Susan Dubrofsky is an editor of Montreal Serai and independent graphic designer and installation artist.

Holly Arsenault’s debut CD , ‘hush’, was touted as ‘one of the top five Canadian jazz releases of 2005 ‘ by the Ottawa Citizen, and was recognized with an East Coast MusicAssociation nomination for ‘ Jazz Recording of the Year’. Since 1991 she has played, written, taught and aspired to evolve in her adopted home of Montreal. For more information: www.hollyarsenault.com

Click on the image of Holly to hear the mp3.

Q: What are your roots, family, experience?

A: I grew up in Crepe Breton, although I was born on the mainland, in Antigonish. When I was five the family moved from the mainland to Sydney Mines, which was my mother’s home town. My earliest recollections of hearing a piano played are at my grandmother’s home. It was Christmas time, the kids in their jammies, and my mother playing Christmas songs on the piano. Prior to this I had never heard piano. I didn’t know my mother played, no formal training, but her ears were huge, metaphorical speaking, which is one of the nicest things you can say to a musician. I heard her play at Christmas time and then that would be it because we didn’t have a piano. I was so taken by this that I would go over to my Grandmother’s house and pound on it to the point that after a few years, when I was nine, finally my parents said, okay Holly might be serious about this. They enrolled me in piano lessons but they still didn’t buy a piano, so I would go over to nana’s house and practice. I would go from Mr. Taylor’s house, the piano teacher, at two dollars a lesson, go to nana’s house and practice and then go home. It wasn’t until two years later, when I was in grade five, when they bought the family piano. It was basically classical training, learning to read. I studied for about seven and a half years until Mr. Taylor retired when I was sixteen. We would have to give recitals at the end of the year. I look back on what I played at those recitals and I think, oh my god, how did I pull that off, because he had me playing things, like Beethoven’s first movement of Sonata Pathétique and that’s got a lot of notes in it. I practice every day and every day as excited as I am to get to the piano, every day I feel like I am just starting to learn something.

Q: Do you play classical music now?

A: I started again about ten years or more, I hooked up with Laurie Altman, a concert pianist who teaches formally at Concordia. I would bring in what I was working on, in my jazz world, and we would talk about the body in relation to the instrument. A year ago I thought, why don’t I study some repertoire with Laurie because that’s her milieu and if she can give me this much, just by bridging the gap between our two languages, imagine what she can give me if I cross over to her world. What I am discovering is that cross pollination is really helpful.

Q: Since you grew up with a classical music background, how did you come to play jazz?

A: When I was beginning grade 12, I had heard of a jazz program that was starting up in the fall of 1980, when I had graduated high school. I was curious, because I hadn’t listened to jazz, jazz kind of scared me. I was threatened by it because I didn’t understand it and I had no idea you could study it. In Cape Breton, unless you play Celtic music, you are not exposed to a lot of other genres. I remember, there was this really really cute guy. Everybody had a crush on him. We were talking one day and he said, you know, I think I’m going to go study at St. Francis Xavier ….. And I thought if it’s good enough for him (the cute guy), it’s good enough for me. I ended up going to St. F.X. and that was my introduction to jazz. I was lost. I couldn’t handle it. I did not know how to study. When I got to university, we were thrown all this information, day after day after day, and I had no way of processing it. I was still living under the myth that is perpetuated all over our culture that if it comes easily to you, then go with it, and if it doesn’t, find something else. I came very closer to flunking my last jury. I was not taught how to learn. I accept my part in that and in the years since, I have come around to how I learn. I left school kind of defeated and didn’t touch the instrument for six months. But then I moved to Halifax, the “big” city, and I did start playing again. But it wasn’t jazz. I was lucky enough to get hotel work because I was a girl and hotel work doesn’t require you to be a good musician. If you are a girl, and you are the right weight for your height, and you are a certain age, then there is work, work, work. I worked really steadily in Halifax. But it always nagged that I wanted more than that. It wasn’t until I had turned thirty, the epiphany, if I practice, if I get my ego out of the way, because I looked at people, and they were working ten times as hard behind the scenes, and I thought, well I might not end up being the greatest jazz musician that ever lived, but I am bound to get better if I figure out how to learn. Starting at that age, which is when I decided to move to Montreal because I needed a network of artists who were showing up for work everyday in their own spaces and being artists.

Q: Since you grew up in Cape Breton, and you keep mentioning Celtic, is it part of what we hear in your music?

A: I wonder, the older I get, it just might be. I get more sentimental about home. For a long time, I couldn’t get far enough away from it. In the last couple of years, revisiting the place where I grew up and going back into that community and feeling, yes, this is home, there is not other place in the world like it.

Q: What is the Celtic sound?

A: I am going out on a limb here. The Celtic sound is, in the Cape Breton fiddle/piano playing, very contrapuntal. Art Tatum had this great stride thing, where the left hand was playing it’s own line rather than boom chick, boom chick. He would create a line that would stand alone as a melody in his left hand. The Cape Breton style of piano playing is just that. This was initiated by a young woman who went to Boston in the thirties, a piano player from Cape Breton, who studied jazz in Boston and came home with this influence, what you hear in really good Cape Breton style piano playing, like John Morris Rankin and Sheumas MacNeil, who also took lessons from Mr. Taylor, it moves, it moves, it moves. There’s a syncopation to it. In jazz there’s a lot of anticipation that gets the music moving, like if you got, one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four… then the piano player will play.. one, two, three, four, BOOONG… two, three, four, BOOONG… two, BOOONG, three, four… one, two, BOOONG, three …. it gives the music the momentum. There’s that in Celtic music. With jazz, we have the beauty of choosing from all these scales, we’ve got the augmented scale, the diminished scale, we’ve got this different palette of colours and our work is made easier over certain tunes because we have so many choices over this four bar phrase. In pop music or Celtic music, it is primarily triadic. To play that as well as Celtic players play it, and to be able to improvise and make it move and give it fire and life without the scale choices there are in jazz, that’s a challenge..

Q: In the history of jazz, there weren’t too many women playing piano, do you now find this has changed?

A: When I went to university, that’s not that long ago, only 1980, women on any instrument were considered a rarity. It’s still a rarity but there are some lovely players, like Eliane Elias, who’s gorgeous and, quote unquote, feminine, but Herbie Hancock is a feminine player too as far as the sound goes. When I was first being placed, at university we had to audition so they could find positions for us in combos, and I remember the prof saying to me, and he was just in his twenties at the time, he said, you play like a girl. And I thought, I can’t go around playing like a girl, that’s not going to work. For years, I thought I am not going to fit in unless I play like a guy. One time Dee Dee Bridgewater was in town with Aint Misbehavin’ and I was doing a house gig at Biddles. The cast came over after the gig, and at one point the piano player from the show came over to sit in. I stood over by where she was sitting, and she said, oh were you the piano player, and I said, yes and she said, oh, I thought you were a man. For a long time after, I considered it a compliment.

Q: What is the difference in the sound?

A: Yin and yang, yang energy is active, yin is more receptive and reciprocal. In my own tone, I don’t have a big sound, I am not capable of producing a lot of volume, but because of the technical support I have been getting, I am getting better at honing the sound that I want which is clarity and control without brashness. Like I said, Herbie Hancock is an extremely feminine player because he’s less between the lines, he sees the big picture. He’s obviously studied the language, he’s a mechanical or civil engineer by training and you can hear the math in his playing but it’s not just the math, it serves something. But about the women in jazz in generally, when I was in Banff in the year 2000, at an international jazz workshop, there was a class of about 120 participants, and there were maybe 10 women, and of the ten women, there were six piano players, three singers and a guitarist, I remember sitting in the back of the class, and one of the young woman, Marianne Trudell, played some jazz. It was so beautiful and so authentic and I thought, women can play. Hearing someone with whom you can identify, thinking it can be done, rather than going, oh, you’re the chick. For years I had taken that on, well I play okay for a chick. That’s what I was told. Starting to see the confidence with Marianne and the other women, and with each generation there’s less of a stigma for them, although it’s still predominantly a boy’s game. And that’s okay, but there’s nothing like seeing yourself represented in a place you would like to be recognized.

Q: What are you trying to do with your music?

A: I am a student of jazz. I love the cerebralness of it and I love that I can go into my brain, cause my brain, when I can get it to do music, is a safe place for me. I can spend many hours there a day and if this opens a crack to something spiritual or a writing idea, I will remain a student of jazz for the rest of my life. I want to find and cultivate my own sound, and the older I get, I do identify as a woman and what do I want to say as a woman in the world. I’ve trained as a musician and I take the tools I’ve been given, from my teachers, from the music that exists, take what resonates with me and hope that it leads to something. I would like to cultivate a sound that is feminine, feminine in the most powerful, articulate and vulnerable way. When people tell me my music has a feminine sound, I’m just thrilled.

Q: Which track do you prefer on your CD?

A: The title track, Hush, because I’m proud of it, it’s in seven and Mike Murley plays and it was such a coup to get him. I’ve known him for years, we’re both from Nova Scotia, but he’s at the top of his game. There’s a lot of femininity in his playing and he draws on it when he plays, and that’s what we need, a balance, we’ve all got conflicting things going on inside us. I’m proud of the way it’s layered and he’s on the track and he does exactly what I didn’t even know I wanted until he played it. He just intuited what the sound I was going for and came up with something perfect on every track he played.

Q: Who would you most like to play with?

A: So many people. The desert island question. I want to say Joni Mitchell but even on the desert island I wouldn’t be worthy. Leonard Cohen.

Q: What would be your choice of instruments for a band and why?

A: I’m just about to study classical composition at Concordia, and I’m excited about learning to write for different combinations of strings like the cello and the more obscure woodwinds, like oboe, I love the sound of the oboe, the base clarinet, those dark rich chocolate textures. I am excited about pushing my own boundaries to get different combinations of sounds and textures, to be more adventurous. I love writing for voices. I’ve done a fair amount of that because I’ve done some musical direction and one of the shows I’ve done was a cabaret tribute to Carole Pope and Rough Trade, for five voices and piano. Even with five voices you can get so many neat things. One of the difficult things about being a live musician, and wanting to work with live musicians, is if you want to experiment with different sounds, it’s hard to get people to come over for a few days a week and indulge your whims, you want to pay your musicians.

Q: I play the Jews Harp.

A: Hahahahahahahaha

Q: You’ve composed all the music on this CD. How do you compose, find your sound?

A: When I was younger I wrote poetry and songs. My mother used to get into my private things and I was so scared of my mother that rather than finding another hiding place, I just stopped writing. It broke my heart that for years what I wanted to do the most I couldn’t. About six years ago, I thought, I’d like to try to write again. I contacted Roddy Ellias…, who is teaching the classical composition course that I am attending this fall. I was lucky enough to get a grant and he agreed to teach me. He had such an organized way of approaching sound. His genius is tweaking a little nut of an idea. The initial gift that he gave me, was that I had to sit down to it every day and just get past that absolute paralyzing fear, which I still have. What he taught me, is that you sit down to it every day and it’s not always going to be brilliant and if you learn your craft than once in a while when you do get an idea, you can serve that idea. All the tunes on this record, written over a three year period, they were all Roddy. I would come in with a few bars and he would suggest how to tweak and tweak.

Q: And how much improvisation is there with the other instruments?

A: If you listen to standard jazz form, we have the inhead, which is the song. If there’s a melody than that’s what we play in the inhead. You go over that once. That sets up the melody. Then the band goes back and the rhythm section plays the chords that would be underneath the melody and the improviser plays another melody over that. And it’s back to the top of the tune again. The essentials are laid out. Jazz is very structured.

Q: With Hush, when the sax comes in, is he playing the same thing every time?

A: Here’s the piano part, um pa pa boom, it repeats, In Hush, the first time through, it’s just piano. At one point the bass enters and plays with me, the left hand. Now we repeat and I play the exact same thing that I did and here’s the line where the saxophone plays… do da da, over that same thing. When he comes in, we are still playing the head, the theme. It goes around again and he’s now playing the melody but he’s looking at these chord symbols and he’s getting his cues from that as to what appropriate choices would be to playing an alternative melody which is what jazz is, improvisation. Around and around and then on the last chorus he comes back and plays the theme again. Theme, theme, theme and then we end it here with the coda. When people are doing their improvisation, someone in the rhythm section is playing the exact same thing we played through the first time. If we had a trumpet player, the rhythm would go back and play again. The rhythm always plays from this first bar to the last bar and back around and around until the outhead when someone refers to the theme and then we’re done. The inhead is the first time you hear the tune, the melody. The outhead is the second time you hear it, they are like bookends.

Q: Anything else you would like to add?

A: I want to be a better artist. In this milieu, you can choose your direction, at least artistically, you know that if you put in x many days a week, you show up to your instrument then you are bound to improve, there is that guarantee, and on a good day it will lead you to something inspiring, or comforting. Even on the worst days, it’s a good place to be.