Celebrating 50 years of a musical partnership
‘We rehearse even when we don’t have a gig. Age takes a toll on voice and chops. But we’re still good. . . . We’ve been playing together for 50 years. That doesn’t happen to people very often.’ MASON DARING (above, with Jeanie Stahl)
What’s the best way for a duo that’s been playing music together for five decades to celebrate that singular accomplishment? By playing music together.
That’s the plan for Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl, who will mark the occasion of their 1973 meeting at a long-defunct Central Square coffeehouse (neither can recall the name of it) with a sold-out concert at the Me&Thee Coffeehouse in Marblehead Friday.
They recently sat together at Daring’s Marblehead home — Stahl lives two blocks away — to talk about what brought them to this point, from their nomadic childhoods to an upcoming recording project.
“My dad worked for GE, and our family moved all the time,” said Daring, 74, who was born in Ithaca, N.Y. “I went to Amherst College, then I was signed to Columbia Records with a band, but the band broke up just before our album. So, I decided to go to law school in Boston, at Suffolk. Once I got here, I sort of stayed here.”
“My parents were Holocaust survivors,” said Stahl, 72, who’s from Geneva. “Everybody in the family who survived made it to Geneva. My father wanted to bring up my sister and I in America, so we came to the States. Later, we lived in Brazil for a year, then came back, and moved to Princeton, N.J., which is where I grew up. Then I went to Wellesley College, and stayed in the Boston area.”
They met when Daring was in his first semester at Suffolk University Law School and Stahl was a senior at Wellesley. At the time, both were on the local coffeehouse circuit. A recollection of what actually happened during that first fateful encounter in Cambridge is clearer to Daring than Stahl.
“He was performing at this club,” she said. “I thought he was good. Then I auditioned and played a couple of songs during his break, and I guess he thought I was pretty good. But I don’t know what happened after that.”
“I remember it well,” Daring interjected. “She came up to me and said, ‘I have a chance to audition here, but I don’t have a guitar. Could I borrow your guitar?’ My first feeling was: Are you kidding me? I don’t lend my guitar to anybody. But she’s really good looking and she seems really nice. So, here! She got up and started playing, and I thought she was a pretty good guitar player. And then she started singing and I went, ‘Whoa! What’s that?’ So, we started talking. We said, ‘Do you want to rehearse?’ And we’re still rehearsing.”
They were asked: Was it a musical attraction or a physical attraction?
Stahl answered immediately. “It was musical, which has always been the base of our relationship.”
“We were together as a couple for a while,” added Daring. “But we realized we make much better friends.”
Their first gig together was at the Nameless Coffeehouse in Cambridge. Their first recording was the dreamy, wistful folk ballad “Marblehead Morning,” backed with “Gold Dust in Our Eyes” on a 45, both written by Daring. Regional radio play earned them some notice, local gigs morphed into hitting the road to play New York, Chicago, and parts of the Midwest, and they recorded two albums — “Heartbreak” and “Sweet Melodies in the Night.”
“We made a living doing that for six or seven years,” said Daring.
“I was going to say six or seven months,” countered Stahl, laughing. “‘Made a living’ is a stretch!”
In ensuing years, Daring and Stahl each married, and they each lost their partners, but their friendship and musical relationship remained strong, even when individual interests put their music as a performing duo on the backburner.
Daring practiced entertainment law. He also wrote, edited, and directed TV commercials; began composing music for film soundtracks, including 18 directed by John Sayles; founded the Daring Records label; and made a self-titled solo album.
Aside from recording three solo albums — all produced by Daring — Stahl sang in eight music videos for the “Masterpiece Theatre” production of “Love in a Cold Climate”; worked with her husband doing strategic planning for large-scale exhibits in museums all over the country; co-wrote the musical “On the Cover of Time” with Harriet Reisen; and is at work on a book — “A Heritage Unfolds” — that, she writes on her website, “follows our family to America and the debacle and redemption that ensued.”
Still, they played when they could. Though their concerts have been few and far between in recent decades, they look forward to each one. At Me&Thee, where they first performed in 1975, the plan is for Daring to play some solo songs, then for Stahl to do the same, follow those with a song together, then play the whole second set together. They’ll be accompanied by Richard Gates on bass, Billy Novick on clarinet, and Duke Levine on guitar.
They’re also in the midst of a recording project featuring the songs they’ll be doing in the concert. It’s scheduled to be released to streaming services.
Despite this being one of only two concerts this year — an earlier one was at Passim — Daring and Stahl are raring to go.
“When you only do two gigs a year, it takes longer and longer to get up to speed,” said Stahl. “But I think we’ve really done our homework this time. We started in August.”
“We rehearse even when we don’t have a gig,” said Daring. “Age takes a toll on voice and chops. But we’re still good. We’ll rise above the threshold. We’ve been playing together for 50 years. That doesn’t happen to people very often.”
Stahl jumped in.
“I wanted to say how great it’s been to work with Mason for 50 years. It’s incredible that we’ve been able to have different careers, that we’ve gone off on different paths, but we’ve always somehow continued to do some kind of music work together.”
“We really enjoy rehearsal, “Daring said. “We sit here and play, and look at each other, and go, ‘Man, this is fun!’ ”
When Guanghao Yu stands at the front of the modest interior of Brookline’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the choir turns its attention to his voice and his hands. The 24-year-old assistant conductor and social media manager of Longwood Chorus leads the singers in vocal warmups — rounds of breathing exercises and “neeeeaaaaas.”
The chorus’s assistant music director, 28-year-old Iris Chan, moves her fingers across the keys of an electronic keyboard, pushing the choir higher in the scale note by note. The singers massage their jaws and stretch their spines before spending the next two hours in song.
This rehearsal took place on an evening in early November as the choir prepared for its “Ceremony of Carols” concert at All Saints Parish on Dec. 9. The singers are health care professionals as well as members of Longwood Chorus, whose mission is to reduce medical burnout and foster emotional well-being through choral music. Some of the members are doctors, others are researchers, and many are medical students just starting out in the field.
Chan is a student at Tufts University School of Medicine, and Yu is a student in Boston University’s master’s in medical sciences program. Previously, he was a clinical research coordinator in Boston Medical Center’s nephrology department. When asked what he hopes to do in the medical field, Yu’s answer was somewhat similar to what he already does with Longwood Chorus.
“Something where I can use my hands,” said Yu, noting that he hopes to do “something procedural,” which, like conducting, requires control and attention to detail. In the group’s upcoming performance of Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28,” Robert Applebaum’s “O Chanukah,” Anna Lapwood’s “O Nata Lux,” and more, Yu will be conducting Ola Gjeilo’s “Northern Lights,” 25-year-old alto singer Vineetha Mathew’s favorite piece in the set list.
The Northern Lights are a phenomenon that “you can’t really describe in words, but you can describe it in music: You get that majestic, beautiful sense from that piece,” said Mathew, a medical student at Tufts University researching women’s cardiovascular health at the Broad Institute.
Gjeilo’s composition is inspired by its namesake: the green and purple ribbons of light that make up the aurora borealis. Like the natural phenomenon, the song is atmospheric — the kind of choral arrangement that reverberates through the church’s exposed wooden beams and can be felt all around the warmly lit space.
Mikaela Bartels, the board president of Longwood Chorus, knows the feeling well. “This semester, there are a couple of songs where we hit those chords and my heart sings,” Bartels said. “It feels like my blood is vibrating in my veins because of the sound that we are making together as a group.”
Bartels is a certified child life specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, a position that she said entails procedural support, therapy, developmental stimulation, and a wide range of educational and emotional programming for children. Bartels works in the hospital’s inpatient surgical unit primarily made up of infants and toddlers, so music is often a major part of her practice, she noted.
“But it’s very different when I’m singing a lullaby to a baby to help calm them and soothe them when they’re in pain, versus the chords and the music that we create as a group,” said Bartels.
Jeremy Faust, the music director of Longwood Chorus and an emergency physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, said he’s found many parallels between music and medicine.
“Emergency medicine is a very highintensity, improvisational activity, as is choral conducting,” said Faust.
“As an ER doctor, I diagnose and treat anything that walks in the door . . . whether that’s a patient having a stroke, COVID, a broken leg, or a new appendicitis that needs to go to the operating room,” he said.
Navigating the voices and dynamics of choral music requires a similar mix of spontaneity and confidence, he said. “The worst thing you can ever do as a performer is to make your audience feel like you’re not in control,” said Faust. “And the same thing is true of medicine. You want to go in there and say, ‘Look, here’s what’s going on,’ and make [the patient] feel that they are safe in your hands.”
Several of the choir members and leaders noted that collaboration is key in both choral music and the medical field.
“Everyone has a different voice, everyone has a different part, but we all have to come together to make this fabric of music that sounds unified,” said Chan, who plans to specialize in pediatrics when she graduates. “It’s very similar in medicine, especially in pediatrics. You’re working with a kid, and they have a parent or guardian or caregiver. Everyone has a different part of the story. It’s your job as the doctor or as the medical student to work with all the members of the team.”
Choral music, like patient care, is made up of moving parts. And every moving part is necessary.
“There’s just a magic that happens when voices come together to create a sound that you will never get from singing on your own,” said Bartels. “There’s a harmony in it.”