Manitoba artist grateful for music’s healing power

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This article was published 18/11/2020 (2100 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian jazz arranger/composer/singer Mike Janzen has a new lease on life these days, singing praises for the healing power of music that has taken him from darkness to light, with a new double album.

The Winkler-born, Steinbach-raised artist, who attended Brandon University (“I’m a fully certified Manitoban!” he quips), is releasing The Psalms Project by the end of the month.

Janzen suffered a devastating brain injury in April 2016 following a fall he suffered while getting a drink of water in the night.

Janzen — who lives in Toronto with his wife, Jodi, who is also from Steinbach, and their two daughters, Hadassah, 10, and June, 4 — tells a harrowing tale that begins with him passing out on his bathroom floor. After regaining consciousness, he stoically soldiered on after his doctors assured him he would heal with time, despite several lingering after-effects.

A month later, when feeling spry enough for a family walk, it became chillingly clear he was in serious trouble.

“After about five or six blocks, I had this overwhelming feeling that I had to get back as fast as possible,” Janzen says.

“After stumbling home, I began to experience extreme dizziness and nausea, which lasted not just weeks or months, but for years. I would have a few good days and then crash back down again.

“It was excruciating, because I couldn’t even have a conversation with my wife, and really tough on my kids, who couldn’t understand why their dad couldn’t play with them or take them to school.”

Janzen credits his “fantastic” family including his “rock star” wife, a close-knit community that rallied by providing daily meals, running errands and giving moral support — including sending Valentine’s Day cards to his wife on his behalf and delivering toys and games for his girls — and his Christian faith for pulling him through.

The freak accident flatlined his career for almost four years and nearly silenced the creativity that earned him a 2017 Juno nomination for Jazz Album of the Year for his string orchestra-based 2015 recording, Nudging Forever. (Local audiences may know him from Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra shows with singer-songwriter Steve Bell and the 2014 Pops program Reimagining Broadway with vocalist Sarah Slean.)

Severely limited and unable to write, play music or use a computer, Janzen could manage only to read a few short lines at a time from the biblical Psalms, meditating on their sage wisdom as melodic fragments popped into his head.

He sang thousands of musical ideas and snippets into his smartphone that ultimately formed the basis for his new album, already on the radar after his friend Keith Martin approached him early 2016 about setting the texts to music.

“The words of these ancient prayers were full of cries to God in times of great distress. They lifted my spirits, even though my own circumstances weren’t changing,” Janzen says. “They gave voice to my despair when I couldn’t gather up the strength to call out for myself.”

Joining him on the recording of 18 new songs — a third volume is on tap — and companion devotional book are more than 50 musicians, many of whom gathered together at a two-day retreat last January at the Abbey, an old stone barn-turned-performance space near Guelph, Ont.

They included Bell, Laila Biali, Erin Propp, Joey Landreth, Davide Direnzo, Eric Darken and Joel Schwartz, plus a string orchestra and a choir.

For the latter, owing to the COVID-19 restrictions that forbid singers to gather together, Janzen painstakingly pieced together individual, digitally recorded vocal tracks like a musical patchwork quilt.

Arguably the best-loved Psalm is the 23rd, which has provided solace and strength to many during their final hours, and has been performed in countless musical arrangements since its genesis.

Janzen offers his own take, undaunted by the challenge of tackling a classic and inspired by the cancer journey of his mother-in-law, who died in Steinbach in late summer.

“Some people say it’s one of the pinnacles, and I originally felt that I shouldn’t do it,” Janzen says. “But as I started reading the words of this psalm, I realized it really fit my season of struggle, and also passed a litmus test of cancer and what my mother-in-law went through with her own journey.

“It’s gentle, it’s lyrical. It’s almost like a little folk tune that slowly meanders its way to a choral ending. It’s very tender and tender-hearted.”

Other personal favourites include Remembers Me (“an honest, raw prayer about the fact that we’re remembered in every season of life,” he says) and Abounding in Love, based on Psalm 86.

“It’s about the idea that we’re heard even when we feel alone, or are in impossible situations. That’s quite powerful.” The album also includes several Laments, recognizing the sometimes darker underbelly of life that must be revealed in order to be healed.

The artist — who his compatriot Bell praises for his “extraordinary improvisational intuition and skills (that) sets songs ablaze with virtuosity” — is certain that anyone, regardless of their faith can enjoy his latest music, which speaks to the human condition.

He’s keenly aware that these songs will particularly resonate for many listeners struggling in a COVID-19 world, giving hope to those who might be staring down their own dark nights of the soul, whether it’s the grief of losing loved ones, numbing physical and social isolation, aching loneliness or even the disruption of comforting daily routines.

“These songs have a lot of space, and there’s a lot of hopeful words in there that will help lift people out of really hard places,” he says. “Even more than whether or not it takes off career-wise, it’s much more important to me that I can get the word out there and get it into people’s homes and hearts.

“Music is such a powerful thing and can really give us permission to think and feel and cry when we’re going through a tough time,” he says. “It’s a key that unlocks our inner heart, as is anything that’s creative.

“All art has such a beauty in it and allows us to experience not just the joy side of things, but also the struggle and those gut-wrenching longings inside of us. The words on this project will allow people to do that, and when we are able to bring an experience to beauty, music, art, poetry, or the Psalms, we can get this stuff out and somehow we’re healed.”

For further information, including links to song samples, or to make a donation towards the album’s final production phase through Janzen’s Kickstarter campaign, visit www.mikejanzentrio.com

holly.harris@shaw.ca