Features

Are you planning to watch the Juno Awards on March 27? If you do, there’ll be no shortage of McGill nominees to cheer for. Meet some of the McGillians preparing for their big night.

by Daniel McCabe, BA’89

The Juno Awards, the biggest night in Canada for the country’s music industry, might seem a little like a mini-McGill Homecoming this year. McGillians – graduates, professors and students – have been nominated for a whopping 22 Junos. The awards, hosted this year by Drake, will be presented on March 27.

Hot off the heels of their recent wins at the Grammys and the Brit Awards, Win Butler, BA’04, and his band Arcade Fire are nominated for five Junos, including the coveted Album of the Year prize, for their CD The Suburbs.

The Virtual Haydn, an ambitious and critically acclaimed effort spearheaded by Schulich School of Music associate professor of performance Tom Beghin, is nominated for Music DVD of the Year. On the DVD, Beghin performs Joseph Haydn’s complete keyboard sonatas. What makes the project extraordinary, is that these performances have been meticulously crafted to recreate the exact sound of Haydn’s original performances – duplicating the instruments the composer used and the environments in which he played. The Juno nomination also recognizes the efforts of Martha de Francisco and Wieslaw Woszczyk, both faculty members in Schulich’s Sound Recording Program, and audio engineer Jeremy Tusz, MMus’06.

Here are some of the other McGillians who might be collecting new trophies later this month:

The man behind the scenes

 

Jeff Wolpert, MMus’86, is certainly no stranger to the Junos. He’s already won the prize three times and he is a finalist again this year for Recording Engineer of the Year for his work on recent albums by Loreena McKennitt and David Clayton-Thomas.

Wolpert has firmly established himself as one of the top recording engineers in the country, having collaborated with the likes of Anne Murray, Kris Kristofferson, Holly Cole, the Cowboy Junkies, Great Big Sea and many others on dozens of albums.

His music and mixing expertise is also in high demand for movie soundtracks – Wolpert has contributed to several films, including American Psycho and Being Julia.

“I enjoy being able to take on different kinds of projects,” Wolpert says. “When you’re working on a record, you become super-familiar with the material, but it can be really slow-moving. You’re there all the time in the recording studio, mixing everything. You’re seeing Oz behind the curtain.

“With a movie, it’s more of a craft. The more expensive the film is, the more that’s at stake. You have to be able to solve problems very quickly and that can be really gratifying.”

A graduate of the Schulich School of Music’s sound recording program, Wolpert is now one of the program’s visiting lecturers. He regularly teaches a seminar about mixing pop music, but he also makes a point of giving students advice on how to get started in the music industry. He warns them that it won’t be easy.

“When you’re trying to establish yourself, you need to be entrepreneurial. You have to be willing to sell yourself for next to nothing. I basically bought my big break. I bought myself a job.”

Wolpert earned a fellowship when he graduated from McGill and he used the money to purchase a small piece of a recording studio. In return for his investment, they had to let him work there. “My second client turned out to be Jane Siberry.” Wolpert’s contributions to No Borders Here, her surprise hit album, played a big role in establishing his professional reputation.

When asked if he has had any career highpoints, Wolpert says he takes particular pleasure in some of his longterm collaborations with artists like McKennitt and the Canadian Tenors and in seeing them grow from relative unknowns into stars. But one memory does stick out.

“When I worked on [the film] Blues Brothers 2000, I was in the studio with Aretha Franklin when she played piano and re-recorded ‘Respect.’ That was pretty special. Paul Shaffer [the film’s music director] said, ‘I am satisfied now – this is all I ever wanted to do.’ I knew exactly what he meant.”

Have banjo, will travel

Another McGill graduate who already has a Juno to his name is Chris Luedecke, BA’98, better known as the soulful banjo strummer Old Man Luedecke. His album Proof of Love earned a Juno in 2009 as Roots and Traditional Album of the Year (Solo). This year, he is up for the same prize for his most recent CD, My Hands Are On Fire and Other Love Songs.

“It was nice to be recognized,” says Luedecke of his Juno win. “When you’re starting out, nobody is out there telling you that what you really should do in life is become a solo banjo player. It was a shot in the arm and it opened up a few doors for me in Canada.”

Luedecke says his musical career, in part, stems from his time at McGill. “I used to shop at a second hand record store on Pine Avenue near St. Denis. One day, I bought a Sam Cooke album and a Carter Family album for a dollar apiece. They both changed my life, but when I listened to the Carter Family, I thought I probably had a better chance of sounding like that than I did of sounding like Sam Cooke.”

He subsequently picked up albums by Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie and became hooked on classic folk and roots. “There is a lonely quality to it that really appeals to me. I never had the ego to be a rock musician.”

Luedecke believes he owes another debt to his time at McGill as a literature and religious studies student. “You don’t really have to pay [a school] money if you want to read Shakespeare, but it was a really important time for me. It gave me the chance to really think about what I wanted out of life and I realized I wanted to work with ideas.”

His tender, sometimes wrenching songs have drawn high praise from this country’s music critics, but Luedecke says his craftsmanship comes at a price. “I’m unable to write unless I’m feeling pretty lousy.”

While the Juno nomination is lovely, Luedecke is currently focused on trying to make a name for himself in the U.S. and other markets, something that’s been elusive so far. “At the moment, I’m certainly not feeling, ‘Oh wow, I’ve accomplished so much.’”

Sounds like some good songs could be in the offing.

A marriage in music

Dan Kurtz, BA’93, and his wife Martina Sorbara form two-thirds of the electronic pop band Dragonette and serve as the group’s songwriters. Dragonette’s Fixin’ to Thrill is in the running for the Juno Award for Dance Recording of the Year (the other nominees include Chromeo’s David Macklovitch, BA’00, MA’03).

Kurtz and Sorbara both had their own independent musical careers well underway when they met at a music festival. The sparks quickly flew, but Kurtz had an easier time establishing a romantic relationship with Sorbora than he did in convincing her to become his musical partner.

“Martina had never written with anyone else before, and I think songwriter was, and still is, for her a very personal process. She didn’t like the idea of anyone else hearing her less-than-finished work, so our compromise was that I’d write some music, leave the house, and she would work on the track without me around. I’d be allowed to listen to it when she thought it was done, and then I could resume my work on the musical side.” His motivation to collaborate with Sorbara professionally was pretty straightforward. “I didn’t want us to spend our lives on separate tour schedules.”

The couple’s relationship and the occasional storms it has weathered sometimes find their way into Dragonette’s songs. “It’s a fine line, I think, for anyone who writes autobiographical songs,” says Kurtz. “Generally, though, Martina weaves her experiences in with those of other people, so that the story she’s telling is in fact a hybrid of a few stories. Our lives blur into those woven ‘tapestries’ well enough to still feel private.”

Arcade Fire’s recent surprise win at the Grammys supplied further evidence that the Canadian music scene is probably a stronger force internationally than ever before. Kurtz, who, along with Sorbara, has also written for Cyndi Lauper, has his own theories as to why this is.

“There was a recent documentary about Rush that really shows how difficult it was in the past for Canadian bands to be heard outside of Canada, and how it was basically up to one radio station in the U.S. that championed them,” he says.

“Canadian bands now have so many more avenues to be heard, it’s only natural that more of us get out and get heard. We have the blessing of government and public financial support [FACTOR, Radio Starmaker Fund], which make the years of money-losing touring easier to manage; and we have the Internet, which is the best border-crossing tool of all. Basically, we’re free to try get people into our music anywhere in the world.”

A memorable group of students

 

Earl MacDonald, BMus’92, is a Juno nominee this year for Traditional Jazz Album of the Year for Re: Visions, Works for Jazz Orchestra, a CD that features not only his piano work, but also six of his compositions and his arrangements for a 17-piece jazz ensemble. MacDonald is struck by the fact that three of the five nominees for Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year, Chet Doxas, BMus’04, MMus’04, Kelly Jefferson, BMus’92, and Christine Jensen, BMus’94, MMus’06, are also products of the McGill jazz program.

“In the years that I was at McGill, we had a very special crop of students, and many of them have gone on to become major players in the Canadian jazz scene, even on the international jazz scene. John Stetch [BMus’90], Tilden Webb [BMus’92, MMus’97], Kelly Jefferson, Joel Miller [BMus’93], Christine Jensen, Denzel Sinclaire [BMus’93] – I don’t think we realized what a remarkable group it was at the time.”

And MacDonald is quick to admit he wasn’t one of the stars back then. “I worked really hard as a student, because I was nowhere near close to many of my peers [in the program]. I got up early every morning and I practiced for six or eight hours on the piano every day.”

Apart from a successful musical career, MacDonald is also an award-winning teacher and the director of jazz studies at the University of Connecticut. “When I arrived at McGill, I had aspirations of making music for films. While I was there, though, I developed a true love for jazz and became interested in teaching too. I had role models [at McGill] in Kevin Dean and Gordon Foote – people who proved this could be a career path. I could be a jazz performer while sharing my love for the music with new generations.”

MacDonald spent two years of his life, from 1998 to 2000, as the musical director for the Maynard Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau Band, and he says he learned some valuable lessons from the late Canadian jazz icon.

“Maynard taught me that show business was a component of what we do. For years, I was focused on my art and how I sounded. With Maynard, I learned how important the presentation aspect was. When he spoke to the audience, he was always so polished and rehearsed. We had a great band, but we also had the lightshow.”

Playing with music

 

When MacDonald thinks of the talented music students he knew at McGill, there is another name that comes to mind – his onetime roommate, Maury LaFoy, BMus’93.

Over the course of his career, LaFoy has worked with Jann Arden, k-os, Olivia Newton John and Ron Sexsmith, but his most recent musical efforts are aimed at an audience that most musicians tend to ignore – children.

Together with his significant other, playwright and actress Shoshana Sperling, LaFoy is one of the driving forces behind the Monkey Bunch, a band that believes that little listeners deserve music that aims higher than the Barneyesque banalities they usually have to put up with. The group’s second CD, Power to the Little People! is a Juno nominee for Children’s Album of the Year. The band is also in the running for an Annual Independent Music Award for Children’s Artist/Group of the Year.

It all started as a lark, says LaFoy, a three-song CD custom-made as Christmas and Hanukkah gifts for their nieces and nephews. But the CDs made their way into the children’s daycares and the demand for more began to grow.

“We really try hard not to dumb it down for kids,” says LaFoy, who believes that much of the music that targets children is so focused on being easy to digest, “it lacks any real emotional depth.”

The Monkey Bunch’s influences range from sources as diverse as the Andrews Sisters, Muddy Waters and salsa.

“As a musician, it’s been nice to see that children’s music can be much more open stylistically that I originally thought,” says LaFoy. “We want to expose kids to a bunch of different styles. And we want to make music that their parents won’t go crazy listening to. There are inside jokes for the adults. There are allusions to the Beatles, the Who, even Spike Jones.”

The plan seems to be working. Even Toronto’s hip alternative weeklies have heaped praise on the Monkey Bunch. Eye Weekly admires their “Sgt. Pepper-ed brass marches, honky-tonk nursery rhymes and monkey-funk,” while Now credits the band with doing “the impossible: creat[ing] a kids’ album that’s actually great.”

Here is a full listing of all of the McGillians who are nominated for Junos this year:

ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Arcade Fire (incl. Win Butler, BA’04) for The Suburbs

GROUP OF THE YEAR
Arcade Fire

SONGWRITER OF THE YEAR
Arcade Fire

ALTERNATIVE ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Arcade Fire for The Suburbs

CONTEMPORARY JAZZ ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Chet Doxas, BMus’04, MMus’08, for Big Sky

Christine Jensen (BMus’94, MMus’06) Jazz Orchestra, for Treelines

Kelly Jefferson (BMus’92) Quartet for Next Exit

TRADITIONAL JAZZ ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Earl MacDonald, BMus’92, for Re: Visions, Works for Jazz Orchestra

INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM OF THE YEAR
David Braid & Canadian Brass (incl. McGill music student Keith Dyrda) for Spirit Dance

The Creaking Tree String Quartet (incl. John Showman, BCom’96) for Sundogs

CHILDREN’S ALBUM OF THE YEAR
The Monkey Bunch (Incl. Maury LaFoy, BMus’93) for Power to the Little People

CLASSICAL ALBUM OF THE YEAR: LARGE ENSEMBLE OR SOLOIST(S)
Les Violons du Roy (incl. Angelique Duguay, BMus’93, ArtistDip’05 and Michelle Seto, LMus’88) for Bonbons

CLASSICAL ALBUM OF THE YEAR: VOCAL OR CHORAL PERFORMANCE
Ensemble Caprice (directed by Schulich School of Music instructor Matthias Maute) for Salsa baroque

DANCE RECORDING OF THE YEAR

Chromeo (incl. David Macklovitch, BA’00, MA’03) for Business Casual

Dragonette (incl. Dan Kurtz, BA’93), for Fixin’ to Thrill

ROOTS & TRADITIONAL ALBUM OF THE YEAR: SOLO
Old Man Luedecke, BA’98, for My Hands Are On Fire and Other Love Songs

ROOTS & TRADITIONAL ALBUM OF THE YEAR: GROUP
The Creaking Tree String Quartet for Sundogs

The Marigolds (incl. Caitlin Hanford, BEd’78) for That’s the State I’m In

JACK RICHARDSON PRODUCER OF THE YEAR
Arcade Fire

RECORDING ENGINEER OF THE YEAR
Jeff Wolpert, MMus’86

MUSIC DVD OF THE YEAR
Tom Beghin, Martha de Francisco, Wieslaw Woszczyk and Jeremy Tusz, MMus’06, The Virtual Haydn

ELECTRONIC ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Chilly Gonzales (aka Jason Beck, BMus’94) for Ivory Towers