Jack Hui Litster: Transcript

Podcast and Video with show notes

Jack Hui Litster:

It was kind of obvious right away. As soon as I started thinking about that, I was thinking, well, maybe I can get back into music. Maybe there's still a way that I can pursue that dream, which had been such a big part of my dream and my goal and my vision as I was growing up. And it was something that I was so focused on for those 10 years of my life when I started discovering, composing and creating a home studio and working, getting commissioned to write for various organizations and the kind of work that has flexibility where I can now drop the kids off at school and then come home and work on my projects and then put the kids to bed and then work on my projects some more in the evening, and I have that flexibility and I'm doing music. That's something that I had never seen as an eventuality of something that I could ever be qualified for when I was younger. So that's why I didn't pursue it. But then discovering that it's not only something that I actually love even more than performing. I love the studio environment and I love composing, but it's also something that has a work-life balance that is actually a lot better than the office job that I worked at before. That's kind of where I ended up.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman.This week’s episode is with the Canadian musician Jack Hui Litster, who has developed an interesting and satisfying creative career after some interesting twists and turns. In this episode, you’ll learn about his experiences as a jazz drummer, his pivot into international development, and his path back to composing, producing and recording music in different styles. The music included in this episode features two tracks from his album "Shining Suns”, a guzheng improvisation and an excerpt from his second opera “What is Love”. We talked about different ways to make a living as a musician, achieving a flow state, some of the positive impacts of technology, and the importance of finding a work-life balance. Like all my episodes, this is available wherever you listen to podcasts, also as a video on YouTube, and the transcript with the show notes are all linked on my website leahroseman dot com.Please consider buying me a cofffee; I’m an independant podcaster and I need my listners’ help. The link for my support page is in the show notes. I’ve also included detailed timestamps if you want to jump to any topic or musical selection! Hi Jack, thanks so much for joining me here today.

Jack Hui Litster:

Great to be here. Thanks for this opportunity, Leah, great to talk to you.

Leah Roseman:

And a fellow Ottawa musician. It's nice. We're in the same time zone sometimes I have to do these at such odd hours, so this is great. It's like a good time of day for me.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, it's a nice warm, warm day here in Ottawa for sure.

Leah Roseman:

You do so many things, and I thought it would be really interesting to talk about your background in terms of how you got to where you are today. And I like to share music towards the beginning of an episode because it's a podcast about music, so it's a wonderful way to bring people in. So if we could talk a little bit about the album you released a few months ago, Shining Suns, and there's one electronic music track on it, Awakener that I really love that would be nice to share.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, so the album itself is, I thought of it as my first solo album that I've released on the various streaming platforms, and I started conceptualizing it as a solo album. It didn't end up being solo in any way. I have a number of different artists that are joining me on various melody instruments. Primarily it's seven songs, and the seven songs of Shining Suns - It sounds like a title of a saga of the seven songs of Shining Suns - It charts a journey, and it's a personal story. It's a kind of an autobiographical seven songs, and they're all instrumental there. There's no words, it's not a spoken story, but this journey that I went through in my thirties of being in a stable place but realizing that I'm not where I want to be in terms of not having music as my primary way, I'm spending my days.

I had worked in various nonprofit organizations in the human rights realm for about 10 years, and it was at a time in my life where I was starting to transition back to music, but I had started out as a musician and now it was coming back to music and it was this difficult transition to leave the steady paycheck and then to move back to the uncertainties of music, but knowing that there's such rich opportunities and so many unknown possibilities that are calling you. So that album is really about following that calling. And so it starts off, the first track is called Before and it paints a picture of things are very peaceful and serene and everything's fine, but you can hear in the, I use some sound designs and various field recordings of a campfire and footsteps on a beach and then waves and you can sort of hear footsteps in the sand walking out towards the water.

And that's sort of the calling. And then the next several tracks are I envisioned you sort of take the plunge and you get in a boat or you start swimming out to sea, but it's unknown out there. And then the next several tracks, so this is the album here. So then the next several tracks, Fierce Light, which features Raphael Weinroth-Browne on Cello, phenomenal. The first track features Emily Calongcagong on Flute. So Fierce Light, Awakener, which is the one that you talked about, Path of Best Resistance and Streets of Orange are those turbulent phases in the journey. And they're in different styles of music as well. Fierce Light is more cinematic chamber music, and then Awakener is more like electronic and percussion ensemble with some synths and then Path of Best Resistance. And Streets of Orange are quite electronic in the dance and drum and bass realms.

And then there's this sort of arrival at the other shore, and the tension just releases the first of the last two pieces. All Possibilities is just singing, so just layers and layers of vocals and just this, it kind of feels like you've gone into the spa or something. And then the last piece is this really joyful and triumphant jazz big band style piece that Petr Cancura and Mark Ferguson join me on and that my kids join me on as well. So that's sort of that journey of trying to get to where you think you're supposed to be and all the challenges or struggles that you might face internally along the way, but you know that there's a beautiful shining shore on the other side that you can reach and that in my life personally I have reached, but I wanted to sort of try to tell that story musically. So that's the Shining Sun story of the saga.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Congratulations. I've listened to it, of course on Bandcamp, but I didn't realize you had vinyl. More and more people are making vinyl available.

Jack Hui Litster:

Just the one actually. So this is a birthday present. This is a birthday present that I got last week from my wife, and she had a single pressing done. There's a

Leah Roseman:

That's so nice.

Jack Hui Litster:

Custom place. Yeah. I am primarily a studio musician. I am not touring or performing this record, so I'm not going to be out selling copies of the vinyl. It'd be great to have a stack of it, but for now anyway. One's good.

Leah Roseman:

It's great to know you could do that though.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was very surprised because it always needs to be big quantities with these things, how they make it work, but it is possible to do a single pressing,

Leah Roseman:

I will talk to your wife about that. That's very cool. Yeah. So let's talk - Well, I think now we'll play this track, "Awakener"

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah.(music)

Leah Roseman:

So thanks for that. So the percussion, you started as a jazz drummer. Maybe it'd be interesting to talk about that in your teen years and what you were doing.

Jack Hui Litster:

Sure. Yeah. I was thinking about that yesterday thinking we're going to talk about this today. It is interesting. I was in some ways kind of a hesitant jazz drummer kind of reluctantly ended up playing jazz because even though jazz drumming is very central to the way I approach the drums, but the way I approach music more broadly, just the rhythmic freedom that comes with understanding jazz drumming is very much very central to the way I create music. And so that'll always be an important part of me. But I felt growing up that jazz, there's something that's not as accessible as I would like about jazz. And I didn't grow up in the golden age of jazz. I didn't grow up in the 1960s or fifties or seventies when all of these ideas were first being created and were new and were fresh. I grew up in an age where I was playing jazz in trios in restaurants and at private events and stuff like that.

And it was sort of a trying to capture a sound that had been heard a few generations back. And so trying to do our best to recreate a certain type of sound and it's commercially being used as background music. I played on lots of restaurants. I grew up in small town Ontario and the higher cost restaurants would hire young jazz musicians to come and play. So we were the background music, we were the wallpaper for the fine dining. And it was fun. I enjoyed it, but it didn't feel as much of a connection with the audience, and that's really what I wanted. But I knew I wanted to study music in university, and as someone whose primary instrument is drums and percussion, I had mostly the two paths, the classical percussion or jazz drumming, and I wasn't as drawn to classical percussion. I've studied bits and pieces of it, and I'm much more into orchestral music now than I was then.

But at the time, it wasn't calling to me and I thought jazz would be more interesting. So I studied jazz. I did a diploma in music performance at St. F Francis Xavier University, so that's how I ended up doing more and more jazz. But yeah, I started out playing jazz drums, but I also was involved in other interesting aspects of percussion. When I was in high school, I was invited to be the director of a percussion ensemble that had never existed in my high school before. They kind of created it so that I could lead it. And it was a large high school. We had about 2000 students, and I knew the community really well, so I knew who the other folks were who played drums, who might be interested in joining this percussion ensemble. So we put together this percussion ensemble. We co-wrote some music, I wrote some pieces for it, and we played in a float to the Santa Claus parade. We played at various elementary schools around the town. We played at the high school concerts, so that was really interesting too. And then I played a fair amount of Broadway musical type shows in my local town and also at various schools, and then played in other styles, played in church. So I got exposed to lots of different styles of music on drums, and I loved that.

Leah Roseman:

So St FX is one of the jazz programs in Canada people hear about. What was your experience like over there?

Jack Hui Litster:

I mean, it was great. I was there at a time with some amazing students. I had a lot of really great friends who were really inspiring musicians in all kinds of genres, like folks who were really into jazz and were really great at it and were really pursuing that. And so I got to play with folks like that. And then folks who were pursuing singer songwriter type stuff on the side, several great singers, and then folks who were experimenting with other stuff like funk music. So I was in a number of different bands there. I thought that was really great. And the teachers were for the most part, quite strong as well too. I was there at a time when Dave Restivo was there. He's a phenomenal jazz pianist. He played in Rob McConnell's, Boss Brass for years. He's living out in the west coast.

He's teaching in, I think Selker College in Nelson now. But he was there for just two years, and they happened to be the same two years I was there. And I got to study piano privately with him as well, and that was quite eyeopening. He's phenomenal. And Tom Daniels was the guitar prof. There were a lot of great folks there. I also got really into the vibraphone while I was there. I played vibraphone in some of the ensembles as well, and wrote some music that was performed by a few different ensembles. So I was starting to get into composing then a little bit on the side as well. But on the whole, it was a great, great experience. I really loveed my time in Antigonish, little small town. So it was about 150 music students in a town of about 10,000 people. So it was pretty saturated with music, which was really nice.

Leah Roseman:

And you play guitar and keyboard as well.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, funny story about that. Piano's my first instrument. So I started playing piano when I was seven. Never really liked it at that time. I thought, well, piano's not cool. Piano is not an instrument you could play in a band. This was what I was telling myself. It was the nineties and you didn't see many piano players in the rock bands. So I was like, well, piano is not cool. I don't want to play piano. And that was part of the reason why young Jack moved to drums. But then when I finished my studies at St. Francis Xavier University, when I first moved to Ottawa, my wife and I, we weren't married yet, but we were living in a small apartment and the kind of apartment where you can't really set up a drum set and play and have your neighbors still like you. So we had a guitar and I just had to play music, and so I just started teaching myself guitar and playing more and more guitar, just I had to have an outlet and my drums were just in their cases. So that's how I got into playing guitar as well.

Leah Roseman:

Okay. That's an interesting story. I was talking to a young trumpet player recently, and he was saying, oh yeah, and his partner's a horn player. And I asked, what's that like? Trying to find an apartment. And he said, well, the last time we went looking for apartments, I brought my trumpet with me. I said, I play this. And they said, is it loud? He said, it's really loud. And he showed them all, but they managed to find an apartment that was like a back house. This is in LA. So they could sort of be separate.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, no, that's smart. That's smart. Be upfront about it. Yeah,

Leah Roseman:

You don't want to move in and then they tell you you can't play

Jack Hui Litster:

Well. Yeah. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So I was just thinking about jazz gigs and unfortunately it's so hard. Ottawa is, we're relatively small city of about a million people, but an incredibly vibrant jazz scene in terms of the number of great jazz musicians. I don't think there's enough places for people to play and not enough places. I'd like to see more real concert settings. So in the last week, I went to one of the small clubs where people play and there's a handful of people, some people were paying attention. It was disappointing for my colleagues on stage. And then I heard another one that was actually a concert setting, and they were saying what a difference it was for them to have that respect. And I would love to see more jazz concerts in proper theaters and treated more like the classical side.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, and it's so interesting. Jazz has, its kind of ebbs and flows of popularity. I wasn't at the concert, but I heard about the concert that Laufey did during the Jazz Fest here. And so she's a young Icelandic singer that sings very much in the style of classic jazz of the forties and fifties, and it was sold out, and I think she did two shows and she's singing fairly straight ahead jazz, and she's got a huge crowd of folks younger than me, which is so cool. Things can just come around and people rediscover styles of music that they might not have heard or maybe that has echoes of films that they love or that music that their parents or grandparents listen to, and it connects them and strikes a chord. Yeah, jazz has some really cool potential for sure.

Leah Roseman:

Now, you mentioned your wife. She's from Hong Kong, Chinese background. Can we talk about the Guzheng and what that whole adventure was about?

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, absolutely. I recently did a Master of Arts in Music and Culture here at Carleton. And one of the things that you can do as part of that degree, it's a fantastic program, by the way, I must say. I love it. It's very, very open-minded, as is their undergraduate program. So I was working in that degree. I was working my way towards my thesis, which was an analysis of Tan Dun's score for the film, crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. And I knew that in my second year I would be spending a lot of time watching and listening and analyzing and reading about that score in that film. And I felt that I just walked into that out of my first year in the program. I really wouldn't be prepared to be able to comment on the Chinese music in that film because the unique thing for me about that film, which the more I analyzed it, I realized it is actually been done in lots of different ways over the past 150 years.

But it was a breakout success that film. And the thing that stood out for me is how that film really seamlessly blended European orchestral traditions with Chinese traditional instruments and Chinese orchestra. And so I thought, well, okay, I've studied orchestration, I've worked a bit in that world, but how much do I really know about Chinese music to be able to really have something to say? So it was possible during that degree to take a directed study in performance as one of the courses for that in my first year. And usually when folks do that, they have a teacher in mind that they're going to work one-on-one with on their primary instrument to get deeper on a certain technique or a certain set of repertoire or something like that. But they let me do it on an instrument that I had never, never played before. So I did a directed study for eight months studying GuzhengZ with Zichan Yang, who's a great guzheng virtuoso and teacher here in Ottawa, and who had had connections with Carleton in the past.

And so I studied the guzheng for eight months. For me, that was really a nice way to be able to spend time connecting more with the culture of my wife's side of the family, and also of my children's culture as well too, because I've tried to study Cantonese several times now and made some progress, but it's the kind of thing where with any language, you need immersion and you need consistency over months and over years. And I haven't been able to get as deep as I would like in that. So I thought, well, as a musician, if there's a way that I can spend time focusing on learning Chinese culture through the music, that would be amazing for me. So that was something that I got to do. And so I learned a decent amount of some of the beginner repertoire for guzheng and then gave a lecture recital as well. And I wrote a couple pieces that were performed at that as well. And my daughter was studying guzheng for a few years as well, and so she also performed, her and I did the final piece together as a duet. So that was really special too.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, that's really wonderful. I was in China once actually when we adopted our younger daughter who's born in China, and I remember there was some dinner that our guides had organized. We all have these toddlers we just adopted, we were exhausted. But there was this guzheng player who was just phenomenal, and I remember just standing there with the kids and just listening to her, but it was in a restaurant setting, right? It's like always the thing, but it was great. So you prepared a really fun improv using live looping to share with this episode.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, I did. I recorded that on Monday, very much inspired by my friend Raphael Weinroth-Browne, and I've been following his career and getting to work with him a little bit. He's a phenomenal cellist, internationally renowned based here in Ottawa as previous guest on this podcast. And he does the kind of thing that I did with some editing afterwards. He does that live and in very beautiful and cinematic and virtuosic ways. And so I've been wanting to explore that with the guzheng of having a part that begins, and not all the parts are standard guzheng technique. I'm tapping on the sides of the instrument to get percussive sounds. I'm strumming it in the way that you would strum a guitar. I'm bowing it, which is a bit unusual, but then having these various layers that build on each other in sequence to develop into a larger idea as if I'm cloning myself and having multiple versions of myself. But yeah, so that was kind of fun. (music)

Leah Roseman:

I know a lot of musicians got into looping during the pandemic when they couldn't play with other people. Was that the case for you?

Jack Hui Litster:

Well, it's actually something that I haven't really pursued in terms of traditional looping, which is you've got the pedal and you're being able to hear all those layers live in real time. So when I recorded that multi-track guzheng piece a few days ago, I could only hear the things that I was playing live, and it all went into my software. I use Ableton Live, and then I had one four minute track, but then I took pieces of it and turned them into loops. And some of them were continuous loops, some of them came in at times and then came out when I hit the cymbal at the very beginning. That's something that I use as a transition piece, and it's also heard reversed as well. So I did about four takes for that and then liked the last one. So it's about half an hour of recording and then about an hour of editing to get that piece.

But as I was doing it, I wasn't hearing the other layers. For that. I would need to get a contact mic on the guzheng itself and have a pedal. And so I'm a few steps away from actually being able to do any of that kind of stuff live. It's something that I would love to explore more. But that type of thing is what got me into composing a few years ago, actually. So when I first discovered recording software, which is amazingly accessible, now. Accessible in terms of if you have the means to access something like an iPhone or any type of Apple device, which I'm not saying that everyone has access to one of those, but they are fairly accessible. And then there's free software such as Garage Band, which you can just use on your phone to create multi-track. You can create orchestral music using free software on your phone. And that's how I first got into multi-tracking. And then that led to discovering my love for composing as a primary musical outlet. And then that led to other things.

Leah Roseman:

Now, in terms of listening, you had told me that you really love Renaissance choral music.

Jack Hui Litster:

Right. And it's funny, I think when we were talking about this before, I think I mentioned that I didn't know years ago when I was young that that was the particular genre that I was so drawn to and I didn't know because I grew up, one of my favorite styles of music growing up was choral Christmas music and choral Christmas music of the type that you would hear sung by professional choirs in England, like the King's College choir, those types of recordings, or The King's Singers. And so I just loved the way the voices would blend, the way those compositions would flow, the way the harmonies worked, just everything about it. It really resonated with me. And part of that is my dad and his four younger brothers all went to St. Mike's Choir School in Toronto. So I was kind of always around choirs.

I was always around choral singing. I sang in some choirs when I was in high school, and so that was kind of always in the blood. But whenever Christmas would come around, I would start the season early, it would be September, and I'd be getting out the King's College choir and just listening to those beautiful harmonies. And it was only, I dunno, maybe six or seven years ago that I started discovering Thomas Tallis and I started discovering Palestrina and I just started discovering all these fantastic Renaissance composers and realizing like, oh, it's not just the Christmas music. There's a whole several hundred years of this style of writing, and it's still performed and recorded by so many great singing groups. And so yeah, I really fell in love with that style of music, and it still is really close to my heart. So I'm very happy to have the opportunity to be writing some choral music now professionally as well.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So you've written two operas.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I'm curious, did you write the Librettos as well?

Jack Hui Litster:

For the first one, I did for the first one, which is called The Day You Were Born. I wrote that libretto. I had some help from Jessica Ruano who's a local playwright and producer. She created the Ghomeshi Effect several years ago, a very successful play that she toured, and she had just adopted her daughter at that time, and so she was closely connected to the subject matter of that opera as well. So she was just kind of a sounding board and gave feedback and sort of questioned a lot of ideas as I was writing the Libretto. So that was really instrumental and helpful for me. Then the second opera that I wrote was, the text is all from a classic book of poetry by Kahlil Gibran called The Prophet. We took the first chapter, which is called On Love, and pretty much adapted almost word for word, that whole chapter into my second opera. What Is Love

Leah Roseman:

Now, just before we go on to that, I know we're going to be playing the finale from that opera. The first one about, I know you had interviewed midwives, you really went deep.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, That's right. Yeah. So I first met Norm Brown who runs Opera Ottawa, and we'd worked together, I'd played percussion on one of the operas that they had performed. This was Pre Covid, and then he invited me, would you like to write for our company? Maybe something small, maybe like a One Act opera is what we started talking about. And as soon as we got there in conversation, I thought, okay, if I'm creating an opera, opera stories are known for being very emotional. The drama is rich and full, and they're not pulling any punches. It's intense tragedy and intense death and intense love and intense betrayal and all this kind of stuff is sort of very classic to the way opera singing works. Opera singing is very powerful because it's portraying these very intense emotions. So I thought, okay, if I'm going to write an opera, I want to draw on some kind of lived experience.

I don't want to pretend to be some epic character that I have no actual lived experience with. So the most intense experience that I'd experienced at that point was seeing the birth of my two children. And it's such a, it's so fundamental to life itself. It's something that everyone can relate to, because everyon's either been born or given birth or seen a birth or all three. So I thought, well, maybe I can find a way to write an opera that explores all the emotions that lead up to that, and then are that moment. And then Act two of the opera explores some other aspects of parenting and stuff. But I thought I have my experience being in the room as my wife gave birth to our two kids, and I was able to deliver my son Fenton when he came out. So I have a little piece of the experience as an observer, but if I really want to tell this story, I need more than just what I've experienced and seen. So I talked to a number of mothers about their birthing stories and their birth experiences, a number of midwives as well too. And the main character of that opera that I wrote The Day You Were Born, is, her name's Isla, and she's a midwife as well too.

So that factors into the story too. But I wanted to do justice to that. I really, the three midwives that were there when my son Fenton was born were just, they were like family to us. They weren't family, but the way they supported us through that was just so meaningful, and I just wanted to honor them in a way. And so I was really happy to have the opportunity to do that as best I could.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I remember when I was pregnant with our first child, one of my colleagues said, do you have a midwife? And I wasn't even aware, I think it was recent in Ontario, that that was even part of the medical system. And I said, is that even a thing? She said, look, you're not ill. You don't need a doctor. You need a midwife. You should get on the list right away. And I'm so glad she talked to me about that because it completely transformed the whole experience.

Jack Hui Litster:

Amazing, same.

So this first opera that we were just talking about was recorded during lockdown. Can you explain how that worked?

It was, so that was a project that we'd started talking about in late fall 2019, around December, 2019. We started talking about it, and then I think I started writing or conceptualizing in the couple months before the first lockdown started. So in January, February, 2020. And then we were working on making plans for how we're going to record a crowdfunding video to start getting some support for this project. And then the lockdown happened. And so we really hadn't got very far at all. And so the first lockdown in Ontario in March, 2020, they shut all the schools and didn't open them for six months. And so we had our kids here at home, and as everyone remembers, it was pretty restricted at that point. Folks were mostly staying at home. You weren't really associating with anyone else in person. There were a lot of new bylaws about how and why you couldn't interact in person at all.

So then I wrote the opera over the next 12 months or so, and then come spring 2021, and I can't really remember where the pandemic was at, had it's ebbs and flows and its' different waves, but we had hopes that we've been in this pandemic for so long, maybe it will wrap up and live performance will start to bounce back, and maybe the timing will work out that as soon as we're ready to actually get together and perform it, maybe we'll have to still wear masks, but maybe an audience will still be there. But then there was one of those spring waves and everything shut down completely again in spring 2021. So the singers already had all their parts. They had already been working on everything. And the way we did that, it was really like you look back on some of the things that we accomplished individually and as a community in Covid, and you just shake your head.

This was my first opera. I was not a seasoned veteran of opera by any stretch of the imagination. So I'd written this 40 minutes of music, and Fred Lacroix, a phenomenal pianist here in Ottawa, just everybody loves him, and he's just ridiculously talented. He's just a phenomenal force of nature at the piano. So he was the accompanist for this performance, and he recorded the piano reduction for every single piece on video from his home during lockdown, and then sent all those videos to all the singers for all their different arias and for all, there was two choral pieces as well with over a dozen singers. And everyone then recorded with Fred's piano in their earbuds, well, not headphones, and mostly earbuds so it would look more like we were actually not in a studio. And they recorded all their parts from home, and then they sent them, transferred the files to me, and then I edited it all together.

I did all the mixing, and then I did all the video editing of the classic sort of Zoom-style gallery view of all the heads next to each other. And we ended up doing the whole opera that way and then releasing it to the world on YouTube in July of 2021. And yeah, looking back on it, it seems like it just an unbelievable story to tell. But I mean, we didn't have live performances so that you, there, you went through all that Leah, those kinds of things were sort of the best we had at the time. So we did lean into them and get the most out of it, as crazy as they were.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it was spring of 2021 that I started this podcast, actually.

Jack Hui Litster:

Oh, okay.

Leah Roseman:

There were no performances and people had time to talk to me. Now I have to schedule eight months ahead often.

Jack Hui Litster:

It was big. Yeah, it was big. But it is the kind of thing where as a composer, I play a number of different instruments and I can sit down and create music myself. But when you're composing, you're writing music and you're writing it in notation and you have it in your head. Sometimes you'll sing it through and get a sense of, okay, here's how the words are going to fit. Here's how it's going to sound together. But you're mostly folks that use computer notation software like Sibelius, which I use. You're hearing a really bad rendering of it playing back. You're like, okay, the harmonies are okay, okay, that works. But it's a very rough version of it. But then you have real great musicians perform it and they send that back to you. It's getting the most amazing Christmas present you've ever gotten. And I was receiving so many of those over a number of weeks and just hearing these beautiful performances of these pieces that had only ever lived in my head before, and seeing them brought to life, it was emotional, it was really special. It was a highlight of those difficult days of the lockdowns for me, for sure.

Leah Roseman:

So then this second opera, it was still performed in masks, though, to see these singers.

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, you know what? Yeah. I feel like the pandemic was still kind of lingering into early 2022, and there'd been a few false starts with live music. I think the summer before had been a little better at times. And we'd tried to do some distanced outdoor performances or masks. Everybody spread out inside, all those kinds of things. So we tried it, but it hadn't really worked. And then so we performed What Is Love, my second opera in person in June, 2022, so just over a year ago now. And it was the beginning or the first few weeks or months into a really big resurgence summer last summer. There was, I remember going to live music many times a week and just getting exhausted because all the festivals were back. They'd been gone for, I don't know if it was two or three years, but everything had been gone, and then everything was alive again.

So, so we performed What is Love in the beginning of that rebirth of all the live performance here in Ottawa, and it was just really, really spectacular to have everybody in person. We had about a hundred people in the audience for that, which having that many people in person still felt surreal at that time, but it was far enough from a lot of people had been vaccinated and all that kind of thing. So we felt like it didn't feel like, oh, there's a hundred people inside. This is really sketchy. I want to leave 'cause I'm uncomfortable. It was more like, okay, this is reminding me of what life used to be like and in a good way. So yeah, it was nice. The timing worked out really well, I think.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need my listeners' help. Please consider buying me a coffee. The link to my Ko-fiif page is in the description. Every dollar helps me cover the costs of this huge project. Thanks so much.

Jack Hui Litster:

Sure. Yeah. So, What Is Love, it's told as though there's some young members of a community that walk into the community and say to the members of the community, tell us what's love all about. So we had two fantastic young teenage singers that came and sang the prologue and started things off. And then there's four soloists, so two, a young man and a young woman, and then more a more mature man and woman. And there's a number of duets and solo arias. And so there's just been these reflections on all the different sides that love can have. Love encompasses duty, and it encompasses jealousy, it encompasses devotion, it encompasses romance. There's all these sides to how we experience love. So a lot of the pieces in the opera have those varied emotions, which is one of the things that was really fun about writing it. And then we wrap it all up at the end. It's the one piece where everybody's singing, but they're not always all singing at the same time. There's a fugal part in the middle where each of the soloists are coming in and building on what the previous line has been, and it builds to this sort of happy climax. So yeah, that's sort of what the finale does.(music)

Leah Roseman:

Thanks so much for sharing that. Now, another bit of education. You did Berklee online, you were able to take their film scoring and music business courses?

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, so I've taken five courses through Berklee online over the past 12 years or so. So I took two music business courses in 2011, and then I came back to Berklee online in, I think it would've been about 2018, 2019. I took a film scoring course, their film scoring 1 0 1, an orchestration course, and then an electronic music course. And Berklee has been part of my musical education destination vision since I was a kid. I would see the ads for Berklee College of Music when I was reading Modern Drummer Magazine growing up, and I would cut out their ads. They had these ads that said, "Take music. (period)Seriously, (period) And then their little logo at the bottom. It was very clever. So I cut out those ads and photocopied them and put them up around the room where I would practice and put them on my bedroom door.

I actually, I printed out, and this was the early days of the internet, so websites were a new thing when I was in high school. I printed out the audition requirements for drum set performance, and I taped them to the door of my bedroom so that I would see them every night as I was about to go to bed. And I would see them every morning as I was getting up. And I really drove towards that audition and then literally drove down and did the audition in Boston when I was 18. No, yeah, 18, and got a partial scholarship, but it was still like the Canadian dollar was rock bottom at the time, and so it would've been more than several degrees in Canada just to try to get through one year. So it just wasn't in the cards to go down there. But I always really admired the breadth of their school.

Yes, it's a very big program and they're financially very successful, so they can offer all these different things, and there's a lot of strengths to that. But I found that there weren't too many, I don't know if that's changed in the last couple decades since I did my undergraduate here in Canada, but I didn't see that in as many of the music education programs in universities here. I just really liked the diversity of different styles of music. It was mostly the different styles of music that they were open to at Berklee, so that always drew me in. But then, yeah, seeing that they have this amazing online school that has, again, dozens and dozens of courses, and they're not cheap, but they're also not as expensive as living in Boston. So you can save up or take out a loan and take some of those courses and get access to really phenomenal teachers. And they keep the class sizes small. It's like 20 students cap, I think, usually for those online courses. And there, there's like online video calls with the professors every week, and it's mostly asynchronous. You work your way through it, but there's several assignments every week. It's pretty heavy. They're just condensed three month semesters. They do four, three month semesters a year. So I've learned a lot in the courses that I've taken there. It's quite rich in content, I would say.

Leah Roseman:

That's really good to know. Now, if we could go back to Shining Suns, the title track is at the end, and it features great trombone playing by Mark Ferguson, who was a previous guest of the series, but in my episode with him, he played piano only. So people might be curious to hear that even for that reason. And there's some special appearances as well on that track.

Jack Hui Litster:

So I had a ton of fun with that. I was actually, I've worked with Mark off and on over the years. We've performed and recorded together years ago. And then while I was at Carleton, I was his teaching assistant for his jazz harmony course. But then I just admire the guy so much that I then took private lessons with him for part of last year actually, just to study specifically jazz harmony and arranging, jazz arranging for big band because he's just so good at that and he has such deep knowledge from many sides of how that works. He's just in high demand as an arranger. So I really wanted to learn more about that, something that I love, and it's been part of my musical vocabulary, but I don't have the depth that he has. So I really wanted to learn from him. So I wrote that piece specifically so I could do that kind of thing where I could hire live players.

So Mark, on that piece, so that piece, Shining Suns, it's arranged for a 10 piece jazz ensemble. So it's arranged for, let's see, soprano sax, tenor sax, clarinet, and then french horn trombone and bass trombone. So Mark recorded the trombone and bass trombone parts. And then Petr Cancura, a, fantastic sax player and runs the Ottawa Art, sorry, Ottawa Jazz Festival. Lovely, lovely guy. He performed the soprano sax, which is the melody line, and he recorded the clarinet and the tenor sax. So there's a tenor sax solo featured in that song as well was, yeah, it was kind of trying to emulate some of the interesting orchestrational choices of folks like Gil Evans who would take instruments that you wouldn't always find in a jazz context, like the bassoon, like the french horn, like the tuba, and then put them into big bands just to get different tone colors, different timbres.

So that's what I was going for with this one.

Leah Roseman:

And then at the very end-

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, and then at the very end, so Shining Suns, there's a secret song or a hidden track, and I grew up in the nineties, and lots of rock bands back then were putting hidden tracks. You get to the end of the song and then there'd be silence and you figure, oh, I guess the CD's done. But before you get a chance to go and take it out, another song starts playing. And so we were, at some point while I was midway through working on this album, my wife and my kids and I were in the car and we were listening to an album that had a hidden track on it. And so that track came on, and then we were explaining to the kids what a hidden track was. And they said, oh, that's really cool, daddy, are you going to put a hidden track on your album?

And I thought, well, I sort of have the album already all planned, and I don't have another track sort of up my sleeve to put on it. And we're halfway through recording it, but I was like, well, if you guys want to help me write one, then we'll put one on. And so they said yes. And so the Hidden Track on Shining Suns, my daughter wrote the melody and performed it. So that's her playing guzheng . And then my son is playing the percussion and the percussion that Fenton plays on it is shaking cereal boxes and playing with bells and things like that. And then I added some piano and some vibraphone and some panda drum and and it's my favorite song on the album, and several other people have said that too. They're like, oh, that one at the end, that's really great. I was like, yep, my daughter wrote that one.

Leah Roseman:

Wonderful. So we'll share that now, but after people hear it, there's more conversation to come. So thanks for sharing that(music). So we started this talk about Shining Suns and your personal journey, and you kind of glossed over these 10 years you spent working in international development. So I'd like to hear a little bit about that.

Jack Hui Litster:

Okay, yeah, yeah, thanks. So before pivoted out of music, so I had mentioned how studied jazz at St. Francis Xavier University, and then after I finished my second year, I went and I had a job working in a show band on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. So I did that, and that's where my wife and I met. And as I finished that, I sort of started to think, I don't know if performing music as my primary job is what I want to do. And I realized that because I was sort of in a way by working on a cruise ship, I was a little bit put off by the whole, and cruise ships, don't get me wrong, cruise ships are great in that they're steady jobs. I was performing six nights a week, which is hard to come by. There's not a lot of places where you can work six nights a week as a musician.

So I did love that, but I felt like I'm performing the same material over and over again for a new crowd, every cruise of folks who are just here to have a good time and have some drinks. And for me, I didn't see the value in that at the time, and I see the value in that a lot more now, but at the time, I felt like that's not enough. I need to make more of a contribution. Growing up in the nineties and early two thousands, and as people were talking more about poverty and climate change and inequality, I just felt like I need to do more than just help folks have a nice night out at the show. I need to do more than that. So that was what drove me to then go back to university. And when I finished my degree, I went back to school at University of Ottawa and I did a social sciences degree focused on international development with the goal of working in non-profit organizations.

And I was able to get work fairly soon after I graduated working, part-time and then eventually full-time, and then eventually as a manager of various nonprofit organizations. And it was amazing. It was a really great decade of my life. I was involved with the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, worked on some of their Asia policy and did their website, stuff like that. I worked on their code of ethics program, and then I shifted into fundraising and I was doing fundraising and public engagement at Inter Pares, which is non-governmental organization, a nonprofit here in Ottawa that works with grassroots local activist organizations in about 20 countries around the world. And that was an amazing job. I got that job when I was 28 and felt like, wow, I've landed in my dream job. This is amazing that I want to stay here for the rest of my career, is how I felt coming into that.

And then that type of work, I think can be really emotionally draining in ways that you don't always name. I think there's, unfortunately in the nonprofit sector, there can be this hero mentality or martyr syndrome, and I don't mean that in a negative way to the folks who are living that, but that's part of the culture that's sort of built into the culture of working in nonprofits of that I'm going to put in these extra hours and I'm going to be available at all hours of the day, and I'm going to do these things that are very psychologically intense and then do them again. And then that cycle never really stops. Working on issues like human rights. It doesn't really have a down season. It's a constant struggle. And so there's a lot of folks that do that for their whole career, and I have so much affirmation for them, but I realized that I couldn't do that.

I couldn't put in year after year and still have my mental health in a good place. So about five or six years into that role at Inter Pares I thought, I really need to find a way to get back to a good place that will be good for my happiness, where I will do well. And it was kind of obvious right away. As soon as I started thinking about that, I was thinking, well, maybe I can get back into music. Maybe there's still a way that I can pursue that dream, which had been such a big part of my dream and my goal and my vision as I was growing up. And it was something that I was so focused on for those 10 years of my life and up to when I went and studied at St. FX and then worked on the cruise ship, and I thought, well, maybe I can get back to where I was then.

I'd always continued to play music. I'd been involved in different bands performing in various styles of music and had done some recording, but I finally started to realize maybe I can be involved in things like producing and things like composing things that you can do from home, which are so key when you're a father of young kids. That was the other thing about performance that really made me uneasy was being in my early twenties and just having met the love of my life and thinking, imagining starting a family and thinking, well, if the way I can have full-time work as a performing drummer in the styles of music that I'm qualified to play are going to involve things like working on a cruise ship or things like touring or things like having to move to a big city and trying to make it in places where there is enough work, then that's going to mean I'm working weekends and evenings pretty consistently and what kind of a home life is that going to lead to?

And maybe it could have been great. There's a lot of people that thrive in that and have great families. I'm not saying it can't be done. I just didn't know if I wanted try and marry those two

Leah Roseman:

Is there an element of what people call compassion fatigue in the helping professions?

Jack Hui Litster:

I think so. I think I, when folks come into it, they have so much goodwill and so much energy and their heart is really full, and they're being enriched by being able to support various efforts, whether that's frontline stuff or whether it's working towards a cause if you're more, a few steps removed from the actual front lines. And then I think for a lot of us, it just starts to wear you down because you don't have that renewal and rejuvenation opportunity built into it. I mean, some places are better than others in that they have those conversations about mental health and self-care, a possibility to take time off. Towards the end, I was using things like needing to take an unpaid leave or taking a stress leave and those kinds of things, which luckily at the place where I worked Inter Pares, they were very open and supportive of that. And a lot of places aren't. I was working in fundraising for those seven years. And the average turnover, from what I've heard of a fundraiser that gets hired in a fundraising position at a charity is about 18 months. So from someone coming in and being the fundraiser, on average, they'll last about a year and a half, and then they'll burn out or they'll find something else, or they'll move on, or they'll change professions.

Yeah, there's some stress. Not to say there's so many other jobs that have a lot of stress, a doctor or a nurse or teacher. There's lots of stress and lots of other jobs too. I'm not saying it's the most stressful one out there, but it's hard to sustain for a long time, I've found.

Leah Roseman:

So in your work composing and also as a player, do you find that achieving a flow state is pretty easy for you, or does it come and go?

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, I think the more frequently you are doing it, the more easy it is to get back too. It also helps to know where you are and what instrument you're at, where those flow states happen. For me, my happiest place to compose actually is at my wife's parents' house. They have an upright piano in a room that's just all wood, and it has a very live sound, and it's just a great piano. And for some reason, when you put the damper pedal on, it has this really beautiful quiet tone, like you're playing lullabies, which is nice when there's, the family's full of the house is full of family, and I could just sit there. I often do sit there for hours and write and come up with ideas and experiment and improvise, but we have an upright piano here as well, and that's a pretty great place for me too.

And when I have the house to myself and I'm there, I'm often get into a pretty good state there as well too. Sometimes here in my studio, I have a MIDI keyboard here. Sometimes it can be pretty good here too, but I mean, often it's when I'm away from the instrument that I have the best ideas, and so I'll be thinking of a melodic idea or a rhythmic idea, and I'll record it as a voice memo on my phone to then come back to as my writing prompt when I'm actually at an instrument. But yeah, I feel like it's kind of like a muscle. I feel like the more often you're using that composition muscle, which is very similar to the improvising muscle. It's just then coming back to it and developing it rather than improvising. It goes out into the ether and lives, but the more often you're using it, the more it's kind of always ready.

I find that even when I'll be putting the kids to bed and it's silent in the room and I just have musical ideas kind of percolating in my head and I'm thinking about them sometimes I'm sort of tapping them out on my fingers, and if they're good, I'll say, I'll be right back, and I'll go and I'll write them down, or I'll record them as a voice memo and something. I'm like, I want to remember that one because they don't stick around forever, and I don't have a great short-term memory, so if I don't document it, then it'll be gone and the next one will come along. But yeah, so I'm grateful for that.

Leah Roseman:

Wonderful. I was just thinking how much all this technology helps us creatively.

Jack Hui Litster:

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, it's mind blowing to think about the breadth of work that so many composers in history did. And their lifetimes were shorter too. They didn't have as many years as we have now, granted, they didn't have as many distractions as we have now, but they also didn't have all the tools and supports where I can type in some notes and then hear back 16 parts in my software in minutes. And they certainly didn't have that. They had really great ears and really great imaginations and minds for conceptualizing, okay, this is what I've written down, and I know what those instruments will sound like, and this is, but it's so much more tedious, right? There's so much painstaking copying and then working with the players and then fine tuning and it's, yeah, things are so much easier for us now, all these memory aids and supports, and it's the best time in history to be a student of music, I think, and especially with the access to music that we have too. I mean, there's debates about whether these streaming services are for the good of all musicians, but they do give us access to such a diverse breadth of music that a generation ago you would've had to have a very great record library or a friend who had a really great record library to even be able to access those, but now they're at your fingertips, and that's huge. That's really huge. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Well, Jack, thanks so much for this today. It's been really fascinating and inspiring. Really appreciate it. Yeah,

Jack Hui Litster:

Yeah, my pleasure. Always great to talk to you, Leah. Thanks.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three with a fascinating of musicians and their stories and music. Have a great week. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need my listeners help. Please consider buying me a coffee. The link to my Ko-fiif page is in the description. Every dollar helps me cover the costs of this huge project. Thanks so much.