SHORT BIO:
Kamile Kapel is a storyteller, an entertainer, a healer, a one woman show. Her songs combine spoken word and singing, accompanying herself on piano and guitar. With a vocal that ranges from lilting to belting, she sings about things like looking for a map for life, meeting strangers and telling them everything, and the desire to heal her guitar teacher. With humour and playfulness, vulnerabity and ballsiness, she helps us to delight in the human travail.
LONG BIO:
One day when Kamile was 8, she saw a piece of paper flying across the gravel playground at her school. She ran after it and caught it. It said “Group Piano Lessons, Wednesdays, 2pm.”
“Mom! Dad! I want to take piano lessons,” she told her parents when she got home. Being cultured, intellectual parents (both with PhD’s in history), who loved the CBC (and having played a little piano themselves, as children), they said yes, and within a week there was a Yamaha upright piano in the living room.
After excelling at group piano lessons (motivated by giant chocolate bars which were the prizes for earning “stars”), Kamile went on to study piano until the end of high school with the brilliant classical pianist, Melinda Coffey. Miss Coffey and music–particularly Chopin and Cat Stevens–were the primary source of creative and spiritual inspiration in an otherwise atheist childhood fraught with dull teachers with whom Kamile was always getting in trouble.
Kamile acted and sang her way through high school (singing “Aquarius” in “Hair”), and studied acting with the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. She majored in English Literature at McGill University for two years before transferring to the more progressive Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wa where she studied and performed experimental theatre.
After earning her BA in Liberal Arts, she joined The Alchemical Theatre in Seattle (an offshoot of The Living Theatre) and moved with them to New York. After a few shows, the theatre company disbanded and Kamile began writing surreal short stories which she read aloud at poetry readings in the East Village.
Kamile returned to Canada to train as a Certified Rebalancer (a kind of holistic bodyworker). Her entry into the healing arts led to a good 20 years of personal growth work which included traveling four times to Osho’s ashram in Poona, India to participate in groups such as “primal de-conditioning”, tantra and meditation.
Kamile took the two year studio acting program at SFU, training each day and acting on the main stage. It wasn’t until her brother died when she was 28, that she realized that songwriting was her true calling.
She staged her song “I am a Victim!” as a musical for the SFU Black Box Theatre Company.
Kamile began performing in what many people perceived as a “one woman show”–telling impromptu stories, gonging Tibetan bells, whispering secretively and then wailing from the depths of her soul. She sang and played her piano at coffee shops, clubs and theatres in Vancouver, eliciting both laughter and tears with her confessional, comedic songs. She performed her one woman show, “Give me that Map!” at the Chutzpah Festival in Vancouver.
For several years, Kamile spent half the year in California, gravitating to a lovely place called Harbin Hotsprings where she discovered the 13th Century poet, Rumi. Inspired to work with the poetry of Rumi, Kamile set his poems to cabaret music, moody ballads, and upbeat pop tunes, creating songs that transported her to a place of deep love and connectedness.
She collaborated with world class multi-instrumentalist Joseph “Pepe” Danza and several of the top musicians in Vancouver in recording Kiss the Ground, an ambitious first album that contains six Rumi poems, one Hafiz poem, and five of Kamile’s lyrics, all set to Kamile’s music, arranged by Pepe Danza.
Kamile had a fabulous CD release party at the grand, Heritage Hall in Vancouver in 2003. There was a full band of Vancouver’s best musicians and 150 people in the audience.
After that, she didn’t quite know what to do. It was out of the question to tour the album with the band so she went back to traveling and studying, performing solo shows along the way and selling her CD off the stage.
She studied jazz piano privately with Bob Murphy, and jazz improvisation and theory at the VCC music school in Vancouver. She studied clowning for four years with Fantastic Space theatre which added to the humour and spontaneous of her performances. Through her work with improvising master teacher, Rhiannon, Julia developed a passion for improvising and documented many of her improvisations on her YOUTUBE channel.
Inspired by her passion for community, Kamile created and managed a communal house called “The Olive Tree” on the East Side of Vancouver for four years. The house became a community hub where Kamile hosted house concerts, “Cuddle Parties” and a meditation/singing night called “Shake! Soup! Sing!”
The house was recently sold and as a result Kamile’s focus has returned to herself and her music.
She is currently working on her second album, “Serendipity.” The singles ”Serendipity, and “Loving Every Day” produced by James Smith, are currently available here. “The Map Song” and “Ordinary Man” produced Paul Wohlstetter are here also and more singles will be added before they are sold as an album.
Kamile is currently taking the “Independent Artists Program” at The Musicians Institute in Hollywood from April – June of 2012, where she will be focusing on singing, songwriting, recording and networking in LA.
