Fern Lindzon Interview
Below is the transcript of my 2025 interview with Fern Lindzon. You’ll find the link that takes you to the podcast and video versions as well as the show notes with links to Fern Lindzon’s music, other related interviews you’ll enjoy, and ways to support this series.
Fern Lindzon is a Canadian multi-style pianist, vocalist, composer and improvisor. She recently released a great album with her new trio project Tryptique with Colleen Allen and George Koller ,and we’re featuring music from that album as well as some of her other work, including her Juno-nominated album Two Kites. We talked about her mother, the artist Rose Lindzon, many mentors and influences including Don Johnson, Alan Bern and Marilyn Lerner, and several of Fern’s projects including creating silent film music, Klezmer with the Sisters of Sheynville, and her new project of learning the expressive electronic instrument the Haken Continuum. In fact, what really struck me about talking to Fern was her thirst to continuously expand her knowledge, skills, and creativity.
Fern Lindzon:
So I was using this as a vocal warmup because I thought Wayne Shorter - I mean, talk about the voice as an instrument. I thought I want to sound like an instrument when I sing, and what instrument do I want to sound like? I want to sound like Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone. And his sound to me is like, it's so pure and rich and full of breath and beautiful. So I used Infant Eyes as a vocal warmup, and I would just try to sing it exactly like Wayne Shorter played it, waiting to take a breath when he took a breath, breaking the sound when he broke the sound, getting that purity of tone when he gets it. And I used it for such a long time as a warmup - I should go back to that, that was a good thing to do - that I decided to write lyrics to it.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Fern Lindzon is a Canadian multi-style pianist, vocalist, composer and improvisor. She recently released a great album with her new trio project Tryptique with Colleen Allen and George Koller ,and we’re featuring music from that album as well as some of her other work, including her Juno-nominated album Two Kites. We talked about her mother, the artist Rose Lindzon, many mentors and influences including Don Johnson, Alan Bern and Marilyn Lerner, and several of Fern’s projects including creating silent film music, Klezmer with the Sisters of Sheynville, and her new project of learning the expressive electronic instrument the Haken Continuum. In fact, what really struck me about talking to Fern was her thirst to continuously expand her knowledge, skills, and creativity. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including timestamps and different ways to support this podcast!
Hey Fern, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Fern Lindzon:
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
So one of your projects we're going to be focusing on today is your wonderful new album, Tryptique, and actually a guest of this podcast, Colleen Allen,
Fern Lindzon:
Mm-hmm
Leah Roseman:
is part of that group. So I hope people have listened to that episode with her, and I will be linking it directly in the show notes if they missed that.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, wonderful.
And like yourself, she's part of many projects as well as your bassist George Koller, who I believe has been featured on over 1600 albums in his career?
Fern Lindzon:
Isn't that crazy? Yeah, George is very in demand and for good reason.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, another jazz musician I interviewed recently, she was saying, if you're a bass player, you're going to get work.
Fern Lindzon:
Actually, that's true, but especially if you're George Koller.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So I thought it might be interesting to start with your mother Rose, the artist, because her work is featured on the album.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes. So my mother was an abstract expressionist painter. She painted throughout my life, and she always listened to mostly classical music, but jazz as well. She was featured in a whole bunch of different major collections, including the A GO. She passed away last June, and it's just an honor to be using her artwork for this record.
Leah Roseman:
And I believe after she died, you found a box of -
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, yes.
Leah Roseman:
That you hadn't known about.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah, my brother found, he found this box that consisted of 296 color separations and slides of her work, which I'm currently having all digitized. So that was a huge discovery. I've now putting a, I guess a Google doc together that will have all of the digital images from that, plus the other images that we already have. So it's really exciting to have that. There's so many works that I didn't know about.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Do you find you're getting to know her through some of this work in a different way now that she's gone?
Fern Lindzon:
That's really interesting. So my mother was, in a lot of ways, she was very secretive, or she had her pursuits that she didn't necessarily tell us a lot about, although in her later years, she did enjoy telling people about particularly things like she was extremely in archeology history. She was fascinated with ancient cultures. She had volunteered on digs, she went to Rome, she was fascinated with Etruscan art, and she actually has these books that I would like to have digitized. In fact, that'll be another project, that are - she's taken, she was fascinated by Homer, was passionate about Homer, and she took the Odyssey and wrote out sections of the Odyssey on one page. And then on the other, I guess on the face page, she have pen and ink drawings that she did of various Etruscan things that she then did watercolors with. She also has another book that's basically just about mythology and the same sort of a deal, and then another book of flowers. She was a passionate gardener as well.
Leah Roseman:
Do you think this affected you as a child because your mom was so involved with her creative pursuits that you had sort of this freedom to go off into your own mind a bit?
Fern Lindzon:
It's interesting. When I was really young, her studio was kind of out of bounds. And what was interesting is that when I had a child, all of a sudden we could have birthday parties in her studio and she would have these big pieces of paper on the floor and give kids paints to use. And it was really interesting how she kind of changed, I guess. But some of my absolute favorite memories growing up were her taking me to places like David Mirvish Gallery, and I got to meet a lot of the artists, a lot of the 20th century. Well, yeah, 20th Century, New York abstract expressionist artists. I remember Larry Poons came and stayed at our house, and I loved going to that gallery.
Leah Roseman:
Very interesting. So let's go back to your album. So during the pandemic, the three of you had these weekly jams?
Fern Lindzon:
Yes. And actually we had a fourth member as well. We often got together with Jim Gelcer as well on drums. And we have another band, which is a quartet, which we call Salter Suite, because we started off at Colleen's Studio, which was on Salter Street. And so the four of us would get together almost weekly, beyond the point where you weren't allowed to see anybody. And because we had a fairly large space, and eventually we moved into a different space, we could be masked, Colleen could be at one end of the room, and so we could still get together. And what was amazing about that was being able to bring in material that we just wanted to work on that we'd never either played before or like, oh, here's a new arrangement, or here's an idea for something. We did some free things. We brought in music from Canadian composers that we really liked, and it was a chance to just explore our own playing, our own writing, our own arranging in a way that wasn't focused on, we're going to work on this material for this gig, let's rehearse it, get it together, and that's that. So it was just a chance to be free. So we have, I don't know, about a hundred or more pieces on that repertoire that we've just tried out.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, I was wondering, I am sure you couldn't include everything on this first album.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh no.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Fern Lindzon:
And in fact, we recorded more than we ended up putting out, and so we're ready. I am ready pretty much to go back into the studio and record the next record. We've got some things that we want, there are a couple of things that we want to rerecord. There are some other ideas because we're always exploring, so I, I've got some new things that I really want to record, and so we'll see what happens. Hopefully in the early spring we'll get together.
Leah Roseman:
Exciting.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, for a lot of people know you as a vocalist, and on this album you're playing piano only.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Was that a decision?
Fern Lindzon:
That's another thing that happened during the Pandemic. I really decided once you got past the first month of watching too much tv, I decided that I really wanted to take advantage of this time to really focus on my piano playing. And so I did, and I thought, okay, I want to work on, so I had started off in classical music. I went through the Faculty of Music at U of T, I went through the Royal Conservatory, and when I was at U of T, I was studying musicology. I wasn't even in the jazz. There wasn't a jazz program, in fact. And so I didn't even discover jazz until my third year. So when I graduated, I decided I was going to stick it out and finish my degree, take a year off, and then go back and just work on playing jazz. And the way that I did it was I took workshops, I studied with various people like Frank Falco and then Don Thompson.
He was a huge influence on me. And so I felt that there, I hadn't really studied jazz. There were a lot of gaps in my education. So I decided that I would educate myself, and there's some great online resources out there, including courses by people like Geof Keezer and Fred Hersch and all through an umbrella called Open Studio. And they had this, so I started taking classes there, and they have all, they've got tons and tons of stuff. And so that's what I did. I just learned and studied and played and worked on my classical music and worked on technique. And then in the studio, what was really kind of lovely, I know that, I mean, I still love to sing and I will sing, but what was nice about this particular outing was not a worrying about singing, just focusing on piano playing, and the fact that I could play with the lid open, totally unmuffled. I could hear the piano acoustically. And that was really a joy because when you're recording as a vocalist and playing piano at the same time, you really have to muffle the sound so that you can do mixing. And if you want to redo something, you can. It's easy. So you have to have a blanket on the piano, and you cannot hear the piano at all except through headphones.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Fern Lindzon:
I really wanted to hear the piano, and I brought in a Steinway. I really wanted to hear that piano. And then I had Mark, Mark Decorte, fantastic piano tuner, tune the piano. So it was really just a joy to be there.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned Don Thompson. I wanted to ask you about him.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
I mean, he's pianist, bassist, vibes, so quite broad.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah. Studying with Don was one of the true highlights of really of my life. I would come in, he wasn't crazy busy at that time, so I would come in for what was supposed to be a two hour lesson every two weeks. And it was in his home, in his basement. And I would be lucky if I would get out of there in three or four hours, and I can't even tell you what we did. I know that because a lot of times we would just play and then we would talk about music. He would bring in ideas. I would bring in, I'd say, Don, I'm working on this thing. And then he would just take it and we would bring it to different places. And Don, my very first record called Moments Like These, Don is, it's actually all duets. And Don is playing vibes on that. He said he really, really wanted to play vibes, and what a thrill to record with him. And really, one of the moments that I treasure the most was when Don actually took me aside one day and said, I'm proud of you. I thought, okay,
Leah Roseman:
That's amazing. As a music teacher myself, I can't imagine giving a four hour lesson what that would feel like.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah, it wasn't really a lesson. A lot of it was just hanging out. We'd listen to music, he'd be playing, I'd be playing, and we would try things over and over again. And he talked about harmony in a very interesting way. He wasn't, so he was kind of the opposite of Frank Falco. Frank was very, now we're going to work on our left hand voicings. And Don was just like, we would talk about harmony, but really about voice leading as opposed to harmony. And I remember doing an arrangement of (singing) Confirmation and where I would take each voice, write it out, and the idea was that every voice had to move on every single chord so that you weren't thinking about harmony. I'm going from this chord to that chord. I'm going from here. The alto has to move there. Where can the tenor move? Where can the soprano move? And what is also interesting is that years later when I audited a masterclass that Fred Hersch did, he took the Bach four part chorales and looked at it that way, and where you'd be following each voice or you'd be improvising one voice while playing the other three. Or you'd play two voices at a time like Alto and tenor or Soprano and Tenor or whatever. And I know that Fred also talks about Bach being the way to learn about voice leading, but Don was very much about that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, since you mentioned Fred in a previous interview, you'd done, Fern, you mentioned this exercise you learned from him that was really great for creativity, like 20 minutes of focusing on one problem.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah. Yeah. And he even has a little kitchen timer, like the old fashioned kind of where, yeah, you would spend 20 minutes working on, let's say, playing a duet with yourself, two voices, counterpoint. Or you would do something where actually, I think it was 10, was it 10? Maybe it was, I can't remember if it was 10 or 20 minutes. 20 minutes is a really long time.
Leah Roseman:
It is.
Fern Lindzon:
It might be a 10 minute solo. There were things where you would take a melody and displace it. He has a whole list of things that you can do. So displacing the melody, doing things where you're crossing hands, like any kind of idea, doing things where you're comping in the right hand and soloing in the left hand. So giving yourself specific things to do.
Leah Roseman:
This is an excerpt from Eucalyptus, from Tryptique. All the music you'll hear in this episode is linked to Fern's website in the show notes of this podcast. (music)
Yeah, I mean, any kind of creativity prompts are so interesting also for songwriting,
Fern Lindzon:
Right? Sure. Yeah. I really think that I've done a lot of silent film score writing as well, and I find that what I need is to give myself a, if there's something I can focus on. And the very first film score I did was a movie called Sherlock Jr, which was for TIFF for the opening of the Bell Lightbox. And they had said, we want, the way that I got into it was because they wanted someone to use Klezmer music as well. They wanted someone actually to string Klezmer tunes together for this Buster Keaton film. And I said, well, instead of that, how about if I use Klezmer music as a idea and completely compose something, but using Klezmer influence and jazz influence. And so that's what they ended up going for. I put it on YouTube, and I found that that was such a cool thing to have that as a sort of my confining space so that I can be free within that limit.
And so I'd always give myself limits like that. So I did one for, I think it was The Scarlet Letter. And what I ended up doing was, at the time I was teaching at Havergal College, so I took out the, I borrowed the big hymn book, I don't know, 500 or so pages of hymns. And I thought, okay, so all of my music is going to be somehow based on hymns, even if I use the hymn in a middle voice or a lower voice, or even if I just use the chord changes of a hymn, or if I do anything that had to do with a hymn, that's going to be my score. And so that was a fun kind of little structural device. I really believe in having things like that. And for any arrangements that I do, I do that as well. I have to find my place first. So when I'm doing an arrangement of a standard, I have to think, okay, what is it about this standard that I can do something with? So for example, in my third record, which is called Like a Circle in a Spiral, so that line is taken from the Windmills of Your Mind, Michel Legrand tune, which I've always loved. And it's taken me, it took me years to figure out, okay, what can I do with this tune? And then I thought about the circles and the spirals, and I thought, okay, so what happens if I have the bass going in some kind of a circular sounding motion, which I came up with by having a bar of six and a bar of four, so it doesn't sound like it's doing this. It sounds more like it's kind of going around like that. And then I have this circular pattern going on in the saxophones and the piano so that I could create this illusion of the craziness that goes on in your mind when you have circles and spirals happening. And that kind of led me into that tune. And I kind of like to try to find that with, particularly if I'm going to be singing or playing a standard.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I love that arrangement of yours. I've listened to that album. Actually, maybe we could just put a clip of that here so people can hear that.
Fern Lindzon:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
This is an excerpt from the Windmills of Your Mind from Fern's album, Like a Circle in a Spiral. (Music)
I said, we talk about Tryptique and we have to get into it.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Tryptique.
Leah Roseman:
We've gotten to so many interesting topics, and I want to get back to some of these things.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of clips, there's always so much great things. I did want to find some of the things that you'd written. So Do look, that's one of yours. That's Baroque inspired, and I believe that's from another project you're doing, right?
Fern Lindzon:
Well, actually, so Do Look came out of, well, two things. One is Fred Hersch, because what I did was I was taking a Bach four part chorale every single day and going through various exercises with it. And I came across that one, and I got actually a different edition of the Bach four part chorales, which just came out. And I wonder if I have it here that I can show you. Maybe I'll find it afterward. It is an incredible edition, and it's got some very interesting harmonic realizations that actually came out of Bach, but they're very different than the normal 360 Bach four part chorales. So I was playing through some of these, and I came across this one " Gott, vom Himmel sieh' darein", or something like that. So I call it Do Look, because it translates into kind of like a do look down, oh God, do look down upon us. And what I did was I start off with the chorale, and then I have this repeated pattern, this ostinato eventually that gets into the bass. I used the melody more or less, and that's basically where that arrangement came from.
Leah Roseman:
This is a clip from Do Look from Tryptique (Music).
Fern Lindzon:
But the whole impetus for writing that arrangement came out of a project called Las Meninas, which is a painting by Diego Velasquez. There's another tune on the record on Tryptique that is called Canarios. And that was actually written by someone named Gaspar Sanz. So this came out of the very beginning of this project was when I went to the, I was in Barcelona. I went to the Picasso museum, and I walked into this room mainly because it was the only place that wasn't crowded. And so I could spend time in this room by myself, and I saw painting after painting of this princess, and I thought, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder what I'm looking at. And then eventually I realized that I was looking at a painting by Velasquez that Picasso had taken and taken every element of, and painted them over and over and over again to find some language or to use his repertoire of languages, exploring the Baroque painting.
And I thought that would be a really fun thing to do with a, why don't I take Baroque music and see if I can make it abstract and cubist and do other things with it? Eventually, I became fascinated with the actual painting itself with Velazquez. So Canarios is written by Gaspar Sanz, who was a, he worked in the court, the same court that Velasquez worked in, which was the court of Philip IV of Spain. And there's stories about Gaspar Sanz too, but he's a fantastic composer and I'm going to do more things with his music. But that was a fun arrangement.
Leah Roseman:
I'd read somewhere that you were writing a musical based on this.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Fern Lindzon:
So we'll see what happens with that. So that was another pandemic thing. I got a grant from the Canada Council because people were saying, oh, so much about this, I think you should write a musical. And I went, well, okay. And I found a director named, well, she works out of a Luna Theater and Bea Pizano, and we got a grant to work on this musical. So we spent about six or eight months trying to put this together, and I wrote a bunch more music, and I've included a bunch of other things. And so that's still ongoing. We'll see what happens with that. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, these big projects must take a while.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
This is an excerpt from Canarios, from Tryptique (Music).
Do you have grant writing advice for people?
Fern Lindzon:
I'm not necessarily very good at it. That one I did get, and I was thrilled, and I got the amount that I asked for which I needed because I had brought in actors, I brought in musicians. It was really incredible to get that grant. Most grants I do not get, so I'm not sure if I have great grant writing advice. I think the best advice that I got was when I was unsuccessful for another grant that I wrote, and then I was successful the second time. This was another Canada Council grant, the officer at the time when I wrote the grant. And this was to explore Klezmer music and to work with Marilyn Lerner and to work on Klezmer Music 20th Century, doing interesting things with it, like Marilyn does. The officer said, be more passionate about why you personally really want to do this project. Don't just give me the history. Don't just give me the stuff, but be really passionate about why you need to do this. And so I kind of took that angle with it, and I think that that's maybe my best advice, be very personal about it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's interesting. I had Marilyn on this series a couple years ago.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, she's wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
So what did you find you learned from her in that process?
Fern Lindzon:
I think a lot of it was just about exploring my individuality and not being afraid. She talks about gesture, and we talked a lot about free improvisation, and it's not that every note, well, Don Thompson says every note counts, but every note does count. But there are times when you can be very gestural with your playing, so you're just taking a brush and painting. And I think that I really learned a lot about that with Marilyn.
Leah Roseman:
Now, back to Tryptique, you have a beautiful tune wondering by Doug Wilde.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And he has another connection to this podcast because I featured three members of Manteca, including Matt Zimbel. So Doug Wilde came up, you know, Canadian music scene.
Fern Lindzon:
You should get Doug Wilde. He is fascinating. Doug, not only is he a great composer, I mean absolutely great, but he has, in fact, this isn't part of his system, but he is extremely knowledgeable. He has a system where he uses the, a six note scale, and he's got a whole whack of those things. So he's got a very mathematical, the methological approach to composing. But he is so musical that it's not about that, but he can explain this is from this scale and this is from this scale, and this is the counter scale that goes with that scale. And this is this other six hexachord that I'm using. He can be very, very scientific about it, but when it comes down to it, he is so musical that it doesn't matter what system he's using or what constraints he's putting upon himself. Wondering isn't part of that system, but it's just a beautiful tune and we love love of playing it. So there'll be another Doug Wilde tune on the next CD.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
This is a clip from Wondering, from Tryptique (Music).
You mentioned free improv, and I know you mentioned silent movies. I thought you had done some improvisation with movies as well.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, yes. Sherlock Jr was the very first one that I did, and that was really composed because I had a sextet. None of my other silent films were for more than me. So for the other ones, and I did a whole whack of them at one point. What I did was, I think I did The Mark of Zoro and I, there were a bunch of them. So what I would do is I would come up with themes for each character. I would come up with situational themes, and then I would be improvising based on those themes. So there would be a lot of structural devices that I used, do a lot of improvising where I would record myself and go, okay, I like that. I can use that, and then I can improvise based on that, and then I have to switch things there. So I'd have an overall structure that I knew that I was going to go to, and within that structure, I would freely improvise. And because it was just me that I could do that. But conducting other people is a little harder, though. I do love free improvisation just as a thing.
Leah Roseman:
And I understand you had a seminal experience in high school with that.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's great. So when I was in high school, well, first of all, I didn't think of myself ever as an improviser or a jazz musician. There was a guy in high school who played Boogie Woogie piano, and I thought, wow, that is, I wish I could do that. While I was playing Mozart and Bach, my brother also played clarinet, and he would listen to Artie Shaw records and Benny Goodman, and that didn't really speak to me either, so that's what I thought jazz was. But my high school music teacher took me and two other people to this woman's house. One night she did free improv, and I remember we started off, we would read words and we would be sitting in a circle reading words and just going in any random order. And then eventually she had all of these found objects and any kind of things that make noise and mallets, she had a prepared piano, and it was such an eyeopener to make music like that with a bunch of strangers and to really feel moved by what we were doing.
It was incredible. And I ended up doing a project in high school where I took a bunch of paintings by some abstract artists like Gorky and Klee, Paul Klee, and I would sit at the piano and improvise and show the art as well. And then I kind of forgot about all that stuff, went through university. And then in third year of university, I accidentally stumbled into a jazz club. In fact, it was because Joey Goldstein, guitar player was standing outside a club in Yorkville called The Ship of Fools, and a girlfriend of mine and I were walking by and he said, Hey, you want to meet some guys? And my friend said, yeah. So I kind of reluctantly went in there. And that was one of those life-changing experiences because it was Lorne Lofsky, Catherine Moses, and Ted Moses, and I just listened to the music and went, this is what I want to be doing at. This is what jazz is. So that's kind of what led me really into jazz. And then I also got to explore free improvisation and realized, yeah, this is very natural for me, just because of that high school experience.
Leah Roseman:
That woman you'd met as such a young age, did you ever run into her again?
Fern Lindzon:
I haven't seen her in years. Her name is Judy Pochiidayev, well was, and then she got married, remarried after when I was graduating from high school. And she said, from now on, you can call me Judy, because I think she changed her name to Nib, and I should look her up and see if I can find her anywhere and say thank you. Yeah, right.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious about these musicology studies you did. Were there any highlights from that time?
Fern Lindzon:
Yes. When I was studying musicology, what's interesting is that my real interests were 20th century music and ethnomusicology and 20th century music. I took one course, I think it was Gainer Jones, which was called 20th Century Performance. And I learned the Berio Sequenza III for voice, which in a lot of ways feels like free improv because what it is is it starts off with, he gives you a bunch of syllables and you basically randomly, it's a poem, but you're basically randomly saying these syllables. And then he gives you pitch ups and downs, but there's nothing really specific. So it's kind of structured free improv in a way. So I learned that. And then also I took an ethno course, which was we were focusing on Balkan folk music, and I ended up learning the, I learned how to play a small bagpipe, and I remember the course ended where we had a party and we all had to perform. And also I had to learn how to sing with this kind of Balkan folk music sound, which was very, in your face, very kind of a nasally in your face sound, which was great for me to explore. I had only done classical singing before that, and I, we were drinking Retsina and performing, and if you could drink Retsina and perform, you pass the class, basically. But it was really, what I find interesting is that through ethnomusicology and 20th century music, I found my way into jazz
And you know that kind of makes sense, even though it had nothing to do with what I really thought I would be doing at all.
Leah Roseman:
It just reminds me an episode I did with the Australian musician, Linsey Pollak. Here he is in Australia on a raft hearing this cassette of Macedonian Gaida music. And then he changed his life and he went there, and he actually starts his episode with me performing on this bagpipe.
Fern Lindzon:
Wow. Amazing.Yeah, I call those Jungian awakening moments, and I feel like I had one when I walked into the Ship of Fools, and I heard Ted and Kathy, and particularly Lorne Lofsky playing, and then I had another one of those when I went to Klez Canada because I got involved with Lenka Lichtenberg with the Sisters of Sheynville and Isabel Fryszberg and Lori Wolf, our drummer. I figured I played fake Klezmer music before that, and I didn't really play swing either. And Sisters of Sheynville was really a swing klezmer band. I thought, okay. And Lori told me about Klez Canada, and she said, if you really want to know about Klezmer music, come to Klez Canada. So I did, and I ended up going for four or five years. And the very first night there were faculty concerts and there was Alan Bern and a guy named Christian David playing a accordion clarinet duet. And it was one of those things where I just went, oh, it just absolutely blew me away. I was like, every single tingle that could happen up and down my spine and my arms was like, oh my God, I need to be doing this.
What I found really interesting about that whole experience is that I did have a Jewish upbringing. I studied Hebrew, modern Hebrew, but the day school that I went to did not include Yiddish at all. It was like Yiddish is a dead language. It's that alte kaker stuff that we don't talk about anymore. And when I heard Yiddish and Yiddish was actually kind of a secret language that my mother and my grandmother spoke when they didn't want us to know what they were talking about. So I never learned Yiddish. And so when I heard it, it felt like it was part of my Jungian whole, and I still haven't really learned it. I love the sound of the language, nevertheless.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, that's such a common story. I also heard some Yiddish growing up. My parents would speak it secretly and with older relatives. And I have studied Yiddish for a few years, and I've interviewed many people involved with Klezmer music on this podcast. So if people are interested, lots of, I can link some of those.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, that's great. And he's, Alan Bern was another great resource for free improvisation. In fact, one of the classes that I did with Alan was, it was a total free improv class that we did a whole week of free improvisation, and it kind of loosely based on anything Yiddish, but mostly it was free improv. And so I learned a lot about free improvisation, and he had all these ideas that he had gotten from the art ensemble of Chicago. And then I ended up going to Weimar to study with Alan, and he was offering free improvisation workshops there as well, which we're really life-changing in a lot of ways.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Colleen Allen, Matt Zimbel, Polina Shepherd, Marilyn Lerner, Kellylee Evans and Kait Dunton. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you every week, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks!
Let's go back to Tryptique. I really enjoyed Compassion Blues, which is one of George Koller's compositions.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes. Yeah, you can pronounce it Koller. That's a beautiful one to play. And what was wonderful about our get togethers is that we'd all bring in different material, and George brought in a lot of stuff, and he introduced us to Freddie Stone's music, which is great because it has free and structure at the same time. But Compassion Blues was his, George is very conversant in Indian, in East Indian music or traditional classical Indian music, and he plays a whole bunch of stringed instruments, sitar type instruments, et cetera. So this was his attempt to sort of have this East meets West with this feeling of compassion. A lot of times when we play it live, he really goes, he takes a very, very long, I guess, intro, kind of cadenza at the beginning and gets into the kind of East Indian tuning ideas, and it's a beautiful, beautiful tune. We're so thrilled that he brought it to the band.
Leah Roseman:
This is an excerpt from Compassion Blues written by and featuring George Koller from Tryptique.(Music)
And you've been performing a lot with the album release.
Fern Lindzon:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
What kind of -
Fern Lindzon:
but not enough.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, not enough?
Fern Lindzon:
Never enough, but yes.
Leah Roseman:
Well, has the scene changed in the Toronto area where you live in terms of post pandemic, have places closed down,
Fern Lindzon:
Places did close down. There was a bar at the Old Mill that had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, jazz. There's a couple of places that opened up, like Hirut is wonderful on the Danforth. So we've played at Hirut, we played at the Jazz Bistro. We played at the Jazz Room in Waterloo, and we've done a bunch of other smaller things, some Vespers services, churches. But the thing is that because there's so many musicians and so few places to play, if you play at the Jazz Bistro, if you get another gig there within a year, and we've played there twice in one year, so that's kind of, if you play it at the Rex, it's like a yearly once a year. And even Hirut now, it's become such a popular place that we were there twice we were. And then the Jazz room as well in Waterloo, which is one of the great jazz clubs anywhere. And also that would be like once a year. So a lot of it is, we also did Mazzoleni Hall at the Royal Conservatory, but the problem is that it's just few and far between. There's no, I think we're going to be playing at La Rêve, which has just opened up a jazz Saturday night kind of thing.
So I think that will be at the end of April. But it's just that there are a lot of musicians and not that many places to play.
Leah Roseman:
Are these mostly listening rooms?
Fern Lindzon:
Yes. Yeah, they are listening rooms, which is what is so thrilling about playing in some of those venues. And they have pianos.
So I'm a bit of, although I should say I do a monthly residency at the Transac with a guy named David Woodhead, and we were there, in fact, yesterday with, he calls it Precious Little, and it's just a get together of various musicians from various places in his life. And so in this case, yesterday we had, I'm a piano player, Liz Acker, who is Doug Wilde's wife. And Doug Wilde always plays. So we ended up writing Melodica Quartets, and David also was playing, and that was really fun. I'm going to write more. So we had, yesterday we had cello and violin, and that was Johnny Johnson playing sax and flute, the three piano players keyboard. I brought something called a Haken Continuum, which is a brand new instrument for me, which I actually got it a few years ago, but I'm just now learning how to play it. It's an incredible electronic instrument. Is this a public jam session or is it, yeah. Okay. Yeah, we usually have one or two rehearsals, and then we just go and everybody writes something for it, so there's something kind of experimental about it. So we work on stuff and we sometimes we'll talk about the, okay, so we're going to do this and go to a section, and then we're going to do that, and we will talk about it before we play, and then we play. So there's kind of half jam ish, but half rehearsal ish, but performance as well, so people can sort of see the process. It's really, really fun. And we had a full house yesterday at the Transac, so that's another great place to play. And they've got an old upright funky piano there, but I enjoy playing it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was just going to ask you about Two Kites, which was Juno nominated vocal jazz album. So most of my listeners are not in Canada, so the Junos are like our Canadian Grammys. They're important here. So do you want to speak about that album? It's really beautiful.
Fern Lindzon:
Sure. Oh, thank you. That was just such a huge shock and surprise to be nominated for a Juno for this record, Two Kites is, it's a tune written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, which I had been obsessed with since I first heard it. And what's really unique about this tune is that he wrote the lyrics in English. It was not translated from Portuguese, and the lyrics are completely nuts. It starts with, and by the way, have you forgotten to say? And I thought, wow, what a great way to start a tune. And it's become kind of a signature tune of mine, which I absolutely love playing. And one of the things that's amazing about it is that it's got this very, very fast piano thing going on, and the vocals just float on top of it, just like the kites are floating. There's some other tunes on the record. It starts with a tune written by Norma Winstone called Distance. Norma is another big, big, big influence on my musicality, singing. I absolutely love Norma Winstone, everything she's done. So it starts with distance. And I even have some Yiddish in there. There's an arrangement of Dona Dona and a thing called Yam Lid, which I sing in Yiddish, which goes into a couple of, sort of a Klezmer thing and a Balkan folk song.
And I have Mike Merley on saxophone, and Mike is absolutely fantastic at just finishing my phrases. I don't know how he does it. He is a remarkable musician. In fact, he just recorded a record with Norma, so yeah, and George produced it. He's on it. And Nick Fraser's playing drums. Wonderful, wonderful drummer.
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear an excerpt from Two Kites, the title track of Fern's album, everything linked to her website, linked in the show notes of this podcast.(Music)
Fern. I'm always curious to ask singers about this idea of the voice as an instrument and how that affects your identity as a musician.
Fern Lindzon:
That's interesting. I think particularly, I am so grateful that I also play piano. It's the voice is so unique because it's an instrument, but also it gets to sing words. And no other instruments actually sing lyrics and words are so important. And when I'm not singing, I'm thinking about the words. And I think when you're improvising or when you're playing any kind of a standard, you have to be aware what the words are. And there are times when I'm listening to something on the radio or whatever, and I go, do they know the lyrics to this? Because they wouldn't choose this tempo or this kind of thing if they actually knew what the words were. And also, it does inform your phrasing when you know the words, because you're not necessarily phrasing a melody as a melody. You want to phrase a melody as a lyric. So I dunno if that answers your question about the voice being an instrument, but I mean, the voice is an instrument. If you listen to someone like Norma Winstone, her voice is definitely an instrument.
Leah Roseman:
Well, that's an interesting angle in of the jazz side of it. And in fact, it's come up with other jazz instrumentalists like drummers and pianists about knowing the words to standards. But in terms of you going through your life and aging and your voice changing, and it's based on health and all kinds of things, it makes you vulnerable.
Fern Lindzon:
Right. Yeah, it's you. It's a scary thing. But what's interesting is that I actually have found my singing has actually, I'm liking my singing way more now than maybe many, many years ago. And I think part of it is because I have different concerns now than I did. And maybe because I don't care so much about the sound, I care more about the heart and what is coming through my breath, as opposed to, oh, what do I sound like? Although it's a scary thing singing.
Leah Roseman:
Now you do so many beautiful arrangements, but you do write songs as well
Fern Lindzon:
A little bit. I've wrote a few songs for this musical that we'll see what happens with Margarita Infanta, the Princess in this painting. I've written some music for that. I think I do more, I guess I do more tune writing than songwriting per se, although I do love writing lyrics. And in fact, even with the Two Kites record, I have an arrangement of My Romance. And what I ended up doing was writing a contrafact, which is basically, you take the chord changes of My Romance, write your own melody, and you can write lyrics on that. I learned that you can't actually write lyrics to a preexisting song unless the composer is alive. If the composer's dead and you're dealing with a record label or an estate, you cannot do that. So what I did with My Romance is I just wrote my own melody, and I added that as a little prequel to My Romance. And I also did that with Stolen Moments where I had to do the same thing. I had written my own lyrics, but I was not allowed to record them. That was on, I think, Like a Circle in a Spiral.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that album as well.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, actually, no. It was Moments Like These, Stolen Moments one. In Like a Circle in a Spiral, what did I have here? But there was another song, I'm trying to see what record is on, I guess it's on my first record as well. Moments Like These where I took a Wayne Shorter tune called Infant Eyes and to See Through Infant Eyes ended up becoming the thing. So I was using this as a vocal warmup because I thought Wayne Shorter. I mean, talk about the voice as an instrument. I thought, I want to sound like an instrument when I sing, and what instrument do I want to sound like? I want to sound like Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone. And his sound to me is like, it's so pure and rich and full of breath and beautiful. So I used Infant Eyes as a vocal warmup, and I would just try to sing it exactly like Wayne Shorter, played it, waiting to take a breath when he took a breath, breaking the sound when he broke the sound, getting that purity of tone when he gets it. And I used it for such a long time as a warmup. I should go back to that. That was a good thing to do, that I decided to write lyrics to it. And because Wayne Shorter was alive at the time, I somehow miraculously was able to get to communicate with him. In fact, it was through his wife and Carolina, and she said, your lyrics are beautiful. I'm going to share them with Wayne, and we'll see what he says. And Wayne wrote me back and said, lovely lyrics. Yes, you can use them. Just rename the tune. And he gave me the whole, and he gave me the whole legality that I had to do in order to be able to do this with him still getting all of the royalties. And so that was the only successful time I've had rewriting somebody's taking the melody and rewriting and writing lyrics, not rewriting them, but actually writing lyrics and being able to actually perform them because I got permission from him.
Leah Roseman:
This is To See Through Infant Eyes from Fern's album Moments Like These (Music)
Okay.
Fern Lindzon:
But I've done a bunch of those things. I wrote lyrics to, I wrote lyrics to a piano solo by, it was on the Kind of Blue record, Winton Kelly's piano solo on Freddie the Freeloader. And I wasn't allowed to record them because the Miles Davis Estate owns every single solo on all of Miles Davis' records, not just Miles Davis's tunes. It's interesting. So learnt a lot about that.
Leah Roseman:
So on a Circle in a Spiral, that album, you have this beautiful photo of you and recently on social media, you posted about this meeting, the photographer. It's kind of interesting.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, okay. So yes. The photographer for that record and for Two Kites was a guy named Peter Bragg. And I met Peter through, I used to do a whole whack of private parties and corporate events, and there was a corporate event that I did every single year for a bunch of diplomats and people involved in that whole world. And Peter being, he was the photographer for Trudeau, and he had written an article recently about Jimmy Carter and how he was the photographer for Jimmy Carter on the campaign trail. And so when I met Peter and we got along and he, in fact, I played at someone else's, I think it was the hundredth birthday party for four, one of these, he was a former diplomat, his mother. So I was chatting with Peter and I said, I'm in the middle of recording this record. Have you overdone a photo shoot for an album? And he said, oh, no, I'd love to. And then I told him what I was doing with Two Kites, and I said, I want to be running around in a gown on the beach flying kites. And he said, okay, I'm in, and I'm not even going to charge you anything because I really want to do it. And then he had such a good time, and we got along so well that he was very happy to also do the album cover for a Circle in a Spiral. And what I'm doing is I ended up buying a, I got this gown that starts off, it's pink, and then it's got this white on the bottom. So what we did was I spun around and he was over, he was on top, and he got this shot with me just spinning around wearing the gown. So that was amazing to be able to, I work with Peter on these records,
Leah Roseman:
And I was curious about teaching. You've done some teaching over the years.
Fern Lindzon:
So I did a lot of teaching at Havergal College where I was teaching in the upper school, I was teaching classical piano. So I would take students from the beginning to about grade nine Royal conservatory. And I taught jazz piano. And I also was doing vocal coaching, particularly for girls that were interested in jazz and pop singing. I also had a jazz choir for a while, and that was really wonderful. We did all kinds of things. We even did some free improv stuff.
Leah Roseman:
So mostly teenagers you were working with
Fern Lindzon:
Then? Yeah, yeah. Mostly teenagers at Havergal. I had one student who was in grade six, I think she was 11 or 12,
And wow, what a talent she was. She is actually working on her ARCT with somebody else, but she wanted to learn about jazz and composition, and I would show her something, and then the next week she would say, well, I started writing this tune. And so then we would work on that. The thing about teaching at Haver goal is they have a fantastic music program. Music is a priority at that school. They have a string program, a orchestra. They have all kinds of choirs, and it was a wonderful place to work. They have studios with pianos, a lot of funding for the music program. So it was nice. I've done some private teaching as well, especially on Zoom, but right now, I'm not actually teaching anyone but me.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's interesting you say that because it strikes me, I mean, I think everyone I talk to are lifelong learners, but you really seem to have this thirst for that growth mindset really.
Fern Lindzon:
Well, as John Williams says in that fantastic documentary, if you haven't seen it, it is fantastic. He says that music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. And I completely believe that.
Leah Roseman:
We started with your mom, and I know you're also a parent, and I'm curious about in terms of encouraging a creative life, and also having worked with teenagers for so many years,
Fern Lindzon:
Talking about my mother, bringing it back to full circle, the reason why I started playing piano was because my mom started taking lessons when I was about, I guess about seven. I never really liked going to bed, but I would look forward to going to bed when my mother, because I knew that my mother was going to start practicing when I went to bed. And I would listen to these pieces. And then when I finally started taking lessons, I was ready. And I thought whenever I got to a piece that my mother had played, it was like I had conquered this thing, and I already knew the music. So that it was really, really wonderful to get that through my mother. And also the kind of music that she listened to. She had all these great records, and I mean everything from Glenn Gould playing Bach and Beethoven. And I remember there was a Judy Garland, Carnegie Hall record, and musicals. I've loved musicals. So it was great to be exposed to that. And on the same token, my daughter has been exposed to lots of musicals, and she's, she loves musicals.
Leah Roseman:
And I always reflect people more our generation that we grew up with, less choice as to what to listen to. There's a benefit to that, because now it's just so wide.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah. And then you have to listen to the same thing over and over and over again, because that's all you've got. They have their stereo, you put on a record, and then you listen to it again and again and again, and yeah, that's really interesting. Whereas now it's like we're so all over the place with everything, and it's hard to just focus and listen. I find that hard to just listen to something and listen to it again and again and again.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Some people are doing their album as part of their album releases they're doing both online and in-person listening parties.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, that's a great idea. And I know Bandcamp has that as an offering. I guess I could still do that on band camp. Yeah. But people are doing it in person, I guess. It's a very cool thing. Oh, in person.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Fern Lindzon:
Oh, so you have a thing where you invite people and you play something from the record
Leah Roseman:
Live too, and no, I think you don't perform. You just listen together. And maybe you talk a bit about it, and people just show up in their cozy clothes, and it's like -
Fern Lindzon:
I love that idea. Yeah. Oh, I could think of some venues that could be really nice. Like a living room concert. Oh, I love that idea. There
Leah Roseman:
There you go.
Fern Lindzon:
Okay. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And I'm curious about any upcoming projects in the next few months.
Fern Lindzon:
I want to really focus on, well, first of all, I want to focus on learning to play this instrument, the Haken Continuum, which is, if you look it up online, it is, this is an electronic instrument developed by a guy named Leopold Haken, who lives, I think he lives in Boston. It took him 45 years to come up with being able to, it's like a big pad with, I can show you what it looks like if you want to see it. Sure. Oh, okay. So just give me one sec. So this is what it looks like.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful.
Fern Lindzon:
And what it is is each one of these, it's like a continuous pad. You can push it in. So it's got what he calls the X axis, which is basically where you're playing a note. It's got the Y axis, which is if you go up or down a key.
And then of course, it's how far you push the note in. So you can control all kinds of things from pitch, so you can play it like a stringed instrument. So it's got a whole whack of sounds that were developed by a guy in Ottawa, in fact, named Eagan, Edmund Eagan. I think it's So, it's like the Eagan sound thing, although if you're a programmer, you can program your own sounds. It's got probably a thousand sounds in it and all kinds of string sounds. It's got sounds that are both traditional sounding, like an actual stringed instrument that was sampled in or very, very, very electronic, and things you've never heard before that he's just come up with. I first heard it when I was at the Museum for Musical Instruments in Brussels. Have you ever been to Brussels?
Leah Roseman:
Not yet.
Fern Lindzon:
Okay. If you go, the musical instrument museum is incredible.It's in an art deco building, which is in itself incredible. But each floor has, so the bottom floor is all pianos, keyboard instruments from early clavichords, harpsichords, that have a clavichord harpsichord. So you can play duets with people to square pianos and you put on headphones and there are various places where you can hear the instruments played. Then there are strings and orchestral instruments on the whole next floor. The top floor is all 20th century and 20th first century instruments from a whole Moog studio set up to Ondes Martinot and various kinds of electronic instruments. And when I got to this thing and I heard the demo, which was like 10 minutes long, I just was, wow. And I just kept listening to it over and over and over again because it's so musical. And whoever was playing it is a fantastic musician. And it went from everything that sounded like from a string quartet to a sitar, to traditional sounding instruments, to things that were completely wild electronic, but incredibly musical. And you could hear how you can control every, it really feels like you play it like an acoustic instrument and you have to learn how to play it.
So I'm learning how to play that and thinking about the next record for Tryptique.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic.
Fern Lindzon:
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for, this is great. I want to do it again. Wow. Leah, you're great, Leah. Wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
