Goodbye Micheal

When I was a teenager in the 80's, I listened to a variety of music (classical, musical theatre, light pop/rock) but most of it was on the clean side--not too loud, obnoxious, or vulgar. My brother on the other hand, listened to heavy metal and a lot of stuff that I have trouble even calling music. One day, he brought his boombox upstairs and played us a song without telling us who the performer was. It was a beautiful ballad, and both my mother and I had to admit we liked it. Then he dropped the bomb and taught us the lesson. The performer was Ozzy Osbourne (or someone equally vile and disgusting) and I had admitted that I liked his work. It was a good lesson. We cannot make blanket judgements about a certain type of music or a certain performer or composer; we really have to look at each song individually to determine its value.

Micheal Larsen was just a little kid in a town far away when I learned this lesson. I don't know if he knew then the place that music would play in his life or if it was something that developed later. I know that when I met him, he was already a professional musician, touring and recording. He came to me for voice lessons, but I think I learned almost as much from him as he did from me.

I'm always a little hesitant when the first conversation I have with a student involves them telling me that they are in a band. Quite frankly, most of those people already on the professional track for this kind of music would be better helped by someone else, and I tell them that. I also tell them what I can and cannot do to help them. Rap is definitely not my thing, and there was nothing I could teach Micheal about it. But, there were other things that I could teach him and he wanted to learn.

Micheal wanted to broaden the scope of what he could do vocally. Our lessons were unique. I've never had another student that actually wanted to spend 30+ minutes of his 45 minute lesson singing solfege exercises to improve his music reading, tuning, and general vocal technique. We talked about how the concept of the vowel, its space and the sound you imagine, change the tone color. We talked about how different emotions and attitudes affect the sound. He sang solfege exercises like a lullaby or like a rant and felt how his production of the tone was changed by the meaning of what he sang. He had a huge range, both in terms of the high and low notes he could hit, and the diverse styles he could perform. All the news articles are using words like hip hop or rap when they discuss his work, but I heard so much more than that in his lessons. Had he chosen the classical music path, he would have been wonderfully successful in that area too.

Often, Micheal would bring in recordings for me to listen to. Sometimes they were examples of a tone color or vocal effect he wanted to learn. Sometimes he wanted me to hear the style of the songs and understand how they were influencing his compositions. Strangely, we didn't really listen to much rap. Most of the songs he played for me, like the one my brother played, I never would have found on my own, but I really liked them.

Micheal was a deep thinker. Our conversations were often about music related things, but occassionally we would get off on a tangent and explore something else entirely. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation. I looked forward to lessons with a student that taught me and challenged me as a teacher to expand my views.

If you don't know Micheal, check out this story from MPR. It is one of the best I've found. This quote from the article really describes the Micheal I knew.

"I know it made me want to practice, want to get better, want to make this my
craft, and realizing that it is a craft, that it is something that needs time
and skill and growth and development to really become a good musician," he said.
Wanke says in his music Eyedea was almost like a teacher, determined to show
people it was okay for them to explore their brain and test ideas. To Wanke,
that made Eyedea's records less a collection of rap tunes and more a journey
toward enlightenment.

To be honest, I'm not sure I really knew the man that his fans and band mates knew. But I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to know this man and learn from him. I'm even developing an appreciation for rap--at least when it is done as artfully as Eyedea did it.