March 26, 2023

#108. Popular Musics Singing and Pedagogy with Jess Baldwin

1 hour 13 minutes

This week’s guest is Jess Baldwin.

This week on a Voice and Beyond, we welcome the multi-talented Jess Baldwin, who is a creativity and artist coach, contemporary voice specialist, indie soul singer-songwriter and producer, as well as the owner of True Colours Voice and Artist Coaching. Jess has also created Singing in Popular Musics, which is a centralised space where voice teachers and vocal coaches can learn from the great pioneers and experts in Popular Musics singing and pedagogy. Jess shares with us that she created this space to help other voice teachers expand their focus beyond vocal technique to a more complete picture of a popular musics’ singer’s needs by regularly providing carefully curated articles that keep up with the rapidly changing world of Popular Music.

In today’s episode, Jess talks about her own personal and professional journey throughout academia and how she transitioned from her formal classical voice training to performing, writing and producing across popular music styles. Jess explains how she developed her own pedagogical approaches across the broad range of popular musics’ styles, why she refers to CCM as Popular Musics, the importance of student led learning, and what it means to be authentic in performance. Part of our conversation was also about advocating for change in the field of CCM singing voice pedagogy in academia. There is so much more in this show as Jess and I really dig deeply in some of our discussions. This is a brilliant and candid interview with Jess Baldwin. One you don’t want to miss.

In this Episode
1:15 - Introduction
8:02 - How Julia cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way” helped her discover her own voice.
18:08 - What is the purpose of academic music spaces?
31:29 - Where did you pick up your teaching approaches?
37:10 - What has inspired your teaching?
42:32 - Do music industry professionals and record labels use the term “popular music”?
55:56 - Singing in Popular Music and how it started.
1:02:07 - How can we be sure that our teaching approaches are student-led?
1:08:30 - What do you want your legacy to be?

Find Jess Online