HIS ‘EMOTIONAL HEARTBEAT’
Singer Michael Curtis Hanna is in the Spotlight
For me, music is an emotional heartbeat. I say emotional to try and separate it from the metaphysical. It’s not like putting your hand on your chest and you feel your heart beating. But the vibrations that occur, the symbiosis that happens, the blending of tomes, the rise and fall of a performance, all feed into your emotion.
Spotlight is a weekly look at some of the people who are part of the Ottawa area’s arts community. This week Bruce Deachman talks with singer Michael Curtis Hanna. Hanna will be performing with Big Soul Project on Feb. 24 at Fourth Avenue Baptist Church. Visit bigsoulproject.com for details.
“My journey has been a little different. I started out singing in front of the television when I was a kid. Cartoons. Themes. All the shows had great jingles. Gilligan’s Island, Tobor the Great, Jonny Quest. But music was not my path. My mother dissuaded me from being a musician, because she had a husband who was a musician and didn’t want me to follow that path.
“Many of the circumstances of entrée into music have to do with my last name, because of my father. When I met musicians — people who love jazz — and they heard my last name, they’d be like ‘Are you any relation to Roland Hanna?’ That’s my father, and that was always a conversation.
“My father has always been a shadow, in the respect that I was fiercely intimidated by his proficiency. Part of the reason that I gladly followed my mother’s direction was that I didn’t want to challenge that. He was completely drawn to the art — we say that the piano was his mistress. Nine-hour practices, regularly. Always on the road. Very exacting, but an incredibly warm and genuine human being. You will not have a conversation with any musician of any note who knows him — Richard Davis, Wynton Marsalis — who will say he was anything but a beautiful soul. He was, he was a great person, but that was his love, and I couldn’t compete with that.
“So I became an engineer. I practised engineering for 30 years, but throughout that time always sang avocationally, in churches, with groups I had fun with. I always enjoyed harmonic engagement with vocal. I sang with six men in a cappella groups, that sort of thing.
“In 2008, I retired, and the Lord told me, ‘I gave you this thing and it’s been around you for 30, 40, 50 years. Why don’t you use it?’
“And it’s interesting, when you get plucked from your general environment where people know you and they know what you are and what you aren’t, and moved to a place where folks don’t know you, that’s an entirely new opportunity. And so here I am. We moved to Ottawa from Toronto about five years ago, and it’s been three years that I’ve been doing a fair amount of singing. I’m not going to my grave lamenting that I didn’t try, so I’m trying.
“But I never sang because I had to. I sang because I wanted to. I sang because choir was coming up on Sunday. Or I’ll go back even further — I had an earlier group in the late ’60s and ’70s, called The Concepts. The first group I ever participated in. Three guys. And back in the day in New York/New Jersey, the three-, four- and fiveman group was very popular. The Philadelphia sound, the Detroit sound, the New York sound, that kind of thing. And so we coalesced around this three-man group. I sang second tenor, another guy sang falsetto first, and another guy sang baritone/bass, and we were all over the place. We sang at the Cotton Club, the Apollo Theatre. We had a five-man group behind us, and we just sang. So we had fun. I wasn’t doing it because I was preparing myself for a career.
“Later on it was church. I was blessed to find Christ right after school, after college. So I’ve always sung, always enjoyed singing, always had a great time singing.
“For me, music is an emotional heartbeat. I say emotional to try and separate it from the metaphysical. It’s not like putting your hand on your chest and you feel your heart beating. But the vibrations that occur, the symbiosis that happens, the blending of tomes, the rise and fall of a performance, all feed into your emotion.
“And I say that because sometimes music doesn’t have to sound good, or right, to have the same kind of impact. Just yesterday, an older couple who sing in the choir, sang a hymn that’s close to them, and the emotion and the energy that flowed from the conviction of words, from the experience that was being spoken in the words, the tone — be it minor or major, it didn’t matter. Everything kind of came out and it just wells up inside you, and it puts you in touch with … I can’t say humanity … it puts you in touch with your creator.
“Music is like putting your hand on something that’s vibrating and it just fires you up. It’s this new source of energy that kind of makes you come alive. It gives you life. That’s what happens for me.”