For jazz couple, ‘music became part of our healing process’
After two devastating losses during the pandemic, musicians Mark and Anne Burnell find peace in making sounds
Time flies but music endures. A couple of weeks ago I could hear the voice of the late piano bar wizard Buddy Charles and he was saying, “There is something primitive about being close to live music. What makes it work is that people are inherently eager for intimacy.”
It’s been a tough couple of years for those who make and enjoy live music, the world battered and hushed by the pandemic. It has been especially disturbing for Anne and Mark Burnell.
“We were crushed,” says Mark. “Just months into the pandemic we lost my mom and three months later, Anne’s mom died. We were not even able to say proper goodbyes. It was devastating.”
But they had each other and they had music.
“There was a lot of trauma,” says Anne. “But music became part of our healing process.”
They healed by livestreaming 40-minute weekly performances from their living room and by spending 17 months creating a marvelously entertaining album, the first for the couple as a couple in two decades.
It is “Two for the Road,” a gathering of 13 tunes, a couple of them originals and others from a variety of composers, from the Gershwin brothers to Rodgers and Hammerstein, with Neil Sedaka thrown in.
On the cover of the CD the pair are euphoric, riding in a car, their arms extending toward a sun-kissed sky. The liner notes are by esteemed critic Neil Tesser, who writes, among many praiseful words, of Anne’s “timbre of clarified honey, containing a hint of clove” and of her ability to “shape her voice around a gaggle of genres: jazz, blues, pop and hybrids of all three, handling each with a mix of intimacy and strength.”
Of Mark, he writes that he “covers a range of styles and contexts … And as you might hope from a husband backing his wife, his playing dovetails neatly with Anne’s interpretations; so does his voice.”
Anne and Mark Burnell became a couple many years ago and one of the reasons was Buddy Charles. They met performing in different bands on one of those cocktail/dinner cruise ships that park at Navy Pier. She sang. He played the piano. They had their first date that night, going to hear Charles, who was then playing and singing in the Coq d’Or at the Drake Hotel, after his many years as the late night/early morning treasure at the bygone Acorn on Oak.
I sat with them on Aug. 14, which was the 30th anniversary of that first date. They had participated that afternoon in a benefit for the church Charles attended every day. It is an event started the year after Charles’ 2008 death by cabaret scene fixture Scott Urban, who sadly died of COVID-19 in 2021.
Anne told me, “Buddy was a father figure to us all. From the first time I heard him (on that first date with Mark), I was hooked, and he was always so encouraging, offering advice, teaching me songs. I love him so much.”
Mark, who would for a time fill the Coq d’Or piano bench after Charles’ death, says, “In all the clubs, halls
and arenas I have been in, playing and listening, I have never met a better entertainer than Buddy.”
Mark is from Pittsburgh, Anne is from Michigan. I have known her for a long time, having met in 1986, when I was judging a talent contest at Yvette, a swanky restaurant on State Street that featured a double piano.
One of the servers took the microphone and started to sing.
The other judge, pianist Al Blatter, and I listened to her sing two songs.
“She wins,” said Blatter. “No contest.”
Employees were not eligible to win the contest, but we were compelled to tell this young server how wonderfully she sang.
“Should I quit my job and try to make a go as a singer?” she asked.
“Yes,” we said, without really thinking. “Do it.”
“I will,” she said. “Watch for me. My name is Anne Pringle.”
I did watch and listen
as she made her mark in various local clubs after she met and married Mark.
This couple knows that a life in music can be a tough life.
As Mark has told me, “This is a crazy business. It may look glamorous, but it’s a hard way to make a living. You have to learn to wear a lot of different hats.”
As Anne says, “We’ve had to be willing to morph as the scene has changed.”
To make ends meet, she has long worked as a fitness instructor, for some years assisting those staying at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and at other institutions, while also teaching kickboxing, Tae Bo and Pilates.
He also sings and arranges, has long taught vocal lessons, plays all over town, hosts open mics and has had a steady gig for many years performing with a trio Saturday nights downtown at the Tortoise Supper Club.
They performed recently
at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, two sold-out shows during which they played all the songs on their new CD, sharing their love of music and one another, continuing their healing process and delighting those who perhaps needed some healing too, as they got back to the world.
One of those songs goes
something like this: Haven’t you noticed Suddenly I’m bright and breezy?
Because of all the beautiful and new
Things I’m learning about you
Day by day.