From Charlie Christenson, for http://www.about.com/
Jazz Vocalist Kate McGarry and her husband, guitarist Keith Ganz, are leaving New York after calling the city that never sleeps home for over ten years. McGarry had a blossoming music career before she moved to New York, but it wasn’t until recently that the stars seemed to have come together for her:
Recent Highlights:
•2005 Released critically acclaimed album, Mercy Streets
•2005 Toured with Kurt Elling and Fred Hersch in Hersch’s Leaves of Grass
•2006 Performed with Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra
•2007 Began performing with vocal jazz super group MOSS
•2007 Released critically acclaimed album, Target
•2008 Grammy Nomination for her album If Less is More… Nothing is Everything
In the midst of moving to more serene surroundings, McGarry was kind enough to sit down with me and answer a few of my lingering questions.
•Charlie Christenson: Who is your favorite jazz musician?
Kate McGarry: Hmmm… It’s a little like asking what my favorite color is…or my favorite animal, or my favorite flower…I’m going to pass on this one because they are all just pouring through my mind and I’d never be able to write them all down. Ok – Louis Armstrong – I did it. I picked one. He really is one of my favorites.
•CC: What vocalists, jazz or otherwise, influenced you growing up?
KM: The Mills Brothers, Nat King Cole, James Taylor, The Clancy Brothers, Ricki Lee Jones, Betty Carter, The Alan Lomax Prison Recordings, Edwin Hawkin’s recording of “Oh Happy Day,” Carmen McRae, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, my mom and dad, my sisters and brothers.
•CC: What makes someone a "jazz" singer?
KM: A natural inclination for swing, an affinity for improvising, curiosity about harmonic structure and the ability to hear and sing changes, love of the past that drives you to listen to thousands of recordings – or one recording thousands of times, things like that. Oh, and let’s not overlook the ability to suspend reality for years at a time while you are trying to understand how to make a living at this job.
•CC: In your opinion, what is the single most difficult challenge jazz musicians face today?
KM: SEE ABOVE ANSWER. This is a little like the first question you asked. There are so many, its actually feels ridiculous to go into them. And who cares anyway? Anyone who finds they simply must sing jazz music can’t be that interested in practical things like challenges. There is a desire to express in a unique and creative way that is unquenchable. The never-ending supply of challenges simply helps the person hone in further and further on that desire. Like the Lions at the Gates of Knowledge, the completely impractical nature of being a jazz singer serves to discourage all but the most sincere (or stubborn, or deluded, or wealthy...hmmm, perhaps I’d better abandon this line of reasoning).
•CC: Do you have any advice for young musicians?
KM: In Real Estate the key words are “Location, Location, Location.” In music for me it’s been “Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate.” Unless of course you don’t feel drawn to that, in which case the words are “Instinct, Instinct, Instinct.” Follow what is naturally interesting to you. Keep mining that curiosity and let it draw you deeper inside to find out what your perspective is and how your being wants to express it. Allow that to dictate what skills you need to develop to be able to express the way you want to. Otherwise you may be working like crazy trying to develop skills that aren’t actually useful for you.
•CC: What are your thoughts on vocal improvisation?
KM: My mind is a complete blank on this topic.
•CC: What are the qualities that you look for in your band?
KM: Love of space, passion, high degree of skill and a deep relationship with their instrument, respect and interest in what the rest of the group is playing, good listeners, interactive, …enjoying each other off the bandstand as well.
•CC: When people describe your vocal style, they often sight folk influences. How do you think this has affected your career?
KM: Early on I was gently advised to “pick a genre, already, will ya?” I was constitutionally unable to follow this advice. Try as I might, I could neither ignore my love of the singer songwriters of the 70’s, or the classic jazz singers such as Louis (Armstrong), Billie (Holiday), Ella (Fitzgerald), Sarah (Vaughan), Carmen (McRae), or Betty (Carter) or my love of Celtic or Brazilian music. The result is whatever career I seem to have at this time. Most recently I have been becoming more interested in more ‘classic’ jazz singing and may be looking further into this end of things in the next few years.
•CC: Do the labels we put on performers – Jazz Singer, Folk Singer, Singer Songwriter – hurt or help?
KM: It seems to be a human tendency to label, doesn’t it? I do it all the time, but I try to keep in mind that nothing I think about an artist – or about myself for that matter – can encapsulate what the artist is capable of or where they might go in the future or even what their intentions are in the present. I think it’s fine if it’s taken with a grain – or a pound – of Celtic sea salt.
•CC: In your last album, If Less is More, Nothing is Everything, you seem to be making a very specific musical or artistic point. What is that point? How is it an evolution from the Target?
KM: All my recordings feel like big run-on sentences in a conversation I am having with God/myself and actual words probably would obscure the point more than elucidate it. But since you’ve asked - around the time that “ If Less is More…” was made I had experienced feelings of great limitation with my identity and a need to get behind my picture of myself to see what else was there. I had spent a lot of time in silence and run into a space where I existed but I didn’t exist. I could see the world of form but it felt like a façade and that huge open (terrifying) space of a Nothing was beckoning and scaring me at the same time. How Keith (Ganz) got into my brain to write “Let’s Face the Music And Dance” I’ll never know, but he did.
•CC: With record labels going under all over the world, the idea of a musician teaming up with a label in any substantial and enduring way seems less and less likely. Why has your affiliation with Palmetto Records been so prolific and consistent?
KM: I guess because money was never the bottom-line with them, the art is. They are committed to helping facilitate the work of their artists, and as a full service recording facility and record label, they do it very well. What a wonderful label it is – I do feel fortunate to be working with them.
•CC: How is singing in a group like the vocal jazz super group MOSS different from performances with your own band?
KM: How to explain it – like meeting at your favorite sandbox for a romp with your best friends except they all turn out to be exquisite composers and singers and instead of a sand castle you make a recording that you love to bits. It is my definition of Heaven.
•CC: Your original compositions represent some of your most unique and emotional repertoire – briefly, what is your compositional process?
KM: I don’t know if what I have qualifies as a process… Every once in a great while a melody and some lyrics squeeze out of an opening in a dark corner of my soul. The opening promptly seals up until the next time. I have not developed much of a relationship with this part of myself yet, but the night is young.
•CC: Compositionally speaking - lyrics or music first?
Hell if I know.
•CC: In performance – lyrics or music first?
KM: Story wins every time. That said, if I am in the right place for telling the story, it calls on the highest of my abilities as a musician.
.CC: How does a pop song like the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” end up on one of your records? With so much great material out there, jazz standard and pop, how do you choose which covers to do?
KM: It certainly seems that the songs pick me rather than the other way around. I start hearing a song in my head – I don’t know why – somehow it connects to an emotion or a memory or a state of being and it basically takes up residence inside me until I get what I’m hearing out on paper and get the band to play it. Sometimes that process takes a few years from start to finish. It was a full 13 years between when I first heard “Heather on the Hill” and when I wrote down the arrangement I was hearing in my head. “We will sell no wine before its time” and all that…
•CC: The trajectory of your career has taken you from the East Coast to the West and back again. What do you say to people who say you have to live in New York to be a jazz musician?
KM: It has been incredibly helpful for me to be here in NY for the past 10 years. I’ve been exposed to a level of musicianship that doesn’t exist outside of the city, also I was steeped in the different rhythms and sounds of all the cultures represented here. It definitely has a particular energy that is like no other city. The funny thing is, I am getting ready to move away and I don’t feel like I have to be in NYC to make interesting or honest music at this point.
•CC: What’s next for Kate McGarry?
KM: I am moving to Durham, North Carolina this fall after 10 years in NYC. My husband, Keith (Ganz), and I are feeling a desire to be in a quieter more contemplative setting – did I mention warmer and less rainy? I hope to write music, record, travel and perform more than I do now and teach less. I also hope to stare down a few more of the parts of myself that have avoided my scrutiny for lo these many years and see if we can get to the bottom of the whole “What is this thing called love” question.
Thanks for asking Charlie.
CC: Thanks for sharing Kate.
http://jazz.about.com/od/interviews/a/KateMcGarryInterview_2.htm
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