A Song In Their Hearts

By Ron Forbes-Roberts

All her life, Jayne Dinsmore harboured a secret desire that even some of her closest friends didn't suspect. “Ever since I was a little kid,” she says, “I’d wanted to be a singer. But I was so shy, I couldn’t even do karaoke!”

This changed in 2000. Dinsmore, who has severe rheumatoid arthritis, saw an ad seeking non-professional singers for a project organized by Vancouver musician sylvi macCormac. “I tried it because I’d wanted to get involved with music, but I was chicken and didn’t know how to start or who to meet,” says Dinsmore. “I went there thinking, ‘Well, I’ll just see what happens.’ I left thinking, ‘Wow, something good is going to happen from this!’”

Dinsmore’s intuition was spot on. Astonished by Dinsmore’s voice, macCormac got her involved with the Vancouver Adapted Music Society (VAMS). With encouragement and help from the society and its members, Dinsmore began performing. Since then, she and her quartet, Jayne’s Gang, have wowed audiences with gorgeous renditions of jazz standards in venues including the Bayshore Inn and The Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. Now retired from a clerical career with the City of Burnaby, Dinsmore is concentrating on her singing and hoping to release a follow-up to her 2002 CD, Dreams Come True.

Dinsmore is just one of many Vancouver musicians with disabilities whose dreams VAMS has helped realize over the past two decades. Kirk Duncan, programs manager for the Sam Sullivan Disability Foundation, of which VAMS is a part, says that Dinsmore represents a lot of what the society is about—assisting people with disabilities to achieve goals in their musical lives. “We’re there if they need any support or services or any structure we can provide,” says Duncan. “This can include arranging performances and finding practice space for musicians.”

The society’s most recent project is Strait Goods, a CD featuring (mainly) previously released music by Dinsmore and nine other musicians with disabilities. Chosen from dozens of submissions, the music on the CD runs the stylistic gamut, from the jazz vocalising of award-winning singer Joe Coughlin, to Jeff Standfield’s and sylvi macCormac’s folky offerings, and the funk sounds of Bobbi Style, who produced Strait Goods.

The CD’s last track—a haunting and abstract soundscape—is by drummer/ composer Dave Symington, who cofounded VAMS with Sam Sullivan (now Vancouver's mayor) in 1989 and is now a board member. Quadriplegic as the result of a diving accident at the age of 19, Symington met Sullivan after moving to Vancouver from Ontario in 1984. Symington was then working with an occupational therapist to develop Velcro gloves with attached drumsticks that would help him play the drums, which he had picked up in his teens. “The idea of VAMS just evolved between us,” says Symington. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get back into music?’ so we started a band called Spinal Chord [in which Sullivan sang and played keyboards] and later released a CD and a music video. Then we realized that there had to be other people with disabilities who were musicians or wanted to be. We wanted VAMS to provide space and funding and opportunities for those people.”

Symington and Sullivan also began working with the George Pearson Centre (for adults with disabilities) and technicians at a studio at GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre to create adaptive devices that would allow musicians with significant disabilities to produce sounds on instruments. One of these was Sullivan’s keyboard set-up. “I don’t have the finger movement to play keyboard, so a lot of computer programming was necessary to let me use my keyboard as an input device,” Sullivan says. “I could run my hands along the keyboard and press the keys with the side of my wrist to trigger all sorts of different sounds.”

VAMS is renovating the GF Strong studio and equipping it with more state-of-the-art adaptive devices. “We’re always looking for devices to make things easier for people with significant disabilities to compose and record music,” says Kirk Duncan. “For example, we have an instrument called the Magic Flute. It’s supported with Apple software and allows people with little or no arm movement to create musical sounds. We believe strongly that music is a form of therapy as well as a source of enjoyment.”

Symington agrees whole-heartedly. “Some of the best moments of my life since my accident have involved music,” he says. “Communication between musicians can be really beautiful; magic happens. And it’s so amazing to see people who thought they could never do it with huge smiles on their faces from being involved in something creative.”

To listen to tracks from Strait Goods, visit www.vams.org. CDs are available for a donation of $25 or more.

Based in North Vancouver, Ron Forbes-Roberts is a freelance writer, music journalist and professional guitarist. He is a contributing editor of Acoustic Guitar and author of One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau.