>>PREVIEW
C-JAZZ CARNIVALE!
Sara Hamilton and David
Thursday, September 7
Beat Niq
Jazz vocalist Sara Hamilton doesn’t mince words when it comes to talking about the business of music. Her experience and talent displays itself in every aspect; be it her professionalism onstage or the fact that she’s been doing it for so long. With husband and piano player David, both have come to a point where the lines between regular everyday life and the time they share on stage are blurred. Thirty-five years together can do that.
"He’s my best friend," says Hamilton. "We’ve been working at it for a long time and I noticed something – every time we argued it was about a gig, but the key was to never ever fight in public and never get drunk in public. If we were yelling our heads off in the car on the way to a gig, the moment we reached the parking lot, we’d stop. We never took it past that. Once you take all that stuff out of the equation, it becomes a lot easier."
From the release of her first album in 1969 as a folk singer and touring with the Hollies to playing and recording with some of the biggest names in Canadian jazz (including Ed Bickert, Stan Perry, Ian McDougall, Moe Koffman, and Guido Basso), Hamilton has kept it real and most importantly – fun. And jazz was just part of that equation.
"Sure, it’s kind of a long story of how I got here, but I don’t think you just start out saying ‘I want to be a jazz musician.’ You just start out doing music."
With that kind of wisdom, it’s not a surprise that Hamilton has changed her sound and direction over the years. It’s just all part of the process.
"You know, the voice is just one of the instruments that people use," says Hamilton. "It happens a lot that vocalists sometimes get stuck and don’t work at it and build. The singers that I draw my influences from range from Melissa Etheridge and Bonnie Raitt, to Carmen McRae and KD Lang. I think people forget that she’s a great jazz singer. People like Diana Krall, though great musicians, aren’t necessarily trying new things. They just sorta lie there. As a musician, you always have to be growing."
Having spent the majority of their years as professional musicians in Toronto, the move to Calgary was a natural progression.
"Toronto’s good if you were good," admits Hamilton. "We put in a lot of work, but back in those days, there were gigs five nights a week. People didn’t have VCRs so everyone went out. But we reached a point, when we’d toured across the country, we’d put in all this time and we were ready for a change. We were at that point where we wanted to relax. So 15 years ago we moved to Calgary."
So much for retiring. Their new album Let the Music Move You will be available at the festival, making its way back from Pennsylvania where it’s being manufactured.
"It’s kind of a compilation of music David and I have done over the years. There’s songs that we recorded from 1979 all the way to the present. The idea is that this music moved us, now let it move everyone else." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.