Alina Morr

My guest this week is Alina Morr. The pianist arranger and one of three original founding members of the landmark all-women's jazz ensemble called Straight Ahead. Please enjoy this revealing and fascinating conversation with Alina Morr.

https://www.facebook.com/alina.morr

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Transcript

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Alina Morr, recorded on 10/24/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and today's guest is Alina Morr. She is one of the founding members of ‘”Straight Ahead,” a jazz pianist, in her own rite and part of Detroit, and international realms of jazz. Welcome so much to the show today. 

Alina Morr: Thank you so much Tia. I'm really glad to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, we met many years ago, through Marion Hayden, and I was just starting to learn how to play improvised jazz violin and I think Regina Carter had just left to go independent. It was like, “Oh, you should come play with us.” And I was like, “That'd be great. But I was, like, I don't know what I'm doing.” So, I came to your apartment, I think. It was curious because I said I can play, but I can't improvise yet. So, I've come a long way because of you guys, because that kind of kicked me in the rear and got me going. I'm glad to say I'm still doing it and that you’re still doing it. And, so anyway, I just thought I'd share that bit of history with you. 

Alina Morr: Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. And I do remember that and, of course, everything is perception. And so, I actually remember it very differently. I remember being really excited to know about you and really enjoying meeting you and I thought that you had this beautiful tone on the violin. And I was just so glad to know that there was a person like you on the planet. Influences are really important for people, and when, if you can look around and see someone who's at least vaguely, somewhat like you doing what you're doing, like not that many women, playing a professional jazz, or ny type of music other than classical, which is a really protected environment, is very nice. So, if I was able to be even a small part of being one of your influences to study your music, I'm just honored. So there's that. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you. 

Alina Morr: Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So, tell me like, what was it about piano and particularly improvisational or jazz piano? Did you start out playing an instrument or did you start out singing or did you start out just… How did you happen to cross the piano in the first place?

Alina Morr: It's really interesting because it happened really quite early in life. I remember… I was born in Massachusetts. I come from a big family in Chicago, but our family moved several times before we settled in the Detroit area and how my family got here, was my dad was in the automotive industry and that's where it was. So, that's how I moved to Michigan. But, after leaving Chicago, my family moved to Massachusetts and that's where I was born. And I remember the first time I really heard a piano was I was at a party and there was this lady, and I was looking at the piano and I am… I was little. And, she said, would you like to see that? And I said, yeah. And she… a very clear memory for me. She actually picked my little self up and put me on the piano bench. I remember, like, touching it with my finger, not like pounding it like kids do, but just like touching and hearing these sounds and just something just zoomed in and connected with me. And I just said, that's what I want to do. And, from that time until I was nine, I just bugged my parents mercifully for us to get a piano and then finally my grandparents did buy one. But it's interesting that you would ask about the singing to connection because the connection to singing, because the voice is the original instrument. And right about that time, I started singing as well because my mother was very musical. She didn't have the opportunity to become a professional musician, she was a depression war time baby. And people from south side Chicago didn't really go into singing opera or whatever she thought she was gonna do. She became a nurse and married my dad and provided a wonderful musical home for us. But we used to sing and from a very early age, she knew I had a very good ear because she sang soprano and I could always sing alto. I could just always do that. And then, when I was about six, then we, started going to church and singing in a church choir. So, I learned how to sing parts and singing ensembles really quite early, that's really embedded in me. And then when I was nine, we got the piano, and I went on from there. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you take, private lessons or group lessons or study at church? 

Alina Morr: Yeah, I had the typical… I had the typical piano lessons. I had a teacher that came to our house and she was very good, very simpatico, but it was basically that was just, “Let's get the John Thompson books and read through those.” So basically, I was just reading and playing classical piano up until my teens. And then, in the meantime, in terms of my listening life, which is very important. We listened to… we always had music on at my house… so just a wide range of things. My mother loved opera. My father liked light jazz and then, we grew up with Motown and everything that came after that. So, I didn't really have a chance. And then a lot of other things happened in my life. And so, I wasn't really able to get back to playing the piano seriously and even begin to find ways to find out how to play jazz and how to improvise. So, I'm actually started again at the age of 26, which was pretty late considering where everybody else in my age group was. I used to just cry and cry.

Oh my God. Everyone was ahead of me. I just want to do this so bad. Like it was very tough. So, what I did was, since I was thinking, I want to play jazz. It's a black art form. I'm coming from outside of the culture. And I need to start somewhere because I don't have the chops of my contemporaries and I love the blues anyways. So, I just was able to get on the scene and meet some people and ended up playing with someone who was very important to me in my life and in music, was like a grandfather / godfather to me in jazz. I ended up playing for a number of years with Bobo Jenkins, who was one of the great Jazz, one of the great blues players in town.So then I was able to be around him and his contemporaries like Willie Warren, Eddie Burns. I never got a chance to play with John Lee Hooker because he was already in California by then. But he was from that same meleiu. Juanita McCray, Washboard Willie, Chicago Pete. So, I was able to gain knowledge of the music and perform and then be around a lot of very charismatic people that were playing the music. So, I think that from where I came from, it was a really good fit for me. And then from there, I was able to improve my technical skills and my background knowledge of the music, and then dig more deeply into playing jazz, which is what I really wanted to do. 

Tia Imani Hanna: You ended up doing a lot of practice on the bandstand, or just woodshedding  in the house, or combination of both things?

Alina Morr: A combination. Basically, I was just teaching myself to play all over again because I'd had a hiatus. And teaching myself how to play scales again. But, of course, you're… there's no way that you're going to do this unless you do a lot of self-study and then you do… that excellent point that you made… you do really learn on the band stand because this type of music is what they call the ‘Art of the Moment’. So, no matter how well-prepared you are, and of course you have to prepare, you can't insult yourself or your music or the music or your fellow musicians by not preparing, but you get on the bandstand and something changes and you have to really turn on a dime. So, that's where the really focused listening comes in and being very present in the moment, listening. Especially like in my early days. We've played with a lot of these guys that were really American originals, and at some point, the blues got formulated into a 12 bar form, which is what it does now, but a lot of those guys were really following the voice and the lyrics, because originally, again, going back to the vocal component, this was sung music, and then people got instruments and we were able to accompany. So, a lot of these guys… and it was a young back-up band, so we were all just really crisp and ready to go and we wanted to play? And we were always taught by Bo and all the other guys just follow the vocalist. Where the vocalist goes, that's where you go. If they slid into the next change earlier, or if they extended a phrase later to where they didn't change the chord, quote unquote “on time,” we just slid right in there with very seamlessly, so that they would be comfortable because we're there for them, to support them. And that happens all the time in jazz, in any art form, something can happen, and you have to, be very aware so that you can go with the flow of the music. And that's what a lot of your preparations about is to give you the tools and the vocabulary to just… to go with the flow. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you get stuck with a lot of vocalists when you first started working on the band stand so that you didn't know what key things were in? Did you have a lot of vocalists would come in and not know what key to play in and then you just had to figure it out or things like that would happen?

Alina Morr: Not so much in the blues cause they knew where they were or like, it's called ‘catching your key’. It’s like sing a few bars and we'll catch your key. It just that. I've done that. I think more later on in jam sessions and jazz, just like vocalist, I don't want to vent, going up and not knowing what in the world they're doing and why they're doing it or how they're doing it and then want to blame you when they don't have a successful experience. We’re not going to go there. Normally in that situation, I don't recall that being a big issue. It was just more like… and then we knew these guys and we loved them. They're these older guys, had all the stories, we were… we wanted them to be happy all the time. It was never an issue in that world. 

Tia Imani Hanna: You went from blues playing to more straight ahead stuff and more Latin feel right. It was a journey for me. So, I started. At that time the jazz scene was very active. I lived in Wayne State University in the Cass Corridor, which is not the same Cass Corridor they have now, but it was a really lively place. There was a lot of people around, a lot of people playing music, Cops Corner, The Sun Shop, the new joints, tons of places. I was on the scene just every night, all the time. If there was some music, I was listening to it. I started just absorbing the music. And then, of course, doing a lot of self-study, a lot of listening, a lot of transcribing, a lot of listening. And then actually the jazz led me to my next experience, playing in the Caribbean. I played with a wonderful… at a number of jazz trios around town. And a woman I've worked with by the name of Kathy Caesar, who was a really great classical oboe player who now plays with The National Symphony in DC, was also really quite a jazz player. And she had studied with, Ali Jackson, Sr, the father of Ali Jackson, Jr., the great jazz drummer from here who played for many years with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Just has an amazing career on his own. Anyways, so she also played jazz. And so, we had a jazz trio, flute… jazz flute, jazz piano, and bass. And then when we could afford a fourth person drums and she got a residency in… with her classical group… in the Dominican Republic and in a beautiful town, right in the center of the island called Santiago de los Caballeros. It was a beautiful. It wasn't touristy at all. It was just, like, no beach there. So, no outsiders wanted to come. It was just, oh, it was such a beautiful place to be. And they had a cultural center. It was, a big, beautiful marble building. One floor for dance, one floor for art, one floor for music. And so, they had a year woodwind quintet of classical music that she played with got a one-year residency there to concertize and teach in the country. And then, my best friend is leaving the country and so she said, “So come and visit. So, I went. I landed in the Santa Domingo Airport in middle of February. It was 85 degrees and there's bougainvillea plants spilling over the wall. I'm like, “Oh, I'm so here.” So, I visit her for a month and then I came back and started furiously studying Spanish. And I said, “I'm going to go back there.” And, subsequently the following year, we actually did end up going back and getting a residency to teach in the same cultural center. And then, at some point, she went back to continue. She wanted to audition for classical orchestras and I wanted to stay because I'm meeting everybody in the whole country and playing with everybody. So then, I moved to the capital San Domingo and ended up playing with a lot of people there. And that was a real formative experience in my life because so often these days, I feel that technology is a blessing and a curse because you can hear anybody at any time just with the pop of the button, but hearing and participating in music is really experiential and there is a different impact on the brain when you are in the same room with people playing music. And I'll say that from my, about myself, in terms of Latin, Blues, Jazz, everything. I've never backed down from any environment, anywhere, anytime there was some music that I wanted to hear. And being in that environment and hearing all the Merenge and Salsa music, it was… it just made a profound impact on me. So, that was how I got that into my playing. 

Tia Imani Hanna: I am familiar with some Latin music, but I never understood, like, some of the differentiations between Merengue and Salsa, as far as there's Montunos and all these kinds of different things that you play. Did people sit down and explain that to you? Or they're like, you just play with different groups that played these different styles and that you just had to learn it by osmosis, so to speak?

Alina Morr: It again, it was a little bit of both. I didn't have that advantage of sitting down somewhere in some college courses saying this is how it's done. Pretty quickly off the bat, I could tell the difference between merenge and salsa because they're just two really different rhythms and they come from different parts of the Caribbean. But, I got a chance to, again, it's just if you love it that much, you're going to go where the people are that play and you're going to ask them questions and figure it out. And so, one of the great experiences that I had that was an offshoot, because there’s an interchange, because everybody, not everybody, but a lot of the musicians in the Dominican Republic, they knew about jazz and they wanted to play jazz and they did jazz. And there's a tremendous, as tradition of great instrumentalists in these countries, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic, and, also Panama. Those areas where it was a combination of Spanish and African, and it's a very different culture from if you go to islands like Jamaica or Barbados that are either very African or very British, but there's not… they haven't developed a culture from the mixing of the two and how this came about, my friend, Ozzy Rivera, who's a great musicologist brought this point to me that the reason why there was more of a blending of the cultures on the Spanish speaking islands was because these cultures were already used to mixing in southern Spain in northern Africa. They were already used to being around each other. That kind of set a tone of communication. And another thing not to go off the bat, but just historically speaking, in terms of when the Europeans came over and colonize the islands, they basically, I'm not trying to diss anybody, I'll just state the facts that I learned from doing an intensive studying on this, is that they basically came over and used the islands as just places to grow their food and send it somewhere else. And the British normally did not settle in the original days. They just kept small colonies and didn't really mix with the rest of the people. Where is in the Spanish islands, they came more with an intention to stay and not only built homes, but cultural institutions and things like that. And it just lent for a more organic blending of people in general and then cultures and so that's why when you hear like Salsa music or Latin jazz, any of these things, you clearly hear the African element in the predominance of the drumming, but those unique rhythms were blended with what the Spaniards were doing because they have their own sophisticated music as in flamenco, so that was all in play. And then, of course, the European instruments and approach to playing. So, it's really interesting. But getting back to your question, Yeah. I wanted to play with cats, and they wanted to play with me. I could show some stuff on jazz or they would show me some montunos and I had a chance to really nail that down because also musicians that I knew from the Island, I got an opportunity to play on a cruise ship, so I was able to play with them on a cruise ship for six months. And it was a really great time. It was before cruise ships got really all commercialized and corporatized and we played several sets of music per day. So, we played jazz during the day and then we got a chance to rock out on some salsa and dance music at night. So, it was a really nice time. I remember those guys showing me a lot of the montunos that I've shown them some stuff. So again, it's just like an interchange. You got to show up and be around other people that do this if you really want to get information. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So yeah, now in the age of… in the age of COVID and the age of computers that reaching is you're not in the same room, but you can have some communications with people who aren't in the same space with you. They can maybe share some ideas, but it's not the same thing.

Alina Morr: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And thank God that people keep devising new ways for us to be able to reach out and be together, especially now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Especially now. Wow. You've covered it like a lot of geographical reasons, as well as musical regions in learning your music. Are there mentors that you had that you never met, but that you studied them voraciously, the recordings?

Alina Morr: Oh yeah. because I had… because I played so much blues and I had such a strong feel for the blues and deep love of it, still do, when I started playing jazz, the first piano player that I really resonated with was Red Garland because I used to listen to those Miles Davis records. And Red had such… he had such great chords, but he had a really bluesy inflection that really resonated with me. And he was such a fine player. So, I really listened to him a lot. Of course, I loved McCoy. But then, being around Detroit and hearing all these guys talk about the great musicians. I did quite a study of Tommy Flanagan for a while because I really wanted to get those lines, those beautiful lines and that beautiful touch that he had. I would say that those were the three that really got me started in terms of who I listened to when I was about teaching myself to play jazz. 

Tia Imani Hanna: I know when I was starting out, no one told me to listen to violin players. I had to go search for them. The only one I knew about Jean Luc Ponte, because that was the one everybody in Detroit knew about because WJR or...

Alina Morr: WJZZ.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, WJZZ would always play Jean Luc Ponte. So that was the only one I ever knew about. So, I listened to a lot of horn players, a lot of piano players, and did not listen to violin players. So, were there other instrumentalists that you really thought of as well, besides the piano players that you listened to?

Alina Morr: To be honest with you, I listened to the horn players and stuff, but I would say, for me, that the other people that were… that just wildly captured my imagination or listened to a lot were Eddie Jefferson and Betty Carter, who are just bad to the bone. Just really, in that realm of unparalleled masters of the art form and their phrasing, their dynamics, their concept… that was who I listened to. And of course, the cliches in jazz, all the vocalists want to sound like instrumentalists and all the instrumentalists want to sound like horns because you want to get that singing style in you're playing. And I can understand it from your perspective because… so you didn't really have a lot to draw on. Jean Luc Ponte is a great player and produced some great music that has inspired many people and there weren't a lot of other people to listen to. You had Stuff Smith. Who else? And so, the instrument is just what it is. It's an instrument that you speak through, that you express your musical thought through. So, it doesn't… because if you're getting in the realm of pure thought, you just want… how do I get those lines to sing? What's the correct way to play on, dominantly or whatever, so you just listen to somebody who knows how to do that. One of my things is that I need to go back and let's listen to some more Bird just because it's… his lines were so perfect. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, desert island this then. What is your desert Island discs for Charlie Parker? 

Alina Morr: [blows bubbles]

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] I get everybody with that one.

Alina Morr: Probably Parker with strings. Probably Charlie Parker with strings because he just soared above that wonderful background. He just… Oh God. Hmmm. Whew! You got me with that one that made me revisit. 

Tia Imani Hanna: It makes you want to pull out your music collection again.

Alina Morr: I think that's going to have to happen. And I do still have a turn table. Yes, I do.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah. Hey, the records are back. 

Alina Morr: Yeah, for sure. 

Tia Imani Hanna: But never left for some of us, right? 

Alina Morr: Yeah. Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, you went through the touring stages. You were in Dominican Republic. You then you came back to Detroit and then, at some point, you met Marion and Gayelynne and “Straight Ahead” started. Now what's your take on that story? How did that start?

Alina Morr: I went to San Domingo one time, then I came back. Then I went the second time for a year, then I came back. Then I worked on the cruise ship and then went back to the Dominican Republic. Then I felt like I really wanted to bump my knowledge up some. So, actually moved to Boston and went to Berklee College of Music for a year because I was just trying to… I never really had that really good music school experience. I always felt I wasn't one of those people that went to Cass and yeah, I was… my life theme is I always feel like I'm catching up to everybody. I'm just running to catch up. So, I did that and then I came back and let's see now, I knew Gayelynne and Marion in an ancillary way from seeing them on the scene and stuff like that. And how the band actually started was it was actually started by Mickey Brayden. I don’t know if you know that. Mickey Braden is a wonderful vocalist who has moved to New York, several decades ago and it's doing very well there. But she was actually the one who started Straight Ahead. Since I'm talking too much anyways, I'll just tell you the story of that. So, she was doing Bert's on Jefferson… was the… was really the spot to be, and they had the Monday night jam session. And so she was in a trio with Earl van Dyke, Muriel Jones, and I forget who the bass player was, but it was one of the classic groove brothers rhythm sections, and they got a job at the Fairlane Club doing a five-night-a-week gig. And I think that it wasn't an option for them to bring in a vocalist, but they took this, this gig and she just said, I'm going to do you one better, I'm going to keep the gig on. And then, just to show you I really don't need you, I will hire an all-female band. So, she called Marion… she called Marion and Gayelynne and they accepted and, I’m going to tell the truth, when they called me, I didn't really want to do it because I just said, what is this, The Go-Go’s? And you know it's going to be a gimmick. Why would you do an all girl band? That's so corny. This music was created by black men. Let's just give credit where credit is due. I'm trying to integrate myself on the scene, not put myself in another box. It's hard enough as it is, coming from another culture and I just really didn’t want to do it. And Ray McKinney, who was a great bassist and poet and philosopher, who was a very serious mentor and friend to me at the time, he said, why not? They invited you, why don't you at least try? I got off my horse and I went to the very first rehearsal and I could see that, between Mickey and Marion and Gayelynne, there was such a wealth of music and there was such a wealth of things that I could learn from being in their presence, that I completely changed my tune and I said yes. So basically, we performed. And Mickey was real nice to rehearse with. Talk about it prepared a vocalist. She really knew her stuff, and then she played piano. I think that, just as an aside, because you were asking me earlier about vocalists, like, not knowing their key or whatever, and that leading to communication problems. See, with Mickey… a lot of times vocalist know what they want to hear, but they haven't learned the instrumentalist language. They didn't know how to tell you. And they get the Billy Buggs syndrome. They just lash out because they don't… when Mickey was just the opposite, she could sit down at a piano and say I want it to sound like this and I'd say, “Oh, okay.” So, it was just great. So, we rehearsed a lot and we ended up doing a recording and we were doing some gigs and then we got… we actually sent a recording and on the basis of that we got onto the jazz festival here, which at the time was the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival. And things were doing really well. Then Mickey got real busy. She was doing the stage play “Lady Day Sings the Blues,” and she was on this extended tour and decided that she wasn't going to come back. She was going to go straight to New York and pursue musical theater. So, we were a trio. And then, in the meantime, Regina Carter had been living in Europe. She came back to Detroit and then we approached her and she agreed. And that was the original “Straight Ahead.” Before it was straight up trio and that it became the large group “Straight Ahead.”

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you guys did the Montreux thing. I think Gayelynne told me about when you guys were thrown on the stage to open for Nina Simone. And what was that like for you?

Alina Morr: It was amazing. Again, it's like being open to all experiences because how we got over there in the first place was that they had, at the time, there was an exchange program between the Detroit Festival and the Montreux festival where every year, each country would send out a group to represent that particular country to the other festival, this sister festival.

And so we had made another demo with Regina and I called the festival office and I just said, “Will you send us over to Montreux, you know, this year?” And they said, wow, there was like ten other people that want to go and the groups that want to go. My approach to problem solving is never just either/or. I always have ‘and’ in there. So, I just said, why don't you just submit everybody that wants to go and let them make their pick. And so, we just lucked out and got selected to go that year and, of course, it was just an amazing experience. But yeah, talk about being rough and ready because how that festival is organized, there's really about seven different sites where music is played. There are outdoor festivals, and then there's a nightclub, which is no joke because all the great people play there as well. And then there's the main stage, which is in this place called “The Casino,” seats a couple thousand people. And so, we were there to play the nightclub, but we were happy about that. Shoot, Roy Haynes had played the night before, so that wasn't any dis. And then, we got there, and they put us up for a week. So, we just had this beautiful time. So, we'd been there for a few days and I just said, we really need to practice. So, we asked the Festival organizers, “Is there a practice room that we could get to?” And they hooked us up with a practice room at our hotel and this sounds like something happens and I movie, but it really happened to us. So we're in this practice room having a rehearsal and little beknownst to us, the main festival organizers were out on the patio having lunch and they heard us and they said, wow, this sounds even better than what we thought they did. And so, then that's when they approached us about our opening for Nina Simone. Within 24 hours we had this tremendous experience. And it was another example where I had to stick up for my guns because they had this 10-foot grand piano there, which I just knew I was going to play. And then they said, we can't move everything around, so you have to play a keyboard. And I just said, ‘You know what? No. I just have to refute, or I have to retain my right to refuse to do this.” You're not going to put me up there playing some lousy keyboard because at the time I wasn't really as cognizant of how to make that adjustment as I am now. And I just put the pressure on them, and they backed down and they got the piano back out and I was able to play it. So, it was a thrilling moment. We walked on stage and everybody just screamed. They just couldn't believe it. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's fabulous. That's such a great memory. I wish I would have been there. 

Alina Morr: Yeah, me too! I would have loved to have had you there!

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, I just wanted to be in the audience. I didn't even have to be on stage man. I just want to be in the audience. That would have been great. Because we were, in Detroit, we were so proud of you guys when you first started, your first album. We were so proud of you. It was like, Oh my gosh, they're so great!

Alina Morr: Thank you for that.

Tia Imani Hanna: That in and of itself was amazing. So ,you guys got a Grammy nomination for the first album, I believe. And then you went on to do several more albums and got to do several tour, is that right?

Alina Morr: We got to do a fair amount of traveling based on the three records that we did for Atlantic. And that was a good thing. And then another thing that this really good about our group is that we've never left it to just… we learned pretty early that you need to manage your own career in your own direction. We did a lot of traveling with the group and then at some point we started doing more and more of the management ourselves because we realized that we could do that. So, then we started going to the Caribbean a lot. We used to go to Jamaica, we had a residency, and we went to Jamaica once a year to play a beautiful festival down there and then as happens in life, people start expanding. So, we've always had Straight Ahead. It's almost like our sorority. and then we started doing other things and, the music world is so vast. So, everyone started, in addition to Straight Ahead doing other things in life. People started teaching. I know I went off more into playing a lot more Salsa music. Another one of my great loves is Gospel music and had a chance to play in a really great church with a great choir, just a dream come true. An organ, drums, and me on piano and a 50-voice choir. That is ecstasy. That is ecstasy every week. I get a chance to do that and just continue to play and grow and learn. It's just one of the things that's beautiful about music is that there's always something to do. There's always something to build on and you just have to keep showing up. You just have to keep showing up and not let the music business pollute your idea of what it is to be successful in music. Because, I heard it. I'm going to take a little left turn on you, but I hope it's all right. I listen to a very interesting…

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s ok.

Alina Morr: Thank you. I listen… I live in Southwest Detroit, right by the bridge, right in Mexican Town. And so, I listened to a lot of Canadian radio, which is far superior to most of what we have here, including NPR. And I listened to a very interesting interview with a woman who goes by the name of story, S T O R Y. And she has put out some very good music as a real good vocalist, singer-songwriter with also some rapping in it. And she has some pretty disturbing things happen to her in her younger life, which I won't go into, but she made a very serious correlation. She feels that the music industry is very closely related to the sex work industry. And, just hear me out, in terms of how women are viewed as commodities and how often their looks and sexuality are used to sell whatever it is you're selling. And I think that how this relates to women in music or to anybody in music, you can look at the… Do you know, the meniscal part of one percentage of the people on the planet that can actually become world famous or whatever that is in the music industry. If you compare yourself to those people or those entities, first of all, you have no idea what their inner life is really like. You just see a picture of them that's been polished to present a certain way. But if you hook into the bedrock of all the people on this earth that are doing music, if you're one of those people, you're successful. Because there's no way you can do music unless you have focus and self-discipline. There's no place you can be in groups unless you have some people skills can go get along with them and can show up. And I think that people, everybody, and myself included, you need to constantly be evaluating yourself and not letting this marketability factor creep into the decisions you make about the kind of music you want to play, or how you want to live your life, or what someone else thinks of you, or like what some things of your body image or whatever it is. That is really not what music is about. And I think that in this age of videos and YouTube and I G and all stuff that people have to… you have to keep pulling yourself back into, you know, that sacred space that music comes from and keep on being from there and just say, if you're doing music, you're already successful, because look how many people quit. And if anyone's listening to me that quit, get back up and get back on it. I did. 

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. I think that the music industry in general does the same thing to men too. 

Alina Morr: They do!

Tia Imani Hanna: I think it's I think it's just that it's almost more accepted of women than it is of men, but men use it as a badge of pride. Whereas women feel like they have to be put there. I think that's the small distinction, but I think the industry is an industry for a reason it's run that way,but because of things like our technology and the internet, we're able to move away from that. 

Alina Morr: Absolutely! 

Tia Imani Hanna: If we want to. And I think that's a lovely thing about the growth of technology because, back in the day, I couldn't have my own show.

Alina Morr: Right! And your show is amazing, you know. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you.

Alina Morr: Thank you!

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I'm really grateful for the technology and how things are changing because the music industry has changed too because of this. And COVID has really put, tied the knot in the boat, so to speak, is that now everybody is in the same boat. We're stuck at home. You don't have your studio. You don't have all your fashion plate designers and everything to make you up. You have to do it all by yourself in your own house. Granted, your equipment might be better. Granted, you might be able to hire somebody because you have more money cause you're famous already. But… but we're all coming from the same place. Nobody's getting gigs anymore or not as much, anyhow. Nobody's got arenas full of people.

Alina Morr: Yeah. Yeah. So, everybody just goes to where the action is, which now is online. And it's pushing us to to use these because these technologies are here to stay and we have to deal with them whether we want to or not. And as you mentioned earlier, that these technologies are great because they do allow us to communicate with just about anybody in the world, And I think that, for myself, I think that we've learned a lot from the Hip Hop generation because they were always self-starters because they came out, they weren't even trying to get with records. They were just really outside of the box and it was, you talk about a badge of pride. Back in the day, like if a guy had a record deal, he didn't want people to know about it because he would lose street cred. They would still be putting their stuff on little scratch tapes and things like that because that made them… because that gave them credibility with their community. And, they moved on, they created a whole genre. What did JayZ say? “I'm not a businessman. I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man. I'm a business.” Every one of those… and they've had such an influence on music, on fashion, and on how to use technology. They bring everybody in. When you look at some of those Missy Elliot videos and she gets off that cartoon that shit is funny as hell. I don't know if I can say that on the air, I try to keep it clean, but you know, that's where we are. It was like Harold McKinney used to talk about the democratization of jazz. Just like, anybody can learn how to play jazz. It's just, like, the democratization of the whole music industry, and bear in mind that everybody is looking for content. So, what you're doing as a content creator, you're in the top echelon because everyone is stuck at home and they got new brains in their head and they are looking for interesting content of which there is a lot. You taking the initiative to do something like that puts you right up there and my hat is off to you.

Tia Imani Hanna: I appreciate it. I just… it's just a lot of fun. I have always wanted to have a salon, like once a month, at my house. And just, what are you working on? What are you doing? And show us a bit of play you're writing and here’s a bit of my film and people just don't do that anymore. So, this is a way to do that, and talk. 

Alina Morr: Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So, that was the idea. I saw that you were doing some solo work at the Blue Llama back in, was it January before COVID hit? Or was it more recently in July.

Alina Morr: It was in the summer. You know what, I want to give a shout out to Dave Sharp, who is a wonderful bass player and a composer/arranger on his own, but has taken on the duties of the curator of the music program at the Blue Llama. And so many people were forced to stop doing live music, first of all, because they were closed. Or secondly, just because the restaurants, not because they're just taking a beating to be in compliance with all the restrictions that we have to observe just to stop the spread of this terrible disease. The Blue Llama was one of the few places that was actually able to keep it going, but they did. So at some point, Dave reached out to me and asked me to do some solo piano at the Blue Llama, so I did. I did a few sessions over there doing that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Are there any new recordings or compositions? Now are you a writer as well? Are you a composer?

Alina Morr: Oh yeah. I'm working on a recording right now that, with a number of my original compositions and always working on music. I just have music floating through my head all day, every day, all night, every night. 

Tia Imani Hanna: How do you… how does, composition come for you? Do you do like a meditation, or is it when you're washing the dishes or, or do you just sit at the piano and it comes to you, or do you dream about it? How does it come to you?

Alina Morr: I can sit down and just write something, but I find that my best ideas, they just come to me and they just really come. Usually, it's fairly fully developed ideas. And so, at that point, I don't feel like I'm so much writing them as transcribing them. That's how they come to me. And when you speaking about writing at the instrument, I don't really do that because I don't want my vocabulary or my technique to influence the thoughts. So, when I get a song like that, I'll usually jot it down or maybe, record it in some type of way so that I remember it, but I don't really sit down to play it because usually I get the main idea, the main body of the idea, then there's always some work I have to do at the end to complete it. And I don't really do that until I've just let it, just wash around on my head for a few days. I want it to get it really. I want to have a very solid thought form and then I will sit down and play it and start doing things with it. It just comes to me as pure thought. I wish I could say I'm like Wayne Shorter since the piano eleven hours a day and write songs. I don't do that. They come to me from a different source.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Everybody wants to be Wayne Shorter.

Alina Morr: I’m just a woman trying to play the piano.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Do you think some of it comes from just your daily practice? Do you have a daily practice of how you approach your music or the form of your life with music? 

Alina Morr: I strive for a daily practice, but I find that even in… I find that even in the present circumstance of the quarantine, a lot of times my schedule is dictated for me by what I have to do. Because one of the things, you know, I'm just getting back into being like a bandleader and doing my own projects again. Recent experience that I had as a band leader is that on 24-hous notice, I produced a concert for the Concert of Colors that was broadcast on their website and on channel 56. Here's an example, I'm sitting in my house and minding my own business and I get a call that the Concert  of Colors was canceled this year, but they wanted to still do it in some form or fashion. So, video recorded all the acts that were scheduled to be on the concert and broadcasted them, so the concert could still take place, although late and virtually. And I got a call that a Latin group that was supposed to perform and had to drop out because too many of their significant members couldn't do it. So, they knew that I do Latin music as one of my sub-specialties. So, I got a call to put a Latin show together. And I had a lot of charts because I ran my own Latin band for about 10 years and played with a lot of other groups, Francisco Mora Catlett, Ozzie Rivera, Eddie Carabio. So, 24 hours, I got together 10 musicians and two dancers and videotaped a show. That means providing all the music, getting all the musicians, dealing with this festival committee, getting other paperwork, and explaining everything to everybody, getting everybody there on time, giving everyone music and actually getting these things performed. This is the kind of things that happened to you when you're playing music. At this point, the daily practice goes out the window because, all of a sudden, it got knocked aside by something else you have to do. Then you play with different groups. I play with Straight Ahead. I play with Johnny Lawrence. I still play with my wonderful gospel group, other folks that call me, so then they drop a book on me, and I have to learn this. So a lot of times, in terms of my regular practice, is always something I'm working on, some transcription I'm working on, just some ideas that I'm working on or just keeping my chops up, just running through some of the basic chord changes to the keys and things like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, your new album, you're going to get in the studio maybe next year or later this year?

Alina Morr: Yeah, later this year. I'm just doing a lot of the preproduction here in my house because I have recording software on my computer and I certainly have the music.

Tia Imani Hanna: And is there anything, any place online that we should look for you where our listeners can find you?

Alina Morr: Look for me on Facebook and then alenamorr.com will be up and running very shortly. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there anything else you want the listeners to know about you that we haven't asked today?

Alina Morr: No, I feel complete. I think this was a very good interview. I think that you asked great questions. You gave me space to speak and you allowed me the space to take some little side turns when I felt that they were cogent parts of my story. So, thank you. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your wisdom and your experiences with us. I really appreciate that. And hopefully I will get all of your schedules together and try to have you, Marion, and Gayelynne on together to talk about the core membership of Straight Ahead. 

Alina Morr: Alright!

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on Tia Time.

Alina Morr: Thank you so much, Tia. God bless you. Take care of now. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. 

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