Multi-award-winning vocalist, pianist and composer Laila Biali release her latest album Wintersongs on November 1. At the end of the month, she’ll be performing two shows in Toronto in support of the album.
Biali, known largely for her work in jazz as a vocalist, (her JUNO-nominated Your Requests album took a dive into jazz standards), turns back to her roots in classical music for this release. Wintersongs, is Biali’s 10th recording as a bandleader.
Her current tour takes her from a sold-out show in London, UK on November 25 to land in Toronto on November 30 for two shows at Tyndale University. After Toronto, she’s off to the West Coast, making her way back to Aurora (Dec. 14), Cobourg (Dec. 15), and finally London, ON on Dec. 19.
The album, Wintersongs, comes from the time she spent at the Banff Centre, and consists of chamber art songs inspired by the environment.
Laila Biali: Classical to Jazz and Back
A classically trained pianist, Laila Bialia is best known today for her work in the world of jazz as a vocalist.
“I got into classical piano before I turned four,” Laila says. She recalls the stories her mother would tell of a young Laila climbing onto the piano bench at the age of three and a half to play the Sesame Street themes by ear. “By the time I was 12, I knew I wanted to be a concert pianist.”
An arm injury at the at of 15 put a detour into the road. She calls her journey from classical pianist to jazz vocalist and songwriter “a long transition”.
“I was heartbroken, “she says, “and I remained, I would say, in grieving […] for three, four years.”
Around that time, she discovered jazz. “Jazz felt like the rebound boyfriend,” she explains. “I wasn’t super happy about it for the first couple of years.” Then, she discovered artists like Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, and others, and regained her musical passion. “That ended up being the silver lining.”
Biali still credits her early classical training for pushing her to be her best. “I had a very dedicated piano teacher for the duration of my classical journey.” Strict, but passionate. “She really pushed me from day one, and I was in.”
As she began to get more and more involved in the world of jazz, however, she discovered some elements she hadn’t counted on before. “I didn’t realize what I was missing out on in terms of the community element,” she says. The world of a classical pianist can be a very solitary one, whether you’re a student or touring professional.
With jazz, the goal is to create something spontaneous in the moment, as you play. “It’s inherently collaborative.” It’s a contrast to the classical norm. “You tried to interpret the music as best you could,” she says. “Jazz is more about departing from the framework.”
Wintersongs
The new album is essentially a love song to winter. “A season I did not previously particularly enjoy,” she notes.
Biali grew up in Vancouver, where winters are notoriously wet, grey, and cold. She moved to Toronto at the age of 17, and remembers it took years to adjust to the new reality of a colder, snowier winter. The pandemic, in a twist of fate, helped her to grow her love of the season.
Previously, she’d been the indoorsy person in an outdoorsy household. Biali’s husband Ben Wittman is a native of Vermont who used to ski at the competitive level. “I felt a little bit like a stranger in my own household for six moths of the year,” she laughs. Cross country skiing helped her survive the pandemic, and see the beauty in the coldest season.
When she was invited to a songwriting residency at the Banff Centre in November 2021, she was given a writing cabin. “All you can see is forest and snow,” she says. “It was fairytale like.” Something about it reminded her of the kind of storybook perfect pictures of winter in Germany. “I had actually gone to Banff with the intention of writing a completely different project,” she recalls.
Whatever she had in mind, it was swept away by the simple beauty of the place. “Out came the sweetest songs. The muse wants what the muse wants,” she laughs. “I’m a firm believer in that a lot of being an artist is just doing the work.”
The album and the nature of the music she was writing was unexpected. “It was also a little bit terrifying,” she says of the writing-in-the-moment process. “It was such a departure, and so different from what I had planned on. I didn’t know where I’d end up.”
It’s not just a creative decision as a songwriter and composer. As an established artist with a reputation for very different repertoire, the issues also revolved around marketing and other more complicated business questions.
Production-wise, the album trickled out track by track over about a three year period, in marked contrast to the concentrated two-week period that it took to compose the material. Spouse Ben Wittman, today a jazz drummer and her co-producer, also has a classical background, and violinist/vocalist/arranger Drew Jurecka (who studied at the Curtis Institute), contributed the string arrangements. A few of the songs expanded from a string quartet to chamber orchestra.
She managed to get her choice of orchestrators, the in-demand Rob Mathes, known for his work with people like Sting and Bruce Springsteen. “That was the stuff of dreams for me,” she says of being able to observe his approach in expanding the works from string quartet to orchestra.
When it comes to live gigs on the road, however, a string quartet is much more viable — although she does still dream of touring with an orchestra.
Biali plays piano on the release, with The Venuti String Quartet (Rebekah Wolkstein, Drew Jurecka, Shannon Knights and Amahl Arulanandam), and Ben Wittman on percussion. Flutist and soprano saxophonist Jane Bunnett performs on the album, and will be on stage with Biali during the tour in November and December.
Lori Gemmel plays the harp on Drifting Dawn Ice. Other guest artists include Sam Yahel (Hammond B3 organ), Kevin Turcotte (trumpet), and George Koller on bass. Vocalists Wade O. Brown, Joanna Majoko, Genevieve Marentette, and Jackson Welchner add harmonies to some of the tracks. The Chamber Orchestra on the album consists of 12 violins, four violas, and four cellos.
She’s performed the music live over the last year or so, and says that audiences responded strongly to the addition of a string quartet. “People connect with strings in way that for me, as a jazz musician, is different,” Laila notes.
She’s hoping the album will get an equally warm reception.
- Find more details about Laila Biali’s album Wintersongs [HERE] and her tour, hitting Toronto November 30, [HERE].
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