Leah Coloff is an impressive musician. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Debby Harry all thought so when she played with them and so did the judges who recently awarded her a Grammy, but her show, Super Second Rate, at theSpace@Surgeons’ Hall, tells another side of her story.
Personal and unusual; presented both as an autobiography and a mini concert.
Complete with cello, Coloff bursts into a frantic pizzicato introduction of repeated staccato statements proclaiming “I was. I am” and many more. After the initial frenzy the New Yorker, who was raised in the Pacific Northwest, launches into the story that merges her career with revelations about her family.
Her father passed away in 2000 and the old hoarder's basement is now the focus of a major clear-out. Coloff casually accompanies the narration with appropriately matched sounds and music and even the occasional song in her fine soprano voice. Her words paint a picture of the cellar and no doubt strike a chord with many who have a similarly cluttered room in their homes. It’s a den of furniture, old lamps, a piano, suitcases, costumes, a slide projector and many other items that form the accumulated detritus of life.
Her father kept drafts of the letters he sent; a memoir of his life as a cello teacher. One is about Leah addressed to her music teacher, which she reveals at the appropriate time in her chronologically structured show. It comes as a shock. Even though her relationship with her father was usually strained. He had put in writing that she did not have what it takes to be a professional musician; that the teacher was effectively wasting her time, as Leah would never come to anything.
She's proved the old perfectionist wrong, however, going on to work with contemporary composers including Philip Glass, Ted Hearne, Joel Thome, Sean Friar and Michael Gordon. She says the implicit rules in her family were: “Play music! Be better than other people at music! But be humble, don’t act like you’re special! Just be better and special, but with humility!” “Super Second Rate,“ she says, “put that aside in favour of being yourself and doing what you want in the way you want to do it. That’s better!”
She tells the amusing story of how the show got its name in a performance that has contrasting moments of hope and despair but is personal and unusual; presented both as an autobiography and a mini concert.
