Quick Q and A with Elana Arian
 by Kathy S-B  ·  12 February 2010

Singer-songwriter and side musician extraordinaire Elana Arian is getting lots of enthusiastic praise for her session and live work with Mark Erelli, Rose Cousins, Patty Larkin, Melissa Ferrick, and others. A Kerrville New Folk Finalist, a Great Waters Folk Festival Finalist, and a Regional Finalist for the Mountain Stage New Song Competition, she’s most definitely someone to keep an eye on. For more information about Elana, check out her website.

I’ve read your biography and am intrigued at the mention of the convergence of your influences of classical, jazz, and folk. As a kid growing up and being exposed to all these distinctly different genres, how did you mash it all together in your young musical mind? Did all the genres meld together into one or could you decipher how one differed from the other and how you were concocting to bring them all together?

I imagine that growing up in a house full of music — so many different kinds of music from many different types of sources — affected me in some pretty dramatic ways, and in some ways so subtle I myself may not even be aware of them. As a kid I was just energized by music, pure and simple. That is, I don’t think that my “young musical mind” made any of the kinds of rigid genre distinctions that we all make now in our hyper-specialized musical world. I would just discover a new piece of music that was exciting to me, and I’d listen to it incessantly until the next “discovery” was made. I remember a spate when I was about 10 where I went to bed every single night to a recording of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” String Quartet, op 59. No. 2. And then for a while it was Chet Baker’s “My Funny Valentine.” Then a family friend gave me a Don McLean CD and it dominated the bedtime slot for a quite a while. But I don’t think I ever thought about those as disparate entities — I just loved it, and wanted to hear more.

I can’t remember a time I’ve heard someone being promoted in this genre as being influenced by Ella Fitzgerald. Do tell. What’s your connection to Ella?

Ella was just one of those early discoveries that spoke to me on a deep level from the very beginning. My maternal grandma is a jazz nut — she went to hear Ella sing all the time as a young woman — and I’m pretty sure she’s the one who first put an Ella record in my hands. I love the joy in Ella’s voice — there’s a constant sense of play running through her music . . . Even when she’s singing a kind of dark, melancholy ballad like “Miss Otis Regrets” you can hear that she’s fooling around a little — trying out some new phrasing, or throwing in a tricky little rhythm that changes everything and makes it sound new. So I pretty much fell in love with Ella as soon as I heard her sing, and I went about collecting and buying as many of her recordings as I possibly could. When I started writing my own music in college, I found that these old-timey, jazzy numbers would occasionally come bubbling out — and I’ve always felt those were a direct result of my Total Ella Immersion as a kid.

You’ve opened for or toured with artists like Catie Curtis and Erin McKeown in the past. How would you categorize your music withe theirs? What do you bring to the table that perhaps they don’t?

Well you’ve named two artists who I respect and admire tremendously . . . in fact, I’d be pretty content if my music was just exactly like theirs! I think the main thing that distinguishes me from a lot of those artists that I look up to is a kind of Musical Multiple Personality Disorder. As a result my truly equal-opportunity musical upbringing that you asked about earlier, in conjunction with the fact that I continue to work across several genres — touring singer/songwriter, sideman/accompanist for other folk artists, improvisational klezmer-y work, classical violin work, etc -- I feel that my music moves fluidly between many genres and styles. It’s not always a great thing- the marketing folk like to talk about not knowing which section of the proverbial CD store they would find me in - but mostly I love it. It’s fun not fitting into a box for now.

What are your goals and aspirations for the next few years? Where do you want to be in 2015?

I have to say that I’m really happy with the direction things are moving in these days. I’m starting to find the right balance for me between touring with my own music and collaborating with other musicians as a “sideman” on their shows - and I’d really like to see both of these streams of musical life continue to grow and change and get better and better. My collaborations with Catie have been among the most inspiring, creative, and challenging work that I’ve done, and I’d especially love to see that continue to flourish as we move toward the middle of the ’10s . . . (the ’10s? the teens? What decade are we actually in now?)