Roddy Ellias: Transcript

Episode link, audio video and bonuses

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. In episode 12, season one, I spoke with Roddy Ellias, a jazz guitarist, composer, and educator. At the beginning of the episode, you'll hear him play a tune. I'll let you guess which one when you hear it. And we discussed many things around creativity, including some of Roddy's projects, his 2022 album, Not This Room, and his puppet opera, Sleeping Rough, both of which he collaborated with his life partner, the author Sandra Nichols. He also talked about his start in the business and his perspectives as both a martial artist and musician. In the separate bonus episode, you can hear us play an improvisation. All these episodes are also available in video format, and the link is in the description.

Hello. Welcome.

Roddy Ellias:

Good morning.

Leah Roseman:

Roddy Ellias, guitarist, improviser, composer, educator, and I'm so happy you agreed to speak with me on the series. And I know you're ready to play something for us.

Roddy Ellias:

I am. And good morning. Nice to see you this Sunday morning. Okay. (Music)

Leah Roseman:

Just hanging there at the end. Oh, gorgeous. Thank you. It's amazing.

Roddy Ellias:

I love that too.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And the name of it is?

Roddy Ellias:

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things. Rogers and Hammerstein, I think.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And it's like you put it through this beautiful kaleidoscope for us. That's really, really great. Can you say a little bit about that beautiful instrument you're playing on?

Roddy Ellias:

I sure can. This is handmade by a woman, which shouldn't sound odd, but well, let me give you a fact too. We're in Ottawa and in the Ottawa region, well, up until two weeks ago, three of the world's absolute best guitar makers were women living in Ottawa. One of them just moved to Newtown Newfoundland, and that's Peggy White. And I can't say enough about... She came to guitar building late in life, and her partner, Linda Manzer at the time, is still one of the world's leading guitar makers. She's the one who made that fancy guitar for Pat Metheny, the harp guitar with a million strings. And she's made Pat Metheny probably 20, 30 guitars. And so Linda mentored Peggy. And so Peggy started like, well, I don't know what age, but later in life she was a musician though as well, amongst other things so she had a great ear and still is a musician and a singer.

And anyways, so she made me this guitar and we talked about it a long time. We talked about the woods and she asked one day, "Would be interested in having a quite unusual back and sides made of African blackwood?" Well, I said, "I'd never heard of that." And she explained it might give it a nicer sound. And we went for it. And sure enough, I mean the bass is, I don't like using this analogy, but it's almost like a roar.

It's just so alive. There's so much as they say in China, Chi in this instrument, it's like it's really alive and it responds so well. We had to work on getting the action, because a lot of times people who play these kinds of guitars are playing folk music or something, and I'm trying to play Bach and stuff on it. So I need an action a little bit more friendly without compromising the sound, which was... And she worked with me and worked with me, and we got it to my picky specifications. She's just brilliant. I can't say enough. I got to get her to make me a seven string guitar. Well, for people interested out there, there's a three year waiting list now.

Leah Roseman:

We'll have a link to her website in the description of this video, as well as all your projects. Yeah. You know, mentioned you practice Bach, I know you do that a lot. So you really do straddle the jazz and classical worlds, especially as a composer.

Roddy Ellias:

As a composer, yeah. I would not perform classical music, I mean I have and I can but it's not my strength. I just do it, one just because it really pleases me and it grounds me. So I either try to do it first thing in the morning or last thing at night or before a gig sometime. I played two days ago, did a recording and I just calm, just to ground myself. I know I was going to improvise with someone like freely for an hour nonstop. So I just wanted to ground myself. And I just played some Bach and... How can somebody write so much beautiful music? Just, I mean, we've all wondered that, endless flow of...

So yeah, it's particularly Bach and I like listening to and studying a bit different composers. Right now I'm back to Ligeti who was a big influence on me when I was a music student. And I'm just taking, with the piano studies and I might just take two bars and look at it and try and play some of the voicings and then see how I might use those principles slowly. And Ravel and studying those. So I more study them from a compositional point of view than to perform them, although I love trying to play, that music.

Leah Roseman:

I think a lot of the most interesting musicians like yourself have a pretty interesting path, the way they develop musically. So can you speak to that, your early days on the road with a rock band in California and different stuff you've done?

Roddy Ellias:

Yeah, well even before that. Okay. Yeah, I mean I went through a lot of different styles. When I was young, I didn't start playing guitar until 12 or 13 and I did not come from a musical house. Nobody played instruments or sang, although my cousins sang, well, I had my first cousins and they all sang and played things. But for a year we were in transition moving and we ended up in, you know one of those apartment buildings that have three walk up, three floors, and there's three of those apartment buildings in the sort of enclave. And in about five or six of those units were guitar players. Right upstairs from us were the Rowan brothers who played in Hull every night, six nights a week. And there was two French Canadian kids, one played the harmonica, so all different kinds of music. And there was a guy below me that played the Hawaiian lap steel guitar like this. And he started, that's how I started.

And country music with a bar and stuff. And then just learning all kinds of music, country music, pop music and so on. And then when The Beatles came out in the 62, I guess, I went and bought the record at The Treble Clef on the mall and within two weeks I knew all the songs.

So we had a band in high school and we played the Beatles songs and Rolling Stones and stuff for a year. And then this musician from Barbados came, Lew Kirton and he was an incredible R&B singer, really great. And he auditioned a bunch of bands and he decided to choose us. So we became the Lew Kirton band and so we played R&B for three years. Meanwhile I'm taking classical guitar lessons and reading lessons because I could played by ear and also trying to learn jazz students and The Girl...

Stuff like that on my own, not really understanding what jazz was, but liking the tunes. Not the heavy, not Charlie Parker or anything. I didn't hear Charlie Parker until later. And then in, I graduated from high school barely. And then I auditioned for a band from Montreal, a pop band called The Sceptres. And they actually had a number one hit across Canada. And anyway, I got the gig and we toured across Canada and that was like, I don't know if you remember a group The Four Seasons and it was that one guy with a really "Sherry, Sherry baby" way up high. So four part harmony and it was like a vocal group, so I had to sing the tenor part which just below him. So straining my voice every night. Anyway, did that for about a year. That group broke up and then I got a call and I was playing at the Skyline Hotel with all these old jazz musicians in the dining room playing standards.

And I was still only 20, 19 or 20 I think. And I got a call, the maitre d' comes up and says, You have a call from LA. So I go and answer the phone and somebody offered me a job playing with a pop tour, like a Holiday Inn type circuit band that was based in LA. And the only reason they'd heard of me was because the guitar player that was leaving knew of me somehow. And then two of them were Canadian and two of them were American in the band. So I thought about it overnight and then the next day I was on the plane to LA.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Roddy Ellias:

And that lasted a year. And we played, I wasn't fond of the music, it was real middle of the road. I couldn't stand it, but I mean, I was making pretty good money and seeing all over the States from California up the coast up to Alaska and all through the Midwest and bit in Canada. So that was nice. And incidentally, on both of those touring things, I'd spend my days practicing, right. On the first gig, I shared a room with a drummer. He'd watch soap operas all day with his drum pad and curl his hair. So I'd go in the bathroom and turn on the fan, so I couldn't hear him.And so I missed a lot of travel. Anyway, so a very eclectic thing, and then came back to Ottawa and luckily started finally mixing with musicians that I wanted to play with, jazz, older music, all older, and was mentored that way by on the gig learning, playing, I was lucky to land a gig that lasted three years, six nights a week, playing with people that were twice my age and they were great players. And I'd come home every night and I sound horrible. And I'd practice literally till the sun came up, then I'd sleep till, and then one day I didn't know what to practice in those days. Jazz, there was no jazz pedagogy or you just learn by copying records and listening, but also, I mean, you had to learn the instrument. So I thought, well, okay, I look at a chart, I got to learn how to play every scale from every finger and every position and this and every arpeggio.

And I developed this really good technique and it was too much because, and one day I asked this older musician, Norm Clark, I said - well, I didn't ask, I said - Norm, I said, "The more I practice, the worse I sound," because I was practicing all these then plugging them in to improvise. So I sounded like scales and arpeggios, right? And so he looked at me, said, "Well, stop practicing."

Yeah, that's it. And meanwhile, I'm always playing classical guitar. And so yeah, it was all new to me. And lucky enough in those days too when I was in high school, to go to Le Hibou coffee house here and hear a real eclectic mix of music. No classical music there, but it was some incredible, like Joni Mitchell came by as a single folk singer, Jerry Jeff Walker, these Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, these blue singers and some jazz there.

And Lenny Breau used to come, Lenny Breau, a Canadian, who was incredible genius on the guitar. And that was a big influence on me too, because he would sit there and he'd play an Indian raga and then he'd play a flamenco piece, or he'd bring all that music into what was loosely termed jazz and that. So I was at a young age exposed to the fact that, yeah, jazz isn't always just (music) it can be (music) all kinds of things in there. (Music) And then he started doing these flamenco techniques (music) like another Rogers. I think, and my mentors would say, the people I looked up to said, "Listen to all kinds of music". And then the famous line by Duke Ellington, "There are two kinds of music, good music and bad music."

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So you mentioned a little bit about jazz pedagogy, and you've been very active as a teacher of both composition and guitar. And you started teaching online way before the pandemic and students all over the world. So what kind of approaches do you take?

Roddy Ellias:

The only approach I take is no approach. So I treat everybody totally different as an individual. So I have no, yes, I mean, I have things that I teach, I mean when we talk about harmony, I do this or we talk about, I have modules, but I don't teach them in any particular order or any particular manner. So I have a certain information, certain approaches, certain philosophies, certain ideas. But I really try to find out first what the student is looking for and what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are, but particularly what their strengths are and go with that. I like to go with, some students don't like it, like I say, But what do you want to work on today? It's different.

It's very different than a classical approach because in jazz, the most important thing is finding your own voice. So if I impose things on a student, it's not helping them find. So my job is to help them teach themselves, because that's really what jazz is about, so yeah, transcribe, maybe transcribe a solo. A lot of jazz students talk about transcribing a solo, which means listen to say what Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong did and learning it by ear.

And that's fine, but it doesn't get you anywhere. What you need to do is maybe learn it by ear then, but then rather than learn those licks or whatever, note for note and plug them into your playing, which some people do, try to analyze and understand what was that musician going for? What's the principle behind what they're doing? And then find your own voice. So we always talk about language in jazz, finding your language, find your own language. But yeah, it's about finding your own language, not using somebody else's language, but you can use somebody else's language too, and then twist it to make it your own language. So it's just like reading a lot of books and then getting used to how sentences work and everything, without copying the sentences verbatim.

Leah Roseman:

Gets distilled.

Roddy Ellias:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Before you talked about feeling grounded, and I know that you've had a close relationship with a couple of martial arts over many years, does that have a bearing on your approach to practicing or music making, do you think?

Roddy Ellias:

Yeah, what I've noticed over the years is that martial arts and music are basically just different manifestations of the same pursuit. And that's the pursuit of grounding, getting inside yourself, getting outside yourself, connecting with the outside world, connecting with the inside world, and different approaches to doing that. I mean, there are some martial arts that actually have music in them, like drumming, and rhythm and flow. I mean, to me, the big connection is, especially with improvisation, is flow. Flowing. So rather than... In martial arts, you spar, right? And so one of the first things when you're a younger martial artist is if you're sparring, you think you have to respond to something or react to something. So somebody throws a punch and you have to react to it. But what I've learned slowly over the years is that it's all about flowing, being in the moment and flowing with really connecting with your opponent, whether it's a friendly opponent or an unfriendly opponent, connecting and understanding what they're doing and going with it, flowing with it, and not trying to oppose it, but maybe deflect it or go with it or whatever.

And I think music is so much like that. It's like you're not, you're flowing. So the other night when I was playing with Jean- Michel if he plays a chord, I don't go, Oh, he played a D minor sus four so I can play.Okay, like you said, you asked a question, I sort of flow with it, right? It's like I don't have an answer set up. I don't have, okay, Leah asked this question, here's my answer to that. It just evolves. So it's flowing. So I think that's the real connection between martial arts and then there's the spiritual, getting inside the energy. External energy comes from internal energy. And I find the same with music. So if I play a note, even on the guitar, which is not a wind instrument, if I breathe out, if it's coming from here and I breathe out from my lower abdomen , middle, the diaphragm and all that, not in a physical way, but if the energy's coming inside just going (music).

So I'm hearing it in here and I'm feeling it here and I'm feeling it here. So three levels, the gut, the heart, and the head. And it's exactly the same at martial arts. Well, that's where that idea comes from, I think for me. But I've always, I remember going to a cello clinic, or actually my girlfriend at the time went to a cello clinic and she relayed this story to me of that another cellist that said, It comes from here and in the sound. And I thought that's when I started, that could work on guitar too. And so I tell all my students, it comes from and just play the note and then listen to it coming out, just like your breath is coming out.

Imagine the sound coming out of the instrument, but it's coming from here rather than just going, I mean, I could hear the difference there. One is just superficial. And I guess in martial arts it's like, okay, here's a punch. I've done all the body mechanics, but now it's coming from inside and everything's relaxed and joined and connected and I'm just projecting with my mind. And it's there. It's like, it's projecting. So projecting out with your mind. If I project this note out, (music)

If I just think of it going to you or going to this microphone, rather than just playing a note. So now I think of it, (music).

Leah Roseman:

So in the last few months I've been able to listen to you perform live with other jazz musicians. Do you want to talk about that? How that's been possible during our lockdown?

Roddy Ellias:

Oh, you haven't been or you have been?

Leah Roseman:

I have been. I have heard you.

Roddy Ellias:

Oh, on the Syncspace? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Adrian Cho, who's a local musician and scientist and brilliant person, came up with this brilliant idea of separating the video and the audio and so that you could actually play with musicians, ideally in the same city, but in different locations and without any latency. And it actually works with people out of town. I play regularly with my friend in Toronto, Lorne Lofsky great guitarist. So we just, we're going to play this afternoon, just play some tunes together. And he reharmonized the tune. He's going to show me how, we'll just hang as if he was at my house or I was at his house and we were playing. And then, yeah, so there've been a few gigs that way and it's been very interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's not like the real thing.

Leah Roseman:

But it enables a certain magic to take place when we've all been so isolated. And in the future, I think it's only going to get better. So I'll have a link to Syncspace for sure in the description on this video. And for non-musicians listening to this, a lot of people don't realize, because there's been all this stuff on YouTube in the past year, and people said to me, Well, those orchestras are playing together. I said, No, no, People really don't get that everyone pre-records their part and it's all put together. But with Syncspace, it is live because, so the latency has to do with the fact that if we were trying to play together now rhythmically, we could not be in sync, even though we're both using ethernet without special technology. So that's what that would change.

Roddy Ellias:

Because I play a note and then you hear it a little bit later than I play it. And then you play one back. Yeah. So if you're in the same city and you both have really good Wifi, high speed, and it's a good day, there's like, you don't even hear a latency. There might be a little bit, but you, sometimes it's like as if you were 12 feet apart.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I've used it as well with my students to play duets. It's quite magical actually. Especially since I hadn't seen them in person for so very long.

Roddy Ellias:

And actually in live music there's latency too, like in your orchestra, for example.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, for sure.

Roddy Ellias:

I mean, the percussionist have to deal with, when in exactly am I going to play this? Because there's a big space between the basses and the percussion. I don't know what, 50, 60 feet. So they have to take all those things into consideration.

Leah Roseman:

And I want to circle to some of your composition projects. I want you to speak about Sleeping Rough, which is an amazing collaboration with your wife and other musicians.

Roddy Ellias:

Okay. Well, Sleeping Rough is an opera, I don't like to use that word because I'm not really an opera composer. And I mean, I've studied some operas, but I'm not, I'm a bit of a phony, but I called it opera because it was the closest-

Leah Roseman:

It was an opera, I was there. It was amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Roddy Ellias:

But for someone who is not really that fond of opera...

Leah Roseman:

Might turn them off,

Roddy Ellias:

Although, no, no, I felt like a phony writing an opera. And some operas I really like, I love, Berg and anyway, I won't get into that, but, so it's an opera for puppets and it's puppets. I've always wanted to do something with puppets, always. And I never knew the different puppet traditions all over the world from Indonesia, Japan and so on, and Africa, and even in the States and in Canada. So I wanted to do something, I didn't know what. Another background to this is when I was, I won't say a young student at Ottawa U studying music, because I didn't go to university to study music till I was 30. And I went to study classical composition. I was already had a career playing jazz for 10 years. So I went back, I was teaching there jazz and decided to take... Anyway, that's another long story.

But I lived, while I was a student, right across the street from the Men's Mission, which was a homeless shelter for men. And I watched these people every day. I got to know some of them, talked with some of them. And so that was always not an interest for me, but a concern for me. And I'd see people starting off there, and they'd maybe start off with a suit jacket. They like, maybe were married, had kids, lost their job, things went downhill. And they'd end up there for what they thought was a few days, and they'd still be there a year later. And I'd see them degenerate.

So they came from all different walks of life. So became very concerned. And so that was always in the back of my mind. And one day, Julian Armour from Music and beyond called me up and he said, Well, we haven't done any Roddy music for a while. What would you like to do? I said, Well... I mean, he's such a great supporter that way. Let's do it. Let's find a way to do it. And so we got the funding. And so the music, it's about a homeless man and all the character, it's about homeless man and a young woman who wants to help him out. She's a social worker and the young woman's mother. And there's a narrator and almost like a Greek chorus, a one person Greek chorus, who was incredibly done by Kellylee Evans. And all four singers, the singers were just unbelievable. Couldn't believe it.

And different. Two jazz singers and two opera singers. And so all the characters were played by puppets made by Noreen Young from Almonte, who was actually where Peggy had her studio too. What a place. And Noreen's like, the order of Canada for making puppets. That's how good she is. And these puppets are so, as you know, so magical. And I felt like they could actually do things that human beings couldn't do because there's no ego in them. So that it was just pure emotion and they were so expressive. And I didn't know what the hell I was doing, really. I mean, okay, now that I got into this, how do you write an opera? So I just said, well, and then Sandra, well, Sandra Nichols, who I've done a lot of work with, happens to be my wife, but I mean, even if she wasn't, I'd work with her.

She's so great. And we just connected. That's how we met, is talking about music and poetry. And I said, I know, always looking for poetry to set music to, she thought I was giving her a line. Well, maybe I was, no. So we talked about what the story, we evolved and she just wrote an incredible moving libretto. So I thought, well, okay, now what do I do? Well, okay, opera, they sing melodies. It's all about singing the melodies. So I just sat down and I took the libretto and I wrote from beginning to end a melody line. Nothing else, no chords, no, just the melody. How do I express these words with melody?

You're not going to go I'm happy today. So you want to get something that expresses. And then step two was, Okay, now, what? Well I guess I better harmonize this somehow. And then step three was orchestrated and I knew exactly who I handpicked the singers and I knew, and they all had different things they could do. Felicity who was singing the part of Emily, I knew she could do anything and she could hear grass grow and change her range like this. So I wrote anything, I wrote and so on. And so that luckily worked for me too, just writing for the singers, for the people. So it came together. I mean, it was really teamwork. I mean, yeah, I'm proud of my writing the work I did, but they say that a chain is as strong as the weakest link. There was no weak links at all. The puppet making, the musicians, the conducting, Matthew Larkin, the singers, the stage people, everything was, everybody was just amazing. So yeah, it worked then.

Leah Roseman:

So when you're writing music, are you using a keyboard? Are you using midi? Is it pen and paper?

Roddy Ellias:

Pencil and paper. And I usually have my guitar in my hand mostly because, I mean, I can sit down and write out of my head, but I find I'm just more secure with the guitar in my hand. So I might just fool around and I might just, I'm sort of like, when I'm improvising, I might be singing the notes in my head. So I connect that way. But it's all, if I'm looking at the text and I'm saying, Well, I'm doing that right now, I'm writing some songs. So I might just start, Okay, who am I writing for? What's their range, what are the words, what do the words convey? And then, okay, so here's my range and this is the mood I want. And then, okay, well, and I'll just maybe play it, I don't know, just play a melody, just think, and then just play along with it on the guitar.

It's because I'm used to that and I play the guitar. And again, if I'm writing a song, which I'm doing now, I'm writing some songs for Kellylee about COVID, and I'm doing the same thing. I'm just writing a melody first, putting chords to it. And I mean, it's not the way the Beatles wrote songs or it's a very, I don't know, I don't know a lot of people. I mean some people write the music and the words at the same time. Some people write the music, then put the words, and some people write with the chords at the same time. Sometimes I do that, but I really like focusing on just the pure melody. Last night I was working on the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, Bach and I was just played the top, the melody part, right. Whatever it's all the way through. And there's these sequences, and it's a fugue and everything, but with the melody, I mean, it's just a song or it's just pure melody. So all, yeah, it's a fugal and there's all these things going on, but that's sort of secondary.

Leah Roseman:

These songs you're writing, is Sandra involved with the lyrics at all?

Roddy Ellias:

Oh yeah. She wrote a dozen poems or songs. And we both struggled with this because we're in the middle of the pandemic and we're writing about the pandemic. And I'm finding, and she found too, usually she works really fast. I work really fast. We both work fast. We both work together. Really, we flow. But we've been struggling with this because I think because of the pandemic, we're not out mingling with, I mean, you get energy from people, even going to a restaurant. Sometimes we go to a restaurant and have a bit of wine, have a nice meal, come home. And then I feel like writing music, I'm charged up from the energy of people, or you can get it from nature. And we go for nature walks and everything, but you know, you really get energy from people, I think. And interacting and life experiences. So sitting in your room for a year and a half and then halfway through that, trying to be inspired to write, it's really tough, but we're getting there.

Leah Roseman:

Well, this has been so inspiring, just the big range of your thoughts and feelings about music and your life and composition. I really appreciate you agreeing to speak to me today.

Roddy Ellias:

Oh, thanks. Sorry, boy. I was really talking this morning. Must have been the coffee.

Leah Roseman:

So thank you.Season one of this podcast had 20 episodes and season two continues with a really interesting mix of musicians talking about their lives and careers with perspectives on overcoming challenges, finding inspiration and connection through a life so enriched with music. Please follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to be informed about each new episode.