Nilia Berkin Whirlwind CD

Nilia Berkin has been pounding piano keys from the tender age of four, when she started her classical training. Like many others before her, she felt a great relief when she finally found the courage to quit the forced lessons and become a normal booze-swilling, class-skipping teenager. Still, music was never very far away as choral singing soon replaced her first instrument and continued on for many years.At the end of university, she tagged along to a friend’s rehearsal space to watch his band. “I was instantly mesmerized,” she recalls, “I kept thinking, ‘wow, this reminds me of Iggy Pop’, yet I’d never even seen him before. I knew I had to join this group.” By the end of the month, she had joined Les PoupĂ©es Gonflables as background singer and center stage dancer. “I wasn’t really doing too much up there but I got to wear go-go boots and be in a rock band. It’s everyone’s fantasy, really.” After playing Montreal and the Quebec region for a number of years, band members went their separate ways. “In the final months I was dead–set on being a guitar player but the band already had three of them and really needed a bassist. Everything became a lot harder for us and I just wanted to write songs on my new acoustic.”Fast forward two years and Nilia found herself immersed in piano playing once again but this time under the tutelage of Montreal jazz pianist, Lorraine Desmarais. “I studied with her for two years. She was such a dynamo and a real musical force and I could barely remember any of the voicings she taught me. I had to write everything down and was by far the slowest in the class.” Nevertheless, Desmarais had enough faith in Nilia to offer her cocktail gigs around the city. She would find herself frequently performing as a duo with partner-in-crime guitarist, TJ Plenty (the Asexuals). In 2000, she met a local agent who booked her a 3-month cocktail pianist gig in Matsuyama, Japan. “I was worried about all the wrong things before going,” she remembers, “I thought it would be hard to play but in the end, it was the isolation that got to me. It was a bit like the movie Groundhog Day: waking up and doing the exact same thing for a hundred days. Still, it was a beautiful country and a great professional experience.”Upon her return she started writing songs for her new album. “I knew it was something ...