Colin Lazzerini

Background

Writer, Lyricist, Jazz Singer

Together with my favourite song-writing collaborator, Pat Coleman, I am owner of ‘Hip Pocket Music’, and two small independent specialist labels – first the decidedly jazzoid ‘RoadHouse’ and later a little singer-songwriter imprint called ‘Root Cellar’.  While admittedly I fantasised some about the idea when I was younger, like lots of other kids, I never really seriously expected to have any career in music at all  – but just sort of drifted into it.  Almost as if dreams were magnetic.

Except for the occasional mistaken spotty teen-aged outing – it was actually not until I was approaching my thirtieth birthday in foreign parts that I embarked upon performance with earnest commitment and real intent.   Even then, a couple of busy decades slipped by between my first stumbling attempts at making original songs and my happy arrival at a truly satisfying level of craft-confidence and the ability to deliver professional goods.

I know I could have got here quicker, but maybe taking the long way round has other benefits.

Footloose and fickle, I had already done mild clerical gigs, a little record retail, hard labour as a river-side timber-porter and as a tunnel-miner on sections of London’s underground system, planted 100,000 trees by hand, loafed around as a lifeguard and faked it as a west-coast tour-guide….   but from those first moments of conviction on discovering a deep need for personal musical expression, my focus became broader and tighter on everything else too, and I somehow changed-up an entire skill-set such that soon, alongside this late-start gigging apprenticeship, I began paying the rent with day-time communications projects here and there,  writing and editing, photography, the design of special curriculum media, being educational consultant for a UN conference … stuff like that, picked up a couple of degrees along the way, and was founder-manager of celebrated hooligan co-operative orchestra ‘Loose Tubes’ over a seven year career encompassing radio and TV nonsense, the international touring circuit, recording schedules, marketing, promotion, production…  the complete business.   Indie before it was called indie.  Truly a big deal.   I learned a lot of valuable stuff.

These days, I perform less and scribble more.   There is a complete stage musical totally ready-to-go for which I provided the [i]libretto[/i] in partnership with composer Dick Smith (compensating somewhat for the half-written botanical detective story still mouldering on the back-burner) and a growing catalogue of healthy original Coleman-Lazzerini songs.   Local vocalist Tania Hancheroff laid half-a-dozen tracks down for our trade demo.    Stevie Vallance included a couple on "Make My Night".   Joe Coughlin recorded a bunch more on his "Things Turn Out That Way" and landed the National Jazz Award as vocalist of the year for 2008.   And beyond the bounds of Canada, the UK’s own award-winning Claire Martin has chosen two for her next release on Linn Records.  These are things to smile about.

And that’s pretty much the story so far.

I became a contributing member of the Songstuff community late in 2003, and was recruited as a moderator five years later.




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