CELEBRATING WITH SONG
Gig heralds win against cancer
For Mélanie Hartshorn-Walton, Feb. 8, 2017 was blessed with the best of gigs and fraught with the worst of diagnoses.
That night, the Barrhaven woman’s francophone jazz project, Mélanie E, had its coming-out concert at the TD Ottawa Winter Jazz Festival. But hours before she and her quartet hit the stage, Hartshorn-Walton learned she had breast cancer.
“It was very surreal,” she recalls. “Keith, my husband and tuba player in the band, would look at me and I knew that we both couldn’t believe it was happening.
“The performance went well, I think. I felt like I was watching the performance instead of being in it. I had to keep my music close by, because my thoughts would wander. I was thinking about my kids, my life and the unknown,” says the 43-year-old mother of two young girls. Fortunately, after almost 16 months that have included eight chemotherapy treatments and 35 radiation treatments, plus much walking, acupuncture and massage therapy, Hartshorn-Walton has beaten back the cancer.
To celebrate, Mélanie E, which includes guitarist Alex Tompkins and drummer Michel Delage as well as the Hartshorn-Waltons, play a concert Sunday at GigSpace, and their show will raise funds for the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre. For the occasion, the group will be augmented by a three-piece horn section.
Hartshorn-Walton, who moved to Ottawa with her family in July 2015, has titled her concert The Year I Became Me, to mark what she learned while she was sick.
“Life was so busy prior to this year . ... I feel that I had lost myself in life,” she says. “This year, I only focused on what I enjoyed and on my inner wellness. My girls, my husband, my friends, my faith and music. And then I visited the music that I loved, singing along to songs that filled me with strength.
“My traditional Chinese medicine practitioner said that it was important to have a life and to let the disease only take up a small percentage of that time. And that’s what I did. Walks, cooking, listening to music … everything that made me happy. A selfish time, if you will.”
Despite Hartshorn-Walton’s illness, Mélanie E was able to record a new CD, Chemin, last summer.
“As I was not working, I was able to rehearse with the band during the day,” she explains. Then she and the band went into Gallery Recording Studio in the Glebe — “before I switched from my first chemo cocktail to my second, as I didn’t know how I’d react and I didn’t want to chance it.
“The process was uplifting,” Hartshorn-Walton says. “I felt
I continue to exercise, eat well and have my massages, all in the hopes of letting my body heal itself.
amazing and really enjoyed working with the band.”
After the album was recorded, Hartshorn-Walton began radiation treatments. She continues to take medications, hoping to prevent the cancer from returning. “I continue to exercise, eat well and have my massages, all in the hopes of letting my body heal itself.
Meanwhile, she and her husband are writing more for Mélanie E, a project that also covers French and Québécois rock and pop artists such as Robert Charlebois, Félix Leclerc and Georges Dor — music that Hartshorn-Walton, whose mother is Québécois, grew up hearing.
“I have made it my mission to let English audiences become exposed to this world, which not only includes chansons but funky songs and artists from the ’70s and ’80s,” she says.
“Most importantly, I just want to be with my family. I want to eat dinner, go for walks at the park, read books to them, and sing with them,” Hartshorn-Walton says.