Paul Lorieau, RIP




Paul Lorieau, the tenor who could make you forget there was a faceoff only a minute or so away, has died, and Edmonton today is full of stories and memories of the anthemic voice for decades of the Edmonton Oilers.

In the Oilers' 2006 Stanley Cup run, Lorieau left us spellbound with his raised microphone, an invitation to the fans, so rousingly accepted, to sing the national anthem together.

Think about that for just a second. The trained voice, the student of voice, the artist with the camera trained on him freely chooses silence, so that the full-throated, beer-holstered hockey throng could experience the joy of singing themselves into a northeast Edmonton night.

Now, we contemplate the meaning of the silence choosing Paul Lorieau.

Countless times on TV and many times in person in the Coliseum I experienced Lorieau's singing O Canada. Once, I met him.

It was on a small rink that a band of friends at CTV Edmonton (Hoop, Raymo, Dub, Kobes)  watered into being on a lovely piece of land behind the newsroom. We called it the Rink of Dreams. And on "opening night," Paul Lorieau came to sing the national anthem. But before he did he sat in the newsroom with a scarf protecting his neck and he tried to teach a few of us about the colour of sung notes. When he ventured outside and, with winged snowflakes spiralling around him, delivered the anthem, man, it forced you to believe. And to consider that a live performance is not just not a recorded performance—it can actually make you feel profoundly alive.

"Being three feet away from that," said entertainment reporter Graham Neil at that moment, "is quite an experience."

We paid him a honorarium. He sent the money to a convent.

Paul Lorieau dealt in sound, that perishable, evanascent sense that, unlike seeing and vision and video, still resists dissection and stabilization (Ong). Perhaps, that is why it feels like such a transport to be in the power of the singer.

Where did he take us?

Indeed, where did he go?

I somehow think that the death of a singer helps make a place a place, helps impel us to come up with ways to make the gift of his time with us stand still.

Now, there will be larger gestures, but maybe that same Rink of Dreams—that patch of ice protected by a stand of trees, that place where under the stars you can see your breath and feel like you understand the poem of it all—should, this winter, be renamed.

Requiescat in pace, Paul Lorieau.
                                                                     ********

Share that night on the Rink of Dreams. Copy and paste http://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/well-known-anthem-singer-paul-lorieau-passes-away-after-battle-with-cancer-1.1351812 and then click on "Paul Lorieau's Rink of Dreams Anthem."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more