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Canadian Music ~ Jane Siberry


Jane Stewart was born in Toronto in 1955 and was raised in the suburb of Etobicoke. She would take her subsequent surname, "Siberry", from the family name of her maternal aunt and uncle. Many years later, she would explain this choice by stating "this woman and her husband were the first couple I met where I could feel the love between them and I held that in front of me as a reference point."

Siberry learned piano from the age of four, predominantly teaching herself and developing her own concepts of notation and structure. At school she learned conventional music theory (as well as French horn) and taught herself to play guitar by working through Leonard Cohen songs. Her first song was completed at the age of seventeen, although she had been developing song ideas since much earlier.

"I started out in music, but switched to sciences when I realised how much more interesting it was to study than music. I would leave the classes ecstatic about tiny things."

Following high-school graduation from Richview Collegiate in Etobicoke, Ontario, and then the Canadian Junior College, Lausanne, Switzerland, Siberry moved on to study music at the University of Guelph, later switching to microbiology (in which she gained a BSc degree) when she found freshman music courses to be stifling. She began performing in folk clubs in Guelph, linking up first with singer Wendy Davis and then with bass guitarist John Switzer in a group called Java Jive.

Siberry's music is most commonly compared to artists such as Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Toyah Willcox, Anna Domino, Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson. She has drawn from a wide variety of styles, ranging from new wave rock on her earlier albums to a reflective pop style influenced by jazz, folk, gospel, classical and liturgical music in her later work. She has cited Van Morrison and Miles Davis as being strong creative influences.




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