You can forgive Jodi Proznick for taking so long.
Over the past decade, the Port Coquitlam upright bass jazz player has dealt with some personal matters — first, with the birth of her son with her pianist husband; second, with her mother’s diagnosis of early-onset dementia.
Now 42, Proznick said she needed to scale back her music career and spend more time as a caregiver. “There’s a lot that happened during that time,” she said, reflecting. “I had to put the muse on the back burner or I wouldn’t have anything left in the tank.”
The emotional turmoil of being a new mom while seeing her own mom fade cranked her creative juices and started a songwriting journey.
And, last Thursday at Frankie’s Jazz Club, Proznick released the result from her composing “hiatus” with a new CD titled Sun Songs, under the Cellar Live label.
Her first full-length album since 2008, Sun Songs is more intimate than Trilogy or Foundations (2006, Cellar Live), the latter winning the National Jazz Award for Album of the Year.
“It’s a release of the last nine years,” Proznick said. “I’ve taken all the challenging times and used the raw material to make it beautiful.”
She penned all but one of the tracks on Sun Songs, and employed hubby Tilden Webb (piano), Jesse Cahill (drums), Steve Kaldestad (tenor saxophone) and Laila Biali (vocals) to fill out the sound.
For the lyrics on Beautiful Again, she turned lines from Aboriginal children’s author Richard Van Camp (Welcome Song for Baby) into the song and for Ancient Yearning, Proznick used text from fellow dancer, SFU instructor and poet Celeste Snowber.
The only cover tune is The Book of Love, written by Stephin Merritt, and made famous by Peter Gabriel; the song closes her album. “The lyrics really summed up where my heart was,” she said.
Her introduction to the upright bass was purely accidental, she explained.
As a child, she studied piano and dance but, by the time she got to high school (where her father worked as a band teacher), she sought his advice on her next instrument.
An oboe position was open in his concert band; however, because it wasn’t in the greatest shape, she “suffered” during the year. Not wanting to disappoint her dad, she wrote him a letter, explaining why she needed to move on to another instrument.
At the time, an electric bass player was needed and, because she was a dancer and had a good sense of timing, Proznick solidified her new role. By 16 — and at the prodding of her jazz band mates — she discovered the upright bass, which had been standing in the corner of the room.
“I never took any formal training. I just played it a lot and I started to get some gigs,” she remembered, “but I had no dream that I would be doing this now. I could never have predicted this.”
Besides promoting Sun Songs — which becomes available to the public on Dec. 8 via her website (jodiproznick.com) — Proznick is also on faculty at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where she teaches improvisation, jazz theory, jazz history, popular music history, rudiments, jazz combo and bass lessons. And she’s the artistic director of the VSO School of Music Summer Jazz Workshop.
Next year, she’s teaming up again with Snowber for a show at The Cultch, touring to promote the CD and, of course, collaborating with fellow musicians such as Coquitlam singer-songwriter Jennifer Hayes, who emceed her CD release party last week.
“It’s what I love to do the most. They give me so much inspiration.”
