Laura Anglade is not easy to pigeon-hole. Known primarily as a jazz singer, she readily admits being influenced by such disparate women singers as Carmen MacRae, Blossom Dearie, Amy Winehouse and Barbra Streisand.
Anglade was born in southern France, but spent her first few years in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, where her father worked in advertising. After living in the United States from the age of five, she attended Concordia University in Montréal, where she studied to be a translator.
More recently, she spent four years in Toronto before relocating to New York City this month.
As with many kids who pursue music, classical piano was her starting point. But it wasn’t really for her, and she’s forgotten most of what she learned.
“I never liked reading music, I was never very good at it,” she admits. My teacher would laugh, because I would show up to the class with the piano part memorized, but he knew I didn’t practise it, because I did it in a different key.”
After piano and a bit of flute-playing, she joined the school choir, developing an early interest in the theatre program.
“I was always really shy, so I never got any leads or anything like that, but I did like singing. I always enjoyed singing. The choir was how it started, I guess.”
As her voice and confidence grew, she began covering pop songs with a friend in local cafes.
“The jazz stuff came later. I started taking voice lessons with a wonderful teacher who had classical vocal training. We were trying a lot of different genres. We did a lot of musical theatre stuff, so of course the repertoire is kind of the same.,” Anglade says.
A later mentor was David Long, whose mother, Dorothy Fields, had written a lot of new standards. He introduced her to a lot of songs she hadn’t heard before.
“It was a very fresh introduction, where I wasn’t necessarily influenced by Ella’s [Fitzgerald] version, or by someone else’s. He would just sit at the piano and play that, and I would learn melodies and he would sing them to me,” she says.
“Even today, I find it’s really important to learn the original melody and find some of the original recordings, like some of those Tommy Dorsey recordings, where the style of singing was very specific to that time. Then, once I really inhabit the song, I’ll go and check out other versions.”
Despite immersing herself in a wide range of standards from the American Songbook, her goal is never to mimic other artists.
“I take pride in really trying to sound like me, and I think you can hear my speaking voice in my singing, and that’s the key,” she says.
“I tell myself to just be open to singing songs with a good story and a good arc. And, of course, they have to have a good melody, but not necessarily be pigeon-holed into one specific type of music. I’m drawn to the jazz stuff right now, because I love those stories, and I resonate with them, and I think I deal with them well. But I love the classical stuff, too.”
Anglade says a lot of people try to sing jazz because they have an idea of what jazz singing is, and try to alter their voices to sound old-school.
“It’s a tricky question. I don’t ever try to convince people. If they’re not going to like it, they’re not going to like it. But I like it, so there you go.” she says.
Anglade currently has three albums to her credit—the first in English, the second in French. A third English-language collection of standards is due for release next spring.
“There’s just so many tunes in the Songbook that are pretty rare and haven’t really been done that much. I just love digging those up. I find it fascinating how many of these tunes are timeless, when they were written in the ‘20s, ‘30s, early ‘40s. It’s cool.”
She also tours extensively, but says she likes being in a room with people, whether in a concert hall or a more intimate venue.
“I think what’s fun about it is that I try to step into a role. I like to treat it like acting, a lot of the time. It’s kind of escapism for me, where I don’t necessarily feel vulnerable, because it’s not me. I become somebody else.”
As her career progresses, how does Anglade assess her own voice?
“I think it’s a voice that’s always changing. I think it’s a voice that is maturing alongside me as I mature in my life. I think that I can definitely tap into more power, which I had when I was younger, and I like to retrieve it,” she says.
“I mean, I love singing with big bands, I would love to sing more with orchestras. I am capable of projecting quite a bit, but I’m also able to get intimate as well and sing softly.
“I like to think there’s a lot of different sides to the voice. I think it’s important to not think about singing pretty all the time. I have a big voice when I want to, but sometimes I like to hide it.”
When Laura Anglade makes her Yukon debut to open a new Jazz on the Wing season this Sunday, it will be almost a family affair.
The ensemble consists of two married couples who first performed together in 2017, and who spent this July touring Canada together.
“We have some nice arrangements, more colourful arrangements, not so predictable … playing with textures to bring out the lyric and have fun with that,”
The group consists of Anglade and her bassist husband, Johnathan Chapman, as well as guitarist Sam Kirmayer and his wife, Valérie Lacombe, on drums. Jazz on the Wing happens Sunday, September 29, beginning at 7:30 p.m., on the mainstage of the Yukon Arts Centre.
