Diane Nalini Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Diane Nalini is an incredibly nuanced jazz singer and composer. She performs in four languages and teaches jazz ukulele as well. I hope you'll join me in my fascination with the incredible range of Diane's interests and expertise. Besides being a phenomenal musician, she's also a Rhodes scholar with a PhD in applied physics from Oxford University, and presently works in environmental science policy for the Canadian government.
Not only is she a great lyricist, but she's also written songs inspired by great literature, including Shakespeare and jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and Bossa Nova styles. During this conversation, she performed some of her original songs for us and I've added timestamps in the description of the episode for the many interesting topics we touched on, as well as her incredible performances.
Hi Diane Nalini. Thanks so much for joining me.
Diane Nalini:
Hi Leah. It's so nice to meet you over the internet like this. Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I remember the first time I heard you was live, pre-pandemic. I didn't introduce myself or anything, but our mutual friend Roddy Ellias, who was on Season One -
Diane Nalini:
Oh, right.
Leah Roseman:
I think he called me and he said, "I'm playing with this amazing singer. She does these songs based on Shakespeare." And it was at the Lord Elgin. And I was sitting there with my husband and my eyes were so big. I couldn't believe what an amazing singer you were, performer. And the songs with Shakespeare's poetry, it was so moving and surprising.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, thank you. Wow! Thanks for coming out to hear us. Well, that was such a delight to play with Roddy. He's such a star and he was so game to try anything, including like just throwing in some original tunes, throw some original tunes at him at the last minute.
I'm so glad you enjoyed this Shakespeare project. I must say that even though I recorded that some years ago, now that's still one of my favorite albums because it's the only album I've recorded where 100% of the compositions were my own. And it's pretty amazing to have a collaborator like Shakespeare, even though he's long dead, of course. But I felt like I had this amazing co-writer for those songs.
Yeah, that was an album called Songs of Sweet Fire. And it took me a long time to finish that project because I remember, I lived in England for a number of years and I started writing those pieces when I was part of a collective of composers that, mostly jazz musicians, and we were setting poetry to music. And I had set a couple of Shakespeare pieces to music and a couple of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca and one piece by Christina Rossetti. And we did them all in this concert. And it was interesting because, I felt some of the pieces worked better than others. And I was working with a fixed instrumentation, which was just dictated by whoever was in this ensemble.
And it's always interesting. I find constraints really interesting from a creative point of view, when you're sort of like, okay, this is what you're working with. And so you work with whatever you're given and then you make something happen. And in that context it just turned out that the Shakespeare pieces worked really, like really spoke to me. And so it sort of started me on this journey.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You strike me, the more I learned about you and I'm such a big fan, I love all your albums -
Diane Nalini:
Oh thank you.
Leah Roseman:
And I knew you were a Rhodes scholar and a physicist and you'd done this stuff, but then I learned that you studied and created Chinese calligraphy and watercolors for many years.
Diane Nalini:
Yes, yes. That was something, you know, when you're a kid, you don't want to be left out of anything your parents are doing. And my parents had studied Chinese watercolor painting and calligraphy for some years before I was born. And then when I was old enough, they would bring me, when I was a little kid, they would just bring me some sometimes to their classes because they didn't have a babysitter. And I would just be in the corner doodling on my own. And at some point I decided, I was like, "I want to try this too." And the teacher kept saying, "No, I don't teach children." And she refused to teach me. And then finally I hit the age of 10 and I think I was less wiggly and less rambunctious. And she finally thought I was settled down enough that she could tolerate having me in the classroom.
And she basically said, "I'm going to sit her down at this table, any funny business or if she misbehaves, she's out." So I was like on my best behavior because I wanted to stick around. And yeah, I loved studying with her. Her name was Virginia Chang and it would be two hours or two and a half hours a week, every Saturday morning. And there's something so contemplative and I find that doing calligraphy is almost like a meditation and it focuses your efforts. And it's interesting because, and I think that music is the same way. I don't know if you feel the same way about your journey in sort of in mastering your instrument, but progress is not linear, at least it wasn't for me. I would plateau and plateau and I would be at a plateau for literally years and I'd be kind of frustrated.
You know, I'm working so hard on this calligraphy and these watercolors and nothing is changing. And then all of a sudden it was like something would change. You'd go back the next week and all of a sudden you'd made what felt like a leap in abilities. But in fact it's not really a big leap, it's I think there's a latency. It's all being percolating in the background, but it just feels like a leap. And then you plateau a little while longer.
So it's interesting. It's very non-linear and same thing with musical instruments, I think. I feel like that might be one of the reasons people get discouraged and give up, is because they don't see a gradual progression, they don't always see that gradual improvement and they don't stick it out long enough to suddenly see that kind of quantized leap in improvement. And if only one can have faith in the fact that that will happen with enough elbow grease, I think if we could all have that faith and we would stick it out.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That brings me to so many things I want to talk to you about, but before we leave the calligraphy thing, it just jogged my memory. I was in China once and one of my strongest memories of that time was this old man who had one of those giant, giant brushes that was like six feet tall and water.
Diane Nalini:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And it was a very hot day and he was just doing the calligraphy and using his whole body, and then it would just evaporate and it was such a beautiful thing to watch.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, that's so beautiful. And that's one of the things I love about... The other thing I love about calligraphy and I've only come to see the linkages some years later after I stopped doing calligraphy, but what you always learn when you're doing either Chinese watercolor painting or calligraphy, is that there are no do overs. It's not like oil painting where you can build layers. Every single stroke you commit to your rice paper or your silk or whatever you're painting on, is there forever. And every mistake is visible and you can't cover things up.
And I think it was Bill Evans who wrote about calligraphy in the liner notes for the album, Kind of Blue, about the analogy between jazz and calligraphy, saying that, just like calligraphy with improvisational music, you record it, it's spontaneous, whatever you commit to tape is there forever. And particularly in an era where albums were not over dubbed and there was no kind of multi-tracking over dues, or do overs, or splices or whatever, everything that you play in the moment is committed to the medium. And so in that sense, it hadn't occurred to me that these two passions that I'd grew up with, two of the passions I grew up with jazz and calligraphy had that in common, that idea of spontaneous creation and risk taking.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And you created paintings for that Shakespeare album as well.
Diane Nalini:
I did. I did. I hadn't necessarily intended to do that. I didn't set out to do that. When I finished recording that album, I had a humongous amount of like just volumes of stuff to listen to because there were 15 songs on the project, 15 pieces of Shakespeare's poetry or songs from the plays that I had set to music. And that means even if you just do two or three takes of each tune, and that's basically what we did, I didn't have a lot of studio time and my musicians were excellent. So I didn't need to do zillions of takes thankfully. But even so, two, three takes times 15, you're looking at like 45 takes to listen to.
And sometimes in the studio, you feel it in the moment when it's the take, it's almost like you get the "chaire de poule", you get chicken, no, not chicken skin, goosebumps. Sorry.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah, you get goosebumps because you feel it. You're like, "Oh my God, everybody's playing so great. This is the take." And so usually as a producer, I'm performing, but I'm also trying to keep notes of, did anyone make a mistake? Do we need to redo anything? So in the moment as you're recording, you're listening to your own performance, but you're listening to everybody's performance, and you're listening to the energy on the take and making notes. So I try to keep good notes when we're in the studio and I'll circle, whichever take I think was the one, I'll circle it, my visceral reaction to whatever I'm hearing in the studio.
But for some of them, I had no particular visceral feeling. And I was like, "Oh, I'll have to figure that out later." So as I was listening to, I traveled to England to visit some friends and I'd stayed there for like five weeks. And I was staying in the flat of some friends of mine and that flat did not have a television or anything like, and I don't think I even had a radio. This was way before the era of like iPads and internet radio and all that. And so to keep myself company, while I listened to all these takes, I started sketching and drawing and doing watercolors. And I didn't quite realize that each of the songs was triggering stuff in me.
So I was just painting what the songs were evoking for me. And then I suddenly realized, I was like, oh, I guess I now have this collection of watercolors that sort of correspond to each of the songs. And so that became the booklet with the lyrics. So that's the most expensive album I've ever produced because it had like this 20 page booklet or something, but it was fun. It felt a bit like a multimedia project for me, because I had done everything, the songwriting, and then the work of designing the booklet and designing the cover and everything.
Leah Roseman:
And so when you were growing up and doing watercolors and listening to jazz and singing, you were dancing.
Diane Nalini:
Yes. Yes. You know, I think I was one of these kids who just can't make up their minds of what they want to do. And strangely enough, even though music was always a part of my life ever since I was a kid, I think my mom said I basically started to sing and talk at the same time. And I started to sing jazz when I was like three, so singing came around the age of two, and then the jazz came at three. I always just did that. Like singing was just something, it sort of came kind of effortlessly to me, I think. I was lucky, my mom had a very strong sense of pitch. She never sang out of tune and my dad just loved jazz. So kind of put them together.
And I grew up listening along like to Ella and Sarah, but it never really, until I was a bit older, it never occurred to me that I might want to become a jazz singer, but what did occur to me, like I have one of those books when I was a kid where you write down in the first grade all the things you dream of being when you grow up, and it was ballet dancer, astronomer, archeologist and I can't remember what the other one was. But I didn't see with kids, kids don't see limitations. They don't think, "Hmm, I can't do all those things." So you just have big dreams and you think I want to do all these things.
And ballet, yeah, I didn't love it my first year studying it. I enrolled in ballet, I think I asked my mom if I could take ballet lessons when I was five or six. And I also was studying piano with a nun at the school where my mom taught. And she was a very nice lady, very nice nun, but she was very strict and she wanted me to follow the piano curriculum. And she wanted me to read the notes and I was not paying attention to that. I would learn stuff by ear and then I would just look at the keys and remember where the notes were and what I wanted to hear. And she'd be like, "Stop looking at the keys, and look at your page and learn to read your notes." And I was like, "Ah!"
And then I wanted to syncopate everything. So my dad says, he remembers me, when she left the room at one point to go to the bathroom I said, "Oh, come in here." And I started like jazzing up Papa Haydn and stuff like that. So she was not impressed with me. I was like a unruly student, I think. Yeah. So I gave up piano in favor of ballet and studied that for the next, pretty intensely, for the next 11 years. And I wanted to be a dancer and I was like, every year I would do more hours per week.
And of course dance is so wonderful because it's music, you are literally embodying the music, right? And so if you love music, you get to move to it. And it's just glorious. And at one point I was doing like 20 hours a week, which is a lot when you're also in school, in high school and stuff. So it was like three hours a night plus on weekends, like six hours a day on a Saturday or something like that. When we had shows, we would do these annual shows at the Place des Arts in Montreal as a company.
We were not a professional company or anything, but our choreographer had professional dancers that she'd hire into the company. And then I was lucky enough to sort of get to do some solo pieces or be a soloist in some of her choreographies. And then one year I auditioned to the National Ballet School's summer program and I got in, and I went to Toronto and it was kind of draconian. Like you get there and they wouldn't let you call home for the first two weeks because they wanted to see if you could handle living away from your parents. And I was very much, like very close to my parents. And so I was miserable from the get go, because I wasn't allowed to call home.
And everyone there is either like anorexic or bulimic or both. And it's just not a healthy lifestyle. And I didn't want to end up that way. And I could feel the pressure to lose more weight. And plus my knees, I had problems with my knees and I had chronic tendonitis in my Achilles tendon on my right foot. And I just thought, "I'm going to be one of those people who's constantly struggling with injuries and it's just going to get worse as I get older." Plus I did love sciences and I enjoyed them. And it was pretty clear to me that if I wanted to be a dancer, I'd have to give up on going to CEGEP and university and I'd just have to just do dance the whole time.
So it's funny because it was the very next year after I kind of quit dance cold turkey for a little while. Because I couldn't stand to see myself go down. Like I couldn't stand to see the, I was like, last year I could do triple pirouettes and now I... You think your legs up there when you're doing it 20 hours a week and then if you go back to doing it twice a week or something, you can't lift, you just can't do the things you used to do because you're not at peak level, right?
And then I quit. I went to Dawson College for CEGEP. And that very year I met a bassist who became my boyfriend at the time. And we started doing gigs together professionally. And it was amazing because it was as if dance had left my life and it had left this big gaping hole of artistic yearning in my life. And just very fortuitously, I met some jazz musicians and I started to sing jazz professionally, from a pretty young age.
And it really filled this need in my life, the big gap that had been left by dance. And it was just felt like so much fun because it's something I had been doing since I was a kid. And I had sung in church and I had sung some solo stuff in choirs and stuff, but it was not the music that I grew up the most passionate about. So being able to perform it when I was in CEGEP and university, was like a big thrill.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of mentors, you met a science mentor in Dawson College, right?
Diane Nalini:
Yes. I had many science mentors. I had a wonderful physics teacher by the name of Richard Shoemaker, who really opened my eyes to the beauty of physics. I had a wonderful chemistry teacher called Mr. John Mohamed, and together, it was just so inspiring to be in their classes because they followed the logical thread of things. And I feel like some of the ways of thinking about science that I still have to this day are due to those people, who basically were always wanting to derive everything from first principles and avoiding memorizing too much, because you could always arrive at things from first principles. So I feel like I owe a lot to them.
Leah Roseman:
That's amazing. I'm trying to... I know you have your Ukulele and you've been prepared to sing for us.
Diane Nalini:
Oh yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to have a little music break or do you want to do that later?
Diane Nalini:
Absolutely. No, happy to do that. Absolutely. So this is a baritone ukulele, which means it's tuned DGBE, like the top four strings of a guitar actually. And I thought I would play you something, since we've been talking about physics, I thought I would play you something from my fourth album, which was called Kiss Me Like That. And-
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask you about the song.
Diane Nalini:
Oh yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, sorry, please go ahead.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, no, just that I knew that, I'm sure you're going to say exactly what I was going to ask you in terms of...
Diane Nalini:
Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. So this is a song called Winter Eclipse, and I wrote it after a really cool, but actually very cold experience of staying up late to watch a lunar eclipse with a friend. I think this was a lunar eclipse in February of 2008, I think it was. And he kept making us hot toddies, going inside and making us hot toddies to keep us warm. And yeah, I'll do this song for you now. Maybe I'll explain the ending after I finish it. All right.
(singing).
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Thank you so much.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, thank you. So the ending of that song is actually something that happened to us, where we've been watching in the dark for what felt like hours, because lunar eclipses take a long time to happen. And we'd been watching and your eyes get adapted to the dark. And you're seeing like all the stars and the beautiful, rusty, dimmed moon, and then somebody turned on their porch light. And we were like, "Ah," totally blinded. So what's really funny is, I was contacted by someone from the Dark-Sky Society who asked whether they could use that song as kind of like an emblematic thing of like to advertise the needs for respecting dark skies for astronomy. I was like, "Yeah, go for it." It was funny.
Leah Roseman:
I was also thinking of your song that you wrote as a mnemonic for the order of stars, Kiss Me Like... Oh, how's it...
Diane Nalini:
Yes. Kiss Me Like That.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Diane Nalini:
That's right. Yes. Yeah, it's funny because I was teaching an astronomy class at University of Guelph. And it's a very kind of random order of stars, when stars go through life on something called the main sequence. The main sequence is basically a sort of a rule that helps you organize stars into categories, where provided that they're still fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores, this is a part of their life cycle that's kind of predictable. And basically if the for sun is very, very massive, it's going to be very hot and it's going to have a surface that's more like blueish, and it's going to be what's called an O type star. And if a star is like Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me, the M class stars at the other end of that alphabet mnemonic, they're going to be the smaller stars that are going to be redder and dimmer and less bright.
And so this mnemonic is something that all astronomy students learn. It's just a way of trying to keep track of which type of designation to give stars in order from very hot, which is the O type star to very, very cool, which is the M type star. And that mnemonic has existed since Victorian times. But more recently, thanks to more powerful telescopes, they discovered two other extensions to that classification system. And those are the L type stars and the T type stars, which are even dimmer and are very hard to see, which is why they were only discovered more recently with more powerful telescopes.
And so I thought, okay, we need to expand the mnemonic. And I thought, okay, well I want this to be a bit of in a feminist, empowering song. So it's going to be a lady who's saying, "Be a fine girl, kiss me like that. Tell me how you want to be kissed." And it can be, be a fine guy, kiss me like that. It can be either, it's gender neutral. But yeah. So I thought I'd write a song to play for my students that would help them to remember things.
I think that song in particular, it didn't start life out necessarily as a song, I think I started writing an angsty kind of poem about a breakup. And so that song is a bit of a allegory for a relationship that's gone bad. And it starts out really hot, like the early universe and then it cools out and starts expanding and cooling like the big bang, everything gets cooled after the big bang.
Leah Roseman:
Your students must have been upset when you decided to leave academia and work for... Like you did climate advising for the government, right? On climate change?
Diane Nalini:
Yes. I actually, I still work in Environment, Climate Change Canada now. I've moved around departments quite a bit. I started my career in the federal government in Environment, Climate Change Canada, then I moved around a few places and now I've come back to that department because I feel like, although I enjoyed the other positions, this work is really kind of, I think my heart is the most passionate about this and I just love the work. So it's where I feel like my background in science is the most useful, even though I'm not actually doing scientific research anymore, I'm giving developing advice and recommendations. You know, like you're supporting policies and Canada's negotiations in different places, but it always needs to be grounded in ever...
... different places, but it always needs to be grounded in evidence and science. And so I very much enjoy the challenge of trying to translate a bunch of very technical stuff into plain language so that it's understandable to anybody. Because politicians, ministers, they don't all have a science background. They're smart people though, and you need to be able to express yourself clearly to anybody, no matter what their own background might be. And it's not always easy for everybody to do that, to let go of their technical background, and to synthesize something and bring it down to its core ideas.
So that's a really interesting challenge and it appeals to... I think there's a thread through everything I've done in life and it's probably this combination of education and creativity. If I have to try to find the commonalities between everything that I've done, it's learning. To me, a life worth living is one where you're always learning new things and you're challenging yourself, and you're trying to make the world a better place. So if you can do all those things at once, it doesn't really matter what you're doing as long as you're somehow guided by those principles.
Leah Roseman:
I think it's in your Future Perfect album that you have that song I love, The Big Hurrah or the...
Diane Nalini:
Oh, The Last Hurrah.
Leah Roseman:
The Last Hurrah, yeah.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, yes. Oh, my goodness. That is definitely inspired by my angst over climate change, I've got to say. You probably can hear it in the lyrics.The funny thing is, I started writing that song way back when. Way before I even became a professor at University of Guelph. I was teaching at a CEGEP in Montreal, I won't say which one, but it was a very nice place to be, don't get me wrong, but there were a lot of wealthy kids who went to the school, and they'd get dropped off by parents driving SUVs. There's only one person in the whole car and you're just like, "Why do they need such a huge gas-guzzling vehicle?" Right?
And what saw first hand in that college was that struggle between ideological kids who want to do something different with their lives and what their parents want for them. And how everybody at some point grows up and is always afraid of becoming their parents. Sometimes people skew away from that trend and sometimes they go for it, at some point. Everybody makes a decision whether they're going to flip in that direction or not. I saw that tension between the young kid who's the idealistic activist, and the parent who understandably wants some kind of security for their kid, and they're like, "No I've paid all this money for your education. You're going to be a doctor. You're going to be a dentist or whatever." Whatever career it's going to be.
But at the end of the day, my concern is that if nothing changes in our society and we're still driven by materialism and the acquisition of more things and a kind of disregard for the impact that our lives have on the planet, then we're doomed. We have to learn to live more lightly, to tread more lightly on the planet. Right? And that's the challenge that I feel both excited and scared. Because I feel excited that on the one hand climate change is at the forefront of people's minds and it's in the news all the time, and that's great. But on the other hand, the debate is the jury's still out on whether we're doing enough. I think most of the... We just had the IPCC report coming out last week that said, we're not doing enough and we're not going to manage to keep warming down unless we do much, much, much more.
And then the challenge is ... To me, the interesting challenge is at the individual level, there's a lot of stuff we can do where we don't have to rely and wait for industry or government to do stuff. But the things we need to do as individuals are harder. I was reading an article in The Guardian that said, there's like six things that everybody can do right now, regardless of what's going on at a higher level. But it involves things like not traveling more once every three years, not taking a domestic airplane within Canada only once every three years. And only one trans-Atlantic flight every eight years.
Can you imagine us as musicians, how do we make a living? If you need to tour, or you need to travel to teach or to perform, how do you do that in a climate conscious way? Clearly it's not feasible under the current way things work. Right? So right away, you take more than one flight every eight years and you're breaking that rule. It's really interesting, the challenges we're going to face in the next 10 or 20 years. It's going to be interesting.
Leah Roseman:
Hmm. Yeah. Of that list, what did you think were the most important things?
Diane Nalini:
Well, one of the things that I find easiest to do, but that's just me, I'm not trying to proselytize or anything. But of the six things, the thing that is easiest for me to do is to convert to a mostly plant based diet. So because eating meat is not only... To me, there's a lot of reasons to worry about the impact of eat meat. One is if you're eating factory farmed food, then the animals are living under very horrible circumstances and they have painful lives and painful deaths. But also meat is highly emitting of GHGS, like methane, especially. And so cutting out meat is both better for the climate and better for the animals. So to me that was the no brainer, but I've already done that.
One of the things I've been trying to do... I've been vegetarian, mostly vegetarian for many years. I say mostly because occasionally I'll have like a tiny little bit of fish if there's no other choice and I there's nothing else to eat and I have no choice. But the challenge for me has been to cut out the dairy and the cheese. Because I've always loved cheese, but I'm trying to eat mostly vegan food and almost cutting dairy out entirely. But I try not to be too like militaristic about anything. So if somebody tells me this is the farmer that I know, and their hens are happy. I'm like, okay, I'm going to eat an egg. I don't need to freak out about that. It's a happy hen, It's an egg, I could do that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Diane Nalini:
So I think we have to be patient with each other and kind to each other and understanding of each other of what everybody's capable of doing in any given moment. But the other thing they said in that list that was interesting was trying not to buy more than three articles of clothing per year. And I don't know if that includes things like socks and underwear, like the real basics. But I was like, oh my God, that's another thing that's... I don't buy a lot of clothes. But I'm pretty sure I've bought my more than three articles of clothing this year, right? And that's because in the pandemic I bought almost nothing but pre-pandemic, for sure. I was like... Also as a performer, it might be different if you're in an orchestra, because you guys are lucky that you can wear black all the time.
But I find as a performer, I also feel like I need to have a certain renewal of the wardrobe. If you wear the same dress to... Especially now with YouTube, it's like, oh, she's wearing the same dress. And we saw her in that two years ago or whatever. Right? So you do have to sort of... But I do try to give stuff away. I'm not throwing the clothing out or anything, but I do try to sort of rotate things out. But basically I think we all have to get vintage, I guess, is what the article is saying. Try to buy secondhand clothes and stuff.
Leah Roseman:
So ukulele, I guess I've always pronounced it wrong. So it's ukulele rather than ukulele.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah. Again, I think there are multiple ways of pronouncing it, but in Hawaii they call it ukulele. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you have a pretty new channel, Ukulele for Jazz Singers.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's right. It is new. Yes. Yeah. I started it in 2019, I think. I think that's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And you're doing some online... I mean, people will listen to this at various times, but if they're listening to it when this comes out, you're doing some workshops with actually people in Hawaii as well, right?
Diane Nalini:
Yes, exactly. I started the channel Ukulele for Jazz Singers because I had a number of voice students who don't play an instrument. And that seems to be... It's almost like a mental, like a psychological hurdle for them to kind of approach a piano. And so what I was trying... I tried... My point in starting that channel was to be like, okay, if you want to sing jazz, you got to play some instrument, just so that you have a chordal basis too. Not necessarily to accompany yourself for an actual performance, but when you're trying to work out chord charts and write arrangements for yourself, you need to know how to do that. And there's also a lot of gobbledygook out there in the published world.
Some published sheet music for jazz songs is good and sometimes it's rubbish or there are mistakes. And so you need to be able to figure out for yourself if the chord chart is correct or not. Right? And what I noticed is there are some singers who will like pay, pay a pianist to write all their charts for them, or they will pay someone else to help them with their arrangements. And I just wanted to do something that would start to empower people to take those steps, to learn an instrument. And the ukulele is so wonderful because it's not intimidating. You got four fingers available and four strings, it's almost like it was meant to be. And it's a very joyful instrument. It's small.
I call it my Goldilocks instrument because about 10 years ago, I studied guitar. I was trying to learn the nylon string guitar cause I love Bossa Nova. And so again, I was trying to figure stuff out a lot by ear for myself. And while I love the guitar, it's just a little too big for me. And I was finding my wrist was kind of hurting. I know that's no excuse. I feel really bad saying things like that because you see those little North Korean girls who are like five years old and they're playing huge, full size guitars and these little ensembles of little... And you think, wait a five year old can do it, I should be... I should not complain. But anyway, this guy is just the right size for me. And so yeah. The channel also delves a little bit into some very basic jazz theory, just so that people... Again, whenever I teach workshops, I try to throw in some just very basic theory.
It's, again, not intimidating, but just trying to explain to people, this is a II V I (2-5-1) , this is a major II V I, (2-5-1) a minor II V I (2-5-1), a I VI V (1-6-5). The kind of progressions that they're going to see over and over and over in jazz standards, just so that they can start to recognize those. And the workshops that I do online are... Sometimes I give Zoom workshops and those are more intimate. So I might have like 20, 30 people and people can ask questions and we can all see each other, which is great. And then other times I do livestream workshops over YouTube. And what's fun about that is I make them free so that anybody can join. If they can't afford to buy a handout, they don't have to. But then I also have how to handout and I put together usually like a booklet, a resource booklet that will have like the history of the tune and maybe like 10 different recordings linked so that people can check out different recordings of the tune and just some harmonic analysis and stuff like that.
So that if they want to enrich their experience, they can get the booklet and have the chord charts. And there's backing tracks that I'll give them and everything. And that's been really rewarding because that's something that I only started doing during the pandemic and out of necessity because everything was canceled. All our concerts were sold. And my workshops that I had planned to give in person were canceled and I had been booked to teach. This was in 2020, I had a whole bunch of festivals that I was going to teach in, mostly in the U.S. The U.S. has a lot more ukulele festivals than we do here in Canada. And luckily I hadn't quite yet gotten to the stage of paying for my work permit for the U.S., because those are expensive and they're not refundable regardless of a pandemic or not.
So I hadn't quite gotten there, but still everything was canceled. And I thought, okay, maybe I can do something online. And it's been amazing teaching these workshops online because I've had people participating and tuning in that I would never have expected. Like people in Germany and Italy and the UK and Australia and all over the U.S. and all over Canada. And just to be able to connect with those people and find these people who have a common desire to learn more and to share music, it's been amazing. And it's very heartwarming to see the comment... People in the chat will be saying things like, "This has really brightened my day." Or, "Thank you for bringing this song and this music into our lives during this difficult time." And it was the same feeling we got when, Adrian, my husband and I started live streaming.
We did a series of concerts, free concerts at the beginning of the pandemic. Again, just to try to bring some happiness into people's lives and people would write down, they'd be like, "This is great. There's no live music happening in Ottawa right now. So we really look forward to your Saturday concerts." And again, it was like building this community of people who just needed that injection of joy in their lives. And what we did during that concert series was we always ended each live stream with a sing along song. Because I really believe that making music together, even if you're just singing along to your TV watching a live stream, it releases the oxytocin in the brain makes us it really high as a chemical, proven chemical effect. Music has a proven effect to make us feel joy and love. So during the pandemic, I think it was really more important than ever to have that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So I want to get... We should need to talk about Syncspace Live.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, yes.
Leah Roseman:
But before we get to that, I just... Because you mentioned Bossa Nova and your Bossa Nova singing's so beautiful. Now your mom was from Goa. So she spoke Portuguese. Did you learn it as a young person, or...
Diane Nalini:
So my mom's first language... Yes, you're right, that she is from... She was born in Bombay, but her siblings and my grandmother and her father and mother, were born in Goa. And she's from Goa and it's the Portuguese part of... Or what used to be the Portuguese part of India. And so my grandma's mother tongue was Portuguese, but interestingly, my grandma and grandfather always spoke to their kids in English because I think they thought that Portuguese would be like the language just between them so that they would have a way that they could speak to each other without the kids understanding. But the irony is that even though they never taught Portuguese formally to their kids, my mom figured it all out. And so she could understand. I think my grandparents thought that nobody could understand them, but my mom was understanding everything.
So, yeah. My mom understands Portuguese well. Doesn't speak it very much, but understands everything. But when I was a little girl, I actually heard my grandma speaking Portuguese and she would have little nicknames for me. She called me "amorzinha", which means little love in Portuguese. And she would always have little sayings that she would say in Portuguese. But we all sort of understood what she meant. Her favorite saying was "barca parada, não faz viagem", which means, "An anchored boat or a stopped boat doesn't make any trips." Which I'm probably... That's just a loose translation, but that was her... She would... That was her motto when she felt we needed to get up and go and do things. Don't stay idle, go out there and do things. But yeah, she spoke Portuguese and I learned a little bit from her. But I really only got to learn Portuguese formally when I moved to England.
And until then I had started to sing at a... I had a regular gig with a wonderful jazz pianist from Montreal. I was in Montreal at the time by the name of Pierre Leduc and Pierre was amazing. So he was on the faculty at University of Montreal Jazz Department. And he had these really amazing musicians with him. Daniel Lessard on the bass and Pierre Béluse on the drums. And I met a future collaborator, lifelong collaborator of mine called Dany Roy, who was at the time, a very young, amazing tenor saxophonist. And into this quartet, I got invited... I don't even remember. Dany was the one who invited me to sub for him sometimes. When he couldn't do the gig, he would ask me to sub for him and I would go in there and sing.
And then I think Danny went on tour or something one summer. And so I got hired as his kind of replacement for the whole summer. So I was gigging there two nights a week, Fridays and Saturdays with this amazing jazz quartet. Pierre Leduc was the guy that Miles Davis called when Miles was in town and Pierre would accompany Miles. So he was that caliber of amazing musician, right? And Pierre told me one day we were playing in this jazz club, jazz bar that was in the ground floor of a hotel in Montreal. The place was called Puzzles. And they had a lot of traveling people coming in and out, including a big Brazilian contingent, like Brazilian business people and tourists would come and stay there. And I remember one time Pierre said to me, "Okay, let's do some Bossa Nova, What Bossa Nova songs do you know?" And I was like, I knew Girl from Ipanema but I knew it in English and Pierre was like, "That won't do, you've got to learn some Brazilian tunes. We've got all these Brazilians here."
So, I was like, "Oh my God." So I studied really hard for the following week after that very first time playing with him. I got myself as many albums as I could. I dug out some Chico Buarque that my uncle... I have an uncle who lives in Brazil and he had sent me some albums when I was little. So I dug out my Chico Buarque, I out my Jobim. I dug out everything that I could find of João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto, and I started learning these tunes. But I was singing them through the... The accent that I had at the time was something inherited from my mom. And it was... Luckily I was okay speaking Latin languages generally. I went... I spoke... I grew up speaking English and French.
I went to French school all my life, but I also studied about five years of Spanish in the same school that I'd been at. And we studied it at a pretty rigorous level. We were... We had very strict grammarians teaching us. So it was great because the grammar of Portuguese is not dissimilar at all to the grammar of Spanish and French. And so combined, I could kind of fake my way through.
But I didn't get to really dive into and understand the subtleties of Brazilian Portuguese until I shared a home with a Brazilian teacher, a teacher of Portuguese from Brazil when I was in Oxford, in England. She was my house... My good friend. And then she, we became housemates and I took private lessons with her. And it was awesome because that... And I got to practice with her and her friends. And so I met a whole ton of Brazilians in Oxford. And so that was really what helped me to... And now all these years later, I still love to sing in Brazilian Portuguese, but I would love to get more practice speaking it on a regular basis like I used to.
Leah Roseman:
So Syncspace. We mentioned briefly your husband, Adrian Cho started this amazing platform and company. Do you want to speak to that?
Diane Nalini:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking about it. Yeah. So Syncspace was something that Adrian came up with during the pandemic because we tried a bunch of commercially available software that is supposed to allow you to jam over the internet with other musicians. And we were not happy with any of it. The video was wildly out of sync with the audio, and it was not something that you could really ever use to perform in time over the internet. But Adrian has a very strong background in tech. He used to... He's worked for IBM and Shopify and all these other places. And he's a musician himself and he is the director of the Ottawa Jazz Orchestra. And because for those first few months I was mentioning, we started live streaming together. Just the two of us from our living room. From April until June and for 12 weeks, we did a show every week and we learned so much about livestreaming, about the dos and don'ts of trying to livestream with good quality video and audio and everything.
So he was able to put together all those different diverse experiences and really dive deep into what needs to be done in order to have the best possible experience and the lowest latency. And the low latency is key because as you know, the way that musicians play in time together is to listen to each other. And that's how we manage to stay synchronized. And you don't want anything longer than like, let's say, I'd say the upper limit that we can tolerate is probably something like 20 millisecond or 25 milliseconds. Which is sort of the equivalent of that delay in the signal would be, let's say the equivalent of like a 50 foot round trip. So you would be like being 25 feet away from your fellow musicians.
Which is something classical musicians are used to. If you're on in a big orchestra and you're on a big stage... I don't know, I was thinking about that. Is it the Wagner? I can't remember what town it's in. There's like a Wagner Festival where they have like a thousand people in the orchestra or something like that in Germany. I can't remember what town it's in. But to perform in a huge space like that, where you're literally... Like the conductor does this and you hear a few milliseconds later, you're going to hear the sound coming at you because you're so far away. Well, classical musicians are very good at negotiating all that because they have to do it all the time on these huge, these big orchestras, right? Where if you're 50 feet away from your fellow musician, there's going to be a delay between when they strike the bow on the violin and when you hear it, let's say.
So in the same vein, I think professional musicians are good at dealing with a certain amount of latency. They can navigate that okay. And then you just have to have the confidence to jump in and go, okay, boom, that's the time let's do it. But what Adrian's managed to do is devise this platform where the video and the audio are in very good sync with each other. So from an audience perspective, it's seamless because the audience is seeing the lips are moving and the sounds coming out correctly, they're not seeing crazy delays. But more importantly, the musicians are hearing each other almost instantaneously. And so they're able to perform. And Syncspace launched in... I think we did a free concert for New Year's Eve 2020. And it made kind of made a bit of a splash because we had just entered another lock down. There was a curfew that had just been announced in Quebec, and there was nothing to do.
Everybody's New Year's Eve plans had to be canceled because of COVID. And so we got a bunch of people, I think we had several hundred people joining for the livestream and Adrian had a tip jar going, and it was just... It was a joyful, joyful thing. And then Adrian decided to launch Syncspace as a platform, as a concert venue, as an online concert venue. And we got a wonderful... I helped him with the sound just that first time, because it was a lot to do. He's mixing video and he's switching between like... He listened for who's going to solo and they'll put the camera on them.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Diane Nalini:
Like everybody... He switches live on the fly. He's doing video editing, on the fly. And again, his background as a musician helps him to predict. He can tell when someone's about to take a solo just based on the fact that the dynamics of the tune might change.
And, that means the solo's about it to end and someone else is going to take it. So he can really edit to the music in a way that I think someone who doesn't have that musical background might have done the edit a bit more randomly. Whereas he'll always edit to the beat. So he'll edit at the end of the eighth measure of a 32 bar form or at the end of the 32 bar measure or whatever. So it's always very musical. All his editing is very kind of tasteful and musical. And then I was just helping that first show. So I did the sound and he did all the video, but he has since then become very adept at doing both. So unless it's a big band where it's like 11 or 12 musicians, then maybe I'll come and help and do the sound again, just so he can focus more on the many, many people who are on video, but of the time he's doing both on his own.
And it's been great. A lot of musicians said that it was a lifeline for them because during the pandemic, they didn't have any other work. So it was a way for them to keep their chops up. They might have, of course, been teaching virtually as well during the pandemic, which is really more of where most people's bread and butter comes in. If they are both teaching and performing, I think most people are earning more from teaching than from performing these days.
But what was so important to the musicians was to keep the joy and the passion of performing alive during the pandemic, when all else had been canceled and nothing else was possible. So I watched him work so hard. Literally 15, 16, 17, 20 hour days sometimes trying to make it all happen. Because he's a one man show he's doing it all himself. So he develops the platform, he hosts the concerts, he attends people's rehearsals so that he can get some footage to cut into a one minute trailer for the concert. And he is the one having to do the promotion for those concerts. And so he's doing everything, but it's been amazing to see how he's turned this into something really special and really unique. And he's had classical musicians on-
... social and really unique. And he's had classical musicians on the platform, jazz musicians. There's this quartet of klezmer musicians, Quartetto Gelato, and the French Horn Ensemble of four French horns. It's pretty amazing. I've never seen that before where it's just four French horns doing a concert together. But world class, amazing New York Philharmonic, French horn guys, and they're all world class, but what's interesting about Syncspace is you can have these very experimental combinations of musicians. So for example, I think this Friday or this Saturday, they're going to have a concert with three pianists. Most venues wouldn't even have three pianos. It won't be three traditional pianos. I think one of them is, Mark Ferguson's going to play B3 organ, and Peter Hum is going to play his Roads, and then Mike Manny's going to play the actual piano. So texture-wise they won't be stepping on each other's toes because they each have different sonorities, but it's still pretty bizarre to have three keyboard players, but they're going to do it because they can, because they can each be in their living room.
Yeah, so I'm really proud of Adrian for what he's accomplished, and now he's moving into the teaching domain. So he's developed something called Syncspace Teach that allows people to teach again with very low latency. It's not quite the low latency that you'd get in the Syncspace platform. In this teaching thing, there is still a little bit of latency, but I was with someone the other day and we sang happy birthday together, and it was like, you couldn't tell that there was any latency. So I'm pretty excited about it for my teaching purposes.
I'm organizing a Ukulele Jazz Festival in May. It's going to be a two day festival, and I'm hoping that I can use his teaching platform for portions of the event, because it's got a really fun interface that allows you to hang out together in social spaces, and you can get a little virtual drink. So it's just way more fun than Zoom or anything like that. So yeah, it's really cool. I'm very excited to see and interested to see what happens when we finally get out of this pandemic, where is the balance between virtual and in-person going to land? Because I don't know about you, but I have found that from a teaching perspective, there's a lot that I love about teaching over the internet.
I have a setup at home, which is my... This is my teaching studio that I'm in right now. And I have a little switcher where I have a second camera, and I'll show you what I mean by that. It's like, I can switch to this. And that just shows a magnified version of my left hand. So when I'm doing chording, I can show people, and then switch back to a main view. And I love being able to do that because if you're teaching a larger group of students, whoever is sitting in the front row gets the best view, and then the person who's stuck at the back is struggling to see. "What's she doing? Was that the third or the fourth fret? What did she just do?" Whereas here everybody gets that same view, but I miss the chemistry and the joy of making music in the same room with people, obviously. But I feel like internet is never going to go away now. This internet teaching, I feel like it's sort of... Do you think that it's been a seismic shift?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I definitely think so, yeah. I've worked with students all over the world, and I still have my core students in Ottawa that come to my house in masks, but then it's very different and it allows for... We were talking about climate change before, it allows for a lot of exchange internationally, which is wonderful.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And plus imagine you don't have to park your car anywhere or go out in the snow or...
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Now you're holding this beautiful Ukulele this whole time. Would you play something else for us?
Diane Nalini:
Oh, absolutely. I would be delighted to. Well, since you mentioned Bossa nova, maybe I would do a Bossa nova that I wrote. It's in French. Is that okay if I sing something in French?
Leah Roseman:
Great.
Diane Nalini:
Okay. So this is also from that album Kiss Me Like That. This is a song called "Le Tournesol," and I wrote it from the perspective of the sun. It's kind of geeky, but I've always admired sunflowers both because I think they're a beautiful flower, but I love the way that they track the sun. And I always think how much energy they expend, just rotating and facing the sun all the time. But I thought to myself, "What if the sun took an interest in one of these sunflowers and fell in love with the sunflower?" So this is a song sung by the sun to the sunflower it's called "Le Tournesol" which means sunflower in French.
(singing)
Leah Roseman:
Oh, wow. Think I have a new favorite song of yours. That's great.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
So you grew up in Montreal speaking, Quebecois French, but your dad is Belgian, is that right?
Diane Nalini:
Yes. Yes. And interesting what you've said about Quebecois French, because I would say that it was one of those situations where I grew up... My first exposure to French was at home, and my dad has a Belgian accent or a French accent that's European anyway. And the interesting thing was that I would go to school, and I would get teased by the school kids because they said I was being a snob, and I was speaking like a French person from France. And I felt like, Poirot: " Belgian, madame, Belgian." Hercule Poirot is always like, "I'm not French, I'm Belgian."
But anyway, I would get teased at school for that. And then I would try to adapt and speak more Quebecois French, and then I'd come home and my dad would be like, "Why are you speaking like that? That's not your normal accent, different..." So I couldn't win.
So I feel like it's only as an adult that I came into my own accent and felt this is what I am, and it's somewhere Mid-Atlantic probably. It's not full on Quebecois. It's not Belgian either. It's somewhere in the middle and that's just it. Deal with it. But until I was old enough to affirm myself, I had a very malleable accent. So I could travel to Europe and morph my accent into something completely different there and then completely different in Quebec.
But my dad is amazing because he immigrated to Canada and only spoke French and some Flemish as a second language, but didn't speak a word of English until he moved to Canada. And then not only did he end up teaching himself English, but he became so good at his English that he became a translator and was an interpreter for the federal government for conferences. And so he has this linguistic proficiency, I would say. And it's partly due to his own natural talent, I'm sure. And also he studied Latin and Greek in school and when he moved to Canada, he taught Latin and Greek and French in school. And so he has this very deep understanding of grammar and the commonalities of language. And you can give my dad a newspaper in almost any European language, probably not Hungarian, but apart from that, he can figure it out because he has this really solid rooting in these ancient languages and many modern languages, too, so he and I love to geek out.
When I was a kid, he would give me these long explanations about the etymology of words. So it was never a simple one-word answer when I asked him what a meant. I'd be like, "What is philosophy?" "Oh, philo from love and sophy from sophia, wisdom. The love of wisdom." So I always got the full breakdown of every word because of my dad's background, and so I have become a bit of an etymology geek myself. I love dictionaries. I collect dictionaries, and I will read through, especially etymology dictionaries. I love learning about the roots of language, and English is so fascinating because we've got the French, but then there's the Saxon, and then there's the German, and so it's like this amazing mélage of so many different influences. So whenever you come across an English word, it's always like, "Oh what is the etymology of this one?" Sometimes I know it, and sometimes I got to look it up.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I have to say when I was a teenager, I bought an etymology dictionary, which I no longer have unfortunately, but I used to read it for fun, and I dabble in languages as a hobby. I'm really fascinated.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, I'm so glad to meet a fellow etymology geek. That's awesome.
Leah Roseman:
And I'm curious, you always perform usually in four languages in all your shows and albums, but are there other languages you've studied?
Diane Nalini:
I have. When I was younger, I fell in love with a German man, and I studied some German partly because of him, but also partly because I met a pianist in Oxford who wanted me to... He came to one of my concerts. It was a jazz concert, mind you. And he says to me, "You want to get together and do Schubert later?" I said, "Holy cow! You realize I'm not a classically trained singer? I'm not going to be like Janet Baker or something. I can't sing that way." So he said, "That's okay, we're just going to do it for fun." And it was really intimidating to me because I love classical repertoire. I love Lieder. I could listen to Schubert all day. I could listen to Mahler all day. I cry when I hear "Das Lied von der Erde". But I am used to phrasing songs how I want to. So it was really hilarious because the first time I got together with this pianist, I had done my homework. I had listened to umpteenth number of different versions of the tunes that I knew we were going to be doing. I can't remember. It was like "Die Fiorelle" or whatever it was.
But we got together and he's accompanying me, and he stops and he goes, "That was a dotted quarter note." And I'm like, "Oh my God, did I hold it too long? I'm really, really sorry. I'm not used to caring about what's written on the page." Because you know in jazz, the lead sheet is just the starting point. Nobody sings. If you sang a lead sheet in jazz, as it was written on the page, you'd sound so square, nobody would hire you again. But it was hilarious. I was like, "Oh my God, I am so out of my comfort zone right now. It's not even funny." But anyway, long story short, I had a blast learning all these different Lieder. We never performed them. We just jammed, like did classical jams and stuff, but it was really hilarious. He made me up my game on sight reading, because I was not used to being held to account for every quaver.
By that point I had done a year or two of German classes just twice a week or something, but it was motivated because I was in this relationship with a German speaker, and so I was reading, he had given me some poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and people like that. And I was trying to read some Goethe, but I had these editions that have the German on one side and the English on the other, so that I could cheat when I needed to. But it was really helpful to sing those. I don't believe in singing in a language that I don't speak or understand because I feel you have to be able to convey the emotion of the lyric, and you have to understand deeply what you're singing about.
And so I hear about people who learn songs phonetically, and they're just singing in a language that they don't understand. I'm like, how do you do that? I guess maybe you could, if you have someone explain to you what every single syllable represents and what every single phrase means, but I don't feel right about it. That was why I wanted to make sure that I understood everything that I was going to sing, even if it was just for jamming purposes. So I do speak a wee bit of German. I've lost a lot of German because I haven't practiced it in a long time, and it's a very complicated language. I find the cases, it's just like, oh my God, dative, accusative, generative, nominative. By the time you've figured out what definite article you're supposed to use, your train has left.
So it's daunting, but I also studied a bit of Italian, and I don't remember much of it in terms of if I had to speak it on the spot, I would probably start speaking some kind of mangled versions of Italian with Spanish and French. But where it's helpful is that as long as it's not being spoken too quickly, I can understand almost everything that I hear in Italian. But it's interesting because it's a bit binary because as soon as things get beyond a certain speed, I understand nothing anymore. When people are speaking really quickly in Italian, it's like, nope, I cannot follow. But I can get by, like I can travel in Italy and be okay, and just kind of people understand that I'm speaking some kind of mish-mash of romance languages in return.
Sorry, go ahead.
Leah Roseman:
No, I was just going to ask, when you went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, you had to turn down a recording contract?
Diane Nalini:
I did. I did. In retrospect it's funny that I agonized so much over that because it wasn't even a big label. It was an indie jazz label from Montreal that doesn't even exist anymore. But I was so excited about this. I'd finished my undergrad degree. I had been steadily doing more and more performing. In my final year of undergrad, I think I was gigging like every single weekend, Friday and Saturday nights, and then I would be hard at work during the week studying physics and doing my homework. And I would try to get all my homework done during the week so that my weekend was completely free to just do music and think about music and not be torn because at that time in my life, I felt like I was really torn between the two things. I was torn between my love of physics and my love of music.
And I felt like they couldn't coexist in my body almost. Like I had a really hard time. I would love doing these gigs, and I would come back home late on a Saturday night, because I'd been performing till midnight, let's say, and then I had to eat and you have to kind of wind down after a gig. So I'd go to bed at like 2:00 AM, wake up really late on a Sunday, and I'd be like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I have to go back to school on Monday." And my classes were always at 8:30 in the morning for whatever reason. So it was rough. And I almost felt like in the old days how you had to reboot your hard drive, I'm going to show my age right now, but you could boot it up in Windows or Unix or whatever, you had to sort of insert a different booting disc or whatever.
But yeah, so I felt like that. I had to reboot my brain into physics mode on a Monday, and then come Friday afternoon, reboot into music mode. And I was wondering how I was going to continue. How could these two tensions continue to exist inside me? And it felt like it all came to a crunch when I won the scholarship and I was told, "You have this amazing opportunity to go to Oxford, to do your PhD, but you also have this recording contract in front of you." And that was something I always wanted to do. I always wanted to make a record, and thank goodness I got some very wise advice from a friend of mine, Andre White, who's a jazz pianist from Montreal and wonderful educator who teaches at McGill. He said to me, "This isn't going to be your only recording opportunity. You can make a record any time in your life, but the Rhodes is only going to come around once."
Until that point, I mean, I hadn't considered declining the Rhodes or anything, but I had considered postponing it. I was thinking, could I ask them if I could postpone it? Would that be the done thing? Will they think I'm not serious enough about it, and will they take it back away from me? Would they withdraw the offer if I said I was thinking about postponing? So all these things were going in my brain. And then Andre said, "You don't have to do this now. You could make a record anytime." And he also told me, because I was very young at the time, and he said, "Your voice is going to change and mature as you get older, and you might wish that you had waited to do a recording."
And he was right on both counts, and the thing about that contract was it was a very controlling contract. They wanted to control who I was going to record with, what repertoire I would record. The contract also said that I had to go in when they wanted me to go in to the studio. And I said, "There should be a bit of give and take, right? They should be willing to be flexible and accommodate my needs, and we should have a mutually agreed upon time to go into the studio for example." But they weren't really willing to bend at all on that. So to me that was a signal: this is not going to work out. This is not what I want.
And I'm glad that I waited because I ended up producing my own recording some years later. I think about five years later, I did my first album, and it was totally indie, very modest pressing. I think I pressed like 500 CDs. But I managed to sell them all at gigs, and this was in the UK. And so then I pressed another 500 and then sold those. And so it was little steps like that, but it was amazing. And I learned so much from having to produce, and to this day, I still love working that way. I love not just singing, but actually thinking about arrangements and thinking about how to sequence the songs, how do you make an album?
I mean, now I guess with streaming, the concept of albums doesn't really matter anymore. But in those days I really paid a lot of attention and gave a lot of thought of how to sequence the songs so that I was varying things like tempos and keys and languages, and alternating between not putting... You have to think about so many things. You don't want to put all your Latin tunes together. You have to spread them around. You have to make sure that it's not going to jolt people. There's just so many interesting things to think about when you're putting together an album. And I remember sometimes I would sequence songs like three or four different ways, and then play them through and see which one resonated the most with me. And then the most agonizing decision to me is always which song is the first one, what should be the first song on the album so that it's compelling, but also somewhat representative of what the rest of the project is going to be. There's so many variables. It's like a puzzle. Putting it all together is such a puzzle. Yeah. It's amazing.
Leah Roseman:
But when you went to Oxford, you were able to sing, you were able to still do music?
Diane Nalini:
Yes. Yes. It took me a while to meet musicians. I've had to do that a few times in my life. Every time you move, it's like you're starting from scratch. And this was before I had my own website or anything, so I didn't really have any kind of place where people could go and hear me. I had a demo. I had made a cassette back in Montreal, and I brought my demo with me. But I felt like I had left Montreal where people knew me, and I'd had a little bit of exposure. I had done a couple of festivals, the Festival Jazz, the Montreal Jazz Fest had hired me and I had done this big outdoor concert, and I was singing around the circuit.
And I knew that if I phoned musicians, they'd be like, "Yeah, I'd love to do that with you." Because they knew me, and they knew I was reliable, and I could hold a tune, and I knew when to come in and all those things that musicians are always skeptical about when it comes to singers, but then you go to a new country, and I didn't know anyone on the scene. And then luckily I met a friend of a friend who connected me to a Canadian jazz pianist who was living in London, and through him, I met a few musicians, and then I did the odd gig here or there. But it took a while. It just took a while to build up those connections. So I had a bit of a period of not doing anything for a couple of years and focusing very much on my studies and focusing on my doctorate.
And then there were no jazz musicians in Oxford that I connected with. I went to a few "jazz nights," and it was not really the speed I was used to in terms of the caliber of the musicians and all that. Maybe I just wasn't going to the right places, but I didn't see people that I felt I wanted to necessarily collaborate with at the time. But I did meet some salsa musicians, and I got into this salsa band. And at the time it was such a fun band to be in. It was a very mixed abilities band. There were professional musicians in the band, and there were also people who were just doing it for the love of it. But what was so refreshing about that band was that I was in a university town where every single conversation with anybody you met always started the same way. It was always like, "So what's your thesis about?"
And you're just like, "Oh my God, I want to meet someone with a real life and a real job who's not stuck in their ivory tower." And so what I loved about that band is we had a bongo player. He was from Ecuador. He was a welder in the local BMW car factory, that was one town away. We had a bassist who was a carpenter by trade. We had a saxophonist who worked at an advertising agency, and a trumpet player who worked for the local gas company as a salesman.
So it was people who were not from the academic world, and I just found that so refreshing. And it gave me a different perspective. And to play for audiences that are dancing was quite a revelation to me because I was used to singing in jazz clubs where everybody sort of sits there like this, and they're tapping their feet sometimes, but they're rarely getting up and dancing, whereas at a salsa gig, everybody's dancing all the time, and that's your purpose is to make them dance and to have lively arrangements and recognizable tunes that people are going to be able to sing along with. And so we were doing tunes by Celia Cruz and Willie Colon and Oscar de Leon, which is just really fun bodacious arrangements. And boy, it gave me such a thrill to see people dancing to our music. It was just the best.
Leah Roseman:
It's interesting. Because at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about your early roots in dance and how that was connected with feeling the music in your body, and then you came to that.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah, you're right. You're right. And actually salsa dancing was... The reason I got into that band was I had also started to dance on the local salsa...
The reason I got into that band, was I had also started to dance on the local salsa. Just getting part of the salsa scene. And that was because of my Brazilian housemate, who would take me out dancing all the time. She's like, "Come on, let's go dancing. Let's go dancing." So we would go dancing together and we would meet all these people, and that's how I met these people in the band. And they said they were looking for a singer who spoke Spanish, and I was like, "I'm a singer who speak Spanish, I could do that."
But you're right, it was through the dance. It was through my rediscovery of my love of dance. This time through salsa dancing, like partner dancing, that it was so much fun. The thing I find hard about those styles of dancing though, whether it's tango or salsa, is the guy's always leading. As a woman, you have to follow a guy's lead. And I was like, "Ugh, Why can't I lead sometimes?" But that's not the done thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Diane Nalini:
Yeah. And you're also at the mercy of whether that person has good rhythm or not, because you got to follow what they're doing, right? So, that's always interesting.
Leah Roseman:
When you brought up your ukulele, you said, this is,.. I think you said it's a tenor, or a baritone?
Diane Nalini:
It's tuned as a baritone. It's actually a slightly smaller scale than a typical baritone ukulele. Most baritone ukuleles are like 19, or 20 inches in scale. This one is an 18 inch scale. But it's made by a wonderful luthier from right here in Canada, his name is Luis Feu de Mesquita . And he builds flamenco guitars and ukuleles, and he builds each ukulele with the same care he would put into a beautiful guitar. And they just have the most beautiful, like... Like the tone is just, oh, to die for. After you've played one of his ukuleles, it's really hard to go back to one of those factory made ukuleles, because... But yeah, I love his instruments, and I'm so lucky to have one of his instruments.
And he has a background in engineering, and to me, he's like the perfect marriage of the science and the art. Because he takes such care in his instruments, and he understands the physics of what's going on in the instrument, you know? I think to me, that's the thing that I always come back to. Is that so much of music production is about physics and waves, right?
And so, understanding the basic physics of what's a harmonic, why is it here, why is it there? Why do I get this pitch when I press this there? It's all physics. And so to have someone like him who understands the physics so innately, but also this deep understanding of what each wood tone is going to achieve. It's fascinating to talk to him. Like, again, I can sort of geek out.
And Adrian's also a bit of a wood tone geek as well. Adrian loves to do the research to be like, "Okay, so if we had a spruce... If we have like Engelmann spruce, it's going to be like this, but we could also do Adirondack spruce, or Bearclaw spruce, or da, da, da, da, da." I'm just like, "Oh my God." So, it's really fun to sort of the joy of consulting during the process of making a custom uke, is to try to imagine what the uke is going to sound like, based on sound samples that you're listening to. And it's so... I find it very hard. It's still very much a leap of faith to decide, like, "What should the back be?"
So this instrument, for example, this is Port Orford cedar on the top. And what I love about it is, the top is from Canada, so it's Port Orford cedar from Canada. But the back end sides of the instrument, they're made of koa, which is a tree that grows in Hawaii. And so, part of my instrument is from Hawaii, which is where the ukulele originates. And then part of it is from Canada, which is where I come from. So, I like that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I understand. It's definitely a Hawaii instrument, but it was inspired by Portuguese sailors, who had brought small guitars.
Diane Nalini:
Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. And so they came over from Madeira, which was... They were laborers, some of them were agricultural workers. There was a crop... Some bad situations in Madeira at that time where they had some crop failures. Just difficult climatological situations where the agriculture just wasn't yielding what people were expecting. And Hawaii at the time had a great need for foreign workers to come in to work the sugar cane fields, and just proper... You know, they needed external labor because their economy was growing faster than they could have. They didn't have enough people to work. And so some carpenters, and cabinet makers, were on this boat that sailed from Madeira to Hawaii.
Apparently this is how the story goes, that it was a long journey, several... I think more than a hundred days journey, if I remember correctly, on this boat called the Ravenscrag that went over from Madeira to Hawaii. And when they pulled into port and when they, the Portuguese immigrants, got off the boat they were so happy that they brought out their little instruments.
And yeah, there's a couple of instruments. There's one called rajão, which is... And then there's... They're in a family of instruments called cavaquinho. Which is typically like a four string instrument, which can either have metal strings, or nylon strings, I think. Depending on which part of the world it's ended up in. But the cavaquinho is also a big part of Samba music. It's like this tiny... The cavaquinho will have like metal strings. And so it has a very plucky sound, because it's like way up here, this octave sound. Like it... That's the sort of that sound. But of course I can't really reproduce it, because I don't have the sort of steel strings that you would normally have on a high tension cavaquinho. But it's that sound that we all familiar with.
If you like Brazilian music, you've heard that little "tik tik tik ta tik" and then you hear the cavaquinho also in music, from like Cabo Verde, so if you hear Cesária Évora, or any of those wonderful musicians from Cabo Verde, they've often got a slower strum, but it'll be like... Those same kind of sounds of up there, that little angels cavaquinho sound. And I think there was another instrument, and I'm kind of drawing a blank right now on its name. But the rajao had four strings, but then the other instrument, and I can't remember its name right now. But it was a five string instrument, that had reentrant tuning. So it had like that... Because you know, this is a linear tuned instrument, so it goes, do do do do. But reentrant tuning would be, da da da da. And that's the classic ukulele sound from Hawaii, is that reentrant tuning.
And so they merged together the tunings of these two instruments. One, the five stringer that had the reentrant tuning, and then the four stringer ragao. I might be getting them mixed up. But they kind of merged the concepts together, where it was like a four stringer, but with reentrant tuning. And these cabinet makers, these early Portuguese innovators who made this instrument, this became the ukulele.
And then the king at the time, the king of Hawaii, was trying to ensure that Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian traditions were given a prominent place in the court, and were elevated. And he was trying to sort of support the Hawaiian, his own culture, his Hawaiian culture. And so he started using these new instruments, these ukuleles to accompany... He was a good singer, and he had a group of singers that he had in his court who would perform. And they all started playing the ukulele, and he loved the ukulele. And I think it was thanks to his support of the instrument that it really flourished. So, it's just such a lovely history. It's even though it's a very recent history compared to other instruments, I think it's got such a beautiful and unique history.
Leah Roseman:
Cool. Things I was curious about, one of them is, are you working on new songs, or a new album?
Diane Nalini:
Oh, that is a good... I have a ton of songs, that I have never recorded that I want to still record. And I'm also in the process of writing some new songs that have been percolating in the back of my mind. But I feel kind of, at this point, I'm a little bit at a loss for how to proceed. Because I released Future Perfect, the latest album, in 2019. We did a release concert at the National Arts Center.
And I did a release show, a weekend show, at the Upstairs Jazz club in Montreal. But there were plans for other concerts, and then 2020 pandemic hit, and everything stopped. And I was like, "What do you do with a newly released album that you can't tour?" And sync space hadn't been invented yet, and I couldn't perform with anybody. And it was just like, "I don't know what to do anymore about this album. Like, is it old news? Can I start promoting it now, or is it too late?" So, I'm still kind of trying to figure out, because we're still not returning to live performing yet, right? And so, it's just... Yeah.
So I have so much material. I would love to do another album, but I also feel like I haven't given this new album it's chance to kind of go out into the world properly. So, I feel like I still need to perform, and tour these songs more, before I think about recording another album. But yeah, it's really interesting to... The songwriting process for these new songs has been very interesting. Because I have found that during the pandemic, it's not been... I don't know. I hear about all these people who are like, "I've been so creative during the pandemic. I've written enough, and I've written an novel." Well, for me, it hasn't been that way. I have not. It's almost like, I feel like you have to be living your life to feel the creative juices for that kind of creativity flowing.
It's not to say, I don't feel like the last two years haven't been creative and productive. They have, because I've been doing... I've been focusing a lot on teaching, and just developing a whole bunch of new workshops and stuff. So, that side of it has been very creative. But it's almost like, I don't know. It hasn't let me just... I'm thankful that I have this stockpile of songs that are either finished, or half finished, so that I know that I can make a new album when the time comes. But you would've thought that those half finished songs would've been worked on while the pandemic was happening. That would've been a good opportunity, but the inspiration just wasn't there. I don't know why that is, but I guess not everybody reacts the same way to these situations where we're locked down.
Leah Roseman:
Probably because you knew that it was so uncertain as to when you could do them live. It probably just unconsciously stopped you. It's interesting, when I talked to Roddy... I can't remember exactly when we recorded it, I think it must have been the fall of 2020. So he'd been commissioned to write that album he did with Kellylee about the pandemic. And he said he was having, not quite blocked, but really hard. He said just not being with people, it was just hard. He managed to come out with some amazing music, but I know it was a real struggle for him. But you know, for me, one thing about this pandemic is just the true knowledge that anything can change so quickly. Life as you knew can be so different. I think you should also make a new album, if you have this material. And tour your, you know, when you get a chance, I love you, that album.
Diane Nalini:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I mean, you need to do all the things, you know?
Diane Nalini:
All the things, do it all. You're right. And you know, you were right in one respect... Well, many respects. You're right in many respects. But, you're right in terms of the life being fleeting aspect. I always think to myself, "Gosh, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I have all these songs that I have yet to even put to paper."
I am one of these people who, for better or worse, when I hear a piece of music once I remember it forever. And that can be both a good and a bad thing. Because sometimes you're like, "Why am I remembering this tune right now? It's not a good tune. I don't want to remember this tune." But I do remember it, right? But what that means is, once I've written the lyrics for a tune down, I often don't bother to write the music, and the chords down because they're in my head.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Diane Nalini:
And I don't write it down until I need to. Which is not good, because I'll be like, "Oh yeah. I've got that concert in a month's time, and I'm going to premier all these new songs." And then I'll be like, "Oh, damn. I haven't written them down anywhere." So then it's like 10 nights in a row, five hours a night, on Sibelius, trying to get everything down, all at once, right? Just writing it all down super quickly. Just before the first rehearsal or something. Instead of writing it down properly, like when you first get the ideas. And that way it's all there and ready to go, and it's not such a frantic scramble at the end.
So I don't know why, again, it's probably my... As I think back to that aversion that I used to have, to reading music, when I wanted to just do everything by ear when I was a five. I bet you it's the same inclination. Which is just like, "Yeah, I've got it up in my head, I don't need to write it down." Until I suddenly need to write it down.
Leah Roseman:
You're like Mozart. I'm really curious about this aspect.
Diane Nalini:
Oh no.
Leah Roseman:
Well, yeah. But, so then, in terms of an improviser, then do you remember everything you just improvised? Like you were just improvising for us, could you reproduce that?
Diane Nalini:
That's a good question. No, I don't think so. I think I have to consciously... That's a really good question. You know, I feel like I'm hearing myself differently when I'm thinking about improvising. So, I'm not listening to my own improvising in the same way as if I was listening to as somebody else. Does that make sense?
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Diane Nalini:
I think it's because my brain is divided, and I'm thinking about so many things. When you're improvising, it's like, you're thinking about the chords, you're thinking about melodic ideas. You're thinking about rhythmic ideas and... I'm not consciously thinking about all those things, but I think they're all kind of like going on in the back the mind, right?
Yeah. No, that's a really good question. I've never thought about that. Like, do I remember my own scat solos? No. You know, I don't want to sound too flippant about the whole thing about, "I remember I'm thinking if I hear it once." I think I remember if something is melodically strong, I will remember it. Even if I've only heard it once. If something is just like, the fifth take of a John Coltrane solo, on a particular album or whatever, or with five alternate takes, or whatever. Am I going to remember each solo? No.
I don't think it's like a photographic melodic memory. It's like, if I choose to engage with a piece of music actively, and it is melodically memorable, I will remember it. Like, to the point where I get haunted by things. Like I remember there was this movie, it was called "Australia" and it had Jeremy Irons in it, and Fanny Ardant, and it was set in the post world war II, Belgium. And I went to see it... I still remember, I went to see it on this tiny screen. There used to be like a 21 Cineplex cinema in Montreal, where they would show all these art house films. But the price you paid for that was that all the screens were really tiny, but it didn't matter.
And it had this beautiful, beautiful haunting score. And I only saw that film once, but it was so memorable that to this day, I still remember it. And I can't find the soundtrack to it anywhere, because now since then there's been another movie made called "Australia", which has Nicole Kidman. And, and I can't remember the name of the actor... Oh, Hugh Jackman, I think. So now, if you look up the soundtrack to "Australia", it's that one that comes up. And I could not find the soundtrack to that other movie. But it's interesting because it has some very memorable intervals in it. And I find it... I don't know. It's just, I've never heard anything like that before. And it haunts me, and I can't find it anywhere. So I have to keep humming it to myself, but I can't find the album anywhere.
Leah Roseman:
And you've written music for movies, as well.
Diane Nalini:
Oh, well, I've written music that got used in movies.
Leah Roseman:
Ah. Okay.
Diane Nalini:
Which is a bit different. So, I wish I had written music bespoke for a movie. I would love to do that. No, what I did was I recorded a bunch of songs with a wonderful British composer called Dick Walter. And he called us all into the studio in London for week long project. And at the last minute, he decided one of his songs needed French lyrics, and he couldn't write them in French. So he had already hired me as a singer to sing all these orchestrated jazz... Some of them were big bands, some of them were more classically orchestrated pieces. And he said, "Diane, can you write me some French lyrics for this tune?" I think I had a week. A week to come up with these lyrics.
But you know how sometimes pressure... Again, constraints, right? Constraints can be very... And they can trigger good things. I feel like they can. It forces you. Sometimes having a deadline to work to is the best, because you're just like, "Okay, I'm going to listen to this thing on repeat, and wait until something presents itself." And I listened to his piece, and I was like, "Okay, yeah. I can hear it. There's a nostalgia element to this." And so, I wrote lyrics that, to me, jived well with his melody. And we recorded it. And then he also asked me to write English lyrics to it. I'm like, "Oh, okay." So I wrote an English version of that song, and we recorded both versions of it.
And it got picked up, and it got used in... I guess, a couple of places. But the one that I know of, because I got SOCAN royalties for it, was it got used in this movie that Kate Blanchett appeared in. It was called "Charlotte Gray". It's a movie about a resistance... A woman who starts working for the French resistance. And it's interesting, and it is appropriate that piece would get used because it had that style. Like, that world war II kind of style to it. And then that piece also got used in Maigret, in an episode of Maigret Mysteries. And I didn't even know about it. It's only because my mom is a big fan of Maigret that she was like, "I was watching TV the other day and I heard your song." I was like, "What?" And then it's been used in like video games, and I can't believe what the life that this song has had, you know? And I only discover this after the fact, when I get like SOCAN royalties for it. And so it's really interesting. It's been a very interesting window into that world.
And then I wrote another. An independent filmmaker, from Los Angeles, also asked to use my song "While You're Sleeping" in a short film that she had produced. And so that was kind of cool as well, because she " what you realize as a songwriter, is your song has a certain meaning to you. But other people have their own interpretation of your lyrics, and their experience, and their interpretation of your song are just as valid as your own. Like, I feel I don't want to, nor do I have the right to, tell other people what my song should mean to them, right? To me, that's so fascinating. Is you put this thing out into the world, and then it has a life of its own. And it has a resonance of its own to people.
I remember I was invited by a... There was a professor of religious studies, at McGill University, who used to teach a course. It was called "Soul and Soul music", I think. His name was Norman Cornett. And he would invite different artists into his classroom, and play songs for his students, and then ask them to write essays about what the songs meant to them. And he did this for me for some of my original tunes. And he very kindly... And then he interviewed me, and we had a lovely conversation with him and his students and everything. But then a week later, he really, very kindly, sent me some of the students comments on what the songs meant to them.
And in particular, one of my songs which was on my first album, it's called After Dusk. There's a song which I wrote called After Dusk. I wrote the lyrics to it. The music is by a dear friend of mine called Mike Rud, a wonderful jazz guitarist, and wonderful composer. And that song to me, I wrote that song as almost a form of therapy. After a good friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine, was killed by a hit and run driver when she was out walking her dog. And her husband was with her, and he got a broken leg from the accident, but he survived the accident. And I was just like.... And I had... This happened like a week after I had just returned to England from visiting my parents in Montreal. And she died, and the funeral was too quick. Like, it all happened too fast. I couldn't get back in time to attend. And I also couldn't like really afford it, because I had just flown back from Montreal.
Anyway, so my way of processing all my grief, was to write this song. From kind of like the perspective of her husband, who's kind of trying to come to terms with the passing. But I kept it vague, obviously. There was no reference to death or anything in the song. But to me, I know exactly what that song is about. And because it's about such a heavy subject, I often have great difficulty performing it live. Because I get all choked up, and I can't kind of... My chest gets tight, and I get emotional, and I can't actually seeing the lyrics out, without tightening everything.
And what was interesting was these students had listened to this song, but I had not been there, and I hadn't talked about what the song meant. And their interpretation of it was totally different. Like, they were hearing something... They were hearing a general theme of separation, and loss. But it was about a breakup, or it was about a parent leaving a child, or something. It was so interesting to see what it meant to them. And it made me realize that I was doing the audience a disservice by explaining too much about the songs. Like, if I tell them what the song is about beforehand, I've shut down their ability to create their own narrative for the song. You know what I mean?
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Diane Nalini:
And yeah. That was very eye opening to me. And I realized it's better to have a bit of mystery, and not explain too much about each song.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That very, very insightful. Well, it's so much food for thought. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much.
Diane Nalini:
Thank you, Leah. It's just, it's been a delight to talk to you. I feel like I've known you for a long time, even though we've just met. You're so delightful to talk to, and I thank you so much for having me on as your guest. It's just been a delight.
Speaker 1:
Season one of this podcast had 20 episodes, and season two continues with a really interesting mix of musicians. Talking about their lives and careers, with perspectives on overcoming challenges, finding inspiration and connection through a life so enriched with music. Please follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, to be informed about each new episode.
