On the wings of song
Is Serafin male? Female? Androgyny is almost beside the point when you sing like an angel
It’s a Monday night at Toronto’s Montreal Bistro. The place is packed. On the wall of this legendary jazz club hang photos of the greats, everyone from Oscar Peterson to Diana Krall. “ I gave Diana her first break,” Bistro owner Lothar Lang says.
The crowd has gathered tonight for a concert to mark the release of the debut CD of a newcomer who seems to have emerged fully formed from nowhere. “I always believe in giving the next generation of artists a chance,” Lang says.
The audience is certainly diverse: young and middle-aged heterosexual couples; groups of gay men and women; other performers on their evening off. At a table close to the stage, two immaculately groomed women wearing flapper dresses and what looks like good jewellery sip white wine. Except they aren’t women; they’re transvestites.
The band of eight, featuring some of the city’s best jazz musicians, is squeezed on to the stage. The vocalist steps forward. The band rings out the first chords of Etta James’s timeless At Last, and the singer belts out the opening: “ At last, my love has come along / My lonely days are over / And life is like a song.”
The voice startles the audience. You can see people sitting up, their bodies swinging back as if something physical has just hit them. The singular sound is somewhere between man and woman, human and angel.
The performer’s look is also in-between: a hulking six-foot-four giant dressed in a nondescript black vest and pants, with long wisps of red hair framing a big face punctuated by tweezed eyebrows and bold eye makeup. Man or woman? you wonder. The singer’s name doesn’t help to assign sex: one word, Serafin, from seraphim, the ancient Hebrew and Greek term for three-winged celestial beings.
The song ends. The applause is rapturous.
“The first time I saw Serafin, I didn’t know if he was a guy or a girl, and I loved not knowing,” says Jaymz Bee, the jazz impresario who produced Serafin’s CD, 2 AM at the Torch Bistro.
The confusion isn’t lost on Serafin. “I imagine people look at me and say, ‘ Who is that freak?’ You know, they see me and think, ‘What is that, a big, strapping, red-headed ugly farm girl, or what?’ ”
But when they hear the voice, which has a five-octave range, people are enthralled. Says Bee, “It’s such a unique voice it can’t be compared to anything else. Serafin creates music that’s so big it goes beyond traditional jazz.”
At the CD launch, one of the performers in the audience is David Clayton- Thomas, the Grammy-winning frontman of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Hearing Serafin sing, he jokes, “I love that voice. I’m thinking of getting neutered so I can sound like that.”
Others wonder where Serafin has come from and why they haven’t heard of him before. Serafin is happy to answer.
Raised by his grandmother and Aunt Betty in Vancouver, Serafin was the only child in the household.
“It was Nanny who called me Serafin,” he says. “She came from Ireland and angels were a big thing for her. She was this otherworldly figure to me.”
When Serafin was eight, he went to live with his parents in a town outside Peterborough, Ont. “It was a rude awakening. I was no longer Serafin, I was Sean. And I was a sissy little thing. I probably was programmed to be such, but who knows for sure. Being raised by two women certainly intensified the femininity. My parents were horrified. My earliest memories are of them telling me: ‘ Don’t stand like that.’ ‘ Don’t walk like that.’ They tried to reprogram me and I didn’t quite get the hang of it.”
Serafin loved to sing, but when he went to live with his parents they wouldn’t let him, deeming his voice too girlie. He did anyway, when they weren’t around.
He recalls his parents renting a video of Victor/ Victoria, in which a woman vocalist (played by Julie Andrews) pretends to be a man pretending to be woman. When his parents got the gist of it, they made him leave the room. But Serafin was intrigued by the gender playfulness — and the notion of a career on stage.
When he came out to his parents, they threw him out. He supported himself with menial jobs, living for a time in an old car his grandfather had given him, then in a renovated chicken coop. His landlords, who owned a video store, gave Serafin free access. He saw almost every film they stocked, including Victor/ Victoria.
His voice hadn’t changed much since his early teens, and he began singing again, this time in earnest. He auditioned for a professional production of the musical Fire in Peterborough. Fascinated by his looks and voice, the director hired him even though he had no experience. One of the actresses in the show, Thea Gill ( who appeared in Queer As Folk), encouraged Serafin to move to Toronto and pursue his career.
Once here, he got a few roles in small theatrical productions, while taking formal vocal training. When Aunt Betty fell ill, he moved to Vancouver to nurse her until her death four years later. He continued to train, though he had no time to perform.
Now, at 36, Serafin is back in Toronto and finally doing what he was meant to do. At Last, which sums up his feelings about his career, has become his anthem in the year since he started performing professionally.
As a jazz vocalist, he sings not just the standards but also interprets pop songs in his singular style. He can take songs everybody has heard on the radio hundreds of times, like The Crying Game, Everybody Hurts or Here Comes the Rain Again, and reimagine them.
“It’s appropriate that it’s torch songs that Serafin sings,” Bee says. “He has the real-life experience to make these songs achingly real.”
Serafin describes the songs he specializes in as “the lover’s dirge, the gay man’s anthem, the shy girl’s lament.”
Adds Bee, “Serafin follows on a long tradition of androgyny in music: Johnny Ray, the great Nina Simone. Many people thought she was a man— Boy George.”
The tradition is also resurfacing in the United States, where avant-garde New York vocalist Antony is causing a stir with his gender-twisting performances. In fact, Antony and Serafin look very much alike and share a similar vocal range.
“The androgynous thing is here to stay,” Bee says. “Even heterosexual guys in the audience are yelling out, ‘ I love you, Serafin.’ ”