The Right to Sing: Prelude & Part 1

Here I am, back again at the joyous music camp, Django in June! The timeless tunes pouring out of every doorway, the exquisitely gorgeous campus of Smith College, the spirit of play and growth, and honestly, the FOOD-- (I swear, there is something truly healthy for me about eating multiple servings of ice-cream per day, one week out of the year.)

Django in June is a magical experience all around, and I've been honored to add to the magic by offering an all-day vocal workshop, teaching yoga in the mornings, and being a part of the all-women & non-binary jam. The Jazz Manouche scene is predominantly male, and creating a space to celebrate the presence and musicality of the non-male players is important work.

In preparation for the vocal workshop, I drew from several sources of inspiration. I dug into the history of the vocal musical lineages that lend themselves to the gypsy jazz style that we practice and celebrate, including European and Romani folk traditions, flamenco, fado, and American Jazz, blues, and musical theatre. I dug into vocal anatomy and phonation pedagogy, from my old theatre and voice textbooks. I dug into performance know how of what works and what doesn't work in front of a crowd; and I tied it all together with pervasive themes of presence, grounding, centering, and authenticity.

Anything that we do is going to be infinitely more effective when we're connected into our authenticity.

At a recent women's circle, the icebreaker question posed was, what is your relationship with your spiritual practice. My answer was, "like a bloodhound." I am deeply interested in following the scent of my spiritual journey, in taking the next step that bliss and authenticity illuminate, and in picking up the clues as they unfold.

I am a highly-qualified professional vocalist. This fact surprises me, and yet here I am. It would be a waste of time and energy to refute this fact. I see and hear the musicians I sing with, I witness the experience of the audiences I sing for, I make my living in large part by singing, and I am teaching voice and singing at a highly celebrated niche music camp.

I would be foolish to miss this clue that the voice is a key part of my soul's work in this lifetime.

But I also recognize that my work here is not strictly musical, in the conventional sense. Autobiographically, I also have extensive training and experience in human anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, neurology, psychology, sensory perception, botany, public speaking and performance, yoga, feminine energy and tantra, astronomy and astrology, and therapeutic process.

An astute student in the voice workshop enquired if what I was teaching in that moment, about grounding and centering, came from my studies of yoga, or my experience performing, or somewhere else. I answered that it is quite necessarily the gestalt, and absolutely not any one piece in isolation.

The aroma of the bouquets that each one of us holds is an emergent perfume that far surpasses the scent of any individual flower in the arrangement.

I am closely watching the emergent magic in my bouquet. And I endeavor to attend to it, foster it, and share it, with as much fidelity as I can.

With this heartfelt intention, I lay out in devotional reverence, the scaffolding for, and what is subsequently brimming from, the vocal workshop I facilitated at Django in June.

Part One: The Instrument

The voice is the most intimate instrument. It is within each of us; inherent and innate. A brilliant participant in the vocal workshop, a violin player, shared with me that the violin is called "fiddle" as a compliment: it indicates fidelity. The violin holds the honor of being the external instrument that can most accurate express the subtlety, diversity, individuality, pathos, and communication of the human voice.

The voice is a part of the body, and emerges from the breath. The body, is not a collection of distinct parts, with the hands being totally separate from the legs, the lungs entirely disconnected from the brain.

The body is a continuance.

Every part is connected to every other part,

without beginning, ending, or hard boundary.

To sing, to channel a song through our voice, we come into reverent awareness of the instrument we are working with, the body itself. The breath shows us the way.

Grounding

As we breathed together, the room began to shift. We began to find coherence, within the self, and between our selves. Another brilliant participant noted the difference between the air within, and the air without. And how one becomes the other. We begin to prepare ourselves to be a channel for the song as we release our energy downwards into the Earth on every exhale.

When we release what we hold,

we are open to receive infinitely more.

The radio couldn't play music

if it tried to hold what was meant to flow right through it.

We are practicing grounding as we exhale and release energy down into the Earth. Like a literal electrical grounding rod, we ready the instrument to receive. This instrument works best when you plug it in.

Centering

We grow increasingly coherent as we shift our awareness from down, to back. The energy of the heart rests into the back. The energy of the throat rests back towards the spine. Energy in the mind rests back towards the skull. And we discover how much safer we feel here. We have physical and energetic habits that life, (as we know it), reinforce and perpetuate.

If our physical and energetic habits inhibit the natural flow of energy,

they are going to inhibit the voice.

Daily life, (as we know it), often demands a forward spilling of energy, pushing out to meet demands, to prove our merit, to meet the deadline, to seek out the ever elusive "enough." We may not register the insecurity of this energetic positioning as outside and in front of the body, because we're so used to it, it seems normal. But we can often palpably feel the novel safety of returning home to the temple of the self when we let our energy lean back into us. The audience can feel it too. Give to the audience the purity of the song from your centered self, unencumbered by the habitual forward-spill, which necessarily feels & sounds insecure-- because it literally is. Bring your energy back home to rest, for the sake of the song.

Elasticity

We continue to breathe, with bodies that were made to be grounded and centered. In the increased receptivity afforded by grounding, we perceive more of our fluidity and interconnectedness in each breath. In the increased security afforded by centering, we can trust in this unusual sense of flow, and even find pleasure in it. On every inhale, every aspect of our whole body expands in a holistic and infinitesimal way. On every exhale we release. We find ourselves increasingly elastic. There is more infinitely more potential in this fluid flexibility.

Presentness

In the suppleness of this awareness of pervasive breathing, we are experiencing moment-by-moment reality. This is good news, because moment-by-moment reality is actually the only reality there is.

Your presence on stage is only as powerful

as you are PRESENT in this moment.

The only things that can ever happen, can ONLY happen NOW.

And NOW, is where absolutely ANYTHING can happen.

1. Down, for grounding.

2. Back, for centering.

3. Elastic, for ease & fluidity.

4. Now, for possibility.

Intonation

Another brilliant participant noted when they watch a guitar player who seems tense and nervous, it actually feels physically uncomfortable to watch, and there's an urge to leave the space in order to actually breathe! Incoherence is contagious. This instrument of the body was made to operate grounded, centered, elastic, and present. When we align into these qualities, not only are we better able to sing or perform, or truly do anything, we have the potential to offer coherence to others. By the end of the first session, the participants in the vocal workshop were in an increased state of calm, presence, awareness, and connection with self and others. This state is known as coherence; the brainwaves no longer running static or dissonance with the electrical rhythms of the heart or the breath. This coherence is contagious too. By the end of the first session of the Django in June vocal workshop, we were offering to each other the coherence that each person was finding, via grounding, centering, elasticity, and now-ness. This creates a positive feedback loop, which made it even easier for each of us to sustain this state of easeful readiness and intonation.

The body literally finds consonance,

the instrument is at last in tune.

As we breathed, releasing energy down on the exhale, rested our hearts back, expanded holistically on each inhale, and found the ease and excitement in the potential of the present, we found ourselves ready to begin to sing.

To be continued...

Part Two: The Legacy

Part Three: The Show