With ES:MO, Elizabeth Shepherd and Michael Occhipinti forge telepathic camaraderie
Whether singing Bruce Cockburn and Leonard Cohen covers or composing their own trippy creations, the pair build off a close friendship
Michael Occhipinti and Elizabeth Shepherd are the musical duo ES:MO. Photo by Camille Gladu-Drouin
ES:MO plays two shows at Pyatt Hall on July 1, at 7:30 and 9:30 pm, as part of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
IF YOU ENJOYED ES:MO’s Juno-nominated debut, The Weight of Hope, but wish more of it had floated off into the deliciously trippy zone occupied by its final track, “Moon Ray”, singer and keyboardist Elizabeth Shepherd has good news for you. It’s going to happen—but you’re going to have to wait a few months before she and her musical partner, the Toronto-based guitarist Michael Occhipinti, release their follow-up effort.
“I feel that we’ve arrived at a sound that is very atmospheric,” Shepherd explains on the line from her home in bucolic Sainte-Lucie-des-Laurentides, a two-hour drive north of Montreal. “And we’ve tried to supplement this sound with groves. We’ll loop a lot of stuff and use electronics and samples, so we thought to honour that sound it would be good to use that as a basis for writing. Rather than go ‘Oh, let’s try this [chord] progression’ or ‘Here’s a melody,’ we would just jam for an hour or two, or whatever. You go on a journey, and inevitably you work through to something. At some moment some magic happens, and you go ‘Okay, that’s the nugget for a song right there.’ So you pick out that nugget and build something.
“I don’t want to make it sound like a jam band,” she adds, laughing. “But the process of arriving at those songs has been really open and free, and sometimes we’ll arrive at these quirky sounds, almost like a hip-hop producer is sampling something and you can’t quite tell what it is, but it works. It provides a rhythm, or some kind of ear candy that informs the direction of the song. So that’s the new album.”
More like “Moon Ray”, in other words?
“Well, there you go,” she confirms. “I think you may be in luck.”
That’s also what to expect when Shepherd and Occhipinti come to Pyatt Hall for a pair of Canada Day shows, as part of the TD Vancouver international Jazz Festival. You’ll also get an undiluted look at a pair of musicians who have built their telepathic camaraderie by working on each other’s projects for more than a decade.
“I think I met Michael initially at the Junos in 2007, out in Saskatoon,” Shepherd says. “In 2010 he asked me if I would be part of [his record] The Universe of John Lennon, and so I was on that album and toured with him. I loved his playing, and I thought ‘Why, it would be great to get him on some tours of mine.’ And so we just sort of ended up touring together on each other’s projects, and at the end of the tour there would be a few dates that we could do that wouldn’t necessarily pay for the full quintet or sextet or whatever the ensemble was, but that we could do as a duo. So we thought ‘Oh, we’ll take it. We’ll stay on and do a secondary, one-week tour and do some duo stuff.’
“That required a secondary repertoire, because obviously you’ve got these pieces that are arranged for a five-piece band, and duo stuff is very different,” she continues. “We just started bringing different songs to the table, like ‘Oh, let’s try this one!’ We’d call tunes and arrange them on the fly, and it was very loose and egalitarian, like a really nice partnership. And that has grown into a really nice friendship, too. Our families get along beautifully, so it’s sort of a family affair, in some ways. And then eventually we thought ‘We should put this stuff out as an album.’”
The Weight of Hope is primarily a covers record, featuring tunes by Nick Drake, Gordon Lightfoot, Stevie Wonder, and several from Bruce Cockburn—which is only natural, as Occhipinti’s excellent Creation Dream album, from 2001, focused exclusively on the work of the Ontario tunesmith. But the ES:MO disc’s emotional centrepiece is Shepherd’s self-penned title track, which elides gracefully into Leonard Cohen’s brooding “Night Comes On”. The first portrays a mother, facing death, opening up to her daughter; the latter finds Cohen visiting his own mother’s grave.
Did a family tragedy prompt Shepherd to write her tune, then choose Cohen’s?
“I did not lose my mother, but you’ve intuited something, which is that she had a serious health scare,” the singer says. “She had a heart condition, and was basically told that it only goes one way and it was a matter of a certain amount of time… Everyone kind of thought, although no one said it aloud, that this might be it. We might be entering our final days here.”
Shepherd’s mother opted for a semi-experimental treatment that proved successful. The hope in Shepherd’s song was justified, and although the singer cautions that her lyrics are not entirely autobiographical, they’re certainly informed by the desire to honour a beloved parent. It must have been a wonderful gift to receive on exiting the operating room—and also bodes well for ES:MO’s upcoming second release, which will be electronic, edgy, experimental, and almost entirely penned by Shepherd and Occhipinti themselves.
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