Canadian Originals is a series by Will Chernoff featuring exclusive long-form interviews with Cellar Music artists from Canada. In this edition of this series, Will talks to pianist Sean Fyfe about his album Stepping Stones (release date: March 29, 2024). Sean has made several big moves as a straight-ahead piano player dedicated to sharing his craft in the tradition, first from his native Victoria, BC to Montreal, then to New York City, and finally to London where he is now based.
Stepping Stones, recorded with British musicians, is his second album as a leader on our label; the first was Late Night, recorded in Montreal in 2021. Sean also collaborated closely in Montreal with guitarist Sam Kirmayer, who recorded his album with us titled In This Moment around that same time.
Will is a bassist and a writer at the Vancouver jazz website Rhythm Changes. He spoke to Sean by videocall on September 30, 2024.
WILL CHERNOFF: Thank you, Sean, for this cross-ocean call here. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time.
SEAN FYFE: No problem.
WC: I'm here on the west coast of Canada, and I understand that's also where you grew up. Can you tell me about Victoria for you?
SF: Yeah. I grew up in Victoria. It's funny how it just became very formal all of a sudden [laughs].
I grew up in Victoria, and I went to Esquimalt High School. I was in French Immersion as a kid. I mean, I really enjoyed it. There was a very strong music scene when I went to Esquimalt High School. It's right as Dave Flello left. I think it was the first or second year since he'd been [gone], because he used to teach the jazz program at Esquimalt. My brother and sister went through that program, and I'm the youngest by five years.
So I came in later, and I played a little bit of piano because I took lessons when I was a kid. I was about four or five when I started taking lessons, and I really didn't like it, because it was the classical stuff. I just didn't like having somebody tell me to learn the music, and I didn't understand why I was learning the music or why the notes were the way that they were. I just thought it was not productive. It didn't make sense to me, so I just wanted to stop at a certain point.
But then I got to high school, and I got into the jazz program. I started learning chords on the piano and that you could actually choose the notes that you got to play, and that it actually sounded nice. And that grabbed me in a way that a lot of other things didn't. I started coming home after school and learning all my scales and stuff. This is when I was about 14, so it was grade 9. As I was learning my scales, I was learning solos and stuff as I got a little bit more advanced. Bill Evans was my favourite pianist back then, and I learned a bunch of his solos, transcribed them.
There was a Thursday night jam session at Herman's, if you know the club. I went there on Thursdays, and the trio that played after the jazz band had its slot to present the students was the Tom Vickery Trio. Yeah, we played first. We did our thing. In a combo that we were in, we had to set up a show – five songs or something – and kind of explain it. It was just part of the program, which was really nice that Herman's offered that.
Afterwards, there was a Tom Vickery jam session. They did a set, and then you can bring your friends from the school if they hung around, and Tom would let you sit in and stuff. So I was there every Thursday; I would just do my written homework at the club. I met Sean Drabitt and Josh Dixon [...] I met Hugh Fraser there, who also has passed away. And yeah, that's how I made my way into the scene in Victoria.
WC: I want to focus on one thing from the Hermann’s thing. Was that one of your first experiences on a real stage, and how did that feel?
SF: Yeah, that was my first experience on a real stage. It was really scary, because I didn't really know what to do. If my dad reads this afterwards, which I'm going to tell him about, he's gonna laugh because there's a story of me up there. I bite my nails when I'm anxious, and I was so anxious to be out there. I was, I had the fake book on the stage, I think we were playing “Autumn Leaves” or something. I was playing chords with my right hand, and I was comping for somebody. I was biting my nails with my left hand. And my dad comes up and he taps me on the shoulder. He goes, play the chords with both your hands! So I took my hand out of my mouth and started playing the chords with both hands [laughs]. That's how nervous I was. But that was like grade 9 when I just started and I didn't really know I couldn't... I was just starting out. You know what it’s like when you're just starting out; everything's new and everything's stressful, because you don't really know what's going on. That was one of my first performance experiences.
But yeah, Hermann's was the place where I first was able to actually see what it's like being on stage. And then after a while, I'd start to get little gigs here and there as I got older.
WC: Yeah, while we stay in Victoria, you said your siblings went in the band program ahead of you, so they played as well? They both played instruments?
SF: Yeah, I have a brother and a sister, and my sister sings and plays a little bit of piano. My brother plays piano, and I think he also played trumpet in one of the jazz bands. I'm not sure if it was the junior or senior jazz band at Esquimalt. But when I heard him practicing piano and learning transcriptions and stuff, when I was still in middle school and even late elementary school, I heard him working on this stuff. They they were much better than I was at the time, and I was very inspired. When I got to the jazz program, that was definitely in my mind. Seeing them go through it was a big motivator for me to go through it as well.
WC: That's cool. I'm an only child, so I don't know what that's like, so it's interesting to hear about [laughs].
SF: Yeah [laughs].
WC: So it sounds like you had a serious disposition toward the music and a respect for the music developing from quite a young age, and I can imagine how that translates into you moving to McGill. Can you talk about the transition from you growing up in Victoria and coming out of that high school program and deciding to, and then moving to Montreal to go to McGill for undergrad?
SF: Yeah, that's a funny story, actually, because being from Victoria, it's not like a small city, but small comparative compared to the rest of the cities in Canada, like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver. I didn't really have any ambitions to go to university. When we got to grade 12, a friend of mine, Nicole Auger, who played the saxophone – I was in a combo with her at Esquimalt – she got an audition at McGill. I'm not sure what led to this happening, but she ended up asking if she could bring her own band for the audition at McGill. I think my parents organized it. Or maybe the music teachers – Ross Ingstrup at the time, and Jen Treble – I think they might've organized it with my parents to send us out, because my uncle lived in Montreal, so we had a place to stay.
We all went out, and I think Nicole and I stayed with my uncle. She did her audition at McGill, and I thought while I'm here – I wasn't going to go to school – I might as well. It's too late to apply, because it was. They were doing the auditions at this point. I went up and I talked to Gordon Foote, who was the head of the program at the time, and I went into his office, I remember. I asked him if there's any way I'd be able to do an audition because I was here helping a friend. He ended up giving me a spot on Monday. It was before all the other auditions, and I had the weekend. It was a Friday, I think, and I had to get together a transcription that I'd done. I had to get together all of my technique, scales and arpeggios and stuff. I had to pick three tunes and play them from memory.
Fortunately, I had all of that stuff together already. The transcription would have been a killer, but anyways, I had all of it together and I just practiced it for the whole weekend at my uncle's place, beause he had a piano. I went into the audition, and they let me in. So that was the turning point. I was like, okay, now I have to go to university, because I got into one of the best ones in Canada for jazz. I was like, okay, I have to. And then I moved out there. My friend, Nicole Auger also got in. We should mention that.
WC: And then your recording career starts to flow from there because a lot of the albums you appear on are with McGill people. And if we're talking about Cellar, your collaboration with Sam Kirmayer, your collaboration begins from there, right?
SF: Yeah, I think it does. If I'm going back, I did my studies, and there were a few little... not proper recording projects, like for albums or anything, but just stuff that the program required students to do that I was involved with. But those aren't records or albums or anything.
I think before I did Opening Statement with Sam, we did a little demo thing. I don't think that was ever released, though. But we did a Bud Powell project as well, and this is when I'm still very young. I still just finished McGill. I still don't feel like I have control over the instrument. But before that, even, I did a recording with Al McLean and Azar Lawrence, and Adrian Vedady and Andre White, called Conduit. I'm pretty sure that was early 2014, and I think that was before the recordings with Sam. Then we did Opening Statement.
And then we did In This Moment, Sam and I [...] he sent the music for his record, and we were rehearsing it, and it's a lot of music. It's very involved for all the parts, which is great. It was a really good challenge, and I loved recording it. It was a bit stressful at certain times.
WC: It's got two horns.
SF: Yeah. Was it two? Yeah, it was only two. Yeah. Because guitar, Sam was the third horn. Yeah.
WC: You've got Alan McLean, Muhammad Abdul Al-Khabyyr, Alec Walkington bass, Andre White drums.
SF: And Sam on guitar and me. Yeah, that was fun. But then right after that, during the first four months of 2021, I was visiting my family in Victoria with my wife, and it was the only time that I would really be able to spend a lot of time with them. I was coming from New York at this point, and we were there for four months. She was working from home, and I was... I don't think I could go out and play anywhere, because everything was closed at that point, but I started writing music and I had some songs from before that I just played around with. But I decided, I'm gonna be turning 30 this year, so I might as well put something out before I turn 30.
It just so happened that I was able to get a recording spot right after we recorded Sam's In This Moment. We had a day in between or something. It was Andre again on drums, and I asked Adrian Vedady to do it, and it was me and Sam. So that was that quartet. Late Night was that recording.I just thought it was interesting, the timing. It lined up. We did two days in the studio for Sam's record. We had a day off, or something like that. And then we did two days back-to-back in the studio for mine as well right afterwards. That was interesting.
WC: Tale of the tape on the album covers: In This Moment, recorded April 29th and 30th, 2021. Late Night, recorded May 3rd and 4th, 2021. So that's within a seven-day period [laughs].
SF: Yeah, that was an intense period [laughs]. It was fun. Go big or go home! Yeah, it is what it is.
WC: I feel like that experience connects you in a very specific way to the history of the music, because that's how so many of those records were made, in the 50s and 60s, was at random times amid a busy schedule playing in the clubs. There's something about it that makes sense, especially because your music is so steeped in the tradition that you recorded them in that fashion.
SF: I never really thought of it like that. That's interesting to think, but I think these circumstances were quite different from the circumstances back then, just because you're coming out of a pandemic and stuff. But who knows? Yeah, there's definitely that element in there. It's like you do a string of gigs, and then you come off of those gigs, and you do a recording right away afterwards and you're still fresh on the instrument. I had been practicing a lot in the two weeks leading up to the recording, because I was in Montreal. I was practicing a lot, like multiple hours every day just running the music over and over again, to make sure that I got it all well. I guess it's similar in that sense, where you're still pretty hot on the instrument.
WC: What else do you want to share or remember about your McGill time specifically. Because that's kind of post that time. It's with those people, but if you think about being at the school, what else comes to your mind?
SF: I remember that time very fondly. I really enjoyed my time at McGill. I learned a lot about the music, the teachers were great, the bands were great, the players were great. The level was really high. I felt like I grew a lot at McGill. I was introduced to what true winter is in Montreal, coming from Victoria. You being from Vancouver, it rarely goes below zero, and you rarely have snow. Going from that one year to Montreal the next, where you get sweltering summers and frigid winters, is something else. But it was good.
I got to play a lot. The scene in Montreal was very welcoming, I thought. It was very open. You've listened to what I sound like on the piano, so you know that I'm straight ahead. I'm more straight ahead than a lot of musicians. There are like a few different scenes in Montreal. There was a straight-ahead scene. It was a little bit smaller, I think. I would go to the Diese Onze jam session, I would go to the Upstairs jam session and there were a couple other ones. I had access to these rooms where I could just set up a session with anybody that I wanted to. I knew the people in the scene that I wanted to play with, and I got that chance. McGill facilitated all of that happening, which was really good.
WC: Yeah. And then there's another decision and another move that you pull off at some point around this time, because then you went to MSM, right? For grad school, for the Manhattan school of music. Were you based in Montreal when you made that decision, or how did you decide to go to New York to do that?
SF: I always wanted to move to New York to try to, quote unquote, make-or-break. My now-wife who was my girlfriend at the time, she’s from New York. She grew up in Manhattan. We had both spent five years in Montreal at this point, and I think she was getting a little homesick, and she wanted to move back to New York. I think there were some more opportunities for her there professionally. That was the catalyst for me to try to get into a school, so I could have a way of getting in to the States, because they don't just let you go in there if you're Canadian. That made me start to seriously start applying to schools. I didn't really know when I would have done it otherwise, but that's what made it happen. She was like, I'm going, you can come or you can not come. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll come [laughs].
WC: So how was your experience there? Who'd you study with, or meet, or play with?
SF: I met as many people as I could. I got into Manhattan School of Music, and my first teacher there was Ted Rosenthal, who I studied under for the first semester. I switched teachers to Jeremy Manasia. I had another three semesters to go, so I stayed with him for the rest of that, because I love the way he plays. He's one of my favourite piano players still. I took some lessons with Garry Dial as well in the last semester that I was there.
The program itself at Manhattan School of Music was very focused on composition and more modern stuff; which was a little frustrating to me, because it was marketed as a performance degree, but it was more of a composition-based thing. I definitely got an education, I can't argue with that. I know I can analyze anything that I see in front of me and understand what's going on, because of that. It changes the way that you think. But I was hoping to get something that was really bebop-oriented, and this was not bebop-oriented at all. Except for the lessons: those were my favourite part of that.
WC: Your piano teacher, one of them there, Jeremy Manasia, he wrote the liner notes to Stepping Stones.
SF: Yeah. I thought it would be very fitting for him to do that, because there's a song in there, “See Ya!”, which I named after him, because he was a very big influence on me. I spelled it differently, obviously, but his last name being Manasia – “See Ya!”, is, yeah. I named that song after him as a gesture in that regard.
WC: I find that – this is about Stepping Stones specifically – there are standards and originals, and on that album, your tunes strike me as the ones that are the most deeply hard-bop sounding. It’s interesting. You have your arrangements of the standards, but it's almost like your arrangements of the standards are the changeups and the varieties, in terms of the arrangement. And then your original tunes, the three of them on the album – that being one of them, “See Ya!”, the first track – they're almost like the most powerfully swinging and hard-bop sounding arrangements. That was something that struck me about the album.
SF: Oh, thank you. It's interesting to hear that, because I never know how my music comes off to other people. I had some ideas of what to write for that, but the reason that I didn't write more for that record was because writing is the hardest part for me. It's finding the inspiration to have something come to you, and I don't like forcing it.
I don't know, I was listening to a lot of Cedar Walton, and I still am. That comes through in a lot of the arrangements. I'm not sure if you hear the influence or not, but in the compositions as well, I think there's some of that. It's interesting to hear you say that, because I never really thought much of those tunes. Obviously I wanted to record them, but it wasn't as planned out as I'm going to record this, and this is going to lead in nicely into this – it was more like, I'd like to do another record, I need to come up with some music for it. It was more out of necessity that I put them on paper, and that was the same for a few of the tunes on Late Night. I feel like there's a fire burning underneath me that I have to put material out. You have to do certain things in order to make a career for yourself. That was one of the things that I had to do, and in order to do that, I had to come up with some of my own music. But yeah, I never really thought of those ones as being really hard-swinging or hard bop. I thought of those as being the opposite. But I'm not saying that they are the opposite! I'm not trying to discount your opinion. Your opinion is interesting to me, that's all, because it's two different takes on the same material, I guess.
WC: And there's more originals on Late Night, which checks out with what you're saying, like you felt that impulse to have the material be more original there, because of what you were just describing. There's more of them on that album than the three that are on Stepping Stones.
SF: Well yeah, everything on Late Night except for “Lush Life” is original. If I had to take all the songs that I've written and choose the ones that I really liked versus the ones that I don't like so much, I think probably about half or a third of the ones that are originals on both of those records are ones that I would actually like, that I actually play. I still play “Little Pants”.
I still play “Late Night”.
I still play a few of them here and there.
WC: Yeah, something else funny that I noticed is you and Sam, you both dedicated tracks to guitarists. He has the track dedicated to Peter Bernstein and you have the one “To Wes”. And they're both in the same track positions on the album, they're both the second last track.
SF: Oh, that's funny. I think that's just coincidence.
WC: Yeah.
SF: I was listening to a lot of Wes Montgomery and Wynton Kelly when I wrote “To Wes”. I feel like all of my tunes, the ones that I played on the records and the ones that I still play, I feel like they're borderline ripoffs of other tunes. “To Wes”, I got the idea for it from “Jingles”. It's like the first half is kind of “Jingles” [hums melody]. And then the second half is like “Short Story” from Joe Henderson. So I didn't plan it like that, it just came out. I sat down, and whatever was going through my head at the time came out on the page. Yeah that's what happened.
WC: Again, that's what people did in other eras, right? They, wrote tunes on top of other tunes, like that's all part of it.
SF: Yeah, I guess so. I don't think of those as contrafacts, but they're definitely suspiciously similar to them.
WC: Yeah, it's true. It's not a full-on contrafact. Yeah, that's right.
SF: Yeah.
WC: Talking about Stepping Stones, that's your first London project, and that's where you are literally right now. So now this is our last move to discuss: what's the move to London like? When does that fit into what we were already talking about: what happens there?
SF: My wife and I had been in New York for seven years at that point. I finished my degree at Manhattan School of Music and I had to get a job, so I got a job teaching at a piano studio. But it was all the way out in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was very annoying, and that was once a week.
When I was at Manhattan School of Music, I tried to work my way into the scene a little bit, but the workload was very heavy. It was hard for me to be burning the candle at both ends, doing classes and classwork and then also going out late at night and staying out until three, four, or five in the morning to try to hang. I did my best with that.
I think I had a little bit more time later on, but at this point my wife – my girlfriend Claire, she's my wife now, we got engaged in 2016, which is when I graduated – had a crossroads. I could push myself to go out every single night and meet a bunch of people and not spend any time with my wife. Or I could spend time with my wife and tone it down a little bit on the going out and trying to meet people. And when you're in New York, you have to be full-on if you're going to do anything over there.
I spent the next four or five years doing what I described, which is spending more time with my wife and teaching kids, and trying to set up sessions here and there where I could, but it wasn't quite enough to get my foot in the door in the scene. There were like five years that I was doing this, and then covid hit.
When I got back from Victoria, I had a different perspective on it, because I knew we would be leaving at that point. I started going out every single night that I possibly could. I tried to find anything that I could, any kind of music at all. Any jam session. I started to get to know people a little bit better, and I did basically what I would have been doing from the very beginning, which is the right move, where you just follow people around and you try to force your way into a scene seems like it's closed. But it's not: you have to just force your way in. That's what it was like for me.
It started working. Stuff started happening, I started getting calls for gigs, which was very nice. I think the only reason I did that is because I knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel with my time in New York, like I wouldn't be coming back. It was coming to an end, and I wouldn't be coming back to it, not right away anyways. This was my last chance to do that.
What prompted the move to the UK was we had gone on trips over here, not to the UK but to Europe. We went to Portugal and Spain, and in 2014 before moving to New York, we went to France and Italy and the UK. We went to Ireland as well.
I remember we were in Ireland, and we just decided that we should try to move to Europe somewhere. It seems really nice over here, and it's a different speed of doing things than New York was, and we liked it over here. She decided she wanted to get her MBA, so she started applying for programs to do that. She got into a program at Imperial College, and then covid hit. We were supposed to go in 2020, but covid hit, so that threw a wrench into things. We were fortunately able to delay it for a year.
Yeah, then she started in September 2021, and we came over in August 2021 on her student visa, and then we started over here. I took everything that I had learned [about] how to make your way into the scene in New York. I applied it over here in London, and it worked great. I started playing right away, which was really nice. I've been playing ever since, and that was August 2021. Been here just over three years.
WC: When did you meet the musicians that you recorded Stepping Stones with?
SF: I met them very early. Luke Fowler, the bassist, he used to run a jazz bar down in South London called The Junction. And that closed, actually, like a year to the day after the first gig that I did there. He's a bassist, and he ran that club, and I was playing there weekly, hosting the jam sessions.
There was a point where he let me do some of the booking there, and I knew a bunch of musicians here that had maybe gone to the Junction, but they hadn't really played there that much because it was a pain to get to in South London. A lot of musicians that I know live in North London, and it is kind of a pain to get down below the river. But I started asking them if they wanted to do it, and I’d have Luke on bass, me on piano, a different drummer and a horn player for all of these gigs. I started playing with him multiple times a week for about a year. We see eye to eye on a lot of things musically. That makes it an easy decision for picking Luke.
With Matt [Fishwick], he's one of the first drummers I met as well, because I had a gig at one of the places. There's a restaurant in Kennington called Toulouse Lautrec, which is a French restaurant, and it's also a jazz club. Matt Fishwick was the drummer on one of the gigs that I did there, and I just really enjoyed his playing. It's the same thing [as] with Luke: we see eye to eye. We didn't play as much as Luke and I played, but we played a fair amount. I tried to get him on more stuff if I could.
And that's also where I met Dave O'Higgins, was at Toulouse Lautrec. And then Dave, I called him for a couple things, and he called me for a couple things. Our musical relationship grew from there, so I chose him for the recording as well.
WC: Yeah. Okay, 2021’s so crazy, right? We already talked about those recording sessions and then later that summer, like months later, you're moving. So that's quite a period of time!
SF: Yeah, it happened pretty quickly. It's just the way that it worked out, I think.
WC: Yeah. I still want to go to Pizza Express. I've never been there. Did you get to play there?
SF: Yeah, I played there a few times. It's a really nice venue. The people are very nice, and it's one of the nicer pianos in London to play on, which is really good. I think it's probably one of my favourites in the city.
WC: And you came to play here earlier this year [2024], in February, you came to play at Frankie’s Jazz Club.
SF: Yes, and I'm playing there again on January 23rd coming up, just so you know. That was with a horn player who is Canadian, Steve Kaldestad, but I'm sure you've heard the story where he used to live over here as well in the UK, in London. He knows a lot of these same guys that I know, because he left and I came in. That was a fun little unexpected connection to make. It was originally supposed to be Cory on the gig, but he had to drop out, and I'm glad that he got Steve on it. It was nice to actually meet Steve, because I'd heard a lot about him over here. And then it was John Lee on bass and Jesse Cahill on drums. And that was essentially, we did a lot of stuff that I did on the quartet record, Stepping Stones. We did it that gig as well.
WC: Yeah, so I do a Canadian jazz podcast, and Steve was on one of my first episodes. It might've been one of my first 10 episodes, and I titled the episode “Three Big Moves” because we talked about him moving from his hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan to Montreal, and then to London, and then to Vancouver. So we have three different moves that we just talked about.
SF: Yeah. It's funny where life takes you. When I was younger, I heard about the music program at McGill in Montreal, and I was like oh wow, these guys really know what they're doing. I put that on the pedestal. Then I managed to get into McGill, and then I was doing what that was, which was really nice, it was good for my confidence. Then I heard about the scene in New York a little bit more and I was like wow, over there, if you want to do something that's where you got to be. And then I ended up doing that, which was interesting, because I never thought that it would happen like that.
Then London, I'm not really sure. I think I was watching a lot of Sherlock at the time [laughs].
WC: [Laughs] Yeah.
SF: I was watching a lot of Sherlock with my wife, and London just looked really appealing. Oh, that looks pretty cool. And then we ended up moving there. Yeah, I don't know. It's funny how life works. You never really expect these things to happen and when they do happen, you don't really think... I don't think too much of it. I'm just going about doing what I'm going to do. You look back and you see all the things that you have done, and it's interesting.
WC: Is there anything else that's on your mind that you wanted to mention or shout out or bring up?
SF: No, not really. It's just been great to have you reach out to me and actually want to hear about what's been going on in my story. I didn't really talk about touring over here at all, but it's nice, because [I’m] closer to the rest of Europe, and a lot of musicians from New York come over and they tour in France and Italy and Germany and Spain, and that's such a long way to go. I figure being over here is much closer.
Earlier this year, I did a thing in Germany for the release of Stepping Stones, and I did another show in France. I was in France doing a show over there in Marseille, and yeah, it seems like a logical thing to be closer to where you want to work. This seems to be where I'd like to be working right now. So who knows in the future if that stays the same, but yeah, it's been really nice just having you ask me to talk about this stuff. Cause nobody ever... this is the first time anybody's ever asked me for an interview on this kind of stuff. I hope it met your standards, I hope it satisfied you professionally [laughs].
WC: I really enjoyed meeting you, because this was our first meeting, our first conversation. I look forward to the chance to hear you again in Vancouver in the new year. Thanks for taking the time.
SF: Yeah, thanks. Thank you for taking the time.