Lara Solnicki, right, decided to pursue jazz singing as a means of marrying her passions of singing and poetry. Photo courtesy Lara Solnicki.
Like a bird with clipped wings, jazz singer Lara Solnicki found herself separated from one of her most well-known attributes: her voice.
A classical singer and teacher in the fall of 2005, the East York resident was advised by a speech pathologist to go on a period of vocal rest when she realized teaching was taking a toll on her vocal cords. This meant barely speaking for days at a time.
“I ended up doing these periods of vocal silence, where I would just rest my voice,” Solnicki recalls. “It’s almost like being in the library all day long.”
As she took a break from singing, Solnicki faced challenges as she entered a period of transition in her artistic career.
“I was really out of money and I didn’t have any support from my parents at that point … and it’s not that the world was closing for me in that direction,” Solnicki said. “I just felt really overwhelmed about having to make a living as a professional musician,”
Serendipitously, she managed to rediscover her voice in another creative avenue: the written word.
“That’s when I got into poetry, and used the opportunity when I wasn’t speaking to explore poetry and creative writing,” she said.
Solnicki captures her experience of vocal fatigue in a poem titled “The Voice.” In it, she speaks of being preoccupied with grey birds, a reoccurring theme in her poetry.
“As a singer, I feel like I was a bird that had kind of gone inward,” she said. “Writing is very inward, we focus, whereas singing is very out there and joyous for the most part.”
Solnicki, who trained in voice and piano at the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music, decided to pursue jazz singing as a means of marrying her passions of singing and poetry.
She describes the craft as very “speaky.”
“Jazz singing is really based around your speaking voice,” Solnicki explained. “As a soprano and a female singer I would never be singing below middle C, and now I’m always singing below middle C.”
After dedicating an estimated 10,000 hours towards honing her voice, not including class time and coaching, she found the transition to not singing at all wasn’t easy.
“I was actually unhappy during the period when I was on vocal rest,” Solnicki said. “I had lived my whole life to become an opera singer.
“But not doing music allowed me to be 100 percent focused and curious and to live and breathe as a writer,” she added.
The experience culminated in Disassembled Stars, a book of poetry and experimental prose. It was released in 2006. Her debut CD, A Meadow in December, was released November 2010.
Solnicki is working on her sophomore CD and will be previewing material from her new album at the Toronto Jazz Festival.
Lara Solnicki’s Coming appearances
Lara Solnicki Jazz Band
Friday, June 22
Gate 403
403 Roncesvalles Ave.
5 p.m.
Lara Solnicki Trio
Sunday, June 24
Distillery Historic District
Pure Spirits Patio
3 p.m.
Lara Solnicki/Mark Kieswetter/George Koller
Sunday, June 24 and July 1
Pan on the Danforth
516 Danforth Ave.
7 p.m.
Lara Solnicki/Ted Quinlan/Jim Vivian
Thursday, June 28
Pan on the Danforth
516 Danforth Ave.
7 p.m.
http://mytowncrier.ca/loss-of-voice-led-singer-to-a-jazzy-style.html
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