Audio File
John Wilson
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2019

Trefor Davies remembers lessons with Ellis Keeler at the Northern School of Music, 1960s.

Trefor: Ellis Keeler, baritone, who came to the Northern to teach individual singers. And very good. Very good teacher. Knew exactly what you were doing, if you did it wrong. You know, ‘why are you doing so and so?’ in a very resonant baritone voice and I was at one time… I’d finished at the Northern and I was in the [Manchester] College of Education at [Long] Millgate, and I was going for a lesson with him and John Wilson was playing, and so he said ‘why are you singing with a stiff upper-lip Trefor?’, and I said, ‘oh I don’t know’, and John plays horn you see and said ‘have you been playing a brass instrument?’ So I said ‘yes, I’ve got to teach the kids how to do this’, so he said ‘what have you been playing?’ I said ‘I’ve been playing the cornet’. He said ‘play the trombone, it’s a softer embouchure, you won’t…’ and funnily it was, it was very good for me actually.
Heather: Oh fantastic!
T: I don’t play it now but I did. It was the sort of thing that Ellis could pick on right away, ‘you’re not doing this’, or ‘your support isn’t right’, or ‘this isn’t right’, and in a matter of minutes you’d be singing how you should be singing. So he was an excellent teacher.

Part of the #NSM2020 project "A 20/20 Legacy: the centenary of the Northern School of Music" supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.