What would you like to know about St. Joan of Arc? Do you have a story about our parish or of general interest that you think others would like to hear? For story ideas, contact Jeff Rholl, jeff@stjoan.com.
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Editor's Note: The SJA website completed stories on all of our regular musicians in June of 2004 with one notable exception, Dan Chouinard. Dan is a busy man and a man with an interesting life that took time and words to profile. We offer his story in two parts, the second to run next week.
Dan Chouinard, one of the finest piano accompanists in the country, blesses us week after week as the leader of the band at St. Joan's Sunday masses. He is in charge of the direction of the Annual St. Joan of Arc Cabaret, a fundraiser that celebrated its tenth anniversary this past October. Dan also hosts this year's wildly popular SJA Concert Series. Chouinard accompanies the performers with an uncanny skill for precisely setting the musical pace and arousing true conviviality among performers and the audience. He is an artist who is unflinchingly honest in a time in our country where social justice takes a back burner to patriarchal control and big money-making profit. He's the quipster-at-ease whose passion pours out not only with impeccable musical skill but in actions of philanthropy. It's no wonder that he grew up in the community of St. Joan's.
A Biographical Chat with Dan Chouinard
Michael: Do you think people forget to count their blessings? Is it something we need to be reminded of?
Dan: Well, I'll only speak for myself. As time goes on, I find myself more mindful of the good things in my life and of the blessings that surround me. I can look back and recognize that I've spent large chunks of my life being pretty disappointed in the way things were going, how slowly things happened and how difficult things seemed to be at different times of my life. I guess with the perspective that comes at the advanced age of 43, I'm grateful for just how many good things there are. I know that counting my blessings is something I'm more mindful of doing everyday. St. Joan's is a community that helps to remind me to do that on a weekly basis.
Michael: What is it in general that St. Joan's gives to you?
Dan: Oh gosh, where to start! I guess the most far reaching gift that St. Joan's gives me is a structure and a community within much love. I practice the habits that are most important to me: the habits of celebration, of ritual, of being with people as family. The habits of introspection and self examination and the habits of joy and of sharing the ups and downs of life. It's a place that gives me contact with kids and with old people. It's a place that reminds me of how much alike we are and just how much we have in common. How beautifully diverse we all are. What the array of gifts we all bring to that place.
Michael: When did you first start coming to St. Joan's?
Dan: My family started bringing us to St. Joan's, I believe it was in 1972 or 1973. I was 10 or 11 years old.
Michael: Did you notice a substantial difference from the parish you previously came from?
Dan: Before we came to St. Joan's, we were going to St. Peter's in Richfield where we lived at the time. By then it already had a guitar mass. In fact, John Sullivan was the guitar player and Patty Peterson was the song leader. I remember [them] doing the songs with big burlap banners with "love" and "peace" hanging from the rafters of the gymnasium. We were coming from that experience which was already pretty twangy, folky and peacenik.
What I remember being different about St. Joan's was the wise old man of Harvey Egan who presided with a profoundly poetic sensibility and a great sense of drama and theater about the mass. I remember [the homily] as being deeply moving even as a kid and Harvey's deep rich voice and his beautifully lyrical way of speaking, praying and leading the liturgy.
Michael: Then your family moved away.
Dan: Our family bought a farm in 1976. We decided we'd drive to a mid-seventies return-to-the-land experiment. We moved out to a 90 acre farm just outside of Lindstrom, Minnesota which was about an hour's drive out of town. For a couple of years we continued to commute back into St. Joan's on a fairly regular occasion.
Michael: Did you attend a church that was close to you in Lindstrom?
Dan: For those first couple of years we did the tour of local churches. We wandered far and wide and, of course, [found] nothing quite like St. Joan of Arc. Although, we found some pockets of surprising liturgical innovation and open mindedness. After awhile we inevitably settled down in the church at Lindstrom which was St. Bridget of Sweden.
Michael:You were on a farm. Did you have new responsibilities like chores? Was it a farm with animals?
Dan: It was a farm with animals. The animals were not ours. At least for the first year, we rented our barn and our pastures to a local cattle guy who was going through a divorce and lost his farm and needed a place to put his animals. In my exuberance I offered to do all of his chores for him for the sum of $30 a month.
Michael: Was this as a child?
Dan: I was 14.
Michael: And you liked these responsibilities?
Dan: I did for the first few months. He had about ten head of cattle and a horse and some pigs. Some of these animals were his kid's 4H projects but they didn't seem terribly interested in 4H.
Michael: Did this interfere with your practicing and study of music?
Dan: No, there was plenty of time for all of this. When we moved to the farm we had just started piano studies with Dr. Edward Barryman who was the teacher and head of music at Westminster Presbyterian downtown Minneapolis. Every other Saturday we would drive—all of us would pile into the station wagon—to Minneapolis for our piano lessons, except for the very youngest ones who eventually took up with teachers in Lindstrom.
Michael: All six of you were interested in music?
Dan: Yes. We all started piano around the age of five or six and then branched out as school music programs provided us with the opportunities to play in orchestras and bands.
Michael: Did you play in a band and in an orchestra?
Dan: I did. We still lived in Richfield when I started playing the violin and when we moved to Lindstrom they had no orchestra program so I [studied] the French Horn. I started a rock and roll band playing piano and accordion because it was suggested to us that we would probably get better gigs if we played old time music. So we kind of livened up our Bee Gees, Billy Joel, Elton John and Doobie Brothers repertoire with the Beer Barrel Polka and variations of waltzes and the bunny hop.
Michael: What started you on the accordion?
Dan: The mother of the lead singer in our band had an accordion in her closet that she never used and she bequeathed it to me and I kept it for actually almost 20 years before giving it back to her.
Michael: Did theater intrigue you as a child?
Dan: It did. I didn't participate in any theatrical productions until we moved to the farm. Oddly enough, that year our neighboring community theater was started in nearby Forest Lake. Fiddler On the Roof was part of their first summer's season and I ended up playing the part of the Fiddler because I was the only person who offered to learn the dance parts and play the violin. I spent a good part of that summer practicing my little dance steps between the house and the silo and play the violin as I did.
Michael: Alright, you have a South Pacific story, don't you?
Dan: Ah, you know that?
Michael: About your shirt.
Dan: Yeah, I was in a production of South Pacific .
Michael: You were Lt. Cable and you didn't want to take your shirt off, right?
Dan: I was somewhat alarmed at the idea of taking my shirt off and kind of hoped by the end of a six week rehearsal that I might be able to get some sort of physique.
Michael: What was your attempt at getting the physique?
Dan: I talked to a friend of mine who was a body builder and he said, "You aint gonna get nothin'." I decided I would have to rely on trick makeup instead.
Michael: Well, you think you could just be adorned with lays and have it all covered up.
Dan: You'd think, but no. I made sure I had a really big dog tag.
Michael: How big has a factor of discipline been for you in honing your skills as a piano player?
Dan: Discipline. How do you spell that? Do I know that word?
Michael: Or has it been from that natural talent, that God given talent from your family?
Dan: I think that discipline had played an important part in the mix of things that sustained me. Certainly passion and a vivid interest in the music that I'm doing at any given time.
Michael: Did procrastination ever get in the way when you were studying and honing your skills?
Dan: It does all the time and discipline just has to be the answer to that. The resolve to discipline comes later rather than earlier.
Michael: You know the horror stories of piano teachers being brutal to us. Did you have an instructor who beat things into you?
Dan: I don't have any stories of rulers or oranges or rubber bands. We all had the good fortune of studying with a really loving and motivating neighborhood piano teacher in Richfield. Dr. Edward Barryman at Westminster was a kind and deeply music loving, old and very erudite gentleman. [He] was the sort of person who inspired us simply by his own sense of wonder and appreciation of the music we were working on. My teacher at St. John's was Father Jerome Coller and he was familiar with my playing and some of my practicing techniques.
Michael: What year was that?
Dan: It was 1980. My first year at St. John's was a semester where I thought I would not be a music major. I was gonna be a theater and theology major. But, I couldn't keep away from the piano so I was [in the music department] all the time playing the piano and Jerome, as it turns out, would often linger and listen to the way I practiced. When I finally broke down and decided that I was inevitably to be a music major, I decided that I wanted him to be my teacher. He already was prepared with directives for me. My first few lessons with him were kind of about laying down the law, things that he thought were careless and counter productive in my technique as a performer and just my practicing technique.
Michael: Did you desire to go on to a Master's program or did you feel you just want to go out into the field?
Dan: I was anxious to get out and work. Move to the city. Start to get to know other musicians and get out and write and perform.
Michael: That just kind of evolved from meeting people and getting connections right away that first year?
Dan: I was already playing quite a bit in high school with my little rock n' roll band.
Michael: What was the band called?
Dan: Neon. We had white bell bottomed pants and shiny nylon jogging jackets which we zipped way down low and we had shiny dog tags with our names engraved on them that we'd gotten from the State Fair. This was the band that played a lot of high school dances and prom parties, wedding receptions, etc. [We were] playing in the wedding band that my high school band director had so I was already gigging in high school and that continued and accelerated in college
Michael: Where did Minnesota Public Radio come into play?
Dan: At St. John's I had worked for Minnesota Public Radio for four years at KSJR and I continued to work up there for a couple of years even after I graduated and moved on to St. Paul. I had already started working in some spots in the Twin Cities so it all really felt like a continual process. What did happen to me after moving down to the cities and playing for a couple of years was that I wasn't thrilled with the majority of the music work that I was getting. It was a lot of "pickup bands sort of stuff" playing at people's parties with musicians I had never met before and the music as a result was, predictably enough, of greatly varying quality.
There were times when I would be working with people whom I didn't connect with at all musically or personally. My personal life had such a random and scatter shot sort of feel— all of which was sufficiently unsatisfying to me—but I did decide after a couple of years that I wanted to go back to grad school, but not for music. I wanted to go for French, for foreign language and ultimately for education.
Michael: You double majored in music and French ?
Dan: I did. At St. John's.
Michael: But you didn't go on to a Master's program just yet.
Dan: I didn't continue. No, I took a couple of years. I worked here in the Cities and then decided to enroll at the University in a Master's in Education aiming for my public school license. Afterwards I spent some time teaching at Brooklyn Center High School, junior and senior high. There I taught French and ESL.
Michael: I gather that was not so enjoyable teaching French to junior high students?
Dan: That was one of the more difficult things I've ever done in my life. Partly because, I think it wasn't a very good fit for me, and looking back, I should've known it. I think I did, but I was so determined to follow through on this course of study and with my plan to become a teacher; even though there was this gathering unease about the prospect of actually doing the job.
Part of it was at a time when I had bought a house that was in constant [need of] major renovation. I was starting to get a lot of music work and there was a lot of competition for my time, and ultimately, I decided that after only half a year of teaching that I wanted to spend more of my time as a musician.
Michael: How did Singer's Voice come about?
Dan: Well, the Singer's Voice was the result of a number of things coming together. One was that I had quit my school teaching job and found myself with the desire to initiate some sort of musical project of my own. I had thought for some time—well, I like being a teacher. I like being in front of a group of people and talking. I also liked being in front of a group of people at the piano. So I got to thinking, Is there some way to put these things together? I met all of these fascinating musicians. I've heard lots of interesting stories but most of them happened on break as we were sitting at the bar killing the time before we [would] play some more. What if I created a show that allowed all these stories to be on stage—on center stage—to be shared by people in an audience.
Michael: Did this fly with Public Radio right away?
Dan: It did. I wrote up a proposal and brought it immediately to Lowell Pickett who was excited about the idea right away.
Michael: This was 1994?
Dan: This was in the winter of January '94. He offered me a couple months worth of Sunday nights. Before I even started the series, Craig Eichorn of KBEM Jazz 88 Radio, who was already a regular presence at the Dakota recording a lot of the live music that happened there and putting it on the air on KBEM, asked me if I wouldn’t mind if they recorded it for a possible future broadcast. The first two months of the show obviously went well enough that we decided to extend it to a total of six months. It remained a pre-taped and edited show for a couple of years until it actually became a live broadcast a couple of years later.
Michael: So that went until what, 2000?
Dan: Yep, it ran for exactly six years.
Michael: What was the decision to end it?
Dan: At the end of six years I had hosted about 220 different singers on the show. I felt that I had gone through most of the singers who could really handle that at the time, at least the singers of my acquaintance. I also felt that it was time for me to move on to different projects. The Singer's Voice was a very consuming labor intensive project, and at times, [because] I was the only one working on it, a very kind of a lonely project. It was a bit like serial monogamy. I had a very intense relationship with the singer, a relationship that lasted a week until I moved on to the next.
Michael: So you had to get to know them obviously before you were about to record.
Dan: I met with each singer before hand, usually a couple of times. Once to talk about ideas for stories and once to actually rehearse the songs that we thought we would most likely like to do.
Michael: What were your musical influences as a child, then in college, and now in your professional career? They must have changed immensely over the years.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Michael: How about a record you played to death as a child?
Dan: Let's see, the Sesame Street Album #1. The one that had "I Love Trash," "Rubber Ducky" and "Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other."
Michael: Mine was "The Square Song." There is a song about defining a square. It was also from a Sesame Street album.
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| Joe and Dan Chouinard(Cabaret 2003) |
Dan: Well, we were [products] of Public Television so there was a lot of Mister Rogers around the household. Growing up, a lot of the family activity catered to the younger ones. The TV was no exception. We didn't watch much TV anyway, and when it was on, it seemed it was mostly Public Television. But I was big into puppets as a kid and I had a Ernie and a Burt puppet. I was very much into that whole Sesame Street aesthetic. But I was also very much influenced by the music to the soundtrack of the movie "The Sting."
Michael: "The Entertainer?"
Dan: Oh yes. Well, Scott Joplin in general and got very turned on to Ragtime music when all that came out and I was about 12 or 13 years old and simply lived and breathed Scott Joplin for awhile.
Michael: That defined a direction or a pivotal change from what it had been.
Dan: It was. It started opening up to me the world of Classic American Popular song.
Michael: Stephen Foster?
Dan: Well, the earlier stuff maybe came a little bit later, but falling on the heals of Scott Joplin was George Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue". I kept on working on Gershwin in my piano lessons at about the same time in Junior High School.. . .and of course, all the music that I was studying as a piano student, the Classical music. Around about junior high, we discovered Pop radio.
In eighth grade I won a stereo in a raffle. My great uncle was Father Tommy Chouinard and he was a priest in a church in St. Paul—St. Louis, the little French church in St. Paul. He submitted all of our names in a parish raffle and, oddly enough, I was the one who won the grand prize—the Lloyd's eight track tape AM/FM stereo. That was the beginning of my eight track tape habit.
Michael: Because I grew up near a radio station in my home town, we were influenced by a lot of 1970s pop music around us. It makes me come to this conclusion that what people listen to in their teenage years basically influences what they listen to the rest of their lives. It's something they'll always go back to— that music of their teenage years. It has a honing impression on them.
Dan: Yeah, I would agree. The music of your teenage years is the music of your own discovery of yourself. Your first romantic experience. Your first travels out by yourself away from the family—so many gateways of experience.
Michael: For me it was the '70s.
Dan: For me it was the late '70s. [Music like] The Carpenters, Elton John, Neil Sedaka, Jesus Christ Superstar.
Michael: It's interesting that it seems to affect St. Joan's musical influence because many of our songs Sunday after Sunday come from '70s Pop era.
Dan: I would say the '60s and the '70s and I don't think that's any coincidence. The contemporary side of St. Joan's started to come into existence in the late '60s with Harvey Egan.
Michael: And folk music was alive and well, the singer-songwriter.
Dan: St. Joan's was a community that drew peaceniks, war protesters, women's lib, people's civil rights. Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan—this was the music of that lefty, '60s consciousness and St. Joan's is a product of that time. So I don't think this is a coincidence that this continues to be a staple of our repertoire.
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Michael: I think St. Joan's Cabaret of the '70s struck more of a resonating chord with the performers than any of the other Cabarets. Of all those past productions, it defined who we are the best.
Dan: I have to say it's one of my favorites.
Part 2: Dan talks with Michael about travel, raising a foster child, being gay and continuing the mission of St. Joan of Arc in the face of adversity. Continue on to Part 2.
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