Lisa Thorson: Improvising a Life


As a 21-year-old senior at Boston Conservatory of Music in 1979, Lisa Thorson was well on her way to a career in musical theater. “I was doing a fair number of shows outside the college and had just landed the lead female role in a 1940s musical that had a lot of pretty athletic dancing,” she says. “Then one day I was doing some flips, back to back, with my dancing partner, and the trick went wrong.” She fell, became paralyzed at the C5-6 level and began an eight-month stint in rehab. Suddenly, her promising career was in serious doubt — just as it was getting off the ground.

In rehab, she refused to eat with others in the dining room — “I just wouldn’t, I was quite spoiled” — and also refused some discouraging advice: “People were saying you’re never going to sing again, you can’t do it, you’re never going to have the breath capacity to do this,” she says. “But I was determined I wasn’t going to stop what I’d been doing.”

She resumed voice lessons while still in rehab. “It was painful, emotionally. I had always been a very strong singer with a lot of power. At that time I had been taking lessons in earnest for about five years and had really developed my voice. But then, it was just nothing, barely a whisper. I was running out of air.” After eight months of lessons she was able to perform her senior recital, but the outcome was disappointing. “I did classical material and musical theater, and I don’t think it sounded good, it sounded weak, but I was at least able to sing.”

Now, looking back on her successful career as an innovative jazz vocalist and respected educator at Berklee College of Music, Thorson wonders what made her so defiant. “What was I thinking,” she laughs. “Being so fixated on the goal of going back to what I was doing before my injury was really a way of coping, and also a way of denial that this wasn’t happening to me — ‘Why should I choose something new? Dammit, I’m just going to do it.’ I’ve always been this way,” she says. “If somebody says no, I get very defiant, very stubborn. Sometimes ‘no’ is the best thing for me.”

From Paradise to the Desert
Thorson was born in Midland, Texas, in 1957, but her family moved to California, then to Hawaii when she was only 3 years old, to the Big Island, where they settled in Hilo. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were a regular part of growing up, and tsunami scares were common. “There would be a tsunami warning and my father would rush down to his office, because the town was right on the coast and his office was a stone’s throw from the water. He’d have to go down there and pack everything up, and I can remember us waiting, like, ‘is he going to come back?’”

Luckily, no serious tsunami damage occurred, but every day was an adventure nonetheless. “I had a lot of freedom as a child. I could go off in a field and pick flowers or pick fruit and run around with my friends for six to eight hours at a time without a lot of worry. Hawaii had a magical aura. There’s something about the islands’ spirit and the way people are easygoing and open.”

Perhaps because of the openness, she learned about cultural diversity and what it felt like to be different. “There weren’t many Caucasian people there so it was an early lesson about being in the minority.” But her parents were very active in the community, so she assimilated easily. “It became normal to be around people who practiced different religions or ate different kinds of foods or looked differently from me,” she says.

Music is an integral part of Hawaiian culture, and she took to it right away. “The great thing about Hawaiian music is ukuleles are played by everybody, and my mother had played the ukulele for many years as a sort of novelty instrument, so we had one around the house and I started taking lessons when I was 4,” she says. In the Waikeawaena elementary school she played in a ukulele band.

She also did a lot of singing and dancing in children’s productions, hula dancing, and choir singing in her church. “Ukulele is a great stepping stone for guitar, so after I played it a few years my parents bought me a guitar. They’ve never said no to any artistic pursuit I’ve wanted to do. It was so much a part of their lives, too.” Her mother, besides playing ukulele, sang and played drums, and her father was a theater director.

In 1968 they relocated to Albuquerque, N.M., where her grandfather lived. Lisa was now 11 years old. “It was like coming home for my parents, but it was a huge change for me and my brother. Not just environmentally, but culturally it was so different. My mother tells the story about my brother, who was about 7 then, just beginning school. He came home one day crying. And she said, ‘well what’s the matter,’ and he said, ‘All the kids look like me and they don’t serve any rice for lunch,’” she laughs. No more wearing flip-flops all day and picking guavas and mangoes.

Ironically, even though the carefree spirit of Hawaii had given way to a more predictable mainland lifestyle, the world began to open up musically. “In my elementary school you could get free lessons on any instrument you wanted. They had small ensembles and everything. I have no idea why I chose the cello, but I did. And I started playing. And when I started on cello I thought, ‘wow, this is really what I want to do.’”

Singing had always been a part of her life, along with theatrical performing and dancing, but now the cello became her first love. Ukulele and guitar had introduced her to stringed instruments, but the bowed cello, with its full rich tones, had a voice that could be made to sing.

Long, Winding Road to Boston
The Thorsons made Albuquerque their home for a little more than two years. While Lisa began studying cello in earnest, her father’s lifelong interest in theater led him back to school to get a graduate degree in theater. “So we moved to — and this was the big shock of all time — North Dakota,” she says, “for a ‘lucky’ year and a half. Now that’s winter, that’s really winter.”

Just as the family began to acclimatize to the Dakota cold, her father landed a professional theater directing job in Florida — back to sunny climes they went. By now Lisa was 15, and her dream of becoming a cellist in a symphony orchestra began to fade. “Adolescence is not the time to be sitting in a practice room,” she says. “And my friends would always tell me, ‘Wow, you’re such a great singer.’ Then, my dad’s involvement in theater opened up some possibilities, and the experience of doing musical theater really changed my focus.”

Her cello spent more and more time sitting in the corner, and Lisa began to think of her voice as an expressive instrument for the first time, but not necessarily due to developing ambition. “It was more fun to be part of a show, singing, dancing and acting,” she says.

In the middle of her junior year in high school, her family moved again, this time to Providence, R.I. By now, moving was getting tiresome to Lisa, but with each move she was learning how to adapt and make new friends. And as fate would have it, her high school in Providence had an excellent theater program. “At that point, I knew that’s what I wanted — ‘I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to act.’” She became active in a children’s theater company that did some touring shows and started taking voice lessons. “I really got serious about it. It was the dominant part of my life.”

When it came time to think about college, while her friends were getting into Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, she applied to the Boston Conservatory of Music — one of only three colleges in the country at that time to have a musical theater program — and was accepted. “There were a lot of straight dramatic programs,” she says. “But musical theater is what I wanted to do. So that’s where I ended up.”

Having left Hawaii at the age of 11, Thorson had lived in five different states over the next six years, finally settling in the Boston area. She not only found a place she could call her own — she still resides there at the age of 49 — she found her life’s calling. But by the middle of her senior year at Boston Conservatory, all of her musical training and experience — her talent for singing and dancing, her unabashed love for and commitment to musical theater, and most of all, her pure voice, a thing of power and beauty — all of it was in danger of disintegrating before her eyes, because of one missed step.

Finding Her Way
Following her spinal cord injury, not only was she told her singing and performing days were over, she was expected to do little or nothing for herself. Fortunately, at 21, she was already involved in a long-term relationship with a Vietnam war vet who knew something about dealing with harsh realities. “Doctors would say to Gene, ‘well, you’re just going to have to take care of her for the rest of your life,’” she says. “So then I’m like, ‘well, goddammit, I’ll show you!’”

Her defiant attitude fit well with her partner’s outlook. “Gene’s overall attitude has been one of the central keys to my being able to adapt as well as I have,” she says. “He’s someone who has a very positive view, much more positive than I am, frankly. He’s extremely adaptable.” The early disability years were difficult, especially in her pre-work days when her major income came from SSDI. “It was really a shock,” she says. “I had to find my way and live on very little money.”

Her first job, about a year after her injury, was working in the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Disabilities, a part-time position working on an access guide to Boston. But she was not ready to give up her dream of performing on stage. “I worked at that job for about a year, doing advocacy work, and then started working with the Next Move Theater, both singing and doing some acting, some tour management, development, that sort of thing. I was getting paid but it was sporadic.”

Next Move Theater was one of the first theater companies in the country to be awarded a grant to do a disabilities project, and out of that grew Next Move Unlimited, which Thorson co-founded, a theater company for people with and without disabilities. “The work we did had a disability theme. It was part art, part advocacy.”

Thorson stayed busy from 1979 to 1988 working as the Access Education Coordinator for the Adaptive Environments Center and consulting for the National Endowment for the Arts and state agencies involved in arts accessibility. Meanwhile, she kept doing theater, radio, artist residencies, and performing wherever she could get hired. “If it had not been for Gene, I certainly would have had to seek other career options for sure. So our partnership really allowed me to pursue my artistic work.”

About midway through this 10-year period, Thorson began to feel that her dream of musical theater was slipping away. But as often happens, when one door closes, another opens, and a whole new style of singing and performing beckoned. She had always been attracted to performing greats and torch singers like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, mainly because their emotional style was so closely aligned with acting and musical theater, but there were other great singers she began to be drawn to now, and one of them, the First Lady of Jazz, won her heart.

Ella Fitzgerald’s pure voice, unerring pitch, impeccable phrasing and ability to improvise captivated her. “I felt like I could identify with her sound, it’s light and pretty like mine,” says Thorson. “And jazz is so flexible. It allows you to take a breath in an unconventional place and to have different colors in your voice.” In other words, she could personalize her style while staying true to the form. “The musical theater doors were shutting. I wasn’t going to be a Broadway star using a wheelchair, that just wasn’t going to happen,” she says. “And as for that kind of singing, I didn’t know if I would ever regain my Broadway belting capacity. Jazz singing was more  flexible and offered more options. You don’t have to sound a specific way.”

Honing Her Chops
It takes years of paying dues (practice, perfecting technique and regular work as a musician), but also countless hours of listening to the masters to become a respected jazz musician. Thorson’s musical talent was beyond question and her voice lessons, innate drive and determination were beginning to pay off in greater power and capacity, but she still had ground to claim.

She was just getting started in jazz, still in transition, when she hooked up with drummer George Schuller for the first time. “There was a little bit of that dramatic-type of stage singing still lingering in her,” says Schuller, “but after that, she learned quickly. And I think Bruce Barth had something to do with that.”

Barth, a superb pianist who now plays with Tony Bennett, steered Thorson in the direction of the jazz giants. “Bruce wrote a lot of arrangements for me, we played a lot together,” she says, “but I remember in those early ‘is Lisa a Cabaret singer or is she a jazz singer’ years, after one gig, I had tried some scat singing, and he said to me in a very gentle way, ‘You know, if you want to improvise like this, you’ve gotta listen to some horn players, and listen to some really good scat singers. It’s more than just making it up.’”

Scat singing, a language unto itself, may seem like nonsense to the untrained ear, but jazz aficionados consider it the ultimate in creative expression for a jazz singer, combining rhythm and harmonically sophisticated vocalizing with unconventional sounds, or scat syllables. The effect mimics a horn solo, and the jazz singer’s voice becomes her instrument.

Thorson listened to jazz giants like Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and of course, Ella, and others, and also attended summer jazz improv workshops at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she worked with other jazz notables like Sheila Jordan, Billy Taylor and Max Roach. She turned to aural transcription, learning famous solos by ear, even before she even knew how to write them down. “I was fascinated by it,” she says. “I loved the energy and freedom of it.”

She continued to seek out gigs but decided to take one more step in the learning process, enrolling in a jazz vocal performance graduate program at the New England Conservatory. She took classes at NEC for three instead of the usual two years and credits the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, headed by quad Elmer Bartels, for being consistently supportive. “They have been there all along,” she says. “Elmer Bartels has been steadfast” .

She remembers well her first graduate year in an ear training class. “Here I was, 30-something in a class with a bunch of 20-year-olds, and we had to learn a solo by Miles. Anyway, we were going around the room, having to sing it, and people were sort of struggling. Well for me, learning by ear is easy, like going home. It’s the first thing that I learned when I was a kid. It’s what I have, my ear, my strongest asset. So it came my turn and I sang it fluidly, and I remember the instructor looked at everyone because they suddenly were aware of me, and he said to everyone, ‘don’t be intimidated, she’s already a professional.’”

Others had begun to take notice by then. “Lisa Thorson has grown into one of the most subtle and tuneful singers in Boston,” wrote Daniel Gewertz in the Boston Herald, about a year before Thorson began her graduate studies. “Perhaps because of her studies with Sheila Jordan, Thorson has become jazzier, her voice more like a horn, her approach looser and lighter.”

The culmination of her jazz transformation came in 1994, when instead of doing her masters thesis performance in a conservatory hall, she held forth at Scullers Jazz Club, the premiere jazz venue in Boston and one of the best jazz clubs in the nation. She had performed there before, but this time was unforgettable, as the event also doubled as a release party for her group’s first CD — From This Moment On [see sidebar].

The evening represented a milestone in her career as a jazz vocalist and leader of her own group, by now polished, tight. “I was really proud because one of my private instructors, who’s now a dear friend and a great jazz singer, Dominique Eade, was there, and a wonderful trumpet player, jazz educator and mentor of mine at NEC, John McNeil, was also there. And Rand Blake and George Russell, two great musicians and MacArthur Genius Fellows. I felt I had just made a quantum leap as a musician.”

Improviser Extraordinaire
In 1996, she landed a position as associate professor at prestigious Berklee College of Music, teaching vocal jazz. By then her trademark in performing had become not only her playful scat singing, but her mastery of improvising in a broader sense — digging deep into a note, surprising with an original phrasing, enriching sound with unexpected emotion, and always on pitch. “She certainly uses her voice as an instrument and has her own special way with improvisation,” says Jan Shapiro, chair of Berklee’s vocal jazz department. “And I love the expression and enthusiasm when Lisa sings.”

One of the first female singing groups to popularize scat singing was the Boswell Sisters, a depression era trio that lifted spirits whenever they performed. Shapiro, a Boswell scholar, landed a grant to do a documentary film on the Sisters in the 1980s, which years later led her to put together a group, Boswellmania, that performed at the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in New Orleans in 2000. “At the time I thought about the overall blend of my voice, Lisa’s, and one of our other faculty members, Adriana Balic. It was my intuition that Lisa would be perfect for singing the Connee Boswell solos.”

Interestingly, Connee Boswell, a polio survivor, also used a wheelchair and always performed sitting down with her sisters, but that was coincidental, says Shapiro. She knew Thorson had the chops to fill Connee’s role as lead singer. The Boswell Sisters were the most popular female singing group in the country for a while during the 1930s, and for a brief, shining moment in 2000, their unique sound returned to their hometown — and birthplace of jazz — New Orleans.

“The crowd loved it,” says Shapiro. “We had made reservations at a gourmet restaurant afterwards. When we all sat at our table, we started talking about the conference and spontaneously started singing at the table. I don’t know why, maybe the spirit of the Sisters was with us. People sitting at other tables started to applaud. Then someone said, ‘you ought to go sing in the lounge.’ Next thing you know, we literally pushed the piano player off his stool, Adriana started playing as Martha Boswell, and we continued singing. We crashed the place! It was such great fun!”

After New Orleans, Boswellmania produced a promo CD and did a few gigs, but the group is on hold since Adriana Balic left for Los Angeles to become a keyboard/vocalist with the pop singer, Pink.

Coming Home
In 2002, Thorson collaborated with pianist Cho Yoo Seung to produce Out to Sea, proving that Thorson is a musician’s musician as well as a jazz vocalist. Her latest project, “JazzArtSigns,” performed for the third time in March of 2006, is a multimedia, multisensory performance of jazz, improvisational painting, American Sign Language, and live audio description and captioning, with braille and large print programs. The interactive fusion is designed for audiences with and without disabilities to experience a universally accessible jazz concert in the spirit of acceptance, innovation and cooperation.

In April, 2007 Thorson was promoted to full professorship at Berklee. Shapiro cites her dedication to her students, her department and the college as exemplary. “Her work with our students is excellent,” she says.
As a jazz educator, Thorson knows no bounds, having taught private lessons for decades, at Wellesley College, and traveling to schools in the U.S. and Europe to teach students of all ages. Schuller, who sometimes accompanied her, says, “She has a way with students, advanced, beginners and in between, and she knows how to get across the complicated language of music with a simple and smiling delivery.”

What Thorson enjoys most about teaching is seeing students progress from year to year, exploring until they discover who they are as artists. Her work with one such student recently has been especially gratifying. “It was a little bittersweet,” she says of working with Erika Gustafson, “kind of like coming home. As it turns out, I teach right around the corner from Boston Conservatory, where I studied musical theatre and where the center of my life was at the time of my injury. So sometimes it is a little eerie and hard rolling past the dance studios and theater. Sort of a dream that got away.

“I’ve had many students at Berklee and elsewhere do musical theater songs, but not a full show. At first I thought I would be reluctant, but so many things came back to me that energized and informed my work with Erika. I was able to draw on so much experience and knowledge that resided in the back of my brain, just ‘resting,’ waiting to be summoned. So it was really fun thinking theatrically about props and dialogue again. And very gratifying to see Erika pull the show off with such energy and accomplishment.”

Now that she is respected as both a first-rate jazz performer and educator, it’s interesting to look back at why she gravitated away from musical theater. At the time she felt jazz was a more flexible form and not as demanding, given her then-limited breath capacity. “Now that I’ve been doing it for 20-plus years and I’m teaching it all the time, I’m finding that jazz is actually some of the most difficult music to sing, and I’m doing things technically that I couldn’t do when I was fully able-bodied and 20 years old.”

Like any good teacher, she credits her voice teachers, especially Barbara McCloskey, who brought her voice, Edwin Gray, who taught her about capacity and possibility, and her current teacher, Jeannette Lovetri, who has taught her it’s not all about strength. “She said to me, ‘Lisa, you are using muscles that you have that most singers who are able-bodied don’t use because they don’t have to.’ Nondisabled singers mostly focus on using their diaphragm, abdominal muscles, and intercostals in their rib cage, and to some degree, muscles in the back,” she says.

“She was sort of feeling around on me to find the muscles I was using and found I was using my intercostal muscles, but also some muscles in my mid-back. I was engaging my lats more, I was expanding these muscles in my upper and mid-back outward, as if I was breathing into the back of my chair. ‘Normal’ singers, she said, don’t use those muscles. It’s weird. Posture is so important in singing. We always tell people not to slouch, not to roll your shoulders forward. And I try, but because of my disability it’s hard not to. But believe it or not, just the sitting down and breathing against my abdomen and being able to breathe into and feel the back of the chair, creates resistance, almost like a ‘touchpoint.’”

That touchpoint reaches from her spine all the way back to a musical rehearsal in 1979, when an unfortunate accident began creating daily resistance. Now, nearly 30 years later in the life and career of Lisa Thorson, finding ways to push back against that resistance has resulted in uncommon strength and beauty of expression, thanks to her drive, adaptability and extraordinary talent for improvising, which still excites her.

“I’m learning all the time,” she says. “For me, if things are just happening in the moment, and there are unexpected surprises, that sense of freedom is just unbelievable. I can’t compare it to anything else.”

Thorson was inducted into the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame in 2006, was named the Humanitarian Entertainer of the Year in 1989 and received a Living Legacy Award from the Women’s International Foundation in 1992. But the award that means the most to her came from the Massachusetts Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities in 1996. “I think they gave me that award for creating a sense of advocacy through the art I do, through that visibility. That meant a lot because it came from staunch advocates I know who have spent their entire lives fighting for equal rights for people with disabilities.”

As for the future, Thorson has a long list of to-do’s: “Record with my New Directions Quartet (piano, bass, guitar, voice) and add cello, flute and percussion. A book about technique and improvising. More CDs — a big band album, woodwind quintets, string quartets and brass choirs. More research into the science of the voice and how my experience could help others with disabilities or compromised respiration. More collaborative multigenre, multimedia projects. More travel and teaching in other parts of the world.”

Is that all?

“And, oh yeah. Be a farmer. I just love putting seeds in the ground and watching things come up!”


Evolution of a Vocal Artist

TAs a performer, Lisa Thorson has been turning heads since the mid-1980s, garnering positive reviews for her two now out-of-print cassette albums, My Funny Valentine and Passion Flower, but in 1994 the release of From This Moment On, her first CD, turned jazz writer Bob Blumenthal’s head 180 degrees. “I had done a Boston Globe Jazz Festival performance in 1988,” says Thorson, “and I remember distinctly that Bob wrote in his review, ‘Lisa Thorson has a beautiful voice but sounds like a pop singer converting to jazz.’” Six years later Blumenthal wrote that From This Moment On was “one of the year’s most impressive debut discs.” Downbeat Magazine gave the CD four stars.

Among the handful of standards on the CD, Gershwin’s “Love Walked In” stands out, as does the upbeat vocal/sax interplay on “New O” and the entirety of “The Music’s Soul,” an original co-written by Thorson and drummer George Schuller. Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Agua de Beber” (arranged by Bruce Barth) provides a nice change of pace with its Brazilian rhythms and Thorson’s convincing Portuguese. Overall, a solid disc.

In 1999, backed by the same group — Schuller on drums, Cercie Miller on sax, Tim Ray on piano and Dave Clark on bass — Thorson released Resonance, again to critical acclaim. Michael Nastos from All Music Guide hailed the CD as “one of the very best offerings of the year and an astonishing vocal document of the ’90s.” From the first track, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Thorson seems a more confident singer, the arrangements tighter. The result is wider variety, with the group taking more chances. Thorson’s voice on “The Nearness of You” shows greater maturity, especially in the lower register. In Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” she plays her voice like a muted trumpet, harmonizing with Miller’s sax. “Mother, Daughter, Sister, Friend” is strikingly original, with its Native American influence. The standard “Do Nothin Till You Hear From Me” is straight ahead jazz.

Her third CD, Out to Sea, made in collaboration with pianist Cho Yoo Seung in 2001, fuses jazz and classical: “I’m proud of that album for many reasons, but especially because it was recorded completely live in the studio, no editing,” says Thorson. Seung’s acoustically rich, concert hall sound gives way to a playful intro/duet on the third track, “The Touch of Your Lips,” with more of the same on “Duology,” written by Thorson. For pure beauty and no-frills vocal and piano artistry, “Touch Her Soft Lips and Part” can’t be beat. The title track, “Out to Sea,” flows effortlessly, while “Ipanema,” hauntingly beautiful, is perhaps the most original interpretation ever of the famous Jobim tune.


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