Page 13 - BiTS_08_AUGUST_2022

LL: So, your father Albert Jordan was a
literary professor, and your mother
Jean Lanceman, a ballerina. What was
it like growing up in your household?

SJ: It was so far away in time that I
barely remember. I do remember my
father deciding to spend a year travelling
to India with the whole family - this was
in 1969. We took freighter ships - a

Russian freighter from Montreal to
England, and then another freighter from
England to what was then Bombay,
stopping at many different ports of call
along the way. We were in the tail end of
a hurricane around the Cape of South
Africa, which was thrilling to us kids -
being tossed around on the ocean like a

bag of sticks - gigantic waves and wild
winds…we were so young that we didn’t
feel frightened, probably because my
Dad did not appear to be frightened!
LL: What kind of music were you
exposed to growing up?

SJ: Early on the only thing I heard was
classical music because that is what my
parents listened to. In those days music was not ubiquitous like it is now - you would not hear
radio or music playing in shops and public places everywhere you went, like you do now. It

was more accessible in India when we lived there, because there would be parades in the
streets with people playing instruments or loud radios, and music from the ashram, and also it
was a time when young people from all over the world were coming to Pondicherry, where we
lived, as the world-renowned Sri Aurobindo Ashram was there, and they started a community
called Auroville. Plenty of musicians and artists were attracted to it.
LL: You started performing music on various instruments including vocals at the young
age of 16. Did you study formally or pick it all up by ear?

SJ: I started playing the recorder at home when I was about 9, and then when I was 12, I

started to take classical flute lessons at the Conservatory in Montreal. By the time I was 14, I
was hanging out with other friends in Westmount Park in Montreal, and we would just sit
around and sing songs all day long - a couple of people played guitars, so we had
accompaniment. We did it so much that we started to get good at it, and people would gather
round to listen to us. I never took singing lessons until many, many years later, when I was
doing an Off-Broadway production called ‘Love, Janis’. The schedule was so intense that I was
constantly losing my voice, so I took lessons from this brilliant man named Don Lawrence. I
had tried to take lessons in my teens, but they told me that if I continued to sing the way I sang,
that I would permanently lose my voice, so I thought - the heck with this, I’ll just figure it out
on my own.