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Friday, 21 November 2008
A Serious Artist, Elizabeth Shepherd PDF Print E-mail
Written by Catherine Kustanczy   
Wednesday, 06 August 2008 16:13


Two images of Elizabeth Shepherd live in my memory. The first is of her performing last summer, primly seated at an electric piano. Her face was a study in concentration and focus; her hands worked quickly, delicately, passing lightly across the keys, as her lilting voice rose above the din of Dundas Square on a steamy summer afternoon. She turned the open, busy intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets into a cosy club –or even a living room.

The other memory I have is of her riding her bike past me not long after the concert ended. She had a big bag in the front basket, and pedaled methodically, carefully almost, exuding that same air of focus. But she also wore a small smile, as if savouring a secret, and her eyes seemed to look far past the immediate road. She reminded me of a Buddha.

It’s these images –the serious artist, the confident player, the delighted music lover, and the everyday Torontonian, that coalesce with such grace and poetry in her music. At once lushly romantic and deeply intellectual, her three albums –Start to Move, Besides, and her latest disc, Parkdale, demonstrate a mix of melody, free-form improvisation, and genuine musical curiosity –not to mention a healthy dose of authenticity. Choosing her words carefully, and giving thoughtful answers full of pauses, she spoke to me recently from her home in Toronto, and reflected on her career, music, and the changes wrought by personal tragedy.

“It’s not a conscious thing,” she says of her jazz-influenced sound, “I listen to a lot of music, different kinds of music, so it probably seeped in, all the different styles and influences. I don’t listen to that much jazz to be honest. It’s more the approach of jazz that I like, the freedom to explore within it.”

Parkdale is a heady mix of worldly observation and lived-in experience. The mix –or rather, balance –of seeming-opposites is a big part of what makes Shepherd such a compelling musician. Raised by Salvation Army affiliated parents, her first exposure to music was in the church band and choir. When I tell her we share the same Sunday morning upbringing, her shy demeanor melts and opens up a lengthy conversation about the benefits of being raised in a church where music is such a central focus. “You know how important music is the organization,” she says, “so yeah, I was in choirs, I sang, I was playing in the brass bands. The bulk of my education in musical formation was in that context.” She notes that the Sally Anne’s concentration on group work, “being part of a larger, music-making enterprise” as she puts it, was integral to shaping her musical path. “My roots are there,” she says with a hint of nostalgia, “that was my only experience with a church. It had a huge appeal for me, and I really miss that.”

It wouldn’t be the first, or last time Shepherd hankered after authentic experience. When Shepherd was ten, her family moved to France, and she was put into classical conservatory training. She says she didn’t take as much pleasure in music, mainly because she was suddenly part of a system that was ill-suited to the drives and development of more creative, experimental players. Being in a new, strange environment didn’t help either.

“I used to loved (playing),” she notes, “I always wanted to play. Practising, wasn’t a chore, but when we moved to France, the whole education there is very different, and there’s a lot of motivating forces telling you how bad you are -that being some kind of inspiration. I was in tears every Wednesday before my lesson, going, ‘do I have to go?’ I really resented (the Conservatory) taking all the joy out… so I wound up quitting for a while.”

Back in Canada, Shepherd attended McGill University, where she studied classical piano. She was drawn by the siren call of jazz however, and was most attracted to the freedom the genre represented. “It was really something I had to learn for myself. I kind of gravitated towards (jazz) without realizing what was happening.” She says she was “tired of classical music, where there was no room for my own voice, outside of interpretive stuff”, noting that the main appeal of jazz piano for her at that time was that “there was no such thing as a mistake, you just work with whatever is in the moment”, a process she says is still “incredibly liberating… frightening, sure, but liberating.” Shepherd left university, reasoning that by staying in school, she was “basically paying a lot of money to read books. I wasn’t allowing myself to admit I wanted to continue (with) music. Even when I decided to go to McGill, when I was actively pursuing it, it was still not clear what I would do afterwards.”
The decision to do jazz full time came about as the result of a personal family tragedy. Shepherd’s brother was involved in a serious car crash that left him a quadriplegic. “It shook me to the core,” she says, “and it made me think, ‘okay, my time here is limited, what do I want to do? How do I want to spend my time?’” She says there was “a lot of fear surrounding that question, things I wasn’t ready to look at,” but she says that seeing how her brother adapted to his situation changed her own way of thinking with regards to controlling her career direction. “It made me think, there’s no room for fear here,” she says thoughtfully, “I was taking inspiration. That was the moment, the phase…” Her voice trails off, lost in the memory of the chaos of the time.

Although she didn’t immediately realize the connection between her brother’s accident and her decision to change her life’s path, it was the experience of living through the trauma that helped her to find her own voice, and express it through her work. She became clear on what she wanted to do with her gift. “I really felt more the need to say something - not necessarily didactic - but authentic, and real. It has speak to something, it has to come from real experience.”

Shepherd’s decision to stick with authenticity makes itself known on Parkdale, where songs like the wistful “Long As You’re Living”, the empowering “Just One Song” and a re-worked version of the classic Faure melody “Sicilienne”, complete with Shepherd’s own lyrics, find the singer/player reflecting life, choice, and love. “The very one for whom my heart sings is burying me alive”, she croons on the latter, “and here, I’m left with two broken wings, too heavy and weary to fly.” It’s musically simple, with just Shepherd’s reed-like soprano over a lovely solo guitar line, but emotionally, it’s balls-out honest.

Was there any fear in being so vulnerable, I ask her, particularly since female artists often seem to get painted with the sentimental brush? “I’m unapologetic about that,” she says firmly, “I’ve never actually encountered that label, but even if I did…” She pauses, carefully weighing her response. “Ultimately, labels are just people’s opinions. If it did rub me wrong, I’d want to investigate it. I’m at a phase in my life right now where I don’t see the point of hiding things. If something’s there, and I mean this in every aspect, whether it’s music or relationships, it should be brought up, ‘cause it’s just the elephant in the room, and I really don’t feel I want to waste time and energy pretending otherwise.”

With tour dates that recently took her to Europe, the UK and Japan, Shepherd hasn’t had any time to waste, musically or otherwise. Have there been any elephants on tour, I ask, any screamingly inspiring moments that shout for a composition? “I can’t say I’ve been on road enough to know,” she says, almost surprised by her own answer. The concept of immediate inspiration isn’t foreign to her, although she says she keeps her composing close to –or make that at –home, sitting at the piano. She admits that with her recent tour schedule, she’s been writing “ideas & poems, observations” that may result in pieces, but she can’t be sure. “It’s funny how being displaced and removed from ordinary life, you start to see things differently, it’s almost like you get a meta-awareness. I don’t know where it comes from.”

I ask her about favourite tour moments, and she earnestly recounts a recent trip to Madrid, Spain, where the collision between the “ordinary life” she alluded to, and her chosen career, found a fascinating intersection. “Every time we do a show,” she says, referring to her bandmates, “my thing is, ‘no one’s going to come’. So we went to the venue after dinner, and there was a lineup outside. I sat down to play and suddenly realized, ‘wow, people have come from all over, other countries in some cases, to come to this gig.” It was, she says, “a realization that people know us here, they like what we’re doing, they come out to support it.” It’s a mix of both shock and wonder, she says.

Reflecting on the effects of gaining recognition for her art, she says “it’s not just ‘I don’t’ deserve this’ but the flip side of it: ‘am I worthy? Do I have something worthy that merits people’s money, attention, time?’” She admits she doesn’t know how, or even if, that kind of insecurity might show itself in her work, although she’s seen it “manifest itself in exactly the opposite –the superhero”. Shepherd is an artist smart enough to know such insecurities are an indication of the fact that she’s spiritually, creatively, and emotionally, on the right road; as opposed to giving in to those doubting voices, she susses them out, providing her work with the sort of authenticity and lived-in experience she was so committed to when starting out.

Referring to the title of her album, which happens to also be the name of the Toronto area she’s called home now for over four years, she says “the album is not about the neighborhood, per se” and notes that, even in listening to the title track “it doesn’t matter too much if you don’t know the area. That song might not speak to all the people in Parkdale – not all of us have the same experience”, though she notes, with some curiosity, “I always wonder what the people in Japan or Europe are thinking. What is it people are responding to here? They don’t even know the lyrics! But then, they know the mood…”

The mood, the charm, the voice, the playing, the honesty - Elizabeth Shepherd has them all, and they work in any language.

Elizabeth Shepherd’s CD ‘Parkdale’ is out now. She plays the Markham Jazz Festival August 15th and Harbourfront Centre August 17th.

For more information, including upcoming tour dates, go to www.elizabethshepherd.com or check her Myspace page, www.myspace.com/elizabethshepherd.
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