Interview With Jazz Singer Kate McGarry
KM: It seems to be a human tendency to label, doesn’t it? I do it all the time, but I try to keep in mind that nothing I think about an artist – or about myself for that matter – can encapsulate what the artist is capable of or where they might go in the future or even what their intentions are in the present. I think it’s fine if it’s taken with a grain – or a pound – of Celtic sea salt.
KM: All my recordings feel like big run-on sentences in a conversation I am having with God/myself and actual words probably would obscure the point more than elucidate it. But since you’ve asked - around the time that “ If Less is More…” was made I had experienced feelings of great limitation with my identity and a need to get behind my picture of myself to see what else was there. I had spent a lot of time in silence and run into a space where I existed but I didn’t exist. I could see the world of form but it felt like a façade and that huge open (terrifying) space of a Nothing was beckoning and scaring me at the same time. How Keith (Ganz) got into my brain to write “Let’s Face the Music And Dance” I’ll never know, but he did.
KM: I guess because money was never the bottom-line with them, the art is. They are committed to helping facilitate the work of their artists, and as a full service recording facility and record label, they do it very well. What a wonderful label it is – I do feel fortunate to be working with them.
KM: How to explain it – like meeting at your favorite sandbox for a romp with your best friends except they all turn out to be exquisite composers and singers and instead of a sand castle you make a recording that you love to bits. It is my definition of Heaven.
KM: I don’t know if what I have qualifies as a process… Every once in a great while a melody and some lyrics squeeze out of an opening in a dark corner of my soul. The opening promptly seals up until the next time. I have not developed much of a relationship with this part of myself yet, but the night is young.
Hell if I know.
KM: Story wins every time. That said, if I am in the right place for telling the story, it calls on the highest of my abilities as a musician.
KM: It certainly seems that the songs pick me rather than the other way around. I start hearing a song in my head – I don’t know why – somehow it connects to an emotion or a memory or a state of being and it basically takes up residence inside me until I get what I’m hearing out on paper and get the band to play it. Sometimes that process takes a few years from start to finish. It was a full 13 years between when I first heard “Heather on the Hill” and when I wrote down the arrangement I was hearing in my head. “We will sell no wine before its time” and all that…
KM: It has been incredibly helpful for me to be here in NY for the past 10 years. I’ve been exposed to a level of musicianship that doesn’t exist outside of the city, also I was steeped in the different rhythms and sounds of all the cultures represented here. It definitely has a particular energy that is like no other city. The funny thing is, I am getting ready to move away and I don’t feel like I have to be in NYC to make interesting or honest music at this point.
KM: I am moving to Durham, North Carolina this fall after 10 years in NYC. My husband, Keith (Ganz), and I are feeling a desire to be in a quieter more contemplative setting – did I mention warmer and less rainy? I hope to write music, record, travel and perform more than I do now and teach less. I also hope to stare down a few more of the parts of myself that have avoided my scrutiny for lo these many years and see if we can get to the bottom of the whole “What is this thing called love” question.
Thanks for asking Charlie.
CC: Thanks for sharing Kate.
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