KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — You might say he’s a member of a `barber-ship’ quartet.

Most days, Canadian Navy Lt. Brendan Ryan has his hands full working out of the OCCP (Operational Co-ordination Centre — Provincial) attached to the governor’s palace in Kandahar city.
In his off hours, however, he pursues his true passion — singing barbershop.

“Back in 1991, I went to a CBC reunion at the station in St. John’s and I saw a quartet on the stage there.

They had acts from the past and that sort of thing and there was a quartet on the stage and I was just awestruck listening to these guys,” said Ryan, a native of St. John’s, NL.

“They told me a little bit about it and gave me a business card, and then about a year later I just showed up at a practice one day — and have been involved ever since.”

“I come from a pretty musical family,” Ryan chuckled. ”It’s in the blood.”

There are any number of places a more typical musician would be able to ply his trade at Canada’s myriad bases in southern Afghanistan. Not so for Ryan.

“Here, it’s difficult — all you can do is go over your music. We have a website we put all of our written music on there,” he said. “There’s some learning tracks, so you can sing along with that stuff and learn new music off the sound tracks.”

Ryan is a member of the Ottawa-based Capital City Chorus, which competed at an international championship put on by the Barbershop Harmony Society in Nashville last June. There are barbershop quartets and barbershop choruses, which can have as few as a dozen singers and as many as 150.

Barbershop is a form of a cappella, or unaccompanied vocal music, characterized by consonant four-part chords for every melody note. Each of the four parts has its own role. Generally, the lead sings the melody, the tenor harmonizes above the melody, the bass sings the lowest harmonizing notes, and the baritone completes the chord.

It’s estimated about 80,000 people embrace it as a hobby worldwide.

Although many people equate barbershop with old ditties such as `Down by the Old Mill Stream’ and `Let Me Call You Sweetheart,’ it’s not like that any more, Ryan said.

“It’s come a long way,” he said. “You’re no longer singing stuff from the 1920s or 1930s — you’re singing stuff that’s from about two years ago.”

The Capital City Chorus, which has about 100 members, finished 13th out of 18th at the Nashville competition after earning the right to go by winning Ontario first. And while Ryan was the only active military participant, he said there’s a deep tradition of retired soldiers in barbershop.

Ryan admitted he has a hard time limiting himself to a single group of partners.

“I can sing a couple of parts — tenor, lead, baritone. It’s like whatever quartet needs me at the time.” In fact, said Ryan, there’s a less-than-savoury term used to describe someone who can sing all the different parts.

“I’m a barbershop slut,” he laughed.