Profile: Jazz pianist Laila Biali

By Alex Newman

I FIRST HEARD Laila Biali’s sultry music several years back wafting from my car stereo, the dial at Jazz-FM. Even with the cacophony from the back seat -- kids squabbling on the way to or from soccer, hockey, school, piano -- it was clear I was listening to a musical virtuoso, in spite of her youth.

But it was only later when her name came up in connection with Toronto-based Imago, a non-profit organization supporting Christians in the arts, that I really sat up and took notice. Let me explain. The tendency, at least in secular society, is to dismiss artistic Christians as squeaky-clean Pollyannas gushing about love on a Sunday morning.

But once you’ve heard Biali you know that kind of assumption is far from reality: bent over a grand piano, her tumble of dark curls bouncing from the muscular workout, she plays a complex and original composition to rival Keith Jarrett, and sings with a rich but nimble voice.

Raised in a close-knit Vancouver home, Biali’s talent was apparent from the get-go -- playing Sesame Street on the piano at age three. Her mother immediately signed her up for lessons and by 12 she had sped through the entire Royal Conservatory repertoire to its highest level, ARCT.

After high school, she declined UBC’s offer of a full science scholarship, accepting instead Humber College’s scholarship to jazz studies, after director Brian Lillos heard her perform at a Musicfest competition.

That meant moving to Toronto. It also marked a break with faith for the 19-year-old: “I was young; I wanted to party. I wanted to fit in and be accepted.”

But while exploring options other than her “inherited faith,” Biali remembers gradually feeling “more and more lost…without Christ.”

And when a friend brought her to the Meeting House in Oakville in 1999, she dissolved into “a puddle of tears during the sermon. That marked a turning point,” she explained to Drew Marshall during a recent radio interview. “And I started longing for that relationship with God again. But it was a slow woo back. I was unwilling to let go of a lot of things in my life.”

Ambition and drive were two of those things. “I was motivated by accolades and achievements, awards, and recognition. The return to faith in my early 20s was a painful transition of realizing that I didn’t have to do a thing to win the love of God. That was humbling, because my sense of value had been rooted in my status as a musician, as an intelligent person, and other criteria I considered important. God had to strip me of those things.”

As “clichéd as it sounds,” Biali says, the love of Christ changed her life, giving her a calling to “hold a kingdom perspective on what God is doing in the world at large.”

That spiritual shift coincided with a surge in her career: touring the world with the Sisters in Jazz Collegiate All Star International Ensemble, meeting jazz legends like Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove, Bobby McFerrin, and teaching at the prestigious Stanford University Jazz Workshop.

She was also awarded a Canada Council grant to study in New York and, with Brandi Disterheft and Sly Juhas, formed the Laila Biali Trio, which recorded the Sea and Sky CD with CBC.

She has opened for both Diana Krall and Dave Brubeck, performed with Suzanne Vega, Paula Cole and Peter Eldridge, played in New York City’s Carnegie Hall and the Cotton Club in Tokyo, and won awards too numerous to mention. This past fall, she sang back-up for Sting’s new DVD, A Winter’s Night Live from Durham Cathedral, and is currently putting together a new CD, Radiance, for which Imago is helping her raise funds.

In her “downtime,” Biali plays in two New York City churches -- Redeemer Presbyterian and Trinity Baptist – but attends tiny Park Slope Presbyterian in Brooklyn. (While in Toronto, her second home, she divides worship time between the Meeting House and Little Trinity Anglican Church.)

Though the Park Slope morning service has some of the best musicians Biali knows, she loves evening worship with its guitarist and couple of singers. “They are often amateur musicians, but the worship is sweet and intimate, and for me that can be more powerful than what I’ve experienced at mega churches with higher production levels.”

The key, she adds, is not the style of worship “but the hearts of those leading.”

The same goes for any music, Biali adds. Wherever she plays, she prays that the “Lord be present in this place, whether it’s a bar, a church or a concert hall, that He would move through the music.”

This notion of music’s sacred potential is something even non-believing musician friends understand. “Think of the incredible healing power that music had on King Saul when David would play. Music connects us to the Lord, and it’s a vehicle for the Holy Spirit to work in people’s lives, even if it’s not a Christian song.”

That said, Biali won’t consider work that doesn’t “honour God.” On the subway enroute to the audition with Sting, and desperately wanting the gig, she prayed “that if this work didn’t honour God, I wouldn’t take it.”

She explains by way of musical inspirations: “Bono is not afraid of the gritty parts of the human experience, manages to find light in otherwise dark places. Sting is a seeker at heart, and his collection is sacred in love. Leonard Cohen, though not a Christian, understands the human soul. Joni Mitchell is a poet whose songs resonate with me, “Fire of Sorrow”, “Slouching to Bethlehem.” Though she quotes the Bible and is pretty scathing, when you think about Job’s perspective you see how we tend to water these stories down. Bjork I love too -- she’s not afraid.”

If there’s truth in the notion that everything that rises must converge – first articulated by Teilhard de Chardin -- then Christianity and jazz can truly merge. The similarities are too obvious to ignore, Biali believes. Unlike classical music, for all its hyper structure and formality, jazz, she says, is one of those musical forms in which the structure prevents chaos yet offers enough freedom for musicians to explore within it. “And the Christian life is the same.”

But this convergence has always been an uneasy one for Biali, who admits to feeling a little “nervous” when she does interviews for Christian media. Will believers condemn her choice of music, which carries some historically negative connotations; will non-believers dismiss her as just some cookie-cutter Christian?

Maybe it’s the tension of straddling these two cultural points that lends some of the depth and complexity to Biali’s music. Or maybe it’s just that the two points of convergence – the jazz she wears like a second skin, and the Holy Spirit who informs from within – are still rising.