A POETRY, JAZZ FUSION
Pianist Tosoff on new album
Many a jazz instrumentalist thinks that he or she can get a musical message across without the help of a vocalist singing some words and possibly becoming the star of the show, thank you very much.
And then there’s Amanda Tosoff. The 32-year-old Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based jazz pianist recently released her album Words, which features the entrancing, airy singing of Felicity Williams on a slate of Tosoff’s originals.
What’s more, those words preceded Tosoff’s music, having been drawn from poems that the pianist used as her inspirations. Prodded by poems written for the most part by Canadians, Tosoff took her music to another level, crafting an album rich with not just Williams’s voice but also refined arrangements for a string ensemble. The disc is full of sonic beauty and lyricism as it blurs jazz, pop, classical and folk.
In an interview, Tosoff, who brings her Words project to the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival on Tuesday night, describes how she came to the point where words really mattered, and how she generated lovely songs from them.
Q What are some of your biggest musical memories from your childhood?
A Well, I come from a supermusical family. All my parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and grandparents are musicians who play something or sing — a number of them professionally, Three songs on my new record actually feature lyrics by my sister, Melissa Mansfield, and my dad and uncle, Lloyd and Ted Tosoff. So I have many memories of family sing-alongs, my mom playing Chopin and Debussy, my grandpa teaching me boogie-woogie bass lines, and so many more.
I like to think that my most important musical memory, though, is seeing Oscar Peterson, while in my mother’s womb! Of course, I can’t remember that, but we joke that that’s when I got into jazz.
Q How did you settle on pursu- ing music and jazz?
A I feel like music chose me, in a way. I never planned to be a professional musician. I just became interested in it in high school because we had a great music program. And then I didn’t really have any other interests, so I decided study music in university.
I had originally thought that I’d become a music teacher, but then I started playing, formed my own band, and this sort of life just happened. So I feel very fortunate to be able to do something I love and that is meaningful to me.
Q When did you move from Vancouver to Toronto, and why?
A I moved to Toronto six years ago. I felt that I needed to leave home and experience life somewhere else, and Toronto just made sense since I knew more musicians here than in other cities. I also wanted to be closer to New York City and Montreal.
Q How would you compare the jazz scenes in the two cities?
A Both scenes are really special. There are so many killer bands and musicians in both cities. I’d say the main difference is that Toronto’s scene is bigger, which makes sense since the city is bigger. I think a lot of musicians end up here because of this and because there are more jazz schools here, too.
Another difference is that the scene in Toronto seems a bit more divided by sub-genre. There seems to be sub-scenes of musicians who, for example, play more straight-ahead, and those that play more free, and so on. In Vancouver, it seems like there are more musicians who hop from one style to another.
Q What sparked your interest in setting poetry to music?
A I became interested in setting poetry to music sort of by accident. I was sitting down one day to do some writing and wanted to do a new exercise, so I decided to find a poem online that I liked and try writing a melody to it.
Within a few hours I came across Edmonton-based poet Tim Bowling’s poem Owl Pellet. It’s an eerie, yet inspiring poem that is three sentences long and has no rhyme. But somehow it worked as a lyric, and I loved what came out when I used it as the starting point for my tune. I wrote something unlike what I had written in the past, and to be honest, I loved trying to sing it! So that is what sparked my interest.
Q What was the process to create an album of music based on poems?
A The tunes were written over a few years. I started before starting my MA in 2012, and then sporadically wrote in between my schoolwork, teaching and gigs.
All of the songs started out as improvisations. I found poems that spoke to me, sat down at the piano, and starting playing and singing a melody to the poem. Sometimes it was just one phrase, and then I’d later flesh it out and try to figure out how to fit the remaining phrases into musical ones.
After I had a basic melodic and harmonic structure, I starting writing string parts around this. It was the first project where I wrote away from the piano, using my computer to listen back to how the parts worked and fit together.
Q What did you learn from the project?
A I think that writing with the poems as a starting point really forced me in some different directions. The music became a little bit more about the song, rather than improvisation. Stylistically, it ended up having some tinges of art song and maybe even pop-folk, as well as modern jazz. This wasn’t intended but just came out.
I also loved having the imagery and emotions in the poems to play with when writing the music. I love instrumental music and don’t feel that music needs words to have strong imagery and emotions, but I feel like the words, and of course the human voice, in this project just amplified this.
I also feel that through the process of trying to fit words to a musical melody — and then trying to sing that — made me really think about how to create a melody.
I think this will translate into my instrumental writing in a positive way.
Q Is it easier to get this music across to listeners, and non-jazz fans, because it has words?
A Maybe. There have been some people I’ve shared the music with who don’t really like jazz but like this project. Maybe having words helps people connect with the music more if they haven’t spent much time listening to instrumental jazz. It makes sense, since most popular music has lyrics.
I’ve also had non-jazz fans comment that they liked the music and that it sounded “complicated.” I suppose some of the music is complex and contains elements typical of modern jazz — dense harmony, meter changes, interlocking parts — so I think that having the words and a fantastic singer to pull them off may help make these elements more accessible. I hope that the project can appeal to any music fan who has an open ear.