Singer's choice: Blues or opera?
Anna DeGraff owes her life to rock 'n roll. She's taken that birthright and tossed it into the musical spin cycle: Bible hymns and Abba hits, snobby recital halls and seedy watering holes. Now she has a choice: Italian opera or the Chicago blues?
BY MATTHEW HANSEN | Lincoln Journal Star
Many years ago, in Wisconsin, a woman named Jean auditioned to sing in a rock band called Trinidad.
Darryl the drummer protested. Whenever we add a woman, someone in the band dates her and the band breaks up, he said.
The drummer got outvoted. The woman joined the band.
Sure enough, Jean started dating one of the guys. The band broke up.
Then Jean and Darryl got married and had a baby girl named Anna.
So Anna DeGraff owes her life to rock 'n roll, along with the fact that drummers are forever getting outvoted.
She's taken that birthright and tossed it into the musical spin cycle: Bible hymns and Abba hits, snobby recital halls and seedy watering holes.
It's her own little "Behind the Music" episode on and near the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus, except with no heroin addiction or bus crash.
It's her own way of answering the question every college student asks. What am I gonna be when I grow up?
Except Anna’s choice is a bit different: Italian opera? Or Southside Chicago blues?
And her voice is her guide.
"When she hits a note, it's so clean," says Ryan Larsen, another drummer.
"She can hold that note for a week. It's not gonna sound thin at all."
v v v
The professor starts again on the piano, Anna's head tilts back and a wall of sound escapes her throat, filling the Westbrook Hall office cluttered with stuffed animals and sheet music.
She's singing in German, a Bach piece called “Buss and Reu”, a song based on the Bible’s Book of Matthew.
Every 30 seconds or so, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Donna Harler-Smith stops playing. She once played Sister Mary Amnesia in "Nunsense." She once sang soprano with the Boston Philharmonia.
Now she's teaching Anna.
"I think Bach intended this to be even," she says.
Anna sings. Donna yanks her hands off the piano keys.
"Just like a razor-sharp knife," she says, slicing one arm through the air. "Your dad can wear a spit shield."
Anna sings. Donna smacks her hands together.
"It sounds like the inside of your head is hollow," she says. "Gorgeous."
Anna sings. Donna stops.
"And what did Bach want here?" she asks.
"Before he was putting the emphasis on penance," Anna says. "Now he's moving onto remorse."
To sing opera, you must be a linguist — the majority of pieces are sung in their original languages, not English. You must be able to decipher meaning behind the mere words. Then you must be able to make your mood fit the song's mood, very much an acting trait.
It helps if you can sing loud enough that an entire concert hall can hear even though you aren’t using a microphone. It helps if you can sing well enough that they don't want to get up and leave.
Anna has performed for audiences since before she could read sheet music. As a toddler, she sang with her family in front of their church's congregation.
She, her two sisters and a brother formed a barbershop quartet. She took 13 years of piano lessons, sang with two Lincoln High School choirs and still regrets missing another year of choir because she joined the student council instead.
All that musical history only partly prepared her for studying opera when she enrolled in UNL's School of Music more than two years ago. With its long performances and attention to every detail, opera is perhaps the most rigid of the vocal arts.
"At first, I thought it was stuffy. It's this high art, where you have to sing this one note and sing it just right," Anna says. "The technical stuff is overwhelming."
So when the UNL junior gets a new piece of music, she plays it on the piano.
She translates it into English, a process that takes an hour. She figures out the pronunciation of each word using an international phonetic alphabet. She looks for the meaning by reading it over and over like a poem.
Then, and only then, she begins to sing. She practices at least an hour a day.
"The more I study opera, the more I like it," she says. "It's not just a bunch of mumbo jumbo in another language. For somebody to capture the emotion in these songs ... it's an amazing thing."
Anna performed an opera recital as a sophomore, a high honor for a student that young, the music professor says. She has an unusual grasp on opera's intricacies. She's a natural linguist.
And then there's that voice.
"Her technical skills are way better than what I had at that age," the professor says of Anna. "The quality of her voice is far superior, too.
"She can go almost anywhere and be successful at opera."
v v v
She takes the stage at the Zoo Bar utterly transformed.
As the Blues Messengers break into her first song, Anna's chin is lowered and her ramrod opera posture has disappeared. Her hips are swinging, her arms are fluttering.
"She's movin'!" someone yells from a back table.
The voice is different, too. It’s lower. Sassier.
"If you don't believe I'm leaaavvin," she growls into the microphone. "Count the days until I'm gooooone."
The Messengers play in near-dark, surrounded by yellowed posters of old blues artists, wobbly tables and a crowd of 60 people.
Three girls spin around on the tiny dance floor, trying not to spill their drinks. One guy dances solo, holding what appears to be a spatula.
Anna dances with them, keeping time with the bass guitar. Someone whistles. She smiles.
"People have told me that I have 'it,'" she says later. "Whatever 'it' is."
She happened into the blues by accident. She used to sing at Duffy's Tavern, performing songs like the disco hit "Dancing Queen" on Thursday nights when a karaoke band named S***hook can cover nearly any song requested.
A friend who used to be in the Blues Messengers heard her and convinced the band, which was looking for a female singer, to come and listen.
That night Anna belted out Carole King's version of "Natural Woman." She was the Blues Messengers new female vocalist the next week.
Like opera, blues has its own learning curve. Just like opera, it is an art form soaked in its own tradition that demands performers understand what has come before them. And like opera, the blues is also dying as a popular musical form.
Unlike opera, the blues is simple, messy and very much American.
"We want a lot of human emotion in it,” says Ryan Larsen, the band’s drummer. "It’s gotta be real. We’re not trying to make everything perfect.”
During early performances, the new blues singer was scared to let go of the microphone stand and afraid she’d hit an imperfect note.
She listened to the mixed tapes the drummer made her, kept getting onstage and soon found herself as comfortable at the blues clubs as she was at Kimball Recital Hall.
"They come to the Zoo Bar in jeans and T-shirts. The crowd gets drunk and talks during the songs. And that's OK. It's just people being people."
The Messengers, whose male front man is Shawn Holt, the son of Chicago blues legend Magic Slim, play about one gig a week in Lincoln or Omaha. They are thinking about recording an album.
They've all noticed that interest in the band has skyrocketed since Anna became a Messenger.
"You can see it in the audiences’ faces," Larsen says. “She just hypnotizes them.”
v v v
The vocal chords aren't much different than any other muscle in the human body. If she sings incorrectly during a blues performance, Anna risks damaging her chords in the same way a long-distance runner might pull a muscle by sprinting incorrectly.
And if she sings too low too often, she risks over-strengthening those vocal chords and weakening the chords that control her higher singing voice. It's the vocal equivalent of building up the triceps but never working on your biceps.
So the blues and opera coexist uneasily inside Anna’s throat, waiting for her to choose.
"That’s why I haven’t been to see her," says her voice professor. “I’d be scared ... I’m sort of letting her do what she wants to do now, but if it begins to affect her (opera), we’ll talk.”
Ryan Larsen attended an opera recital soon after Anna joined the Messengers.
It shocked him, the sheer volume of emotion the singers could pack into words he didn’t understand.
It surprised him how much opera was like the blues.
“I remember the songs about heartache, that thing every culture has. It’s cool to hear it in a different way.”
So maybe, Anna says, she’ll end up in an opera master’s program.
Or maybe the Messengers will get a record contract.
No matter, really. The daughter of Trinidad understands it’s all music.
“I just wanna go forward, one way or another. I just want to sing.”
Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.
BY MATTHEW HANSEN | Lincoln Journal Star
Many years ago, in Wisconsin, a woman named Jean auditioned to sing in a rock band called Trinidad.
Darryl the drummer protested. Whenever we add a woman, someone in the band dates her and the band breaks up, he said.
The drummer got outvoted. The woman joined the band.
Sure enough, Jean started dating one of the guys. The band broke up.
Then Jean and Darryl got married and had a baby girl named Anna.
So Anna DeGraff owes her life to rock 'n roll, along with the fact that drummers are forever getting outvoted.
She's taken that birthright and tossed it into the musical spin cycle: Bible hymns and Abba hits, snobby recital halls and seedy watering holes.
It's her own little "Behind the Music" episode on and near the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus, except with no heroin addiction or bus crash.
It's her own way of answering the question every college student asks. What am I gonna be when I grow up?
Except Anna’s choice is a bit different: Italian opera? Or Southside Chicago blues?
And her voice is her guide.
"When she hits a note, it's so clean," says Ryan Larsen, another drummer.
"She can hold that note for a week. It's not gonna sound thin at all."
v v v
The professor starts again on the piano, Anna's head tilts back and a wall of sound escapes her throat, filling the Westbrook Hall office cluttered with stuffed animals and sheet music.
She's singing in German, a Bach piece called “Buss and Reu”, a song based on the Bible’s Book of Matthew.
Every 30 seconds or so, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Donna Harler-Smith stops playing. She once played Sister Mary Amnesia in "Nunsense." She once sang soprano with the Boston Philharmonia.
Now she's teaching Anna.
"I think Bach intended this to be even," she says.
Anna sings. Donna yanks her hands off the piano keys.
"Just like a razor-sharp knife," she says, slicing one arm through the air. "Your dad can wear a spit shield."
Anna sings. Donna smacks her hands together.
"It sounds like the inside of your head is hollow," she says. "Gorgeous."
Anna sings. Donna stops.
"And what did Bach want here?" she asks.
"Before he was putting the emphasis on penance," Anna says. "Now he's moving onto remorse."
To sing opera, you must be a linguist — the majority of pieces are sung in their original languages, not English. You must be able to decipher meaning behind the mere words. Then you must be able to make your mood fit the song's mood, very much an acting trait.
It helps if you can sing loud enough that an entire concert hall can hear even though you aren’t using a microphone. It helps if you can sing well enough that they don't want to get up and leave.
Anna has performed for audiences since before she could read sheet music. As a toddler, she sang with her family in front of their church's congregation.
She, her two sisters and a brother formed a barbershop quartet. She took 13 years of piano lessons, sang with two Lincoln High School choirs and still regrets missing another year of choir because she joined the student council instead.
All that musical history only partly prepared her for studying opera when she enrolled in UNL's School of Music more than two years ago. With its long performances and attention to every detail, opera is perhaps the most rigid of the vocal arts.
"At first, I thought it was stuffy. It's this high art, where you have to sing this one note and sing it just right," Anna says. "The technical stuff is overwhelming."
So when the UNL junior gets a new piece of music, she plays it on the piano.
She translates it into English, a process that takes an hour. She figures out the pronunciation of each word using an international phonetic alphabet. She looks for the meaning by reading it over and over like a poem.
Then, and only then, she begins to sing. She practices at least an hour a day.
"The more I study opera, the more I like it," she says. "It's not just a bunch of mumbo jumbo in another language. For somebody to capture the emotion in these songs ... it's an amazing thing."
Anna performed an opera recital as a sophomore, a high honor for a student that young, the music professor says. She has an unusual grasp on opera's intricacies. She's a natural linguist.
And then there's that voice.
"Her technical skills are way better than what I had at that age," the professor says of Anna. "The quality of her voice is far superior, too.
"She can go almost anywhere and be successful at opera."
v v v
She takes the stage at the Zoo Bar utterly transformed.
As the Blues Messengers break into her first song, Anna's chin is lowered and her ramrod opera posture has disappeared. Her hips are swinging, her arms are fluttering.
"She's movin'!" someone yells from a back table.
The voice is different, too. It’s lower. Sassier.
"If you don't believe I'm leaaavvin," she growls into the microphone. "Count the days until I'm gooooone."
The Messengers play in near-dark, surrounded by yellowed posters of old blues artists, wobbly tables and a crowd of 60 people.
Three girls spin around on the tiny dance floor, trying not to spill their drinks. One guy dances solo, holding what appears to be a spatula.
Anna dances with them, keeping time with the bass guitar. Someone whistles. She smiles.
"People have told me that I have 'it,'" she says later. "Whatever 'it' is."
She happened into the blues by accident. She used to sing at Duffy's Tavern, performing songs like the disco hit "Dancing Queen" on Thursday nights when a karaoke band named S***hook can cover nearly any song requested.
A friend who used to be in the Blues Messengers heard her and convinced the band, which was looking for a female singer, to come and listen.
That night Anna belted out Carole King's version of "Natural Woman." She was the Blues Messengers new female vocalist the next week.
Like opera, blues has its own learning curve. Just like opera, it is an art form soaked in its own tradition that demands performers understand what has come before them. And like opera, the blues is also dying as a popular musical form.
Unlike opera, the blues is simple, messy and very much American.
"We want a lot of human emotion in it,” says Ryan Larsen, the band’s drummer. "It’s gotta be real. We’re not trying to make everything perfect.”
During early performances, the new blues singer was scared to let go of the microphone stand and afraid she’d hit an imperfect note.
She listened to the mixed tapes the drummer made her, kept getting onstage and soon found herself as comfortable at the blues clubs as she was at Kimball Recital Hall.
"They come to the Zoo Bar in jeans and T-shirts. The crowd gets drunk and talks during the songs. And that's OK. It's just people being people."
The Messengers, whose male front man is Shawn Holt, the son of Chicago blues legend Magic Slim, play about one gig a week in Lincoln or Omaha. They are thinking about recording an album.
They've all noticed that interest in the band has skyrocketed since Anna became a Messenger.
"You can see it in the audiences’ faces," Larsen says. “She just hypnotizes them.”
v v v
The vocal chords aren't much different than any other muscle in the human body. If she sings incorrectly during a blues performance, Anna risks damaging her chords in the same way a long-distance runner might pull a muscle by sprinting incorrectly.
And if she sings too low too often, she risks over-strengthening those vocal chords and weakening the chords that control her higher singing voice. It's the vocal equivalent of building up the triceps but never working on your biceps.
So the blues and opera coexist uneasily inside Anna’s throat, waiting for her to choose.
"That’s why I haven’t been to see her," says her voice professor. “I’d be scared ... I’m sort of letting her do what she wants to do now, but if it begins to affect her (opera), we’ll talk.”
Ryan Larsen attended an opera recital soon after Anna joined the Messengers.
It shocked him, the sheer volume of emotion the singers could pack into words he didn’t understand.
It surprised him how much opera was like the blues.
“I remember the songs about heartache, that thing every culture has. It’s cool to hear it in a different way.”
So maybe, Anna says, she’ll end up in an opera master’s program.
Or maybe the Messengers will get a record contract.
No matter, really. The daughter of Trinidad understands it’s all music.
“I just wanna go forward, one way or another. I just want to sing.”
Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.
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