Musical stardom is all a matter of taste

When you sell exactly two copies of your first record, you expect your musical career to be pretty short-lived. Unless, of course, there’s some twist of fate that ends up putting you among Canada’s best-selling recording artists.

Which is exactly what happened to Michael Jones, a psychologist and former motivational speaker living in Orillia, Ont., who spent $1,000 to record a 90-minute tape of his piano pieces during a one day session in his living room back in the early ’80s. He sold two copies at one of his workshops and figured that was that.

But then he contacted an American distribution company called Narada Productions, and they created Narada Records to release his debut album, Pianoscapes. The next thing Jones knew, Pianoscapes had sold a remarkable 35,000 copies just by word of mouth.

Since then, Jones has gone on to sell nearly two million albums (mostly in the United States) without any radio play, major label support, or media coverage. With the exception of stars such as Celine Dion, Shania Twain, and Alanis Morissette, that amounts to more sales than most Canadian rock bands or pop singers.

And Jones is not the only Canadian act to have slipped beneath the music industry radar while selling millions of albums. There exists an entire world of recording artists who rack up the kind of sales most Canadian bands can only dream of, and they do it very quietly.

Most people wouldn’t recognize Hennie Bekker’s name, but the 65 year-old Toronto composer has sold two million albums worldwide, with 14 Solitudes albums and several other wildlife recordings that “explore nature through music.”

Bekker is also the B in the successful Canadian dance group BKS (with Greg Kavanagh and Chris Sheppard), whose album, Astroplane, last year won a Juno Award for best dance recording. The BKS song Living in Ecstasy made it on to Billboard’s Top 20 charts, and songs by BKS have also been included on dance compilations that have sold another 1.5 million CDs. Still, Bekker remains anonymous.

“I understand it.” said Bekker in an interview. “The industry basically doesn’t recognize or is that aware of the potential of the kind of stuff that I do. They’re still hooked into pop music and rock and roll and, OK, there’s a bit of a dance thing going on that’s quite big, but it’s still not really that well known. So there’s this big thing going on right under their noses and they don’t even know about it.”

A few more people know about Toronto’s John McDermott, the hammy Irish tenor who often gets local press coverage while on tour in Canada or when performing for American politicians such as Newt Gingrich and the Kennedy family.

But he’s still relatively obscure, considering his first two albums, Danny Boy and Old Friends, have sold more than 200,000 and 100,000 copies respectively in Canada. McDermott’s 1996 album The Danny Boy Collection, which combined songs from the two previous albums, has also sold 500,000 copies in the United States, according to SoundScan, a company that tracks record sales.

By comparison, the Barenaked Ladies’ recent hit album Stunt has sold 200,000 copies in Canada, Vancouver’s Matthew Good Band, one of the most successful Canadian bands of 1998, has sold 100,000 copies of its album Underdogs, and rock band Moist has sold 400,000 copies of its 1996 album Creature. With the exception of Stunt, which has sold a phenomenal 3 million copies in the U.S., most Canadian bands includ ing Sloan and the Tragically Hip can’t even come close to the U.S. and international sales racked up by Bekker, Jones, and McDermott.

What the three artists share in addition to obscurity and impressive numbers is music that’s not exactly, well, mainstream. Gordon Gibson, co-owner of Solitudes Ltd., which combined Bekker’s music with Dan Gibson’s nature sounds, nails it when he says, “If it’s not Top 40, it’s not sexy.”

Both the Zambian-born Bekker and the British-born Jones, 56, fall into the musical realm of the New Age movement that uses Chicken Soup for the Soul books as its guid ing lights, and the music of former Entertainment Tonight co-host John Tesh as life’s soundtrack. For followers of the movement, pivotal, life-changing moments arrive in neatly told anecdotes. And so it was for Jones, who decided to share his music after someone told him not to hide his gift.

“People find the music evokes images,” said Jones, whose rambling piano compositions rely on superficial aspects from classical composers such as Debussy and Chopin. “What I wanted to do was create a language of nature. I thought of myself as being a musical painter. What I wanted to capture was the impression of what it felt like to see the sunlight sparkling on the surface of the water or hear what the wind sounds like when it’s whispering through the pine trees.”

Bekker is considerably more grounded, and his music more skillfully composed. After living through the ’60s, he said, he doesn’t have any soul-searching left to do and he doesn’t subscribe to NewAge philosophies.

“The music though, is bordering on New Age,” said Bekker. “Except I still go for form, composition and melody. I go a lot for good melodies whereas a lot of these New Age guys, they kind of noodle around on a couple of chords and they don’t really say much.”

And because noodling is an integral part of the Chicken Soup recipe, it makes the music a hard sell in mainstream circles.

“There’s been no press,” said Jones, “and I think part of the problem for me is that New Age music has been somewhat suspect as a category as to whether it’s really a valid form of music to be reviewed or commented on. As a result my sales have been almost entirely through word of mouth.”

The same is mostly true of Bekker and the 43-year-old McDermott, who used to work in the circulation department of the Toronto Sun until Conrad Black financed his first album in 1992. It was a 50th anniversary gift for his parents. A record label snatched it up and now McDermott is licenced to endlessly crank out overwrought sentimentality that has made him a late-blooming entertainer.

But McDermott is nonchalant about his success, spurred by a two-minute infomercial that aired on US. television.

“It was fortunately being in the right place at the right time, having a half-decent voice, great material, and a good deal of people who wanted it to happen,” he said.

For Bekker, with more than 40 albums under his belt, it’s been a longer slog. Most of his music is distributed through a major label, but about 90% of his Solitudes sales come from placing the CDs at listening posts in airport shops, women’s stores in shopping malls, and high-end gift-shops, as well as the usual record store outlets.

“What has been surprising to me and I guess others in this industry” said Jones, whose Narada label has a mailing list of 100,000 people, “is how music can some times begin to get spread through a community without a lot of the things we usually feel we have to bring to it to make sure it’s going to sell. Word of mouth itself can be significant.”

Sales will no doubt quietly continue, with McDermott’s latest album, If Ye Break Faith, being rereleased this month with a new wedding song added. Bekker is planning his first Yanni-style concert in support of the Solitudes series, and Jones has released a double CD, The Living Music.

In the end, the low profile and high sales for all three artists come down to one thing. And Bekker sums it up best when describing how he manages, unlike some, to keep things from getting too cheesy. “Really,” he said, “it’s a matter of taste.”