Engaged To Song

We’ve all heard the stories of how talented people remember being discovered or discovering their talent when they were only wee young children. That their love for their creative activity started early on when they were just discovering whom they were. But that’s not always the case. My friend Mim, for one, is an anomaly.

Mim loves to sing. Now. But growing up in small-town Ontario, her creative outlet was the theatre and piano, sans singing. And although Mim liked pop stars such as Technotronic and Mariah Carey at that time, she didn’t really sing along to the radio or dream of being a rock-star like other kids her age. She just liked music and liked playing the piano, with no desire to sing while taking center stage in her theatre classes. You see Mim was incredibly shy about singing in front of anyone. Little did she know about the hidden talent that was laying dormant inside her.

Then mid-way through high school something happened. Not even Mim remembers what exactly propelled her to check out musical theater. Maybe she heard Donny Osmond sing in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat or another Andrew Lloyd Webber opera? But she was driven to try it out. Forgetting her shyness about singing, she decided to listen to her inner voice and join the local community musical theater. When she opened her mouth to sing at an audition, she had a voice and she could sing well. It turned out that it was the kind of music that Mim had been listening to that prevented her from wanting to sing. She didn’t like to sing pop or rock ‘n roll. She preferred musicals and jazz repertoire: the old greats from the 30s and 40s, Bing, Frank and The Andrew Sisters. And once Mim started she couldn’t stop listening and singing to them, over and over, developing her voice and her love. Singing this kind of music made her feel lively and engaged and she became hooked. Soon she increased her technical skill making it into Mohawk College as a jazz vocalist.

As Mim said, “if I fell in love with Bob Dylan, then maybe I’d be a better songwriter but I fell in love with Jazz which made me a better singer.”

Mim is by nature a neat and orderly type of person, which actually matches the kind of music she likes to sing. Jazz repertoire is known among the music community for having singing voices that are considered clean in comparison to other singing styles. Singers must have big vocal ranges and technical know-how. Something Mim has learned through her career teaching others to sing

After 17 years of singing, and 10 years teaching full-time, and being part of a band, Mim is still not bored and is still in love with musical and jazz repertoire styles of song. New singers pick up old favourites and develop a new way to colour the sound, bringing richness to her career. She still practices, although not as much as she’d like, but every time she sings she knows she must keep learning, must “do justice to the song, to the human sound that voices make.”