Transforming a concert into a community and an audience into a choir 🎶 Nobu Adilman of Choir! Choir! Choir!

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TRANSCRIPT

Bailey Richardson: We see people who start communities really have to care themselves if the community is going to thrive.

You’re an entertainer. So many entertainers perform at people, very few engage others in the process. Why are you so excited by the idea of singing with others? Where does that come from?

Nobu Adilman: It’s not just about singing with others. It’s about being around other people.

There’s gotta be better words for it, but my guiding principles and life have been about making work with people and collaboration.

Growing up, my father was an entertainment journalist in Toronto but also for Variety. So he was super tapped into the arts and it was made a priority. I didn’t have any of this like identity crisis with my parents about choosing to be in the arts because it would be a complete contradiction if they were to say no, you can’t have a life in the arts after showing me that it’s the most important thing on the planet.

So I grew up watching musicals, watching plays, going to film premieres. You know, my brother and I and my mother were plus ones to my dad, who had a golden ticket to everything. I grew up around artists and appreciating them and putting them on a pedestal, feeling that what they were doing was as important as government or whatever else people do to make the world turn and operate. It contributes to better society. So that was like my starting point.

And then I went to university Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1990s. I stayed there afterwards and ended up working in television. Toronto’s a city that provides everything for you as entertainment. You don’t necessarily have to work hard to be able to enjoy culture. But in Halifax, it is a thriving creative community like so many smaller places. It’s not tiny, it’s like 330,000 people. It’s harder to exist as an artist on a business level and it’s harder to run venues. It’s harder. Everything’s harder.

We were in our early twenties and if we wanted to have a venue, we had to create it. So we did. We started a venue, and my friends and I would throw the parties. We’d have to start a band to entertain people in the venue, and we would roll a keg across the street from the brewery across the street. It wasn’t just a place. Our jam space became a social hub. It was where all of our friends showed up—filmmakers, artists, and other musicians.

When you have to build the infrastructure, you have to rely on so many other people’s energies and creativity and vision. Thankfully, we were also aligned in just creating things.

Right, so it wasn’t just singing. It’s just really about community building and about lifting each other up. What’s so great is that we didn’t even realize that we were doing it. You just have more time when you’re younger. Once when we were going to have an Easter dinner, not that any of us were particularly religious, but it’s an opportunity to get friends together. Instead of just having dinner, we decided to make a video called Easter! Easter! We knew at the end would be the Easter dinner, but we just involved all of our friends and then it became a series. We made a Canada! Canada! to celebrate Canada Day. We turned every possible social interaction into an event.

Later I was in a food show called Food Jammers that was on the Food Network and sold around the world and, and it was directly out of the friends that I made in Halifax during that time. Creative partying is at the core of everything I do. It brings people together to hang out and to tackle something that nobody really has the answer to—to create something much larger than any one person could create. That is the through line of my life leading to Choir! Choir! Choir!

BR: Tell me about that first Choir! Choir! Choir! I read that it was at a wedding. Is that true?

NA: I had moved back to from Halifax to Toronto, my hometown. I felt lonely without my community.

I did a solo album called “Mister Nobu and the Choir of a Thousand Voices.” So I had this image in my mind of starting a choir.

BR: What about the concept of a choir did you like so much?

NA: The idea was essentially not to feel so alone as a solo musician.

Word got around to friends that my friend Amanda and I were like talking about starting a choir. Then our friend Sarah threw a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend, Matt, at the time. Sarah asked Amanda if we could put together a choir for the party.

Amanda asked Daveed to play guitar because he was the manager at a brunch spot down the street. We all knew him but didn’t know him that well. We never hung out outside of the restaurant. He showed up at my house and there was like 13 people in my kitchen. We rehearsed the song “Magic” by the band Pilot.

We went to the birthday party and we got up and did our thing like three times as fast as we recorded it. But there were a lot of musicians in the room and everyone was like, that was so much fun.

Then that was it. We didn’t do anything afterwards. You know, life is busy and whatever. But whenever I would go into the brunch spot Daveed was managing, he would be like, “when are we doing that choir thing again?” Daveed was more of a solo singer songwriter who would write sad love songs in isolation, not really performing them. He had a lot of friends who were musicians, but he wasn’t really part of a sprawling musical community in the way that I was.

A couple of years later, that’s when it just kinda hit. It was the right time. He asked me again when we were doing the choir again. I had just joined Facebook and so I put out an invite seeing if anybody would want to sing in a choir. That was in November of 2010.

BR: Was that first event really in a real estate office?

NA: That’s true. In February of 2011, we had our first Choir! Choir! Choir! It was at the Bosley Real Estate Office on Queen West. Our friend Alice Kent was working there so she got the space

It was an unremarkable evening in many respects. There was a huge snow storm coming in. We thought, well, if some friends show up and we just have a couple of beers, that’ll be fine and be fun. We prepared like some minor arrangements to The Beatles song “Nowhere Man” and another Pilot song, “Just a Smile.”

And it was kind of extraordinary what happened that night, which was people we didn’t even know showed up. They heard about it from Eye Weekly, which was like kind of like a Village Voice in Toronto at the time. I got a phone call from them saying, “We want to take a photo of what you guys are doing.” I told that to Daveed as we were walking to the venue and he’s like, “We don’t even know what we’re doing. What are they coming for?” You know? But it was indicative of what was to follow because at the end of the night, people were so happy. They were so into what we did, which was very little, but they loved it and they wanted us to do it again the next day.

BR: What about the experience made strangers want to show up?

NA: Well that night it was mostly friends. There were probably like four people we didn’t know who were there.

But it gets into wholesome platitudes about community and about coming together. I think it just sounded like a fun thing to do honestly. I don’t think that there was any intense emotional angle to it. Maybe it reminded them of some aspects of their lives that was missing or something like that. I can speak more to the sense of community that formed afterwards, but in terms of that first night, I don’t know. It just was a new kind of thing that was happening.

BR: I ask because singing with a room full of people is probably one of the most powerful human experiences.

It’s something that the Internet can’t recreate. It has to happen with another group of people in the room with you and it moves you emotionally. Is it just obvious —you knew that if people are singing and their voices are together, that’s just going to be meaningful?

NA: It’s not rocket science. What’s happening is lots of air is moving through you. In our daily lives is we trap the air and we don’t let it flow. That’s why meditation is becoming such a big deal these days. People are acknowledging that they need to sit and breathe and find some stillness and quiet. You can find that quiet, that same sense of euphoria or stillness within a large room full of people because you’re focusing on your breath.

Singing is really just breath control. It’s about finding that right flow. You’ll sound richer if you get more into it and more inside yourself. When you’re more inside yourself, you can share more of yourself outwardly.

Early on I would say that singing was like exercise for people who don’t like to exercise. You have to gain control of your voice, otherwise you’re going to hyperventilate.

It makes you just feel good to breathe. I was speaking with somebody yesterday. They played me a clip from a Swedish scientist doing some kind of research with singing. When people breathe in, our heartbeats increase and when we exhale, our heartbeat sets itself rhythmically to everyone else’s—synchronizes to everyone around us. Your heart gets a lift when you start singing. They put sensors on all these different people and got them to sing. More than any other thing that they got them to do, singing lifted their spirit, their hearts, you know. It synchronized everybody together. And that’s something that is happening on some level when you’re with a large group singing.

The thing about singing is that it happens naturally just like dancing happens naturally. You just start dancing with people and you feel a certain rhythm at different points. It kind of locks in step and the whole room is dancing to literally the same beat. You lock into it and it feels really, really good. It’s great when you can have those moments without having to explain anything to anybody. The over-intellectualization of feelings is the death of that feeling. So it’s nice when everyone feels it, but you don’t have to say it.

That energy carries through with you. It can last, like a workout can last. It works itself through your body, or a massage or that kind of thing. It stays with you. I think you can remap your brain to feel more positive when you have more experiences like that. We’ve seen that happen with a lot of people who come out to our choir.

Nobu celebrating a singer’s birthday mid-show.

BR: One of the things that strikes me about Choir! Choir! Choir! is the commitment that you guys both show to it.

It could have just been a one-off. You guys could have just done it this surprise birthday party, but you did it one more time. It could have just been in the real estate office, but you kept doing it. And that devotion from you two has given a big group of people something to come to every single week in Toronto—like you said, to give their brains this space to practice the feeling of being around each other people in a positive way.

So when did you realize you wanted to commit to Choir! Choir! Choir!?

NA: There was zero strategy here. Like less than zero. That is probably the reason why it’s succeeded on some level.

A lot of people contact us and say, “What’s your business plan? Tell me how you do this and do that.” And I’m like, not interested. Do It yourself, have fun. Create it yourself and then it’ll be honest to yourself. Right?

Sometimes people get angry about that, but I think that we just responded to the reaction people had. They were so excited the first night. We ended up doing it every Tuesday for the next year.

BR: How did you clear your calendar? You’re on food shows, you are an entertainer, you are you doing a million things.

NA: At the time we didn’t realize what was going to happen. It became that.

But there was a momentum from the very first night. There was enthusiasm and when you get that kind of positive feedback, it feels so good. We weren’t thinking about the future. We weren’t thinking about that it would become our lives. It was just like a new thing that felt good.

And winters in Canada…sometimes you literally don’t see your friends for four to five months because people are just off in their own corners. So it was an opportunity to see really good friends, even though there’s no auditions and anyone could show up. Eventually more people started showing up and we started moving venues and whatnot.

I think that for Daveed, a light was going off that this was a way he could share music. It could be his way back into music. For me, I just love parties. I love hosting and I love, despite feeling a little bit nervous to step out in front of my friends, to be a conductor. When I’d never been in a choir before, I’d never done anything like this before in any real way. I was completely delusional about what was possible. I had no idea what to do. Like if you watch the early videos, my hands are like on like a boneless chicken. I have no idea what to do with my hands. It’s like ridiculous.

One of those early videos! Sorry Nobu, I still dig it. Choir!Choir!Choir! sings “Fleetwood Mac — Say You Love Me” in April 2011.

BR: I will watch the early videos!

NA: There was no real thought. Now I look back on it there was severe commitment, but there was no reason for that except because it was super fun. I was working at the time producing a TV show. I’d work 12 hour days and then just zip up to the venues that we were singing at. And just do it, you know?

BR: I had a friend who does something similar, not in with music, but she has hosted a small event every week for the last five years on Sunday. And I asked her, you know, how does she keep doing it? And she’s responded, “It always gives me energy.”

Did you find it energizing for you?

NA: Yeah. It doesn’t matter how tired we are. When we get on stage and we have such an incredible venue to perform with people who are so supportive and amazing and appreciate us so much, we appreciate them back just as fiercely. It’s a positive loop that just keeps on giving. It’s total euphoria, we couldn’t be happier when it’s going well and it usually is going well. If it’s not going well, then that’s a bit of a challenge. But in general it gives us so much energy, you know?

BR: Tell me about a time when it was not going well.

NA: When you’re going through personal things and you have to be onstage, that’s sucks. When you want to hide out from the world and you’re forced on stage, that’s just the worst.

Otherwise, in the early days we had to deal with hecklers. What I mean is people who are so excited that they just had too much to drink. They’re really happy to be there but they’re just showing it in a weird way. We’ve learned how to deal with them. This summer we had a show just outside of Toronto. There was this guy, kind of like classic middle aged guy, who would never go to a choir event and must have been dragged by his partner—who the hell knows why he was there. But he was tanked and he was just yelling.

I was like, all right, do you need a venue? Do you need to be heard? I said to him, “Get up on stage.” We got them on stage and I was like, “Do you need a hug man? What’s up with you?” Then I just pulled him close to me and I hugged him.

We started playing guitar. I started dancing with him. I put my hand on his bald head and then he like collapsed in my arms.

The crowd was laughing because like two men are dancing on stage—this Asian guy with this older white dude—and it becomes a touching moment. And then he like whispers in my ear, “Sing to me.”

We turned a potentially caustic situation that was going to gum up our night and ruin it really for other people and made it part of the show. Experiences like that just show you that there’s always many different ways to deal with a situation. We could have just been like, “you shut up, you get the hell out,” you know. But it would’ve put a damper on the evening. So it’s kind of fun to deal with situations.

But that’s part of it, you know, and like you work on it. Daveed has become so adept at creating harmonies that are easy to get and fun. Whereas in the early days we were struggling through arrangements.

BR: Walk us through what you guys need to do to set one of these up. How do you get people on the same page?

NA: It’s a lot of distraction, I would say. It’s like dealing with children. You tell them what’s going to happen, but then you distract them constantly on the way to get there so they’re not thinking too much about one thing—they can’t get too fixated on something in a negative way. Improv and spontaneity is just at the core of what we do because we know where we’re headed—we know our goal. But coming to Choir! Choir! Choir! is like, don’t worry about anything. You got your lyric sheet, we’re going to teach you your part. Just have a good time and if you’ll listen it’ll be fine.

BR: How do you decide on songs?

NA: A few days before an event, we announced the song. But we keep it loose so that we can react to what’s happening around us. We want to be able to react to what’s happening in front of us as immediately as possible, so that sets us apart from other choirs.

After the Kavanaugh hearings, we could just feel that it was really sensitive and a lot of. People were feeling really emotional about it, even in Canada. So we decided we were going to sing “Roar” by Katy Perry. It’s a potentially throw away pop song, but it’s a power anthem. We donated the door that night to an organization here called the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, which serves to help women who are fleeing abusive situations with support from a law perspective and also housing.

But the basics are: you show up to a venue, you get a lyric sheet, there’s no sheet music. We don’t pedal in official music speak at all. Its lows, mids and highs. You’re in one of those sections. You can start in one and end in another. You know, I joke that you’re not signing a mortgage. You’re just singing a frigging song. Then we split you up into parts and then we teach the parts and put them together.

That’s the literal arc of the night. But so much other stuff happens, which is you could be at the back of the room, never come before by yourself. Next thing you know, you’re onstage singing a song because we’re interviewing you because you’ve caught our eye. It’s about being completely open. We never script what we’re going to say unless it’s a very special event and we’ve got certain things we would definitely want to hit. We encourage people to be vocal. We encourage people to yell at us. We shame people because it makes them better. We highlight the mistakes, we celebrate the mistakes. We make fun of people. They make fun of us. It’s a normal hang.

I heard this great quote recently, which is your best friends are those who make fun of you to your face and speak lovingly to you when you’re not in earshot. You know? That really affected me because I was like, yes, there needs to be more honesty in general.

BR: I heard about Choir! Choir! Choir! as a stranger in another city because I saw a video of the Rufus Wainwright singalong. It’s just absolutely blew my mind.

When did you start filming these meetings?

NA: Pretty early on. Our first four months we bounced around venues. We were in that real estate office a couple times, my living room or galleries, performance spaces, art spaces, and then eventually a bar.

I think when we ended up at this first bar called No One Writes to the Colonel, that was like four months in. That’s when we started doing the videos. They used to be just one camera shot from behind. They weren’t edited at all. Just tops and tails.

BR: When did you decide to start charging admission? Was that always a thing?

NA: We realized at the four month mark, we had grown from like 20ish people to about 65 people who were coming out every Tuesday. Then it became like, “Holy Shit, this is turning into a bit of a job.” This is really, really intense and community is building and people are starting to write us letters about how important this thing is to them. And we were getting tired. So we decide to start charging $5.

It was an agonizing decision to make—and in Toronto we still only charge $5 you know? But at the time it was a huge deal because everyone felt like they owned it on some level because everyone was contributing to it. So the fact that we started charging $5 created a little bit of an issue initially.

BR: It seems like the early days although there were strangers, it was you and Daveed’s friends and kind of extended orbit. Then it transitioned. You start charging more, more people start finding out about it today.

If I were to Choir! Choir! Choir! today how many of the people are there every week would you say? And what percentage are brand new each time?

NA: We are at Choir! Choir! Choir! version 5.0 at this point. At this stage, people travel to Toronto to do it. I was doing an interview with a woman from Australia yesterday and she literally came to Canada to experience it.

BR: I’ve definitely thought about traveling to Toronto just to do Choir! Choir! Choir!

NA: A lot of people do. This one guy Eddie came from Ireland recently specifically for it. It was kind of bananas.

At this point in Toronto, it’s something that everyone can take for granted on some level. So from that initial first wave of really close friends, I would say very few of those people continue to come on a regular regular basis. We’re still in touch with them. Of the second wave, I would say, you know, a solid 60 people of them could’ve come out every week, you know, in and out sort of thing. But then the third, fourth, fifth waves are coming out in droves.There’s so many new people who come out based on the song that we choose. So yeah, it’s hard to say it, but the great thing is that because there are no auditions and people just feel like it’s an open door, that they can come back in whenever they want.

But for some people from the early days, that new excitement of something starting up, which you guys all know about, it’s just not the same anymore. It just will never be the same. Growth is a problem for that. It’s like having a child. They can’t be three or four cute forever, you know? Things just grow up.

So we’ve tried to maintain that intimacy. We’ve tried not to change in a negative way. We’re still the same people. But when we look back on early days of Choir! Choir! Choir!, we get very nostalgic for the way it felt back then. We used to know everybody in the room on some level. Now it’s just too many people, which is, you know, a great problem to have. You have to just adapt. You have to continue to adapt and welcome new people into the fold and appreciate that they’re there.

Kevin Huynh: I want to ask more about the decision for payment.

I work with an education nonprofit. Their events will always be free no matter what. But I was working with the professional women’s network and they made this painstaking decision to start charging for their events and are glad that they did.

I’m curious, you mentioned that it was sort of a painful decision. It might have ruffled some feathers. What went into that? What did you gain or lose?

NA: Daveed and I acknowledge that if we didn’t start charging it wouldn’t have continued. Right? We had to make a decision for ourselves—do we want to continue this thing? What’s it going to take? We realized that we were putting in like an extraordinary amount of time and effort into it.

So we made that decision. Then after that it was like, well how much? And we were literally talking about $3.50. And Daveed’s wife was like, guys like once you make this change, you can’t increase it or decrease it. Just make it five bucks. Five bucks is just five bucks.

So $5 felt like fine, but we were still nervous to present it to everybody because making it about money on some level changes the feeling of it. We’d looked into the idea of memberships and like annual memberships, that kind of stuff. We acknowledged that we were too disorganized to deal with that and to put systems in place.

We prepped people that we were going to start charging soon—really trying to put that in people’s consciousness. The reaction was as to be expected. Some people were upset by it, some people felt like we had taken something innocent and kind of flipped it on them. I had lot of conversations with people about it, but I think that in the end people trusted us. I think that they recognize $5 wasn’t very much money.

We didn’t lose many people, but looking back on it now, it was a completely necessary step to take for the continuation of the project. Sometimes when we tour it’s considerably more money cause it’s way more expensive to leave the city.

We’re a full on business now and we’re providing great entertainment and all this kind of stuff. So I feel like I can stand behind it. But it’s a classic issue with artists, you know, in terms of like feeling self-conscious about money exchanges. I’ve been freelance my entire life. I’ve had to negotiate my own salaries for every single job I’ve ever had. I’ve had to deal with questions of the idea of selling out versus staying true to the art, all that kind of stuff. And I feel like I can stand behind all of the decisions that we’ve made in that regard. For the people in Toronto, they’re getting a crazy deal for $5—for the kind of energy and love that we put into our thing.

It’s a complicated conversation, but I think that it’s a good one to have and I think that it’s important for people to value themselves and set a price. The fact that it’s still $5, I’m proud of that actually, that, that we’ve never raised it when we legitimately could.

BR: So you started at a real estate office. Now you’ve shared iconic stages with Rufus Wainwright, with David Byrne, with Patti Smith.

Was there a moment when you felt like, “I need to pinch myself. I can’t believe this.” What stands out most for you?

NA: The entire time with Choir! Choir! Choir! has been a pinch me kind of thing. An endless amount like I’ve got bruises all over my body amount.

It is so extremely unusual what we do and the experiences that we get to have. The fact that we can get a room full of people and not just in Toronto. We now tour all over the place.

Even without a special guest, we can get people singing one song for over an hour. Like, we can get people to focus on this task at hand. I’m constantly amazed that people will give us that attention and they’ll give so much of themselves to create something with people they don’t even know. That’s extraordinary to me. Every single time.

Being able to meet someone like David Byrne, somebody who I admire, who didn’t disappoint as a person in real life. By meeting him I feel like I’ve deepened my idea of what he represents and what he as an artist and as a life to live as an example— the books that he’s written and the depth of his thinking. The amount of time that he gave us, how he showed up to soundcheck just eating a sandwich and saying, “Hi, my name’s David.” Doing a sound check in the the lobby of the Public Theater while other people are walking around. And I’m like, really you’re, you’re okay to do this?

He observed what we did with such intent. He was in the room when we were teaching the parts. He was singing different parts even though he was going to sing the lead. He was out there be cause he was interested in what we were doing on an artistic level. And then he wrote this two page piece that he posted on his website that perfectly describes what Choir! is in the moment, but also what it represents. That to me…I still can’t believe it.

BR: One of your idols didn’t just come to Choir!, he spent hours thinking about and writing an essay about something that you started off the cuff.

NA: Exactly. It is so gratifying to have had that happen, let alone standing next to him while he goes into his deep Byrne voice—when he hits those notes. I edited the video and just was like freaking out every time. It’s not like out of some sort of celebrity worship. It’s because the words that he wrote touched me because he had been thinking so deeply about it. The sound of his voice was so rich. That’s why I love what he does. It’s like a thrill, you know?

BR: What about venues? Where have you played that amazed you?

NA: We started doing larger venues and doing tributes to artists who had passed away, starting with David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. We did one for Prince and at Massey Hall, which is a signature venue in Toronto. It’s probably the most important venues that’s ever existed in Canada, like your Carnegie Hall. 2000 people came out to sing “When Doves Cry,” and we ran the night the way we would run it at a tiny little dive bar. We were able to maintain the intimacy with that many people.

The show was over two hours long. It was a complicated harmony and I’m in the venue that basically was the venue of my dreams as a kid growing up in Toronto. I’m like, if this isn’t success, I don’t know what it is. Like I’m getting to do what I want with people. I love honoring a musician who I admired and getting to feel all of these things.

It’s not normal and it’s beautiful. After the Bataclan shootings happened in Paris and then you know, all of the horrible things that have been happening, this idea of large groups of people together coming together to create something really positive took on even more meaning.

I remember being at a basketball game and being worried what would happen in this situation if something horrible was to happen. I start to now feel that when we’re going to America. We were just in Texas and walked into a restaurant. I’m just like, “Well this looks like a calm scene. Beautiful people are walking around having, enjoying themselves. What happens if?” you know. We were in Thousand Oaks the summer and then the news came out just the other day of that shooting.

It feels like a political act now just to get people together in large groups to express joy and spread love. It seems cliché on some level, but I feel it all the time and as things get more intense, I feel like every moment is an opportunity to show people across all political stripes that this idea of human interaction is critical. It doesn’t have to be some kind of like echo chamber. There are opportunities like a Choir! session to meet people you wouldn’t normally meet.

The great thing about singing with other people is that you have to be able to hear the person to your left and to your right. Otherwise you’re singing too loudly. It’s like the building blocks for having a normal conversation with somebody.

I really believe that if people would just talk to each other, even if you think somebody’s racist or sexist or has just the worst opinions about everything, if we just talked to people, then you’re somewhere, you know? I know it is naïve on some level, but my naïveté has gotten me this far and I’m going to hold onto that because the other options are less inspiring to me.

So we’ve had a lot of amazing brushes and opportunities with people who are “important,” but every single time we go out there, we’re looking to make a connection with people—to make people feel like they came to the right place and that they can carry that forward. We’re not going to impress everybody, but a critical number of people have shown us or told us that what we’re doing is important to them and that keeps us going.

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