Voice

"When I was touring with Three Mo' Tenors, I applied my classical technique to nine to ten different styles of music: opera, musical theater, jazz, gospel, new school r&b, hip-hop, old-school Motown, spirituals, and rock 'n' roll. So I teach my students not only a very good classical technique, but also a way to apply that same technique to different styles of music. It's about different placement of sound—how and where you place the sound as it is being delivered from your mouth."

"I want students to enjoy the process, and the rest will come. To take students out of their comfort zone, I might ask them to throw the song into a completely different key. Or make them play with only one hand, if they're a piano player, to hear the space in the song. Or ask them to play the whole song up two octaves, or take out all the vibrato, or, for the guitar player, to use an alternate tuning. It's not that the crazy version of a song is the best alternative; it just sends them down a different road so that they come out somewhere fresh on the other side."

"You need to nail your technique, but also understand how to immerse yourself in a song and let it work its way through you and out to the audience. I had an international student once who was having a hard time with 'Smile' by Charlie Chaplin. I wanted her to feel that she was singing to someone. We talked about who she was close to, and it turned out she was missing her mother. We talked about the meaning of the words, and she sang it again. It was spine-tingling. She really got the emotion. And that to me—that sense of space you get when someone really opens up—is just so moving."