Lenni Jabour
“You learn a lot about technique and fundamentals,” Jabour says about her classical piano training. “I mean, it’s no different from jazz, which is a whole other set of technique, and although I’m not a jazz piano player at all, I still love watching it; it’s like a whole other instrument. But my music tends to very theatrical, and I think my classical background allows me to be more experimental, a little more diverse.” Jabour’s career in music began in much the same way that her love of music emerged when she was a young girl; her family would go out, leaving her all alone to just sit at the piano and play her favourite songs. She went to Ryerson theatre school and studied dance, but by the time she was 19, she was playing her favourite songs from Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen in Toronto piano bars. So it was during one of these performances she was discovered right? |
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“Actually I was discovered while waitressing,” she says with a grin. “I was a waitress in a café in downtown Toronto which was frequented on a daily basis by the guys from I Mother Earth who were just such friendly, sweet guys and one time after several weeks they asked me, ‘What do you do besides waitressing?’ And I told them I was a musician and that I had a show and they asked if they could come to the show.”
I Mother Earth’s drummer, Christian Tanna, was as good as his word; he loved Jabour’s style and brought his manager to her next performance, and just like that Lenni Jabour had a manager all her own and set about putting together her premier, self-titled album. Since 1996, she’s released five more albums, including Les Dangereuses, while performing live constantly and collaborating on music with other artists like Jason Collett, Hawksley Workman, and of course I Mother Earth. She has never worked directly with Britney Spears as other media sources have implied, but she did lay down some piano tracks intended for a couple of Britney’s songs while in L.A. A producer had asked her if she could do it, and she said, “no problem.” However, Lenni isn’t sure if they were used (Jabour doesn’t own any of Brit’s records so she can’t double check). It was a one-off thing that got blown out of proportion.
This was during a one-year period in year 2002/03 when Jabour had taken up residence in Los Angeles, an experience she’s appreciative of, but one that made her glad to be back home in Canada considering the all-business atmosphere of Lala land. “There were parts of Los Angeles that I really loved, and there were other parts that I didn’t understand. It kind of freaked me out a bit, but there are many aspects to L.A. that make it very easy to live there, but I wouldn’t say that the entertainment industry is one of them.”
Jabour usually reserves team-ups for just the artists that she knows and loves, but even then she prefers to work on her own material. “I’m kind of a lone wolf musically, but I appreciate what other artists do,” Jabour says of working with other musicians. “I have a thing and people know my thing, so when they need me they call me. I could make myself more adaptable, but it’s not really, artistically, what I do.”
And according to Jabour, her thing is a light-hearted, vintage cabaret–style piano pop. “As an artist you fill out a lot of grant applications and that question always comes up and you have to check one box.”
Adding to Jabour’s eccentric sound is the fact that she sings in both English and French like the true-Canadian artist that she is. One of her inspirations is French cinema, and for Jabour, the words for an emotion are just sometimes easier to find in that other official language. “Some of the songs I’ve written, it’s just been easier to express myself in French and it’s not my first or second language, it’s just something I learned so I could be more versatile musically. Sometimes the people who say they love the French stuff best are not French, it’s just that the French songs tend to be more theatrical, so maybe it’s something that people find a connection with it.”
In the end, all you need to know about Lenni Jabour is that she aspires to be nothing less and nothing more than a working musician. She stopped contemplating getting signed to a major record label a long time ago and happily keeps total control of her music and her image, answering to no one and recording her albums out of her living room. “I just make music for me and my friends, and I have an amazing fan base in Toronto. I found that my ambitions used to get me in a lot of trouble; it used to make me really upset that I hadn’t accomplished enough, but it’s not that fun for me to have career ambition, and music should be fun.”
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