Arts editor Marieke van der Vaart sat down with jazz and cabaret singer Mary Foster Conklin last week to discuss her singing, musical journey, and experience living in New York City. Here's what she had to say.
Marieke van der Vaart: What was your singing background?
Mary Foster Conklin: I came from a rock and folk background and loved singing Gregorian chants and early music and stuff like that. When I got to college I was a theater major and sang with a punk band – I had purple hair back when it meant something.
MV: What do you love about the Great American Songbook?
MC: With musicians, standards are a common language — a reference point where we can make music. “You know ‘All of Me’? What key dyou do it in?" And boom ... They really encapsulate everything that’s good in the American voice. It almost sounds old-fashioned: our pep, our optimism, our arrogance, but that is what we are.
MV: What’s the shelf life for these standards?
MC: I would think of those standards like Shakespearean sonnets — perfectly constructed, timeless, universal. Those songs sit well with everyone. Every period has their own music, their own time, but to dismiss the standards as old-fashioned or hokey and out of step, I just don’t agree. They are a fabulous reference point.
And as you get older these songs resonate deeper with every year of experience.
MV: New York seems to have influenced your music a lot — how has the city changed since you first moved there?
MC: I lived in the East Village when it was really crappy. We call it the “Bad Old Days.” It was when there was still cheap housing in Manhattan and artists could really live cheaply and make art. It was a really wonderful time to live in New York and create.
[Now] it’s not the only place to create but it’s such a dramatic town. Also, it’s such an uncomfortable place to survive. You have to really want to live there. There are too few venues and too many musicians. I’m just a little scrappy girl from New Jersey — I seem to thrive with all of that discomfort. It’s nuts, I don’t know if it’s normal.
MV: How did 9/11 affect the jazz and musical world of New York?
MC: We may hate each other heartily, but we have to take the subway together every morning. It’s a forced tolerance and we protect our own. We don’t like outsiders coming in, hurting anybody in our neighborhood because that’s all New York really is, a collection of little towns and neighborhoods.
You get this feeling in the last couple of years that people really need to be sung to and they didn’t really care doesn’t really matter if it was standards, rock and roll, folk, German, as long as it was good.
MV: Is it true that you perform with a group on fire-escapes in New York?
MC: [Laughing] It was one of the trippier performance opportunities. [The apartment owner] was served by a cease and desist by her landlord. Another theatre contacted us last summer and said, ‘We have a fire escape.’
It has it’s own life. It’s not really legal because you’re not allowed to have things out on the fire escape — we have to come and go like Batman but that’s part of the fun. It’s tremendously hip. We did a Bastille Day production and Elizabeth said “O my God, we’ve got to get a French singer.” And I’m like, “No we don’t. We’ll all wear berets and smoke and we’ll bring in my friend who plays the accordion and that’ll be our French and it was a real hit.”
MV: That’s crazy!
MC: Well, it’s New York. To be part of something that spontaneous and creative: every singer that we invited up to perform with us came off the fire escape looking like they’d done crack [more laughter].
[Bonus: On her bright red Doc Martin shoes — "You can take the girl out of punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl!"] To read more about Mary Foster Conklin, visit her website here.
Stay tuned for profiles of the student concerto competition winners!
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