on the other hand is totally fearless and will think nothing of going straight to the top. She messaged me on tour to say “it appears that Stephen Fry is following me, so I can message him: so I private messaged him with a link to the sneak preview of At Last. Hahahahaha there’s no stopping me now!”

I wonder if Stephen will spot it amongst the huge pile of requests he receives?

She was referring to a YouTube video she made, which has a copy of the album cover design as an image, with the title track playing. The video is not available for searching yet, so it’s a neat trick to get people interested. My delicate ears hate the fact that the YouTube platform spoils the beautiful quality of the audio which Andrew Cleyndert has created. Nicola thinks it’s an easy, quick link that busy people can click on, to see if they want to listen further. On the information about the track there is a short CV and history of the project with links to my website, and details where they can get hold of the whole album.

While Nicola has been beavering away on Facebook and Twitter getting contacts, I’ve been running off CDs and printing out the latest proof of the CD cover and booklet. I’ve been really careful to put a clear contact address, website and phone number on the actual CD (they can easily get separated from the letter and artwork). I’ve then been drafting a short letter of introduction – outlining who was the initial person who ‘introduced’ us. Gradually, as I’ve started to get interest and feedback from various people I add that into the introduction letter as an incentive that the CD is worth a listen.

Happily there has already been some really positive feedback that has spurred me on. Here are a couple of quotes:

“WOW!!!!!! It’s absolutely stunningly beautiful! I’ve just listened to the album and have been mesmerised from start to finish. Wonderful. All my favourite tunes too! Ruddy love it!”

“Heather’s voice is sublime and David Newton’s credentials are impeccable so yes, I’m impressed.”

Nicola had contacted one person and received an email asking me to send some CDs. He called me when I was still asleep in my hotel bed in Pisa. The previous night we’d done a concert in Pisa Cathedral of Stravinsky and Bruckner with the Monteverdi Choir and I’d stayed up rather late chatting to my colleagues. He left a message telling me that he’d left a longer message on my home phone but had been cut off in the middle of giving me his home number. I rang home excitedly and retrieved that message where he said that he loved the album. He had already passed on the other two copies I had enclosed to a well-known Jazz Radio DJ, who had played it to his boss and would hopefully pass it on to their record label. He asked me if I could call him and when I’d picked myself up from the floor, I did. He turned out to be a DJ himself, as well as having a company that produced radio programs. Watch this space!

All this meant that when I sent a copy to another Jazz label (via a producer I had recorded some baroque music with – use the force!),  I could tell him honestly that other labels were already showing interest. All this, in the hope that my CD wouldn’t be tossed into an enormous pile of hopefuls.

I remember when I was travelling around the States with the Swingle Singers. We were given a tour by a friend and a cappella fan, of the big christian record company who had signed Amy Grant. I never forgot the moment when he opened a door to a small room filled to the ceiling with padded envelopes. “This is the hopeful cupboard,” he told us. I asked how he could possibly get the time or even choose what to listen to. He launched himself onto the pile with his arms outstretched. When he had extricated himself he was holding two envelopes. “These are today’s lucky hopefuls!” he quipped.

As a musician the random nature of the choice made me shudder. I knew what enormous personal cost, effort and most of all hope was contained within each of those envelopes.

Linn Records warn would-be artists on their website:

“We are inundated with requests to look at websites and listen to demos. If you want to be heard seriously please put a media pack together which should contain:

• Sound files together with a description of what they are – e.g. demo recorded at home studio or pre-mastered files ready for licensing. Each disc must be clearly labelled.
• Gig-list including a list of past and future gigs.
• Press coverage including reviews and airplay received to date.
• Online links including links to photos, videos and music.
• Your contact information including your telephone number, email address and postal address.

They also warn: Due to the volume of music we receive and listen to every day, we cannot return any material supplied.”

Eeeek – I wonder if they use the launch technique to choose what to listen to?

My task (ably aided by my marketing-terrier sister) is to get my CD to the people who will actually listen to it. Nicola is hard at work on Twitter and Facebook making contact with anybody she thinks might help. She has a much wider net than me – typing in generic terms like Jazz into the search box and following people’s tweets. She’s busy commenting and re-tweeting and trying to form a connection with them before asking if they’d like to hear a sneak preview. I’m slowly getting to grips with all that too. (My Twitter name is @altovoice) I found an old colleague (and wonderful fretless bass player) who now, it seems, just happens to be the reviewer and jazz editor of a well known London publication. I sent him a message asking if he’d be willing to review it and he gave me his home address to send it to. If you don’t ask……

The DJ suggested I might send a gift with the CD when contacting radio stations to attract attention! Bribery – surely not! I do remember though that chap who won The Apprentice did just that! He told the receptionist that he had to deliver a gift basket personally when he was trying to show his curved nail file invention to the Walmart Buyer.

Maybe it’s time to get baking – perhaps a Bree Van De Kampf style muffin basket?

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

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Heather and Dave during recording

There are lots of decisions to make along the way and of course everybody has an opinion. From the terrifying moment when you start to play the recordings to your trusted friends and colleagues, through to choosing a picture for the CD cover.

Of course, I did seek out opinions – there is so much I need help with.

When Tom Chapman first offered to fund the album, I thought long and hard about the sort of recording I wanted to do. I’ve made so many musical friends along the way it was tempting to do an enormous collaboration, to experiment with some earth-shakingly different concept and indeed last year I was cooking up a very ambitious project involving lots of musicians.

When it came down to it, I just wanted to get it done and keep it very simple.

I wanted to draw on my years of vocal and life experience, trust in my technique and try and be true to the songs. I decided I wanted to sing in the same room as the pianist – no separation and no ‘dropping in’ and repairing sections that weren’t perfect. I wanted to record in the same way that the singers of the time would have done when the songs were originally written.

Scary stuff!

For my recording work, I am asked to sing in so many styles and make so many different sounds that it’s hard to remember what my voice is. On one memorable occasion, I was asked to audition for the singing voice of Miranda Richardson’s Witch in Danny Elfman’s score of Sleepy Hollow. In the email, they told us we had to sound child-like yet womanly; scary and yet innocent; unearthly yet earthly.

All this, in about twenty bars of music. Here’s the extract from the soundtrack:

On the day I did my best and the next day, after some choir sessions, the producer asked me to stay behind on my own to do a bit more. They had run out of time when recording one of the choirboys. The tune looked familiar to me, so I asked if they wanted me to sound like a boy.

“No” said the voice in my headphones.

“We’d like you to sound a bit more deceased for this one”.

As this is my first solo album, which has been so long coming, I decided that it was important to sound like ME. Just sing, try and be as honest as I could with the lyrics – and get back to the core of the songs.  Not have a producer to shape the performance.

You can read more about the actual recording sessions in my previous article

The fine jazz bass-player, Andy Cleyndert (who engineered the recording) sent three CDs to me by post. My sister Nicola Cairncross has been championing the whole idea and helping me with my website for some time, so when they arrived through the letterbox it just seemed right to listen together. We put the first one on and as soon as the first song finished, we both promptly burst into tears.  We were so excited and relieved that the moment had finally come. Andy had really captured my voice in a way that I had always hoped I sounded. There were some fifty takes of eighteen songs. A couple started well and ended most amusingly with some colourful, Scottish swearing when Dave Newton played something he wasn’t quite happy with. (I’m tempted to compile an X-rated out-take version of that!) I was thrilled that nearly all of the takes could have been used, and most surprising to me was that every take was completely different from the previous version.

As we listened I wrote down the track number and made notes. Strangely it seemed a simple task – the recordings that made me get a tingle (technical term) were the ones I put a tick by. I was carefully listening for overall vocal and piano performance but also the take that seemed the most honest. When I had chosen the ones I wanted, I had to try and fashion them into some sort of order.

I made a list and noted down the keys.  If songs are in the same key then it’s better not to put them next to each other. A musician friend explained to me that “the steel worker from Dagenham will know there’s something wrong – he won’t know what it is – he’ll just feel it in his bones.”

Next, I noted down the feel of each song – tricky this one, because the repertoire is shamelessly made up from love songs sung in a very intimate way. There are no out and out fast numbers. I then re-arranged the order until there seemed some thread and shape.

I had ended up with eighty-two and a half minutes of music. I rang Andy to ask what I should be aiming for. He said that he thought sixty minutes was the optimum length. I would have to cut five songs – but which ones?

One song, which I really liked, had to go because the lyrics didn’t seem to fit with the mood of the rest of the songs. I also found a few bits I wasn’t absolutely happy with vocally – the downside to the way we recorded the music was that there was little, if any, chance to repair anything we didn’t like. It was just Dave and I trying to capture a performance in one take – both of us had to be happy with what we had done.

I made up a playlist on my ipod and listened on the way up to London for a rehearsal. Particularly trying to feel the moments between the songs. Was there anything that jarred? There were a couple of things that needed re-arranging. When I got home I did the same thing and listened in the car.  A couple of tweaks more and I thought I had a good order.

It was time to ask friends for their suggestions and favourites. One song, probably the most up-tempo from the session, started out with just my voice. Dave played a bass line on the piano. This gradually built up during the song and the voice and piano part grew until the end – there were a lot of lyrics and there was no pause for a piano solo. I was keen to keep it on the list because of the tempo, but one friend was adamant it should go. I tried moving the order round but was struggling to make things work. In the end, I decided it had to stay. I then sent a few mp3s to a wonderful musician friend in Wales. He sent me an email saying that the very song that my other friend disliked so much was his absolute favourite.  I emailed all the songs to my brother in Sydney, Australia and he sent me comments back about his favourites – all different from everybody else’s. I started to realize that I had to make the choices – I couldn’t please everybody with every song and I had to start trusting my own judgement. One even told me that what I was missing was a producer – somebody to take what we’d done and add to it with other instruments……

I explained the concept and realised that I would have to be very careful in my liner notes. So that people knew what we were aiming for and understood that we weren’t just economizing!

I then played the music to a few ‘civilians’. People who liked music but weren’t musicians. I discovered that they felt compelled to make a comment.  Some searched for clever things to say – and some comments were a bit disconcerting. After the first song one friend said – the piano solo is too long. It was a song where the form was absolutely jazz standard format. A,A, B (the middle eight bars) and finishing with A. The piano solo was two times though A and I came back in on the middle eight. My heart sank, as this was how we’d treated a few songs. For me this was definitely a collaboration between piano and voice and I felt the balance between the two was good.  If my friend didn’t like that then he was going to be disappointed with most of the album. After chatting, I think I understood that he thought saying that was a compliment – that it was my album and my voice should be the featured thing.

I guess I was being a bit defensive and cared a bit too much about my friend’s opinions and I was genuinely trying to take on board criticism and learn from it. In the end all of the helpful things people said were too late now – the recording was done. I had to trust that we’d done the best we could.

I sent Andy the list of my choices after a few days along with some notes about slight noises that needed cleaning up. I also wrote down a few things in the balance between voice and piano, which I thought needed changing.  I was at the RFH a couple of days later and got a text from Dave Newton asking if I’d received the CDs and should we compare notes about our choices.

Arrrrggghhhh!

I had forgotten to ask my pianist! Andy had told me I needed to choose, as there were so many versions and I had taken the responsibility seriously. He’d told me to let him know the choices before he would do any more work on the balance and overall sound of the tracks.

I arranged to call Dave the next day and when I got home I sat down with some trepidation with the list of my choices and rang his number. I asked him to tell me which were his choices in the order they came on the CD. Amazingly we had chosen exactly the same tracks – for all 18 songs. I was so relieved and also thrilled that we were in one accord. He was as pleased as I was with the result of the recording. He did, however really like a couple of songs, which I had taken off the list and felt strongly that they should be included.  So, it was back to the drawing board for me on the order of songs.

I then had the difficult choice of which photo to use for the album cover. The designer and I had decided that my website pictures were a bit too bold in colour and attitude for the mood of the songs. I called my friend Wayne McConnell and we set up another photo session. It was blowing a gale that day so we ended up at a friend’s house snapping away in her upstairs guest bedroom. I shared the resulting pictures with various friends. It became clear that everybody had a different favourite of course. I would have to be brave and trust my own judgment once again. Here’s one my brother liked as I look a bit cheeky, but we decided that it wasn’t right for the cover.

I have finally come to the conclusion that when you create such a personal project, you really don’t want to make any mistakes. In the end, what you’re trying to sell is a big reflection of yourself. Not everybody will like it. You have to try and let go of seeking approval from everybody and hope that, if you’re honest and happy with your own choices, then enough people will agree with you to buy the product. Hopefully they will enjoy the end result of those difficult choices.

We’ll see…….

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

This year I’m doing a lot of concerts to celebrate Stave Reich’s 75th birthday. You may have seen the pictures of Jonny Greenwood which I took in Krakow at the Sacrum Profanum Festival. He was playing the iconic guitar piece Electric Counterpoint which Steve originally wrote for Pat Metheney. It reminded me of this picture which was taken in Steve’s 70th birthday year. We were lucky enough to be asked to do a concert at Carnegie Hall to celebrate this.  It started with the Kronos Quartet playing Different Trains followed by Pat Metheney playing Electric Counterpoint from memory. We then played Music for 18 Musicians in the second half with Steve Reich and Musicians. Pat was really friendly and very kindly posed for this picture backstage after the concert.

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I set off with the precious Neumann U87 microphone to drive round the M25. I was heading to the famous Ronnie Smith’s house in the outskirts of North West London to do a couple of days recording with David Newton.

As we had decided to record so quickly after I first called Dave, in the week running up, I had been emailing back and forth with our suggestions and requests for song choices. I’d been desperately working away on the score-writing program Sibelius to finish the chord charts. They would be a starting point for Dave to weave his harmonic magic. He had been his usual, elusive self and was impossible to pin down on the keys he preferred to play the songs in. I had transposed a few songs into three or four different keys so we could try and get a variety. I hoped I had everything covered.

I stopped off at the M&S services and bought lots of sandwiches, shortbread biscuits, hot cross buns, juice and some aptly named jazz apples (well it made me smile when I saw them). I know that musicians work better on full stomachs.

We had agreed to aim to start work at midday. ( That’s Jazz Musicians for you!) Dave was also coming from Bath in Somerset. One thing I couldn’t control was the traffic and even though I’d left plenty of time, there was an accident near to the M3 and my car crawled along at walking pace for over an hour. I texted Dave, to tell him that I would be a bit late and asked them to set up without me. I arrived at half past twelve and Andy Cleyndert was nearly ready to start. I went through and met the owner of the house, Ronnie Smith who is friends with both Dave and Andy, and is also a fine pianist himself. He has a reputation for always having a good piano at his house and this was the reason we were there.

Although I wanted to record in the same room as the piano, I was a bit concerned that my microphone was set up very close to the actual keyboard. Dave is not known for his silent playing and has a very low voice, which he finds hard not to use when he gets really involved in the music. I was rather worried his dulcet tones would spill onto my vocal microphone.

There was however, a large horseshoe-shaped, metal contraption surrounding a vocal microphone which had acoustic panels on the inside.  Andy took the Neumann microphone from me and set it up pointing upwards at one of his which he already had set up. He explained that he would record my voice on both microphones and then we would have a choice of sound. (I think it was secretly a scientific test to see if I could tell the difference). I got out my charts and we decided to start with the aptly titled “Where Do You Start?”. We chose a low key and Dave started working away on the arrangement to make the song his own. I sang along for a while and then decided to pop into the kitchen to get a pencil and a bottle of water.

Andy changes some leads

When I returned, the lads were laughing and I asked them why. Apparently when I had left the room, Andy had commented from inside the piano, where he was adjusting microphones,

“How refreshing…..” then a long pause, followed by “a singer who can sing for a change.” This amused them both highly and, I must confess, put me at my ease.

I’d been a bit nervous that he would think “oh no, a classical singer who thinks she can do jazz”.

Andy was set up in the corridor with the computer and the recording controls and he pulled the door to and we set to work. When we’d finished our first whole take, Dave broke the mood as he announced in his Scottish drawl “No major **** ups there then.”

The sandwiches and hot cross buns went down a treat between recordings and by the time Andy had to leave for a gig, we had finished four songs. He assured me that it was very simple for me to work the controls, so that Dave and I could carry on working. The computer program he was using had an interface very much like any tape recorder. I just had to press record and then stop and most importantly remember to save what we had done. He would get rid of the takes we didn’t want after the session. We were on a roll now, so we carried on until 8pm and managed to record three more songs. I had come to the sessions with 18 charts and was hoping to get at least 12 songs done, so I was very pleased with how things had gone. I purposely didn’t listen back to much during the day as I can be very critical and start to alter things technically to correct ‘mistakes’. This can make the singing sound more perfect but knock all the stuffing out of the performance.

I turned off the amplifier and closed the computer. It was a Macintosh like mine, so I felt fine to just close the lid as Andy had instructed me to. I took Dave and Ronnie out for a curry and we had a really fun evening. Ronnie told us some wonderful stories about his colourful life as a pianist. He had also played the piano for films and had a wonderful story about playing underwater at a safari park with a killer whale and some dolphins on the TV programme That’s Life!  He told us that the dolphins had been let in and they’d become a bit excitable.  The killer whale got jealous and bumped Ronnie in the back with his nose. He told us “It wasn’t his fault but it really hurt – I kept on playing though as I didn’t want to spoil the film”. What a pro! I’d noticed a striking statue of a dragon in the garden and Ronnie explained to me that he’d got it from the set of a film he’d played the piano in. The film was set in a Chinese palace and Ronnie had managed to sweet talk a stage hand to let him take it, even though at the time all props and sets were supposed to be burned. This was apparently because of a rule made by the Stage Carpenter’s trade union.

We got back to the house and I left the men having a nightcap and went up to bed – I was exhausted, but happily my voice felt fine.

Dave in the listening corridor

The next morning I was the first one awake and had a hot cross bun breakfast and sat down nervously to listen to what we had recorded the previous day. I played from the beginning and was somewhat shocked to hear what sounded like a man singing. My mind was a whirr – I knew I had a low voice but nobody had ever told me I sounded quite so much like a man. I carried on listening and then Dave spoke – his bass voice also sounded much lower. After a couple of takes, it started to sound more like me. Maybe I’d imagined it? Dave came back from the bank and after a cup of coffee we started recording again. An hour later, Andy arrived from the physiotherapist (he was suffering with a bad back) and I started to tell him about what I’d heard. He knew immediately what the problem was – it was something to do with the computer’s time clock running at a different rate, which he’d spotted quite soon into the recording. It meant the playback for the first few takes was playing slow and the pitch had dropped. He thought he could sort it out afterwards and not to worry. I was relieved, to say the least.

Dave makes a few changes

That day we did 11 more songs and at the end Andy suggested we re-record the first song, just in case he couldn’t fix the problem with the clock. My voice was so warmed up by now that the key we had first recorded it in, now seemed much too low. We decided to try it in F major and Andy was amazed how it completely changed the colour of the song. He asked me to sing it in the original key of D major and then in F major – “Why?” I asked. “No reason” he answered. ” I just couldn’t believe how the key could make the same song seem so different in character.  It was also to do with where it lay in my voice – the higher key made it sound lighter and less world weary. We did two takes and agreed that we’d got it in the bag and started to pack everything up.

I was amazed that we had, in effect recorded 19 songs in two days. Vocally, I could have honestly carried on for another few hours. Dave hugged me and told me how much he’d enjoyed himself. I felt quite emotional and told him that I had never enjoyed a recording more in my whole singing career. It was true. We’d worked together so well and the mood had been so positive. I had tried to just focus on putting the lyrics across honestly and everything else had fallen into place. My voice had seemed to work without me even trying. I had been able to sing longer phrases than I’d ever thought possible. Certainly longer that if I’d planned it in advance. In that certain moment, it had made sense to carry a phrase through and I’d miraculously had the breath to make it work. There were only two instances when I’d had a small catch in my voice, one that came from the emotion of the moment and one that popped in with no warning and I didn’t want to stop recording as the feeling of the song seemed too good to lose.

The lads wouldn’t let me go back and re-record those songs again as they felt the overall feeling of the take far outweighed the tiny vocal glitch.

It was what I’d intended when I decided to record the album that way – forget perfection and go all out for interpretation.

I helped Andy to wind up all his wires – all those years touring with the Swingle Singers in America meant I was pretty nifty at the slight twist you do as you wind the cable round. This is to avoid kinks and make them lie perfectly flat. He was impressed! I kissed Ronnie goodbye and thanked him for his incredible hospitality and promised to send him a copy of the album as soon as it was finished. Dave set off back to Bath and I texted Nicola to tell her we’d done 18 songs and how pleased I was.  I headed off round the M25 for home. It was strange leaving with nothing but my memories of the songs. Andy had said that he’d get to work on the recordings after the weekend and would send me something as soon as he had anything for me to listen to.

The excitement was over for now and I just had to wait……
As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

He’s playing the piece just before we do Music for 18 Musicians with Ensemble Modern and Steve Reich. The concert is part of a week long celebration of Steve’s 75th Birthday.

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I’ve started writing this on the train home to Brighton – whilst on the packed 52 bus to Victoria, I asked a promenader if they’d enjoyed the show and they replied: “It couldn’t have been better”.

I first sang with John Wilson and his fabulous Orchestra two years ago in a celebration of the MGM musicals and again, last year, in a concert of Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. John has an amazing passion for the music from the golden age of musical films.  For the first concert he got permission from MGM to recreate from ear the musical scores that had been buried under the golf course at the studios. An amazing feat, as the orchestra had a hundred players – not to mention the lavish choir parts and solo vocals.

This year was no exception. John quipped in an interview with the Telegraph that the sellotape bill to stick together the band parts had come to over £1700! We were a little underpowered this year with a 98-piece orchestra.

Our first rehearsal was at the BBC studios at Maida Vale in London and we started off with three hours with Christopher Dee – the chorus master of the Maida Vale Singers. The excellent BBC rehearsal pianist had no piano reduction or even just any chords to play from. We had no clue as to what we would hear before we sang, just endless bars of rests to count. After the dinner break, John Wilson and the soloists arrived and he sat at the grand piano and brought the whole score to life.

He told us that this choir rehearsal, once a year, was the only time he played in public and apologized. Unbelievable to us, as he plays the scores without any music rather like some famous, matinee-idol pianist from one of the MGM films!

John loves us to sing with a fast vibrato – a shimmering vibrato he describes it – and we did our best to create the sound he wanted. It’s interesting to do, as it’s not a sound that’s very fashionable in today’s singing world. John reminded us that his orchestra plays with a fast vibrato and if we could shimmer like them then we’d be ‘like peas in a pod’.

All through the rehearsals he exhorted the players and singers to go further with the style and tone and assured us that if we did, then we couldn’t go wrong – and somehow, because he seems so unshakingly confident that we can deliver, everybody just does!

At the beginning of the second rehearsal, Chris told us that once we had shown John the sound he wanted, we should save our voices as we had such a lot of music to get through. John looked up from the piano and turned to us, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted in his broad Geordie accent “RUBBISH!”

He demands 100% all the time from his players.

In the Strike Up The Band medley we had to shout ‘Hooray’ and although we did it in the correct place we were a bit too short and sharp. John told us he wanted it longer, which we did the next time, and he smiled wryly and said, “trim about a quarter of an inch off that”

Here are some other great phrases that John quipped during the rehearsals (try to imagine his gentle Geordie lilt):

“In your head, think about the beautiful sound you’re already going to make, so that what comes out of your mouth is absolutely ravishing.”

“Ignore the bar lines – they’re only the boxes the music comes in – that’s what Thomas Beecham said and he was right!”

“I’ll give you two bars in:  1 – 2 – absolutely in tempo and I won’t budge – then we can’t go wrong.”

Towards the end of the rehearsal the choreographer asked us if we were willing to learn Sit Down We’re Rocking The Boat from memory – and add movement. Everybody looked scared! We’d only just sight-read the music and the thought of having to sing it from Memory AND do the moves and possibly make a fool of ourselves on BBC television seemed rather too daunting. Thank heavens for MP3 downloads – I found the Stubby Kaye version from the Frank Sinatra film version and popped it onto my iPod so that I could listen to it on the drive to Blackheath Concert Hall for the tutti rehearsal.

Once again, the choir sat excitedly as some of the best musicians in London whirled their way through the overture – breathtaking stuff! We were rather squashed into this rehearsal space and had the usual problems of distance, sight-lines and no fold-back speakers to hear the soloist’s cues for us to come in. We had to trust that things would sort themselves out in the Royal Albert Hall, where there would be more space and the three rows of choir would be raised up.

While the orchestra was rehearsing the solo numbers the choir went to the bar (only to rehearse honest) to run through the moves. It was incredibly hot and people were all talking at once, as they were so worried about doing the wrong moves. Chris did an excellent job of herding us into some sort of movement order and when the choreographer popped back we were much more on top of things.

John called us back into the main hall and we had to quickly sing it through with the moves in front of the orchestra – a nightmare! With the pressure I was all over the place. I knew I’d have to do it through on my own many more times to fix it into my brain.

We finished on the dot at 9pm (MU rules!) although we hadn’t managed to sing two of the encore numbers. They would have to wait until the rehearsal on the next morning – the day of the concert.

John came over to tell us what a good job we’d done and reassure us that it would ‘all be fine’. Here he is with Christopher Dee giving us a few notes.

After a long drive home and an early start I arrived for the rehearsal. There were already people queuing for the promenade £5 standing tickets – one couple had slept in sleeping bags, they were so keen to get a front row spot.

I dropped off my dress in the dressing room and rushed onstage. This was the first time we’d been able to hear the soloists properly and they sounded great.

We were all given hygienically sealed, red kazoos with the BBC3 logo stamped on them. (I had actually made my kazoo debut at the proms a few years earlier in a number from Chicken Run in the Film Music Prom). In the concert it didn’t stop  me momentarily thinking that mine wasn’t working, when I absent mindedly blew into it, instead of singing through it, during the Mary Popping Penguin Medley.

We also got a sneak preview of the hilarious baby costumes that Sarah Fox, Matthew Ford and Caroline O’Connor had to wear clutching their teddy bears, which they used to hit each other.

It was also the first time we’d seen or heard the New York Italian tenor, Charles Castronovo who sang the Serenade from The Student Prince (originally sung in the film by Mario Lanza) He was ably accompanied by the Maida Vale Male Singers.

He had a fabulous voice and I sneaked back during the tea break to hear him sing One Heart from West Side Story with Sarah Fox – in the concert you could hear a pin drop at the end of that number. He certainly had the matinee idol looks and amused the choir as he gave all the pretty girls in the audience a wink. Here he is in action:

Near to the end of the rehearsal, John Wilson called to the violins “Who’s playing an Ab? – you’re officially fired!” Everybody laughed and that quip summed up his rehearsal style. Humorous but with ears like a hawk. No detail went unnoticed.

This year, John had chosen a great mixture of excellent Big Band singers, Mathew Ford and Clare Teal; Annalene Beechey and Caroline O’Connor who are well known for Musical Theatre, along with the more traditional Operatic Tenor and Soprano voices of Castranova and Fox.

For me, on the night, the highlight of the show was Caroline O Connor singing Judy Garland’s number The Man Who Got Away from her comeback musical A Star Is Born. Stunning singing, accompanied by searing characterization and a physical presence that was breathtaking.

The real star of the show was, of course, the orchestra. Each section packed with virtuosic playing. Howard McGill gave beautiful solos on both Saxophone and Clarinet and Mike Lovett shone once again on Trumpet. My old percussion friends, Sam Walton (who had the epic task of playing the Maracas in Cork on Reich’s Music for 18 concert) and Owen Gunnell (from my Portrait of a Woman Arundel Festival Concert) were manfully scurrying from one instrument to another at the back of the stage.

Before the show, as promised, Emma layed out her great collection of costume jewellery and let the girls choose some Hollywood Bling to wear.

Ivan Hewett from The Telegraph gave the show a five star review. He summed it up perfectly:

“Lots of factors conspired in that comfortable feeling, one of which is the way Wilson embodies an old matinee-idol archetype. He’s just the right slender shape for tails, with a beat that’s as shapely as a chorus girl’s ankle. More than that, the orchestra resurrects something we all remember and love but haven’t heard in a long while, in all its pristine splendor: the sound of the great studio orchestras.”

I was so pleased that he picked out one of our Maida Vale Singers who stepped out to sing the solo on Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat, along with the choir, for special mention.

“There was Nigel Richards, making a brief but sassy appearance in Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat, with the chorus (the excellent Maida Vale Singers) in support.” (Read the full review)

It seemed that once again, we had got away with it, despite my heart beating out on a stalk as we stood to do our ‘dance’ number. Nigel turned to us during the rapturous applause from the completely sold-out Royal Albert Hall audience and whispered “Has it started yet?” He’d been so nervous it had all flown by like a dream.

You can listen again to the concert on Radio 3 for a week and on Saturday 3^rd September the concert will be broadcast on BBC2 TV.

I had a great time and certainly hope to see you all at the Royal Albert Hall next year!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

I found the trailer for the film on YouTube. It starts with Costner’s character saying “I have just created something totally illogical” and his wife replies “that’s what I like about it”. Then, to my amusement, some white words flash up on the black screen, one at a time:

FIRST

CAME

THE VOICE

My sister Nicola is a big fan of mind maps, and lists and white boards……in fact anything to do with stationary does it for her.

I must confess to sharing her addiction – we like nothing better than starting a new project and realising that we need a specific, coloured pen or sticky label in a size we don’t have. I adore those little Post It Labels that you can put in your music to mark the place where you have to sing.

Particularly the ones in the individual dispenser the size of a lipstick – so handy to put in your handbag for an emergency, musical marking situation. It’s the perfect excuse to visit the exciting shrine to stationary that is Staples.

Oooh sorry – I got carried away….

Here’s a definition and example of a mind map:

“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.”

You put your aim or goal in the middle and then think about the steps that would get you there. You then break down those steps into smaller steps. Don’t be put off if things seem completely out of reach – eventually you’ll get to a branch of the map that you CAN do.

The centre of my current mind map is my new album.

Just over a year ago, I was sitting having coffee with my sisters and telling them how downhearted I felt about my singing career. I was having a very lean patch and was struggling to make ends meet. Although I had some very prestigious work, it was very sporadic and I was feeling that my age would soon catch up with me.

Not vocally – I actually felt I was singing better than I ever had. It was the culture of ageism that exists in my business. I am somewhat lucky that I have a low voice and there are not so many of those about.

Last Christmas we did a concert at Cadogan Hall with the Monteverdi Choir, where we realised that the oldest soprano was 27! I have always been lucky enough to be able to sing in lots of different styles. This increases my chances of work. I have spoken before in my article on the Susan Boyle Session about the precarious nature of the music industry and how easy it is to drop off the list of the all powerful Fixers. If you say no to a couple of jobs in a row, because you’ve already been booked for something else, then  your face can be quickly forgotten.

I’d been away doing an opera in Paris for a few weeks and I was worried that I had, indeed, dropped off the London session singing lists.

My sisters asked me what I’d ideally like to be doing. I joked that I would prefer to stop waiting by the phone for others to book me for their projects and get on with my own music.

In our family, we’ve never being able to sympathise with moaning for very long without making a positive plan of action. They immediately whisked out paper and pens (many coloured, of course). Nicola wrote in the middle of a circle “Heather’s Hit Album”. I groaned and we cracked open a bottle of wine to fuel the creative flow.

What things would you need to make an album? Music (obviously), the recording, manufacture of the physical product and promotion…..

Ok, maybe you haven’t got those, but what would you need to get those? The music can be broken up into musicians and repertoire. Those can be broken into lists of your ideal collaborators, ideas for songs and getting the sheet music or song charts ready (the music that the musicians would play from). The recording might need a studio or room with a piano to record the music in…..The physical product could be split into manufacture of the CDs, album cover design and liner notes, photographs, MCPS licences for any previously published songs, a barcode for the CD……it’s goes on.

How about when you have the CD? Perhaps compiling a list of publications to send the CD to for reviewing? – at last, something I could usefully start on.

A LIST (did I mention we love a list).

The main stumbling block for me was believing that anybody would want to buy the finished product, or that even if they did, how would they know it existed. For ages my sister had been gently bullying me about blogging. Writing down all the funny things that happened to me on tour and in the studio. I still had great difficulty believing that anybody would be interested in what I had to say.

“Just write” she said. “What’s the worst that can happen? You write and nobody reads it. So what? you’ve been creative and stopped your moaning and got off your ass and done something positive. Job done. Nobody’s lost anything.”

So here we are.

If you build it, he will come

Opening those creative doors in your mind is a powerful thing to do.

I started writing and learning how to use WordPress to re-build my website. I was lucky that I had a great team to answer questions, big sister Nicola Cairncross, who’s also been blogging about helping me with my album launch and Steve Watson Online (who sorted a couple of big problems that I’d struggled with for days in a matter of minutes). I found lots of forums to help me too. Rather than seeing empty days in the diary as something to despair over, I’ve filled the time with building my own personal baseball pitch.

I know a fine jazz pianist, Wayne McConnell, who is also an inspiringly, creative friend. He loves photography as well and when he’s not talking about music, his FaceBook status is often “off to the seafront to take pictures”. He’s currently working on his seagull series. We were chatting one night about taking publicity portraits for his new website, WayneMcConnellPhotography.com and I jumped at the chance. I didn’t have anything in particular to use the photographs for (or so I thought) but knew that we’d have fun. I told him we needed to find a good industrial door to stand in front of and he suggested the beach huts on the promenade. “Brilliant” I replied. “Let’s take pictures in front of lots of different doors. The door shapes and the singer stay the same and the colours of the door change.”

Then, just when the publicity machinery was set up, Tom Chapman appeared like a fairy godfather and offered to pay for me to record the album.

If you build it……

Why not try getting a nice, big piece of paper and treat yourself to some new coloured pens and see what’s hiding in your field of dreams – and put it smack, bang in the middle circle?

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

If you prefer to read click here >>>

After the first flush of excitement, we knuckled down at Cairncross Castle to all the preparations for next weeks’ recording.  The Real BookMy main task (apart from updating my blog) was to finalise the list of songs and make sure I had some clear charts for them. I know (and hope) that David Newton will probably largely ignore these and weave his own harmonic magic over the music … to read more click here >>>

After the first flush of excitement, we knuckled down at Cairncross Castle to all the preparations for next weeks’ recording.

My main task (apart from updating my blog) was to finalise the list of songs and make sure I had some clear charts for them. I know (and hope) that David Newton will probably largely ignore these and weave his own harmonic magic over the music, but I think it’s only polite to make it easy for him to do this, with a clear chart to base things on.

A good friend of mine wrote to me in response to an email I sent out to my mailing list telling people about the new album. He quipped “I see you’re doing some Doris Day, but I see also you’re only doing the most beautiful ones, which may possibly exclude my Doris Day favourite,  which I think I’ve mentioned before. Still, if you do need a filler, here’s a suggestion with some ideas on interpretation…Well, I’m just trying to help!“

Here’s his helpful suggestion:

One of the things I see very often at our local pub’s Jam Session, is the singer who jumps up to sing and doesn’t know their key, or even the speed or feel in which they want to sing the song.  They invariably don’t have a chart (the chords written down for the musicians to read) and then they wonder why things go wrong – or even worse, blame the band. In my opinion, it really gives singers a bad name. Most Jazz musicians know tunes in the keys that they appear in The Real Book (or other similar books of charts). These are often the high men’s key and as a rule, they’re usually lie about a fourth away from the suitable keys for me. (I have quite a low voice anyway).

To make it easier for myself, I always try to turn up with the chords (the chart) in my key. I think about the tempo and feel, and try to communicate this to the band (not always successfully I admit). I think about getting the tempo right in my head and then I count in the band – I confess that I have also made a few mistakes doing that in my time!

For the album songs I don’t already have charts for, I have emailed Dave a PDF version with the chords I have found on the sheet music. (This a very handy, as he lives in Bath and I live in Brighton, some three hours drive away). I have also sent a chord-less version of the melody and words, which I have prepared in Sibelius. When I made the list of sixteen songs and wrote down the keys, I found a few were in the same key. It would sound a bit dull on the album if I put them a row in C major, for instance. The advantage of writing your charts in a score-writing program, is that you can magically transpose the songs at the press of a button.

I’ve asked Dave to look at the keys and see if he would prefer to play them up or down a few steps. Not too far, or it wouldn’t sit so well in my voice, but I can be pretty flexible.

When you’re thinking about keys you should find the high and low notes in a song and then try singing the song in a few different keys. If you can’t do this yourself, then try and make friends with somebody who can help you. Perhaps try and sing along to recordings of various singers until you find one you’re happy with, and then ask a pianist “what key does Ella sing All the Things You Are in?”, for example. If you know your key, then you’re half way there. It’s also well worth paying a pianist to make you some charts in the best key for you, if you can’t do it yourself.

Another good tip is try not to pick really difficult keys ( a lot of sharps and flats) unless you always use the same musicians, or have a chance to rehearse. If you want to ‘sit in’ at a Jam Session (get up for a guest slot) then don’t assume that the band will know the song – if it’s in a friendly key then it makes it easier for them to read. Finally, you might want to think about choosing a key that’s not too difficult for the transposing instruments like the trumpet or saxophone. They play the printed note and sound the name of their instrument. eg. A Bb trumpet will play a written C and you will hear a Bb. So their chart will have to be a tone higher – that’s when a score-writing programme is really useful – you can run off a Bb chart for the horns up a tome from the piano part.

The hallowed Neumann U87 handover

I was speaking to another, rather more helpful Sound Designer friend about the best microphone to use for my voice. After a few suggestions he very generously offered to lend me a vintage Neumann U87. Today we met for a coffee and he handed over the precious cargo and then scared me by telling me that they cost over £2000 new! Even more scary, was the history of this particular microphone. Apparently Ian Curtis from Joy Division recorded using the very same microphone. (He very sadly killed himself when he was only 24 and the same band that reformed as New Order later used the microphone ).

So, we nearly have the songs chosen and their charts almost completed. We have a fantastic microphone to record my voice. As you can see, my internet-marketing expert (and big sister), Nicola Cairncross is also cracking the whip, making me update my website often, so that when we have made the fabled album, people will know how to get hold of it.

There’s so much more to do – find out about manufacturing the album, MCPS licences and bar codes, designing the cover – I’m only a singer after all!

Help….can somebody please let me off

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

This is one of my favourite photographs! I think it was taken about 1989, when I was a member of the Swingle Singers. We were on an American tour and were invited to perform at the Wolftrap Performing Arts Centre in Washington D.C. It was a big televised concert for PBS and we sang both the solo and choral parts of Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music with the orchestra. In the second half we did a few a cappella numbers, including our party piece, Tchaikovsy’s 1812 Overture.

Backstage there were so many interesting people and everybody gathered in the Green Room to watch the show on the small television. In this photo I’ve plucked up the courage to ask the legendary Jazz Trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie to sign my programme. Another star was Chita Rivera, who played the original firebrand Anita in the 1957 production of Bernstein’s West Side Story, which made her a Broadway star. She must have been about 56 when we met at Wolftrap and she still kicked her leg right over her head. I also remember she had two very young and pretty boy dancers who with dancing with her, wearing next to nothing!

The hall was amazingand  it’s back walls could open up to grassy slopes outside where people picnicked whilst watching the show. I couldn’t resist showing you three more pictures. One is of the empty hall, another picture of Dizzy, with a great expression on his face and the final one is of me and a wonderful blues singer, laughing backstage. I can’t remember her name and if anybody recognises her, I would love to know it!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to the VIP box on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email which you receive to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.

If you want to make sure you keep up to date, just subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, so every time you plugin and update your smart phone or iPad, the latest episodes will be downloaded automatically for your listening pleasure!  Just like having your favourite magazine delivered to the house…

2011 marks Steve Reich’s 75^th birthday year and I’ve been lucky enough to be singing his compositions since his 60^th birthday. I first met him as a soloist in Tehillim played by the London Symphony Orchestra. All of my Steve Reich concerts since, have been with Synergy Vocals the group that grew out of that very fortunate and successful night.

We started out at the ‘Reich Effect’ Festival at the Cork Opera House in Southern Ireland. I’d never visited Cork and decided to take the opportunity to stay on for a couple of days after the concert for a bit of a jolly (sometimes a perk of the job!)

We were performing with London Sinfonietta and I was looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends.

We flew out the day before and had an evening rehearsal on stage at the Opera House as soon as they’d cleared it. There had been a performance of Reich’s Drumming by O Duo and guests. (You might remember Owen Gunnell from O Duo, who played percussion on the videos of my Portrait of a Woman Song Cycle concert. The music for that concert was written by David Newton who’s playing for me on my new album.  It’s a very small musical world.

The vocal part for me, consists of either fast, repetitive patterns (called the pulses) that crescendo and decrescendo in volume, or the slightly nasal imitations of the string patterns. Keeping the ‘pulses’ absolutely regular is very difficult, especially if you have a rehearsal close to the concert. Tongue fatigue can make you sound very strange in this piece. Again, the repetitive nature of the part can cause tension and vocal tiredness and I have to concentrate very hard to keep my throat relaxed.

Here’s a picture of John Constable (principal pianist of Sinfonietta), one of the four pianists for Music for 18. I took this photo during the evening rehearsal – the light made him look particularly unearthly, almost as if he was about to be beamed up to the World of Minimalism….far, far away.

After the break I was amused to notice that one of the other pianists had a Daily Telegraph Stress busting Sudoku book, casually resting on her score. Although some of the content of the music may be deceptively easy, the very nature of it’s repetitive composition make it a huge feat of endurance for all the players.

The part written for the maracas, in particular, is famously long and almost athletic in the stamina it requires! Here’s Sam Walton during rehearsals – in the picture his maracas are a blur!

The Cork concert went really well and all credit to the Opera House for putting on such an ambitious project in such a small city. I spent a lovely couple of days taking boat trips to nearby picturesque villages and listening to lively, traditional music in somewhat dubious pubs – a few half pints of the local ale might have been consumed? Purely in the interest of research, you understand.

And so we come to the London concert. The first time Music for 18 Musicians had been performed at the BBC Proms. It was a late night Prom starting at 10.15pm. This unfortunately meant we had a rehearsal at 09.30 – this is so the evening prom people can have a rehearsal in the afternoon. We arrived as Mats Bergstrom was rehearsing the beautiful guitar piece Electric Counterpoint. This piece was originally written for Pat Metheny and we’d been lucky enough to hear him play it at Carnegie Hall in the first half of  Steve’s 70th Birthday concert along with the Kronos Quartet playing Different Trains. We also performed Music for 18 Musicians with Steve’s band in the second half of that concert – It was a certainly a good evening!

The Albert Hall was the fullest I have ever seen for a late night prom, also considering that this was also the awful week of the London Riots. On my way to the Warehouse for a rehearsal the day before,  I tweeted “Rehearsing with @ensemblemodern for tomorrow’s late night @bbcproms. Wondering how to get there and back safely and will anybody come?”

George Chambers (@geocham)  quickly replied “@altovoice Rioters won’t keep me away from this – I’ll be there!”

…..and he was.

That was definitely the mood in the hall and the audience was certainly lively and excited.

The morning after, Stephen Graham wrote in his review for musicalcriticism.com:

“There are no better performers of the piece than Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals, veterans and authorities after years of service.”

In fact, Steve remarked to the members of Ensemble Modern in the morning rehearsal that Micaela Haslam, our musical director, knew the piece much better than he did – “I just wrote down the notes!” he quipped. Nowadays, Micaela tends to go and direct a few sessions with any new group which hasn’t done the piece before.  She helps them make sense of the very confusing published parts and it means that the rest of Synergy can arrive on the last day of rehearsal to slot in the vocals.

We had performed Music for 18 at the Barbican Centre for Steve’s 70^th and there was a South Bank Show made to celebrate that. Sections of the live concert were used during the programme. It was really interesting and Steve speaks at length about his life, his influences and his compositions. I must admit, I learned lots of things about him that I didn’t know before. Here’s the first part of that TV show and you can view the subsequent parts on YouTube.

Back to the dressing room at the Albert Hall and we were looking at the concert programme and noticed, to our amusement, that the photograph they had used of a previous rehearsal of the piece, was actually taken at the RFH, a performance we did with London Sinfonietta.

As we walked onto the historic Royal Albert Hall stage, the crowd cheered with warmth for the composer. When he is there, Steve plays piano and, as a result there were actually 19 Musicians on stage that night. In Ireland we did it with 18 musicians, as one of our brave singers, Amanda Morrison, puts down her microphone and plays the piano pattern with the other three pianists.

Ian Dearden

There is always one other very important musician on the night – and that is the Sound Designer. For London Sinfonietta it was our old friend and long time collaborator Ian Dearden from Sound Intermedia. For the Ensemble Modern, it was the legendary composer and full time Sound Director, Norbert Ommer.

Norbert Ommer

For a piece that has such a complicated soundscape, we are completely in their hands to ensure everything work well. Not only being responsible for the front of house sound reaching the audience as the composer intended, but to ensure all the musicians hear the things they need to hear in their foldback monitors. In the case of Music for 18 Musicians, this enables the ensemble to keep together without the benefit of a conductor.

In the long seconds of silence at the end of the music, before the crowd erupted into applause, you could hear the distant sound of London’s sirens – quite chilling.

Backstage, the official proms photographer took a final picture of the whole band with the composer and I rushed off for a bus to Victoria in order to get the last train home to Brighton. I stood at the bus stop for over half an hour, as other bus numbers came and went. In the end, some audience members hailed a cab. I cheekily asked if I could share it. Then the last man at the bus stop asked if he could jump in too. When I told them I was one of the singers, we had a very convivial chat about the performance, which they’d all enjoyed immensely. Me too!

A couple of days later, George Hall of the Guardian wrote:

“The final piece – in which Reich returned as one of four pianists underpinning Ensemble Modern‘s clean-cut realisation – was the large-scale minimalist masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. Now 35 years old, it is more widely admired with each passing year. At nearly an hour long, the piece allows you to home in on infinitesimal detail at the same time as grasping an overview of its complex trajectory. In its luminously percussive sound world, topped off by the gemlike precision of Synergy Vocals‘ interventions, its endless harmonic perspectives seem to spin off into an infinite distance.”

At last – I am officially a Gem!

As always, if you enjoyed this blog and would like to know when I write a new article, or bring out the new CD, don’t forget to add your email address to one of the boxes on the top right hand of this page. Then click on the link in the email you get from Feedburner to confirm your interest. Your email address is completely confidential.  

If you want to make sure you keep up to date, just subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, so every time you plugin and update your smart phone or iPad, the latest episodes will be downloaded automatically for your listening pleasure!  Just like having your favourite magazine delivered to the house…

Me - scared?

Today I begin my diary about making an album, highlighting the pitfalls I discover on the way. (I think I can already hear cheering from my family and friends and lovely, loyal supporters).

Many of you will have listened to the interviews I did with Ewing Stevens on his radio show in New Zealand. His producer Jason Beaumont contacted me after I wrote about the Susan Boyle Sessions I sang on. After the interview, where they played some recordings of me from Myspace.com, Jason told me that lots of people had contacted him asking after the show asking where they could get hold of my CD.

When I do solo concerts and gigs, people are always asking me if I have a CD – it’s all very frustrating because after over twenty years as a professional musician, I have recorded for just about everybody – but have never recorded something with just me.

After a particularly enjoyable evening at Steyning Jazz Club, where yet again people were asking me for my CD my friend and singing pupil Tom Chapman came up to me and took me to one side and asked “seriously Heather, why haven’t you got one?”

I told him that it was mostly for financial reasons. As a jobbing musician, I am very lucky that I can make a living as a singer (partly down to the fact that I do lots of different types of singing, so I have a better chance of work than if I were just doing opera, for example) At the end of the month it’s a miracle if I can pay the bills, so there certainly aren’t a few spare thousands sloshing about to make a CD.

But it’s not just the money.

I have discovered that there is a much bigger obstacle in the way – me.

Singers, as a breed, are insecure. I think that one of the reasons we put ourselves up there with only our vocal chords and lungs for support, is because we need the audience to say, well done – you’re ok. It’s a very humbling and emotionally exposing profession when it’s done well. There are obviously things you can do to ensure it does go ok. Singing Lessons, vocal practice, learning you music thoroughly, playing with the best colleagues……but when it comes down to it, one frog in your throat can distract you and make you forget your words or make you go wrong. It’s only your professionalism that steels you through such moments and I’m a firm believer in “Tits and Teeth”.

NEVER show the audience that you’ve gone wrong – they mostly won’t have noticed, unless you point it out to them.

So, I admit it – I’m scared of making a CD – nobody wanting to either buy or listen to it. Or that it won’t be any good. Or that my colleagues will judge it harshly. I remember when a friend of mine spent a lot of money making a solo CD and another colleague said very disparagingly ‘why on earth did she bother to make yet another album of songs people had recorded before – what was the point?” That really stuck with me and encouraged the fear. What could I say in my interpretation that was different, unless I wrote completely new material? So this stopped me starting. In my mind it had to be the most original perfect thing, or there was no use doing anything at all.

So that’s what I’ve done – nothing.

Until this year.

My big sister came to live in my spare room and she has been pecking away at all those negative beliefs. She took me right back to the beginning. IF I had a CD, how would I sell it – how would I get it to people that might want to buy it?

“Nobody will want to hear about me” I whined to big sister. “Just do it!”, she said. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

So I started this website, writing a few of the stories I had regaled my family with at the dinner table. I was surprised to find that I was wrong – it seems that people actually find my profession interesting. Big Sister Nicola has been helping me with some of the technical stuff and lots of internet marketing advice on search engine optimisation – she is a whiz at all that.

Last week, Tom came up to me at our local pub, the Brunswick. We go there on a Tuesday for their excellent Jazz Jam and to meet up with friends. People of ALL standards get up and play with the house band and every week some surprising and often fabulous things happen. He said he’d been thinking about what I’d told him and, if it was just a case of money, then he was willing to give me the money to get the CD made!

Now I was really scared – elated, but also afraid as my main excuse had gone.

The next day he came along to another pupil’s Open Garden day, where each year I sit and sing with my guitar. This is where people open their garden to the public for charity and it’s usually a lovely occasion. Unfortunately this year it was rather cold and wet, as you can see from our clothes. Tom looked round the beautiful garden and then sat and had a cup of tea and slice of cake with me while I was on a break and told me he was really serious about doing this and asked HOW would we go about it? My sister snapped us together for posterity.

What to do? Who to do it with? Where to do it?

I had been putting out tentative feelers all year, asking colleagues where there was a studio with a decent piano. Apart from the really obvious and expensive ones, like Abbey Road, it seemed they were all coming up with a studio in Hastings, run by a really good Trumpeter. I had emailed him to find out rates a couple of months ago, but when I emailed him back to ask for dates he wasn’t available until the middle of September. I looked at my diary and realised that, after a couple of very quiet months, the middle of September started a period of back-to-back tours with the Monteverdi Choir and Synergy Vocals – no two, free days together until November. I was despondent.

Another part of my avoidance technique had made me inexplicably reluctant to call David Newton, the fantastic pianist I had worked with in the Arundel Festival, whom I knew I wanted to play piano for me. Again, I don’t know what was stopping me. I told myself that I couldn’t call him until I had found a studio first. It suddenly occurred to me that HE might know of a studio, as he has recorded with so many wonderful singers.

So yesterday, I took a deep breath, picked up the phone and called Dave. I explained that what I wanted to do was make an album of voice and piano. No overdubs – just whole takes of songs. My favourite standards, with just voice and piano. I wanted to do it soon and then the ‘next’ album could be more ambitious, have more people, be more experimental, be better! I just needed to get it done and stop making excuses.

I explained what I was aiming for was the albums I love and admire containing only voice and piano – the song being the only star. Those albums are the Tony Bennett, Bill Evans albums called Together and Together Again; The Intimate Ella with Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Smith and the Duet album with Doris Day and Andre Previn. In fact Dave suggested a song from the Doris Day album – spooky!

He told me that he’d recently recorded in a large, private house in London with a fabulous piano. A Double Bass player, whom he had worked with many times had brought his microphones and recording equipment to the house and he’d never heard a piano sounding as true and excellent as the recording they’d made. Dave said he’d call the owner of the house and the Bass player and try to find two consecutive days. He rang back an hour later and, as he went through the possible days my heart sank as on pair, I either had a rehearsal or a BBC Promenade concert. Then we hit on three days together that we could ALL do, so we chose two – IN TWELVE DAYS TIME!

Now I’m really scared!

I’ve made a list of songs, twenty three starters, which I have to cut down to about twelve. I have to sort out charts and keys and in twelve days time I will record them – and then we’ll see what happens. There’s album design and manufacture and technical things like licensing and selling on Amazon, Itunes and Spotify to sort out. I’ll keep you posted on that but for now I have to focus on the music.

No more excuses.

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I welcome your comments and perhaps even song suggestions!