TO Jazz Festival: Interview with Toronto jazz singer Alex Pangman
June 21st, 2010 by Alex | Co-Editor
What: Alex Pangman & Her Alleycats, Free Concert
When: Friday, June 25th @ 5PM
Where: Nathan Phillips Square, Afterworks Series, TD Canada Trust Toronto Jazz Festival
On Monday, BlogUT caught up with Canadian jazz singer and composer, Alex Pangman, for a telephone interview, before her performance kicks off the Toronto Jazz Festival at Nathan Phillips Square on June 25th at 5PM with a free concert. Sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Sweetheart of Swing”, Ms Pangman specializes in standards from the 1920s up until about the mid 1940s, and refers to herself as an “anachronism in her time”. As the Toronto Star once wrote, “It’s time-travel magic whenever Alex Pangman breathes into a microphone and evokes the great jazz femmes of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.” I first saw Ms Pangman at the Old Mill in November 2009, picked up her Live in Montreal album, listened to it on loop for weeks, and went back for more at her Reservoir Lounge gig last week. Ms Pangman also plays some country music but, she says, “Jazz is where my heart lies”. In addition to catching her show at the Jazz Festival, you can catch Ms Pangman at the Reservoir Lounge on the first Tuesday of every month.
BlogUT: When is your next album coming out and what can we expect from it?
Alex Pangman: I have a new album coming out in the fall, which I just finished recording, with my band, the Alleycats. It’s in the can, as they say. It’s called “33” and we’ll be releasing it to iTunes. The “in hand version” will be as a 33rpm, and it’s all songs from 1933. It will be my first record since the double lung transplant.
BlogUT: How has having a double lung transplant affected your career and life?
Alex Pangman: Being so sick for so long, it sort of took me out of usefulness for quite a few years. Things being rocky enough that I had to have a transplant, it’s as if the hours on the table gave me back not only my life, as in the ability to breathe, but also gave me back my art. As a singer with lung disease, I could see my health stolen from me in little increments. It’s pretty awesome now to be able to stand in front of a microphone and belt it out without having to cough or wheeze. I would encourage everyone to sign a consent form to become an organ donor as you can really help change people’s lives for the better.
BlogUT: What songs will be on your new album?
Alex Pangman: We play “100 Years from Today” and “I Found a New Baby”. We also have some guest vocalists: Denzal Sinclaire sings a duet with me on “You’ve Brought a New Kind of Love to Me”.
BlogUT: How did you get interested in jazz and in music from the 1920s-40s?
Alex Pangman: I was disenchanted with the music of my generation and looking for some sort of inspiration. I found some old records in my mid-teens with music from that time which was such a pleasant discovery. I was drawn to an era of music where melody and substance were very important; those were really lacking in my generation.
BlogUT: Who are your biggest influences?
Alex Pangman: I don’t have one single influence but I have certainly been influenced by a number of singers such as Mildred Bailey, Jack Teagarden, and Maxine Sullivan.
BlogUT: Do you listen to any modern music or have any modern influences?
Alex Pangman: I don’t really listen to modern music much; I’m a bit of an anachronism. I do own the Amy Winehouse CD… that’s modern right?! As far as jazz contemporaries are concerned I am a big fan of US trombonist Dan Barrett and his arranging. I’m also a huge fan of Canadian cowboy singer/songwriter Corb Lund.
BlogUT: What are your top 5 desert island albums?
Alex Pangman: Any of Connee Boswell’s albums. Something by Ruth Etting, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Kay Starr.
BlogUT: How do you think these old standards fit into the modern scene?
Alex Pangman: It’s definitely a niche market, the music that I’m drawn to. But I don’t think that this music needs to be thought of as history. It’s music of the past and present with timeless themes. People can still appreciate it as present and modern in that it’s being done now and in a trio.
BlogUT: When selecting your repertoire, do you have any difficulty with finding pieces that mesh with your modern sensibilities?
Alex Pangman: A lot of songs from back then are way too over the edge and not at all politically correct. Times have changed a lot since the 1930s: music and words have a very different meaning now. “Am I Blue” has beautiful verse and I must say the melody is remarkably memorable and yet the words are so antiquated that they are almost offensive. “The Right Kind of Man” is the same thing, though a beautiful song from the 1920s. I don’t want to be revisionist about history though so I hope I choose carefully.
BlogUT: Can you talk a bit about arranging for your group?
Alex Pangman: Writing the arrangements usually gets split between me and what the guys come up with: it’s somewhat of a joint thing. We’ve played together so long that arrangements will often come out of practicing together: we have a “schtick that we work on”.
BlogUT: How do you go about composing your original compositions?
Alex Pangman: I just need to find a quiet moment to put aside the craziness of life to sit down with an instrument. I find that I tend to speak in a very modern way, use modern slang, so it can be challenging to make my modern way of speaking mesh with an older way of song-writing. I sit down at the piano or with a guitar and I write as I play.
BlogUT: Aside from singing, do you play any instruments?
Alex Pangman: I play a bunch of instruments. I play the mandolin in my country music band, Lickin’ Good Fried. But my instrumental skills are a bit lacking. I think Duke Ellington said that he hired great musicians because they made him look good, and that’s what I do. You don’t really need to hear me play the piano.
BlogUT: What do you do when you’re not performing?
Alex Pangman: I spend a lot of time arranging, being a band leader, keeping the website up to date, making the records, doing all that stuff that comes with performing.
