Not Whistling Dixie

Not Whistling Dixie

Pro whistler Jason Victor Serinus says it’s all about the breath.

Perfecting your whistling technique is usually an indication that you’ve got a little too much free time on your hands—that is, unless you’re Jason Victor Serinus, professional whistler and music critic. While not a full-time job, whistling has afforded Serinus his share of paying gigs over the years. He’s portrayed the song of the otherwise mute Woodstock of Peanuts fame, for movies and commercials. In the late ’70s Serinus appeared on the Tonight Show where he staved off then-guest host David Letterman’s attempts to derail his act. A judge at the International Whistlers Convention, Serinus, is also available for weddings and private parties. Serinus, 62, claims he came out of the womb whistling Brahms’ “Cradle Song,” and as a teenager warbled along with his father’s opera albums. Dubbed “The Pavarotti of the Pucker” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Serinus even changed his name to reflect his interest in whistling (Serinus is a genus of songbirds that includes canaries). As a public service to those who want to improve their technique, I managed to get the Oakland-based Serinus on the blower recently to discuss the finer points of the art form.

Paul Kilduff: Can you take a non-whistler and in one lesson get him to whistle? Are there any secrets you can pass along to the pucker-impaired?

Jason Victor Serinus: The answer is yes and no. I once read that there was a teacher who claimed that she could teach anyone to whistle; however, that included wolf-whistling, hand-whistling, fingers in your mouth and probably, if she was really desperate, sticking a blade of grass between your two thumbs or something. We all have physical limitations, as it were, and some people simply don’t have an embouchure that works for whistling. I look at some people and when they put their lips together there are two holes rather than one.

I know people say anybody can sing, but the truth is some people can’t do it. And they’re never going to be able to. Beyond the physical limitations there are realities. . . people tend not to work at whistling when it’s not in general social favor. As a result, an ability that really could be strengthened is not.

So what I want to do is talk to people about their breath, about their determination, about their focus. My experience has been that anybody I’ve worked with who can even make a sound, one note or something, ends up doing better. For example a lot of people will tell me “I can’t whistle.” And I say “Really? Let me hear,” and they go [makes faint whistling sound]. I go, “Uh, you can’t whistle and you just whistled five notes.” They go, “Oh” and there’s this certain recognition. People need validation for what they can do right here and now. And once you first accept what you already can do, then you can move forward. You can begin to expand your range.

PK: Sounds like whistlers may suffer an inferiority complex right up or down there with kazoo players, since it’s not necessarily encouraged.

JS: Yes, down there. Well, I’m not going to lump whistling in with the kazoo. The only thing anyone has to go by is what they’ve heard of whistling in the past. There’s a moderated whistler’s discussion group on Yahoo called “Orawhistle.” And there was a discussion recently about how one person lost a TV commercial because his whistling was too high-class. Most people expect someone who whistles professionally to do variations on “Dixie.” And here I am doing Puccini and doing Mozart and people cry. I once had two women who hired me to perform in their house because they got embarrassed when I would whistle at street fairs because they’d break down crying.

PK: Jeez, I’m tearing up just imagining that.

JS: There is an ability of someone who really treats whistling as an art form to touch the heart in very, very fundamental ways.

PK: What happens in the workshops? Do you do a tonsillectomy on everyone first?

JS: I wing it. I cannot predict exactly what’s going to happen. I have no script. It’s spontaneous. But we can expect that I will ask people to stand up and whistle for everyone and we’ll work together.

PK: Sounds like you’ll do a quick assessment on where everyone’s at, warble-wise, and go from there. Are there any little techniques you want people to latch onto so they’ll grow as whistlers?

JS: Fundamentally I’m going to work with the breath. Breath is life. And breath is the life of a whistler. And you can’t sing a phrase, you can’t whistle a tune without focusing the breath. It’s the fundamental source of life and it’s also the fundamental source of your sound. And because our society basically does not teach people how to breathe and often restricts breathing, people have remarkable breakthroughs very fast when they start working with the breath.

PK: What do you advise? Whistle from your diaphragm?

JS: Well, yeah.

PK: Should they stand up, too?

JS: Well, I do. But if you commit the diaphragm and kind of free things, you can do it just as well sitting down. I mean, for readers who know opera, we have all these Toscas who lie on their bellies, some of them having bellies so large that one can’t imagine them lying there and they sing “Vissi d’arte.” Or they lie on their backs. I’ve seen opera singers lying on a bed which is on a raked stage, so their head is down with part of their body draped over the bed singing gloriously. So you simply learn how to control the diaphragm no matter where you’re at.

PK: Any quick tips for people who don’t even know what or where their diaphragm is?

JS: Go take a yoga breathing class. That’s my quick tip. Because if you have no idea what the diaphragm is and you’re alive, which means you’re using it, then it is time to bring some consciousness into your body because your entire life can change when you start breathing deeply.

PK: Breathe deeply, OK. Got that. Hopefully, your lips pressed together in an O-shape will create only one hole. Anything else we need to know?

JS: There’s this indescribable thing called musicality. There are two things that people say to me when they hear me whistle. Usually with some amazement they go, “You’re so musical.” Number two, they start talking about my voice. And then they correct themselves and they say, “your whistle.” And I say, “No, you’re right to begin with.” I use it as though it were my voice.

I’m not saying that most whistlers do that—that’s just me. But the musicality thing is key and I’m not convinced that musicality is something you can teach, per se. It’s something you can learn or it’s something you have innately. Four-year-old Mozart was musical and he walked to the piano and he started playing. And he started composing music and though it was the music of a child, it had some kind of integrity and some kind of intact expression.

Musicality is about far more than playing the correct note or whistling the correct note. It’s a way of putting notes, phrases, melodies together that achieves some kind of inner communication. It’s a communication that goes beyond the string of notes per se or the sound per se. It’s the reason you like one singer over another or one trumpet player over another. Because there’s something about their musicianship that speaks to you on nonverbal levels.

That’s what music does. Although a lot of music is sung with words, ultimately it communicates things that are beyond words and there are ways that do that that are musical. You can’t achieve musicality unless your instrument is capable of nuance. I want to get people to the place where they can begin to shade their whistling; where they can do things like diminuendo and portamento and change the vibrato and change the tonal envelope.

Barbra Streisand—she walked out there, she was barely 20 years old, and the gal opened her mouth and you went, “holy fucking shit.” I mean, this woman is amazing. Or some of these people you’ll see on these talent shows. Yeah, a lot of them are just like aping one another, but some of them really know to color their voices and to grab an audience and to seize you.

People expect whistlers to whistle incredibly fast and to sound like flutes and do bird-calls and trills and have a grabbag of tricks; you go on these whistling discussion groups and everybody’s talking about, “Well, I’ve now been able to whistle two notes at a time, plus hum, plus do three trills simultaneously and I can also make a fourth trill by wiggling the tip of my nose.” And you go, “Oh, how wonderful. Who cares?”

PK: It sounds like you want people to get in touch with their inner whistler. What about the role of the tongue in whistling?

JS: Well, you’ve got to put it in the right place. If I keep talking too much my tongue will undoubtedly go to the wrong place. It’s very interesting because people analyze where to put the tongue. And I know that voice teachers will spend years teaching people how to raise the palate. How to soften the palate. How to drop this, how to drop that. I never did any of that. I just listened and watched. And I listen and watch more closely now than I did when I was starting out—which was about 37—because I have to work harder. I just turned 62. I have to work harder to do the same things and it’s not easy. I’m paying attention. When you ask me, “Where do you put your tongue?” I have to stop and figure it out. The tongue does move as the lips move as you go up and down the range. The main thing is to let it do what it will do. That’s all I can say.

Overanalyzing it can mess you up. You could try making a note and moving the tongue around various places and discover that if you can’t make a note to begin with, oh, by putting my tongue here I can make a sound. That makes sense to me.

PK: It sounds like lessons from you are not overly technical. You want people to get into the spirit of whistling. Feel the wind passing through their lips. No?

JS: Yeah. I have no idea how many people are going to be there [at his recent workshops]. I don’t know if I’ll have 25 people in my audience or 250. I do have a cassette and CD of my whistling available for sale on my Web site that people can kind of use as models. But I only offer one model.

I just judged the International Whistlers Convention. And I’ve heard every kind of whistler under the sun. For example there’s one man who holds his lip and whistles. He pulls his lip out and whistles. It’s a completely different sound. I have heard people who have a technique that would rival that of Sir James Galway. And I’ve met others who just whistle very simple tunes but in the most lovely manner. So there’s room for all different kinds of techniques and styles. And I think what’s essential is that people simply broaden their expectations for that they can accomplish and what whistling can be.

PK: Self-improvement through whistling?

JS: Well, I’m not ready to write the book, How to Achieve Happiness in Your Love Relationship and Better Sex by Whistling a High C.

PK: What is your range?

JS: My range is a little over two octaves. I hear from people who tell me that they have a three- or four-octave range. And then I go to whistling contests and I hear these people who tell me they have a three- or four-octave range and if I hear those three octaves I hear little sounds that are very musical.

I think it’s more important what you do with whatever range you have and whatever range you can develop because you can expand your range, than how many notes you can hit.

PK: How much professional whistling do you do?

JS: Not much. There is a greater and greater demand for whistlers—especially in commercials and a lot of people are whistling in recordings. I’m still waiting for an ad agency to use me as the whistling operatic pizza delivery-man because opera is one of my fortes.

I whistled Puccini as the voice of Woodstock and I would be the finest whistling pizza-man you could ever imagine.

PK: Is this a part you’ve auditioned for or just an idea you have?

JS: It’s an idea that I’ve held for at least 27 years.

PK: How long have you been puckering up?

JS: Well, the apocryphal story is that I came out of the womb whistling Brahms’ “Cradle Song.” When I was 11, my father brought home a Caruso reissue album. I never cried as a child, I just whistled for my supper. And he put on the Caruso reissue album which I still own and . . . I said, “Daddy, I’ve heard that before.” And he replied, “Yeah, you broke it when you were two.” So it seems that opera was around me at a very early age and it spoke to me at a very, very deep emotional level. And I spent my teenage years walking to school whistling arias.

PK: Are you Italian?

JS: Serinus is not the name I was born with. Serinus is the genus of songbirds of which the canary is a member. I’m someone who basically has kind of renamed himself and reinvented himself any number of times.

PK: So you chose Serinus because of your whistling interest?

JS: Yeah. And by the way, I’ve managed to fold the laundry so this has been a very productive time for me, thank you.

PK: We aim to please.

JS: The largest bird store in San Francisco in the ’70s was the Marina Pet Shop. I knew the manager. I visited her one night and I whistled for her. Everybody kind of looked at me like, you whistle? Who’s this crazy person? And I whistled for her and this amazing thing happened.

She had a parakeet named Azul who stopped flying around the house and landed on my shoulder. There was a quail who ran around on the floor and it sat down at my feet. And all the birds in the cages became silent and she said, “They’re entranced by your whistling. They think you’re a bird. You should have a bird name.” And we went to an ornithological dictionary and came up with Serinus.

PK: How’s whistler’s mother doing?

JS: Well, she really did like my whistling. She didn’t think I’d make a living from it.

PK: Is she still around?

JS: No, she hit her high C and went on her way. My mother was 41 when I was born so it’s not inconceivable that she’d be alive, but at this point she’d be 103.

PK: Do you ever get recognized for being the whistle of Woodstock?

JS: People do recognize me because, amazingly, I still look like I looked when I was on the Tonight Show.

PK: How’d that go?

JS: That was the time—1979—when Johnny Carson was considering leaving and they were trying out other hosts so they had some guy on who’d I never heard before named David Letterman. He was trying to make a name for himself and we all know about David Letterman. And thank God, I really mean this, I didn’t know anything about David Letterman so I had no negative expectations. No matter what David Letterman said, I said what I wanted people to hear.

PK: Was he a smartass with you?

JS: Well, he was trying his best and I just ignored him. If he wanted me to make an ass of myself I’m capable of doing that without his help, but in this particular case it wasn’t what I chose to do.

PK: So Letterman didn’t get your goat?

JS: It worked out just fine which is probably why they didn’t invite me back on, because he couldn’t make a fool of me. It worked real well.

PK: Sounds like you have the right attitude to be a pro whistler, since most people don’t take it too seriously.

JS: A lot of people don’t, but more and more, when I tell people I whistle, and I’m talking about professional musicians, their eyes light up and they go, “Wow, where can I hear you?”

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Suggestions? E-mail Paul Kilduff at PKilduff@sbcglobal.net.
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HEAR JASON WISTLING!
I Dream Of Jeannie
La Canzone

Jason Victor Serinus Vital Stats

Age: 62   |  Birthplace:  New York City, darling
Astrological sign: 
Cancer
First real job: 
Surviving my mother
Favorite pizza topping: 
I don’t eat pizza.

MORE ABOUT JASON:
www.jasonserinus.com

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