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Maria Schafer Wants You To Know Love |
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To say that Maria Schafer is an old soul, a beautiful and classic voice
from another era would seem to be stating the obvious, whether she is
singing the Harry Warren and Mack Gordon song, “The More I See You” or
Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” when she demonstrates
her smooth, effortless scatting ability. Both songs are from her current
album To Know Love. Where
does that old soul vibe come from?
Maria Schafer explains, “I have always been a quiet, curious, studious
type of person. It was not that I didn’t get along with children my own
age; it was just that as I was growing up I was more interested in
spending time with adults. I (wanted to know) what they were concerned
about and I wanted to be a part of their conversations. I loved to do
well in school and I was very shy. I loved to read and I was interested
in the culture of the old school society that was presented in old
movies from the forties through the sixties.
In high school I came across a movie called
The Girl Can’t Help It
featuring Jayne Mansfield and Julie London. Julie London plays a sultry
ex-lover of one of the male leads. She keeps coming up in the movie
singing “Cry Me A River,” which is the song that got me into Jazz. The
way in which people conducted themselves and the way they communicated
was always a little more attractive to me than present day communication
styles. It branded me as an old soul and I hear that quite often.
When it comes to songs written by someone else, each singer needs to
find a way to make them their own and Schafer talks about how she did
just that with the song “The More I See You.”
“That one has a long history with me and with my guitarist Shane Savala.
It is one of the songs that we started playing together during the first
year that we worked together as a duo. It has definitely evolved. I love
doing the verse of this tune, because the Great American Songbook has
all of these tunes, which were originally written for musicals and often
the verse is neglected or people don’t even know that it exists. On this
particular arrangement I made sure I did the verse. It has a great
melody and it is one that just sticks in your head.
It sings itself with the way it was written.
I did that in a way that gave the verse every bit of energy and time
that it wanted in terms of the lyrics. I love the song. It is adorable.
It is sweet and it has a lot of optimism in it. It is about how
wonderful things are now and it looks to the future and what the future
will be like with someone you love and maybe have a partnership with.
You know things are going to be even better,” she says.
Brad Black serves up a superb trumpet solo on “The More I See You,” and
Schafer says, “I think that he has a beautiful solo that completely
encapsulates that idea and he adds his own twist on it as well. That
song was meant to be this little bubble of ambition and excitement for
not only what is in the present, but for what could be in the future.”
She talks about some of the arrangements, “One of the new arrangements
that I wrote for this album was for the song “I Fall In Love Too
Easily.” That is another one for which I recorded the verse and I have
only heard the verse sung by two people. I really wanted to make sure
that on that particular track that I included the verse. I thought about
how people sing that song. Quite often it is sung as a lament by a
forlorn person who runs headlong into relationships, goes into things
too aggressively and then things end prematurely, because they went too
quickly and they fell in love too easily.
I got a bit cheeky with this arrangement. The character in the song is a
little more capricious and digs into that side of her personality. She
has the attitude yeah, I fall in love, I play hard and I work hard. It
burns out fast and bright, but boy it’s fun, while we are doing it.
I wanted to do the verse and the song in this 5 / 4 feel rather than the
typical 4 / 4 that it is written in. Part of the reason for the 5 / 4 is
it extends the phrases harmonically and it gives the lyric a little more
time to breathe. As I am singing I am talking about my heart should be
well schooled, because I have been fooled in the past and that part gets
big and louder. There is more activity from the band, before it falls
back to this lighter, reminiscent part when the singer is laughing at
herself and (saying) you think I would have learned by now and yet I
haven’t and I don’t mind. I put an interlude at the end of the form,
which serves as a launching pad out into the guitar solo and it seems to
reset things. With each new relationship or each new endeavor into love
the character experiences this rebirth. That was my intent with the
interlude,” she says.
While we would rather talk about Maria Schafer’s torch like vocals on
“Lush Life,” when she is accompanied by bassist Joe Butts, the
conversation shifts to what she describes as a “quite ambitious
arrangement.”
“I love the idea of playing with just an acoustic bass, as the other
harmonic instrument. Having these two instruments that are continually
checking their tuning against their context seems like a great
adventure. It can go wonderfully or it can go very wrong if the trust
isn’t there between the musicians.
“Lush Life,” and “Summer,” are about haunted people. “Summer,” is about
a love that has passed and “Lush Life,” is about a life that has really
passed. The idea for having such sparse arrangements for each song was a
life that used to be exuberant and full of vitality and now that person
is burned out. The purpose of writing the arrangements so ambitiously in
my mind was to test myself and to test my musicians as well and to see
where you can take it. When there is not a lot on the page in terms of
an arrangement and you do not put any constraints on where the music can
go, you can take it quite far.
I think that Joe’s playing on both tracks is just absolutely beautiful.
I am so glad I got to work with him and I felt like his bass playing was
a perfect complement to how I was singing the lyrics. He is very lyrical
in his playing.
The only way that you can grow personally, professionally, in your
friendships and your romances is by challenging yourself and not by
staying the course. The growth occurs in that spot where you want to be,
but you also aren’t quite sure if you have the skills or the gumption or
the strength or whatever aspects of your personality that you think you
are missing. It is in that space where you are not quite sure what is
going to happen. That’s where the magic happens and where the growth
happens,” she says.
Drummer Kyle Sharamitaro was a musical colleague of Brad Black’s from
New Orleans, where the album was recorded, so he was invited to add his
playing to the already excellent musicians who appear on
To Know Love. Maria Schafer
describes the musicians as being “phenomenally musically talented” and
“who also have great attitudes.”
Even though Maria Schafer is on the road touring worldwide with the
Glenn Miller Orchestra between forty-six and forty-eight weeks each
year, she considers Long Beach, California to be home.
“That is where I got my start as a singer and where most of my
connections still are. I am starting to make my way back into the LA
Jazz scene,” she says.
Schafer was born in Burnaby, British Columbia (adjacent to Vancouver)
and as she recalls through the eyes of a child that period of her life
it sounds idyllic, “We were next to the nature preserve there. The back
of our yard extended into the forest. There were all of these beautiful
trees rising up around the house. It was a very tight knit community and
we knew all of our neighbors on both sides. Growing up there instilled
in me this great love for nature. It could be one of the reasons why I
was quiet as a child, because there were not a lot of children around,
just a lot of nature. Even
when I was in Oklahoma (where she
lived later in her childhood) I would fancy myself as a Snow White
character and I couldn’t really sing in front of people, but I would
definitely sing to nature or to birds or to squirrels. I would sing to
the wind and I would try to get creatures to come to me.
In Oklahoma I was in a small town with 5,500 people in it.
It was such a slow life it seemed. I had a carefree childhood and I
could ride my bike anywhere or I could walk down the street anywhere. I
remember trick or treating by myself, but in California it would be
insane to let a child do anything (alone) it seems.
My experiences in Oklahoma seemed to make me value taking life slow and
getting to know the people around me. It cultivated within me a sense of
community and hard work. Being there reminded me of how important a work
ethic is and how important it is to have integrity and being proud of
what you do.
California is very fast and quick, super modern, go, go, go, achievement
based and when I want to get away from that I just drive to one of the
national parks. I have taken a bit from each place that I have lived.
Those have been internalized into the good aspects of my character.”
It also makes it easier to understand where that “Old Soul” sensibility
in her vocals comes from. Maria Schafer’s album
To Know Love should be a
treat for anyone who considers themselves to be a Jazz aficionado,
superb, smooth, evocative vocals, enveloped in equally emotive
instrumentals and set to very good arrangements. Do yourself a favor and
visit your favorite digital music store and pick up a copy for yourself. You can visit Maria Schafer's
website here.
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One
of the benefits for me of being a singer rather than an instrumentalist
is we get these wonderful lyrics that are poetic and heartbreaking or
uplifting, but they are poetry. We have the opportunity to sing those
and they should not only be sung, but they should be conveyed in a way
that is very personal and in a way that is very impactful to other
people. It results in a bigger focus on phrasing, articulation and
making sure that I sing the phrase just the way I would say it in real
life, (such as) never stopping in the middle of a word for a breath or
stopping unnaturally in the middle of a phase. It even comes into play
with the way I shade my voice and if it is an angry or an irate type of
a song there (needs to be) an edge to your voice. If there is heartbreak
the voice should be somewhat weak or your voice should be emboldened if
it was the type of love that makes you never look back and never look
down again. You just keep moving on from that kind of heartbreak. That
is the way I want to interpret songs, how they would be lived in real
life, not just the way that an instrument might play them without the
narrative that is attached to the lyric.” 