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Sing for Joy is a community choir for people with Parkinsons Disease and similar conditions, their friends and carers. We meet once a week. We are all sorts of ages, types and genders. All that we have in common is that we have an illness, or care for someone with an illness, and that singing with others makes us feel better.
Let's Sing!
Promotional Text by the Sing for Joy Comittee
for contact information please click here
Carol Grimes has appeared to glowing reviews at the Barbican, the Proms and jazz venues around Britain. But on Tuesday nights, she works with a group of people who can barely produce a piano riff with all 40 hands. They comprise the Sing for Joy Choir who meet once a week in a room down a dark alley in Kentish Town to be taken through the fundamentals of breathing, stretching and projecting sound from the belly of their bodies, as well as the delight of singing in harmony to the rhythms of jazz, gospel or ethnic punk. If the involuntary shaking and shuffling of some members’ bodies adds an unpredictable rhythm, that is all part of the fun.
The core of the group has Parkinson’s Disease, usually accepted as the familiar palsy of old age. But of the 120,000 people with PD in the UK, one in twenty is under the age of 40. Then family, work colleagues and medical profession often consign them to a future of drugs and despondency. The same is true for most chronic illnesses. Other people in the choir, which numbers 20 to 25, have multiple sclerosis, asthma, chronic depression, or are recovering from cancer and strokes. (About a third of the choir is in good health!) The conventional 'best practice’ view of all chronic illnesses is that the NHS should provide a good doctor who will prescribe the right drugs and the local authority will provide other forms of care and equipment.
When Nina Temple and a friend were both diagnosed with PD, they decided such a future was neither good enough nor the right approach. A chronic illness should not mean a life spent in retreat. They decided to form the choir, got funding from the Parkinson’s Disease Society in 2003, appointed Carol Grimes as their singing teacher and the highly inventive jazz musician Dorian Ford as their pianist, and they were off. From a shy and shaky start the choir has blossomed into public performances. Last year these ranged from its annual cabaret using the TUC’s Congress House as an unusual venue, to singing in the vast Westminster Cathedral as part of the Parkinson’s Disease Society Christmas Concert. Carol Grimes: ‘The performance is in fact a remarkable part of what the group is. The illness is not on show. The singing and the joy and the community is. My joy lies in the small steps that we take followed by even bigger steps, and some of those small tense voices have become big bold resonant voices. That is wonderful.’
Nina Temple describes this approach to chronic and degenerative illness as: ‘An amazing journey for many of us, from hardly venturing outside our homes, to pure enjoyment in the weekly workshops and then on to singing in public. Being part of Sing for Joy helps us overcome isolation, pain and anxiety and makes us feel uplifted and glad to be alive. We want to raise the public profile of Sing for Joy, both in order to secure the future of this precious choir and in order to spread the message, so that singing becomes an integral part of mainstream treatment for chronic illnesses.’
Nina’s comments are not just wishful thinking. Researchers have looked at the effects of music therapy and choir singing on a range of people with chronic illness and disability. There is evidence in the medical literature from serious studies, including randomised clinical trials, that these approaches not only make people feel better (perhaps the most important outcome!) but that they produce measurable changes in the body’s physiology and can improve both physical and mental health. What’s more, unlike many conventional therapies they have no unwanted side effects.
Dorian Ford is some kind of genius. An assured and intelligent improviser, his interpretation of Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You’ managed to invoke both the spirit of Charlie Parker and the slow movement of Bach’s ‘Italian Concerto’. Apart from us, Dorian has worked with Courtney Pine, Ian Carr and Geoff Gascoyne.
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"Everyone who joins us says they can’t sing. As long as you can open your mouth you can sing with us. You won’t have to sing alone."
"I love knowing that tonight is choir night, a chance to express myself through singing – something I thought I would never be able to do"
"The choir has given me the confidence to sing in public, which I never thought I could do."
"I also joined because Carol Grimes is our teacher, and I love her personality, and the choice of songs, which is mostly jazz, blues and the American songbook."
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