New skill brings new life to Murray McLauchlan’s career

By Chris Brown on October 19, 2018.

cbrown@medicinehatews.com @MHNBrown

Murray McLauchlan is proving that you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks.

Or at least that he can learn them on his own.

McLauchlan, 70, finished his “Human Writes” album in 2011 and didn’t feel he had another one in him. He went to Italy and began working on a guitar language called “shell voicing.” It turned out to be a gateway to playing a kind of music he’d never been able to attempt before.

“Any jazz guy worth his salt would go ‘oh yeah, that’ but for me it was something brand new,” McLauchlan said recently. “So I worked and worked and worked and worked until the point where I felt like I can actually play along with Freddie Green and the Basie Orchestra.”

With that, McLauchlan came to realize he could play songs from the American Songbook and a lot of the really complex modulations that are built into them. He said he found things he thought were very difficult to play in some of those songs were actually “really dead simple and that the songs themselves appeared dead simple but they were actually really complex.”

He adds that a person needs to have a pretty in-depth understanding of music and music history to really comprehend what the songs were about. McLauchlan, having gone to school on some of the writers of these songs for a planned musical, was well positioned. His love for those songs pushed him to give them another life.

McLauchlan sat down with his guitar, an upright bass and a tube mic to play the songs.

A call to Drew Jurecka, violinist and jazz violin teach at Humber College in Toronto, to have him add string arrangements turned out wonderfully and that was that.

McLauchlan had his record.

“Love Can’t Tell Time” mixes standards like “Hey There” with McLauchlan originals.

He calls it the least ageist album that’s ever been created.

“You hear it in the titles. ‘Love Can’t Tell Time’ is really a song about love and the passions of love, although different in intensity, can befall people in a Chartwell nursing home just as easy as they can befall a teenager in high school,” he said.

For the show at the Esplanade on Oct. 24, McLauchlan will play his hits like “Farmer’s Song” and “Down by the Henry Moore” in the first half. The second half is devoted to songs from his two most recent albums.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are available at tixx.ca, by calling 403-502-8777 or in person at the Esplanade box office or the Medicine Hat Mall customer service desk.

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