01.04.07 - Volume 3, Episode #12 - Length 25:04
If you ever felt you couldn’t follow your dream prepare yourself for a true inspiration that may make you rethink your course in life. Ellen Finn defied the notion that it’s too late to find happiness and embarked on a musical career. While her peers are watching nest-eggs, Ellen is creating the world as she sees it. Please sit back and enjoy this unifying virtuoso.
AAC 24 MB
MP3 23 MB
( ♪ Yid Tango – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: I quite my day job after I had been playing bass for six months and spent all of my retirement on instruments and gear and lesson and I was totally broke. I was living on beans. I know thousands of bean recipes. It’s scary at any age but it’s scary at any age but it’s particularly scary in your 50s when all my friends are retiring and my goal is to save up for an avocado.
( ♪ Yid Tango – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: I started by taking some lessons as a small kid. I started piano and violin when I was about five or six and played to early high school. There was a long gap in between until I picked up the bass again. I stopped in high school because there was some family problems and I just didn’t have the time or energy to continue and playing and practicing at that time. But I started again around 48, 49 years old. I was picking up the bass as a hobby, it was just going to be a hobby, and my goal was to play one blues song in a blues band. That was my goal. I was a big listener of blues at that time so I knew everything and all the blues greats. And I would go and listen to music and I felt, wouldn’t it be great if I could just be sitting in and play a song. So, I went out and got a bass. Actually, I remember going into the bass shop and I said, I wanted to look at basses and the sales clerk said, for who? So, I said, would you have asked a man that question and he said, oh, I’m sorry. So he put me in the back of the room, he gave me a bass and an amp and he showed me how to play a blues scale and I went nuts. About three hours later he came back and he said, I’m sorry ma’am but we have to close. And I said, Oh well, wrap it up. I’ll take it! So I went home with a bass amp and a bass and I was thrilled. I found a great teacher and I remember telling him that I was only going to practice about ten minutes a day. Within a month or so that ten minutes became twenty minutes, half hour and I remember telling him about two months later that it was only be an hour a day. No more. I was very busy and had a good career. Within about about six months, of course, it was three and four hours a day and eventually six, seven, eight hours a day. I remember hitting my peek at ten hours a day.
( ♪ Yid Tango – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: Well one of the things that happens, I think, when you’re new at something and excited you think you are invincible. After about ten years of what I would call a really incredibly rich, rewarding bass career my hands gave out. I was diagnosed with tendinitis and had to stop playing bass for…they gave me a minimum of six to eight months and I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated. I went into a really bad depression, couldn’t see my usually friends because I didn’t want to be connected with music. I couldn’t turn on the radio. I couldn’t even listen to a CD. It was just too painful. After about three months I started to go to the piano and my hands were in braces and all sorts of slings and various poultices and started poking out music with my left pinky and my right thumb which were the only free fingers I had available and poking out those tunes were very melodic. They were very Jewish in sound. It was bringing all of my Jewish past and most of them were incredibly sad songs. Very haunting, old traditional Jewish music but, more and more they were getting into Jazz melodies and some compositions and eventually some Sephardic Tangos and all sorts of music started developing out of that. I couldn’t hear my own music because I only had two fingers to play and so I would take what I had written down. Scribbles, because I barely had use of my right hand. I took the scribbles to a piano player and various friend who played the piano so I could hear my own music and make editing that was necessary. And those scribbles got into probably somewhere between a 140 and a 150 compositions. And some obviously had to go on a CD.
( ♪ Bad Ass Chosen Chick – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: The CD is called Matzo Balls and Chitlins. The sub title is a A Tzimmes of Jazz, Blues and Jewish music. And Tzimmes is a stew or a concoction is the Jewish word for that. And Matzo balls for the Jewish section and integrated with chiltins because my passion has always been Blues and Gospelly music and Jewish music and that seemed to be what was pouring out of me. So, I have a couple of traditional songs that I wrote that are that are Jewish traditional. I have a couple that Jazz tunes on there, a little of everything that’s kinda’ mixed together. But they are kinda’ in a Jazz way where they’re soloing over the songs as well.
( ♪ Bad Ass Chosen Chick – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: Jordania is the first cut. That was a wild experience for me and being relatively new at composing and not having any instruction about it, I had gone to see a therapist during my grief and transition of this new life, or the life I had left behind, not knowing what was coming. I was so excited after the first meeting with her and so hopeful that I ran home, I just through the car in the garage, I could barely park it fast enough. Through my coat off on the floor in the kitchen, which I never do, I’m a Virgo and ran to the piano and this music just poured out of me and it was a waltz. A Jazz waltz which I was so excited about it I dedicated to my therapist who’s name is Jordan and Jordania became the song. It came out in one take. I don’t know how those things happen. It just poured out of me. It was so exciting and fun.
( ♪ Jordania – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: It’s really amazing to me, this process and being an ex psychologist. I think this is very fascinating to me, anyway, to see the sociology and the psychology of how music happens. I grew up in a… early, very early years in a black ghetto and moved eventually into an immigrant ghetto. I grew up with lots of hugs, lots of music, lots of garlic and was yelled at in every language. It was the best years of my life I think. I think that music just got absorbed. It’s not something you learn and you try to memorize. It’s more. It’s something that’s just in your blood and when I was a little girl, but also when I was a big girl, I would sit outside the black churches and listen to the Gospel music. You could almost feel the walls move. It was just the best music I ever heard but I didn’t think I was allowed to go in there being white and Jewish and seven years old, but I used to just sit there every Sunday on the curb and listen to the music and have had some experience playing bass in some of the churches and certainly that music just pours out of me. It’s just fabulous. So, a lot of that is a big influence on what is coming out now. One of my fantasies is doing either my next album or a part of an album on integrating Arab music and an Arab composer or Arab musicians and Jewish musicians, me being Jewish as a composer. I think we need to do so much to integrate in our world. I may not be able to solve world peace but I’d love being able to do even just a little part of that. And then also I wanted to integrate it with just different cultures to continue to do what I’m doing because it makes me it makes me feel like I’ve come home. It makes me feel like that’s where I belong. It’s not in a sector that’s splintered off but part of a whole beautiful picture of music and cultures and people who love each other. Not because of culture or race or age or any of those barriers. I think my next albums have to incorporate this a lot more.
( ♪ Mummeleh and Jotty – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
Ellen Finn: That song I love. To me that’s just the ultimate haunting Jewish sound. Mummeleh was my my nickname for Mongery, a typically affectionate name and Jotty was my dad. I used to call him daddy and then diody and then it came to Jotty and when he wrote to me he would always sign it Jotty. J-O-T-T-Y. This song was dedicated to them. They’ve since past on. I know they would have loved it, or do love it if they are getting to hear it where they are. I certainly hope they are. My website is www dot ellen finn music, E-L-L-E-N F-I-N-N music dot com. You can buy this at a number of places. There are a lot of local places in Seattle like, Tree of Life Judaica. I have it in music stores, I also have it in book stores, I have it in Jewish stores. I got so excited about it I just ran around in my car and put them everywhere. You can also get it from CD Baby online and also off my website. We ship. We give discounts for truck loads. (Laughter) This is the first of hopefully a lot of CDs to come, I’ve made CDs of my playing but this is the first of my compositions. I’m quit excited about it. Andy Zadrozny on bass, fabulous bass player. And Murl Allen Sanders on piano and accordion. And the artwork is done by John Hillmer who is this brilliant artist. Interestingly enough, I found him on the Internet. He lives and teaches in Guadalajara but for ten years he lived a block away from me and I never knew it. Right around the corner from me. I must have walked by his house a hundred times.
( ♪ Mummeleh and Jotty – From the Album Matzo Balls and Chitlins ♪ )
"After about ten years of what I would call a really incredibly rich, rewarding bass career my hands gave out... I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated." - Ellen Finn
Official Website
http://www.ellenfinnmusic.com/
Music
Matzo Balls and Chitlins – A Tzimmes of Jewish/Jazz and Blues
