SAIGON KICK vocalist Matt Kramer recently spoke with John Buchanan at Aventura Magazine about his career as a vocal coach. An excerpt from the story is available below:

Twenty years ago, 21-year-old Matt Kramer reigned as a newly minted rock star—the co-founder of and lead singer in the band Saigon Kick.

Today, he has reinvented himself as a master voice coach and career development consultant, with a clientele that includes aspiring recording artists as well as doctors who just want to do better on karaoke night. “My oldest student is 70,” says Kramer, proprietor of North Miami Beach-based Kramer Voice Company. “He’s a doctor who sings Mexican ranchera, a traditional form of music that dates back to the Mexican Revolution.”

Kramer’s students include raw beginners as young as 10 years old and Russian pop stars who fly in to be tutored in his uniquely pragmatic technique, which can teach virtually anyone to sing competently. “Last December,” he says, “I even trained the Miami Dolphins for a playoff and Super Bowl TV commercial so they could sing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’”

Since childhood, Kramer has enjoyed a distinct and rare musical advantage. His mother was a renowned opera singer who went on to become an acclaimed vocal coach. “I had spent my childhood watching her get trained by the greatest maestros in the world, the old schoolteachers who are long gone now,” he says. “They learned in Italy and were the finest voice trainers ever. There aren’t many left today of that caliber. And just sweeping up around the studio or listening against the wall, I was able to learn about and understand training at that level. And that has always been inside me.”

What exactly is so unique about his method now?

“Everything,” he says, with a laugh. “Because I grew up in a traditional opera-teaching environment and my mother later taught in a way she called her ‘holistic method’—including bringing in yoga breathing back in the 1960s—I had that to refer back to and draw on.”

As a result, he questioned the way modern voice lessons were doled out. “I always had a problem with how vague voice lessons really are,” he says. “And the more I researched it, the more I learned how vocal teachers throw around words, like diaphragm. If a student doesn’t really understand what that actually means, they get frustrated very quickly.”

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As previously reported, Kramer recently released his second book of poetry, entitled A Book Of Poems From The Smallest Of Towns. Kramer recently spoke with BW&BK; scribe Carl Begai about the book; an excerpt from the story is available below:

Kramer unwittingly borrowed a page from DEVIN TOWNSEND's recently executed assault, in which he wrote four albums simultaneously – each one completely different from its partners – and released them over a period of two years. Then again, Kramer has been chipping away at his five book project since 2007, so maybe Townsend is a mind-reader. Kramer’s second volume, A Book Of Poems From The Smallest Of Towns, is even more of a surprise than An American Profit.

“This new book is just my time, a lot of it spent in Nebraska,” Kramer reveals. “I went to Nebraska and stayed at a cottage. I spent a lot of time there, took many vacations there with family, and it just turned out that I wrote and wrote and kept on going. Not just about my surroundings, but about other small towns that I love as well. I was in this town of 340 people, and it’s a throwback to yesterday that is just so unique and different and charming. I made the best of it, I wrote about it, and made a charming little book. I don’t think I’ll ever put out something like this again, and I really don’t know how it came out of me. It’s a really cool book, and it doesn’t talk about fucking, or bucking religion. I’m always creating some kind of lyrical trouble, but this book doesn’t do that (laughs).”

“It was a really great experience for me – and I’ve told you this before – because it was me being totally out of my shoes. I was able to step back from me and have a snicker like everybody else does, and see where I’m at. It allowed me to see that there are other roads I can take, which is very important. I see a lot of guys, my colleagues, travelling the same old roads and coming across the same footprints; I don’t know if that’s healthy. I think you should do other things, not just the same old stuff.”

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A Book Of Poems From The Smallest Of Towns is now available via www.mattkramer.net. Kramer's first poetry book, An American Profit, is available below.