As a performer and songwriter, I live for the moments I get to see my work come to life as well as the process it took to get there. Any musician will tell you that albums are never easy to make. You will find that things don’t go as planned, and it is in those moments where true magic, creativity, and open-mindedness meld to breathe life into your studio project. I had an awesome opportunity to attend a clinic on this very subject featuring the Daryl Lowery jazz!Quartet.

This quartet—featuring Berklee faculty Mark Walker on drums, Consuelo Candelaria-Barry on piano, Keala Kaumeheiwa on bass, and Daryl Lowery on saxophone—performed some original music at Cafe 939 in preparation for an upcoming recording session slated for this month. Daryl, a Berklee ear training professor, has played with the likes of such jazz cats as Ran Blake, Boston’s funk legend Ellis Hall, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jackie Byard. How cool is it to be within feet of someone who has played with the greats and be able to ask pretty much whatever I wanted? This was a free concert, Q/A session, and a meet-and-greet rolled into one. I was in awe and knew that I couldn’t and wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste.

I caught up with Daryl after the clinic and picked his brain about of how the band is preparing for the experience of “cutting” live. We also talked about limited rehearsal time/rehearsal strategies, and how pre-production strategies are key to putting together a killer live studio album.

Daryl Lowery jazz!Quartet

Here is an edited version of the conversation.

On putting an album together

 When recording an album, is there a form to putting it together? Should you have an equal mix of ballads and up-tempo songs?

I wrote so many ballads leading up to today including the one we just played. For me you can’t put a record together with five ballads so I suppose I need to make sure I mix it up.

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Attending Christine Vitale’s Optimal Performance Workshop gave me a better sense of how to deal with the intangible, but very debilitating, things that happen to a performer before, during, and after a performance. But before I get into the meat and potatoes of this topic, if you have never heard of Christine Vitale, she is an accomplished concert violinist and a performance psychologist who applies mind-based strategies to aid any musician in how to overcome or manage anxiety, concentration issues, and perform at a consistent level.

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I recently had the opportunity to attend a vocal mastery class led by Beth Bruno. Now for those that don’t know who Beth Bruno is, she is an accomplished singer, whose career spans more than 30 years. Critics have celebrated her as one of Brazil’s greatest artists of the new generation.  She has also had the opportunity to collaborate with musical giants the likes Brazilian songwriters Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Ivan Lins, Roberto Carlos, and performed on tour with jazz icon Al Jarreau.  This master class focused on a lot of important areas that every vocalist should pay attention to.

Bruno touched on many areas like passion/connection to the message of a song; pitch accuracy; breathing; and vocal technique, but her two messages that stuck out for me were about breathing and delivery. Delivery is huge for any performer, especially me, because it dictates whether my audience will stay engaged in what I am doing. Delivery has everything to do with how a song is presented. Whenever I look at who I consider to be the greatest vocalists of all time (Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Mercury, Luther Vandross, Pavarotti, Whitney Houston etc.) what comes to mind is how easy these individuals made it look. They did not let the technical part of singing get in the way of the delivery. I grew up singing gospel music so I always had a sense of style with a carefree approach because I was at a point where I did not have to think about what I could do with my voice; rather, I just sang with everything I had and left nothing on the table. I now struggle with this very principle, which on paper seems very simple. But when you really get down to the nuts and bolts of this concept, it can really be a long process.

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