June 2002
The high energy particle of jazz
by Ian McGillis
At a time when the talent-to-success ratio is far too often out of whack, when substance runs a distant second to image, it's almost surreal to come across someone with talent to spare, who places art - and science - above commerce. Well, meet Diane Nalini.
Born and raised in Montreal, the 27-year-old Nalini now lives in Oxford, England, where she went as a Rhodes Scholar and now holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at New College. And, oh, yes, when she's not in the lab, she sings. Like an angel. In four languages.
The jazz singer's art thrives on intimacy. Great ones have been known to die the death in unsympathetic venues. Well, I've seen Nalini in concert twice. Once was at a Montreal jazz festival show last year, in Complexe Desjardins, a huge, anonymous multilevel atrium. It was lunchtime, and civil servants poured out of their offices, intent on getting outside.
Something interesting happened, though. Slowly at first, then in increasing numbers, people stopped to cock an ear to this trio of voice, guitar and bass. By the time they went into a Portuguese-language rendition of Chico Buarque's Carolina, there must have been 2,000 people who had forgotten all about lunch.
The other time was last October in Oxford's St. Barnabas Church. Autumn in Oxford can be cold. Inside the unheated church, it was very cold indeed. There was every reason to expect a miserable evening. Then the band began. Nalini went into a rendition of My Favourite Things that can only be described as sultry, and we may as well have been at Newport on a balmy summer night.
Craig Raine, one of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary poets, was at the St. Barnabas show. "She's got brains, beauty, artistry, the jackpot deal," Raine says of Nalini. "She's lucky to have a voice that sounds like itself and to possess a wonderful feeling for phrasing and cadence."
The artistry Raine remarks on shines through on two wide-ranging, self-produced albums, After dusk and the newly released Tales... My Mama told me. Rendering songbook standards as well as French chanson, Brazilian classics, her own compositions, and settings of poems by Shakespeare and Tennyson, Nalini consistently displays bell-clear tone, meticulous enunciation, playfulness and subtle swing.
Her musical and intellectual inclinations took root growing up as the only child in a cosmopolitan household. (Her father emigrated from Belgium, and her mother from the former Portuguese colony of Goa in India.) One hazards a guess it was a musical household.
"Music was always there, yes. My dad was a huge jazz fan, and my mother was always singing... My first love was Ella Fitzgerald. Billie Holiday came later, when I was 9 or 10." Nine or 10 is "later"? "Well, I got into Ella at 3."
Nalini began singing professionally at 17. She received an honours physics degree from McGill in 1995. Then she applied for a Rhodes scholarhsip (awarded to 11 Canadians a year) to pursue a doctorate at Oxford. She got it, receiving three years of tuition and living expenses.
The day before our chat, I accompanied Nalini to a brown-bag lunch at which professionals and students (and me, entirely baffled for an hour) listened to two specialists discourse on the latest developments in the study of supernovae.
I ask Nalini if the science side of her life ever feels dull set against the world of live music, which has involved recent gigs in front of Bill Clinton ("He told me, 'You keep singing, 'cause you got it!' "), Paul McCartney, and other luminaries.
"Science, unless you happen to make an earth-shattering discovery, doesn't give you that explosive high, but there is a constant sense of satisfaction."
I remark that she may be faced with choosing between music and physics, sooner rather than later.
"But with the music, it's not a case of uncontrolled growth. I'm in control. It's my choice whether to accept or refuse a gig. In the past I've had to juggle an occasional show if I'm already booked for an experiment." Not a problem Ella or Billie ever had.