Pickle Barrel
WHEN JUNO NOMINATED Sophie Milman
takes the stage at Massey Hall on Dec.
8th, she will be halfway around the
world from the small Russian town in
the Ural Mountains where she first
learned to sing, and where she fell in
love with jazz music when she was just
seven years old.
Now, the petite blond songstress with the big voice is set to wow audiences on her latest cross-Canada tour.
With her self-titled debut album selling nearly 100,000 copies worldwide, sold-out shows and performances with the Neville Brothers, Chick Corea and Jesse Cook, Milman is taking her success in stride.
As down-to-earth as they come, Milman prefers to spend time with her family and boyfriend, at her parents’ home at Bathurst and Wilson, to life on the road.
When she gets a spare moment, she’ll use it to complete her commerce degree at the University of Toronto.
“I am very much a family-oriented person,” says Milman. “I have this great family and a great boyfriend, and I want to be able to have a balance in my life where I can spend my time with the people I love. I know it’s easy to lose that balance in this business, but I want that stability.”
At the age of 24, Milman vividly recounts the upheaval in her early life. Her family left Russia in the ’90s after the fall of the communism and settled in Israel until she was 16 years old.
Her parents then decided to bring Milman and her younger brother to Canada in search of a better life. Through it all, she says it was music that gave her strength and eased her transition from culture to culture.
“My dad introduced to our family this really deep passion for music, and now my mom is the same way and shares that same love,” Milman says.
“We always say that we don’t listen to music, but we experience it physically. It changes our mood, it makes us dance. It’s has always been a very important thing in our household.”
Milman smiles as she recalls how her parents have shaped her musical background.
“My mom has the voice, and I definitely inherited her musicality,” she says. “But my dad was the big jazz guy and Western music fan. He’s the one who had the big stack of jazz records: Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson. I’ve been listening to them for what seems like forever.”
She says that, although, as a child, her English was not strong enough to understand the lyrics to her favourite jazz songs, the melodies drew her in and cemented her love of the genre.
“There were these intricate, strong, beautiful melodies,” she says. “And when I would sing along, I would fill in the blanks. Words that I couldn’t pronounce or understand I would just invent.”
After arriving in Toronto at 16, the Milmans lived briefly in Forest Hill before moving to the Armour Heights neighbourhood in North York.
She fell in love with North York, finding the best chicken and matzo ball soup on Bathurst and venturing up to Yonge and Sheppard to nibble on sushi.
However, other aspects of her new life weren’t as easy.
Milman had difficulty with English.
Music, however, came a bit easier to her, and within a month of her arrival, she was given a solo during the high school’s music night. She said she found music helped her to fit in at her new school and gave her a sense of achievement. However, it never occurred to her that it could be an actual career path. When Milman graduated high school, she went on to pursue her commerce degree at the University of Toronto. Then one night, with the encouragement of some friends, she attended an open mic night hosted by Bill King, the director of the Beaches Jazz Festival.
“I sang one song, and from that I got my first gig,” she says. “I had nothing going for me other than the fact that I had a nice voice and a certain understanding of traditional jazz. I had no idea what it meant to be a singer, no sense of how to navigate the industry.”
King took her under his wing and helped cultivate her talent.
“I just thought there was something in her voice, a sweetness,” he says. “But what I really noticed was her diligence.”
King works with a lot of talented singers, many of whom get discouraged too easily to make it.
“She came to me, and I gave her a song to work on. She came back, and I gave her two more. She came back, and I gave her three,” King says. “So eventually I gave her a whole night.”
Things quickly fell into place after that night, and Milman was soon being featured on City TV’s Breakfast Television, and TV Ontario. Then came the offer for her first recording contract.
“It was a crazy, hectic, terrifying time,” Milman recalls. “I was so young and all of a sudden putting together this album with all these very talented people.”
The album, which features jazz standards along with some carefully chosen original compositions, was released to wide critical acclaim and earned a Juno nomination as Best Jazz Vocal Album of 2006.
“It was incredible,” she says. “The people nominated alongside of me are so talented, and it was such a shock and an honour to have been included among them. To be nominated next to Diana Krall was a big thing.”
Milman says another highlight from her career over the past three years has been the invitations she has received to play with some of the music industry’s biggest legends.
“It’s almost all so good I just don’t know what’s going to happen now,” she says. “I got to do a duet with Aaron Neville, and it was crazy because he’s just a genius. I got to open for Chick Corea, and I couldn’t believe it when I got that call. And Jesse Cook is the nicest guy in show business, bar none.”
And with this fall’s release of her sophomore album, Make Someone Happy, Milman says she’s ready to prove herself once again.
“I did 16-hour days, every day for weeks straight, singing non-stop,” she says. “It was brutal, but in the end, I felt like I’d just poured my soul out into this record, and I feel like I did something really good. I’m so self-critical, but when I put this record on, I feel like it is something I can be proud of.”
She says that with her second album she has become more comfortable drawing upon her unique musical heritage for inspiration and says audiences can expect a more mature, polished sound.
“As soon as I started embracing my own cultural influences, things started fitting,” she says. “All the cultures influenced me, influenced my personality. It doesn’t mean that I have to only sing Russian or Israeli songs, but it does mean that I need to allow myself to infuse my culture into these tunes, the way I sing them, the way the arrangements are written for me.”
Now with a new tour underway, Milman reflects upon the whirlwind of her career over the past three years.
“I’m just sort of riding the wave of the new record right now,” she says and laughs. “I’m always looking for new stuff and putting together new material, but for now, I’m just focused on the tour.”
She says she will get her next break in May and is eager to spend some time at home in Toronto in the house she and her boyfriend have recently renovated.
“When I come back from these long tours and I fly into Toronto, I just get this surge of joy, because it’s just a great, great city, and I love the fact that I’ve been able to make a career here and the people here launched me,” she says.
King agrees and credits the support Sophie has received as the “X factor” to her success. “It’s really hard to make it out of this town,” he says.” But Sophie has done that. She has a lot of people working to make this happen for her.”
And with this support, Sophie
knows her future is bright, providing
she brings that same dedication she’s
shown in the past. “I want my career in
music to be a long and healthy one, not
just a spurt of fame and a long slow
descent,” she says. 
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