Music as medicine

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This article was published 28/08/2023 (1116 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Musician, heal thyself.

That’s the advice Danny Carroll followed after he survived a heart scare in 2018, an event that would become an epiphany for the Winnipeg pianist, teacher and composer who has worked and performed with almost every theatre company in the city and has a place on Rainbow Stage’s Wall of Fame.

“I was very, very fortunate,” he says. “I come out of that and I go, ‘OK, Danny, you want to do your own music? This is the time. So let’s start working on it.’”

What Carroll, 68, came up with are a dozen new works that make up Keys for Transformation, his debut album focusing on heart health that gets an album-launch concert with a string trio Wednesday night at Westworth United Church in River Heights.

Instead of the skip-a-beat moments of early love that are at the heart of the past century of pop music, Carroll has composed genre-blurring works that have elements of classical, new age, jazz and electronica meant to keep the ol’ ticker beating from one life-affirming moment to the next.

The first track has an appropriate title: Healing.

“We respond emotionally to music and that emotional response comes from the heart,” Carroll says. “The intent is to create this music as a sound-healing experience that will provide people with an aid to transforming.

“It became more than this melody. It became more of a cohesive sound that started to live on its own.”

Carroll’s partner, Laura Carroll, hosts musical meditation sessions with her mindfulness company, Crystal Music Sound Healing Meditation, and plays crystal singing bowls and flute to accompany meditation sessions.

He began adding electronic piano to her classes held in their home — he sat behind his keyboard tucked into a corner of their living room — and when the couple expanded the sessions to a church, he used Launchpad software that played mood music he’d accompany on a grand piano.

His soundscapes received some encouraging namastes from the class.

“I started writing these tunes and I was getting responses from people saying, ‘I really loved the piano at the beginning of the session,’” he recalls.

“I was like a DJ, only when I hit the Launchpad, instead of it going boom-ch-ch-boom-ch-ch-boom, it’s going whoa-whoa-whoa,” Carroll says, imitating a slow, drone-wave sound meant to enhance the meditative experience.

He thought he was on to something, especially when he encountered the music of German composer Nils Frahm, who also combines electronics with classical piano, and Iceland’s Olafur Arnalds, who mixes strings and piano with loops and beats and is known for composing the haunting theme music for the 2020 Apple TV miniseries Discovering Jacob.

“We call it neo-classical or classical crossover. It has some chill piano. It’s a really hard genre to define,” Carroll says. “I like the electronics. I’m using loops right now and I’ve got piano and a string trio (for Wednesday’s concert) and I’m very excited about that.”

Carroll has changed musical styles from when he was working with shows such as Rainbow Stage’s Strike! in 2009, It’s A Wonderful Life for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2018 and performing jazz piano at the Fort Garry Hotel’s old Palm Room off and on for 18 years.

Perhaps Carroll’s biggest switch has been to seek a softer sound, so he’s added felt piano to his repertoire.

The use of felt to dampen the effect of a piano’s hammers striking its strings has been around for centuries, but it’s become more popular in the 21st century, owing to musical tastes and the use of computer software that mimics the dampening effect without going to the trouble of installing a felt mat within a piano’s innards.

The use of computers in music has grown exponentially since Carroll bought an Atari 1040ST computer in the 1980s solely because it included MIDI software that he experimented with, using his piano at home.

“You’ve got so much manipulation you can do. You can control the mechanics of the sound, the intensity of it, the timbre,” he says of today’s technology. “It opened up a world for me, but my prime thing is still sitting at the piano.”

Each song on Keys for Transformation includes a key word of what emotion it seeks to address. Healing aims to transform, while another track, Protected, connects with trust.

“The intent of the music, for me, is in there and I thought ‘That’s my lyric sheet,’” he says of the instrumentals, three of which include harmony vocals from jazz artist Erin Propp. “It’s just a guide and you don’t have to work on that.”

Perhaps the biggest adjustment in this new chapter of his musical career was figuring how to steer his ideas in one cohesive direction.

He credits The Art of Managing Your Career — a 12-week Creative Manitoba course geared to artists of all types, taught by singer-songwriter Heather Bishop — with getting him this far, a journey that’s included a deal with Little Symphony Records, a Canadian boutique label that focuses on neo-classical artists.

“That was the main catalyst for me because it was all about how to go about this,” he says of creating and releasing Keys of Transformation. “(Bishop showed) how to define who I am as an artist, what I want to do with my music and let’s work and look at how we’re going to do this.

“This is my first time on this merry-go-round. I’ve been playing and performing and writing things for other people’s projects, but this was my project. It brings a lot more different feelings. Let’s see what happens.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall