Nikki Yanofsky, a wunderkind turned 18-year-old, plays Massey Hall on April 21.
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Glow All Summer Only $20 Putting Edge Mini Golf Summer Membership, only $20 before May 14Gordon Lightfoot. Bob Dylan. Bob Marley, Neil Young. They’ve all had break-through nights at Massey Hall. So have Glenn Gould and Charlie Parker, the great jazz saxophonist. But Nikki Yanofsky has a way to top them all when she walks out on the celebrated stage on April 21.
“Massey Hall is my first solo show officially as an adult,” she says perkily on the phone from her Montréal home sounding all of 10 years old. “And I am aware that so much history has gone on there.”
Her high and perky “real” voice takes some getting used to particularly for anyone familiar with her sultry contralto singing and her unfazed-by-anything professional aplomb. Then again Yanofsky has been zooming along the learning curve, even appearing at Carnegie Hall the day she turned 14, with the crowd singing “Happy Birthday” to her. (By next month, she’ll be touring with popera stars Il Divo, playing the Air Canada Centre on May 19.)
But being 18 is different, she thinks. “Massey Hall is going to be the start of a new look and new sound for me,” she continues. “I know from being an opening act there how cool it is particularly backstage. But this time the whole point of the Massey Hall concert is to bridge the gap between the jazz I do and contemporary music. The show is going back to how I started, when I was singing Motown before I got into jazz.”
“I’d always been singing,” Yanofsky says. “To me scat singing and singing are the same thing. But here was a song you had to stick with. And since then ‘Airmail Special’ is the one the crowd likes the most.”
Growing up she had to contend with two older brothers who were forever getting her to listen to the Beatles and the rest of that,”older music” as she calls it. Family talent shows with friends and cousins made Yanofsky stage-smart early on.
“I don’t know if there were any ‘aha’ moments when it came to my singing,” she goes on. “I compare it to a kid growing older. You don’t realize that over the years than the kid is a foot taller.
“I do know that songs definitely change as you grow up with them. When I was younger I had a kind of carelessness in my singing because I was just singing a song that I loved. But I’ve noticed that my voice has changed in the past two years. I am sure it will get a little deeper when I am in my 30s.”
A number of heavyweight reputations are riding on Yanofsky’s chances of becoming the next big thing out of Quebec after Céline Dion. Nikki, her first studio album released in 2010 had Phil Ramone listed among its producers and among Ramone’s past clients are Billy Joel and Tony Bennett. Ramone reportedly saw the need for Yanofsky to find a way beyond being a novelty jazz act.
“The likable Yanofsky has stardom written all over her,” wrote Guardian critic John Fordham in 2010, who added: “The issue for her future will be whether she lets the industry smooth her off into just another jazz-inflected pop star, or she puts all of that formidable talent to more personal use.”
Yanofsky understands the concern. Better, she understands what she doesn’t understand — yet. She jokes that for years she’s been singing “At Last,” the soul-tearing piece defined by Etta James, to her dog. She realizes there are questions about her singing “God Bless the Child,” which when performed by Billie Holiday, its co-writer, takes on the gravitas of a southern gothic novel.
“I’m the most boring teenager in the world,” says Yanofsky. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. So maybe I’m lucky not to have a sob story. Maybe I’ve not gone through the things the writer of that song did. But it’s still up for grabs to sing.”
“Massey Hall is my first solo show officially as an adult,” she says perkily on the phone from her Montréal home sounding all of 10 years old. “And I am aware that so much history has gone on there.”
Her high and perky “real” voice takes some getting used to particularly for anyone familiar with her sultry contralto singing and her unfazed-by-anything professional aplomb. Then again Yanofsky has been zooming along the learning curve, even appearing at Carnegie Hall the day she turned 14, with the crowd singing “Happy Birthday” to her. (By next month, she’ll be touring with popera stars Il Divo, playing the Air Canada Centre on May 19.)
But being 18 is different, she thinks. “Massey Hall is going to be the start of a new look and new sound for me,” she continues. “I know from being an opening act there how cool it is particularly backstage. But this time the whole point of the Massey Hall concert is to bridge the gap between the jazz I do and contemporary music. The show is going back to how I started, when I was singing Motown before I got into jazz.”
For someone billed as a jazz prodigy, any move beyond jazz must be considered an audaciously risky move by Yanofksy and her manager parents, Elyssa and Richard Yanofsky, himself a jazz musician. Until now Nikki has garnered press worldwide as the era-defying jazz wunderkind who dazzled the Montréal Jazz Festival in 2006 opening for the Neville Brothers, knocked the rest of the jazz world on its ear with the 2008 release of Ella . . . Of Thee I Swing, her tribute to the late Ella Fitzgerald, and who gained international attention with her jazz groove “O Canada” — as well as “I Believe,” which became utterly ubiquitous in Canada — at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
The very idea of channelling Ella in the first place — a 13-year-old Yanofsky is included on Verve Records’ We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song 2007 compilation — was taken as a particularly plucky career move given that Fitzgerald is considered to be the very definition of the jazz singer. Some jazz diehards feel that Yanofsky’s scat-perfect reiteration of “Airmail Special,” Fitzgerald’s signature improvisational wordless solo — her “canny mimicry,” was how one writer discreetly described Yanofsky’s version — may have been a way of showing up Fitzgerald, who wasn’t considered to be precociously talented being all of 17 when she first started singing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
The truth is less complicated. Yanofsky has the benefit of perfect pitch, as did Ray Charles, Glenn Gould and a select group of other musicians who seemed to naturals from the start. So for Yanofsky, having the chance to intellectually absorb the glorious tonal cloudburst that Fitzgerald makes of “Airmail Special” was tantamount to giving a diamond junkie the key to Tiffany’s for a weekend — the time it took Yanofsky to copy Fitzgerald’s riffs.“I’d always been singing,” Yanofsky says. “To me scat singing and singing are the same thing. But here was a song you had to stick with. And since then ‘Airmail Special’ is the one the crowd likes the most.”
Growing up she had to contend with two older brothers who were forever getting her to listen to the Beatles and the rest of that,”older music” as she calls it. Family talent shows with friends and cousins made Yanofsky stage-smart early on.
“I don’t know if there were any ‘aha’ moments when it came to my singing,” she goes on. “I compare it to a kid growing older. You don’t realize that over the years than the kid is a foot taller.
“I do know that songs definitely change as you grow up with them. When I was younger I had a kind of carelessness in my singing because I was just singing a song that I loved. But I’ve noticed that my voice has changed in the past two years. I am sure it will get a little deeper when I am in my 30s.”
A number of heavyweight reputations are riding on Yanofsky’s chances of becoming the next big thing out of Quebec after Céline Dion. Nikki, her first studio album released in 2010 had Phil Ramone listed among its producers and among Ramone’s past clients are Billy Joel and Tony Bennett. Ramone reportedly saw the need for Yanofsky to find a way beyond being a novelty jazz act.
“The likable Yanofsky has stardom written all over her,” wrote Guardian critic John Fordham in 2010, who added: “The issue for her future will be whether she lets the industry smooth her off into just another jazz-inflected pop star, or she puts all of that formidable talent to more personal use.”
Yanofsky understands the concern. Better, she understands what she doesn’t understand — yet. She jokes that for years she’s been singing “At Last,” the soul-tearing piece defined by Etta James, to her dog. She realizes there are questions about her singing “God Bless the Child,” which when performed by Billie Holiday, its co-writer, takes on the gravitas of a southern gothic novel.
“I’m the most boring teenager in the world,” says Yanofsky. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. So maybe I’m lucky not to have a sob story. Maybe I’ve not gone through the things the writer of that song did. But it’s still up for grabs to sing.”
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