As Christmas and an impending visit to family and friends in London drew near, my mind fell upon a new plan. It came to me during a day dream in Dutch class, at the House of the Netherlands on Congostraat. What could I prepare for my dad that would please him at a low budget, yet satiate my desire to be creative? Then I had it: make him a CD, an album of the jazz standards that Lukas and I had been informally running through at Zilverhof for months. I could see this mini-Christmas project as something that would perform dual functions: alleviating the pressure of buying presents and giving us both a sense of creative direction and focus.
The next five or six days passed by in a flurry of activity. It was over the weekend, so naturally I was very busy with work at the pub, but now I was also in official recording cahoots with Lukas, who had instantly taken to the Christmas gift idea after sacking off one of his guitar buddies.
“Irreconcilable artistic differences,” he informed me.
It seemed that Lukas’s music partner had insulted him in a moment of drink-fuelled honesty.
“I cannot play with someone who doesn’t like my music,” said Lukas to me afterwards, severely wounded.
So it was really more of a mutual sacking-off. Anyway, the conflict made Lukas endorse my own musical project with renewed relish and excitement.
“How long have we got?” he asked.
“Four days tops.”
“How many songs?”
“I think a full album – ten with piano and vocals, two as piano solos.”
Lukas almost fell off his stool with laughter.
“You think that recording is that easy? It can take months to do a proper recording of a song!” he replied.
“Well, I’m not after perfection in jazz, just something that will warm my father’s heart from time to time.”
I had no pride to defend. I knew I was completely inexperienced and that he was the ‘musician’, and I also realised that he was probably selling himself short by agreeing to work with me. But sometimes artistic stuffiness gets in the way of so much real progress. Maybe sometimes projects need amateurs to push them along into realisation. In any case, the process was set in motion that Friday afternoon.
We began work straight away, recording some of those jazz standards that we believed worked best. Which ones were they? Well ‘Can’t Help Loving Dat Man’ done up-tempo or ‘honky tonk style’ as Lukas always says, ‘My Romance’ and ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’. I was surprised to see some of these songs in our jazz anthology (loaned to us courtesy of the magnificent Ghent public library): I was familiar with them from the great Roger & Hammerstein musicals such as Show Boat and Oklahoma, that I watched with obsessive interest as a little girl. But in any case, they instantly magnetized me; they were melodies that I knew as instinctively as primary school hymns. Then there were also the more difficult ones, the elusive, broken discordancies of ‘But Beautiful’ with its tapping insistence on B flat, and then others — more ‘bluesy’ numbers that required a bit of vocal sass, such as ‘Is You Is or Is You Aint my Baby?’
It was a marvellous experience. Often, the best recording moments were in the early hours of the morning when I returned home from my night-shift. Then we would sit, penny a piece, in Lukas’ dank, messy room, knotted and overcrossed with wires and cables – I with my black waitressing apron tied in a ribbon round my waist, and he at the piano; bow-backed, beautiful.
It was during those nocturnal sessions, snatched between shifts and ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ voice moments, that I realised how rewarding the collaborative and highly demanding work of recording music together really is. I mean, I had been recorded before – I had done it informally myself on a dictaphone with my piano teacher, and for school projects, but I had never done it with a computer programme and a microphone and one of the most brilliant jazz pianists in Belgium. Lukas was also in his element – the beautiful piano solos, intros and outros he carved out of the air in moments, his inherent ability to spot what key I should sing in – the sessions muscled out in him, what I already knew to exist but had lain dormant beforehand, that Lukas was a producer and musician of the highest possible calibre.
The strange and illuminating process of trying to capture that elusive ‘wrap’ number was also of great educational value to me. What was it, we both wondered and questioned together, that conspired to make one recording mediocre or another definitive? How could you harness the ‘magic’ — as we began to call it – trying to identify a quality that evades easy definition with words. Sometimes we found that it was grinding re-rehearsal that produced what we were looking for, at other times true teamwork, feedback and assessment, constructive criticism from listening to previous recordings. These felt like familiar tag-lines from teaching. However, ultimately more often than not the final cinch numbers came about mysteriously and unpredictably.
It was that weekend that I realised what an intimate, probing test and experience recording is for the vocalist. The mic, poised before your salivated mouth, captures everything: every false intonation, every flat note and hesitation. To achieve great recording requires mastery over your instrument but it also requires a deep degree of control over yourself, and feeling, a feeling for the beauty and pathos of the songs that you are singing. The mic can capture belief. It was astounding. Those recording sessions were some of the most profoundly honest self-encounters I had had for years, and more profound because they were witnessed by another. So great recording is about honesty, self-knowledge and also about trust. I realise now that those recording sessions with Lukas were also an act of love: they were nourished, enriched, ‘produced’ and structured by a feeling we shared between us.
And the result? Of course they were not all ‘great’. But some of them weren’t bad at all, considering that I am not a professional singer or even, really a talented enthusiast. Plus, those bitterly cold nights and comradely feelings of shared purpose and achievement also furnished me with another important realisation. The production of art should be collaborative. If for music, why not for writing? My experiences recording with Lukas, tapping out blues rhythms and debating about keys and tonal harmonies made me realise that great art should not only be encountered and received socially – but should be produced, as part of a more general benediction and grace, socially – in commune with another. In Campo Santo W.G. Sebald writes that “we make music to defend ourselves against being overwhelmed by the terrors of reality.” This seems to me a rather cynical point of view. Perhaps sometimes music is defensive or escapist, perhaps all art is; but it is also enriching – it works towards eliminating and palliating some of the very ‘terrors’ that we do see in life.
833 words a day 