When Oprah Winfrey wanted to learn how to sing, she did what top singers in the Chicago area have been doing for the past three decades: She called Doug Susu-Mago.
The 60-year-old whom many call the Chicago area’s leading voice trainer works out of a modest office in downtown Evanston. Susu-Mago Vocal Studio, 636 Church St., is the size of a walk-in closet and few Evanston residents even know it’s there. And Susu-Mago likes it that way.
“I don’t like notoriety. I don’t need to keep a higher profile,” Susu-Mago said. “I’ve got more work than I can actually do.”
That work included training Winfrey after she decided in the late 1990’s to sing the theme song to her TV show. Though Susu-Mago only worked with her for an hour and a half, Winfrey talked about him extensively on her program.
“It was really quite a spectacular instrument,” Susu-Mago said, referring to Winfrey’s voice. “I told her if she ever wanted to give up the TV gig, she would be a good singer.”
Susu-Mago knows a thing or two about singers. Chicago resident Gwen Pippin has studied with Susu-Mago for 25 years, both as a student and as a professional singer. She said Susu-Mago’s knowledge has kept her coming back as a student.
“He’s an expert with the voice. He understands the physiology of the voice,” said Pippin. “He understands how to use it.”
Susu-Mago has been building his interest and expertise ever since high school.
Growing up in Hawaii, he fell in love with opera in 9th grade. In 1961 he attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. He took a class trip to Austria and decided he didn’t want to come home. So he stayed and enrolled at the Mozarteum, a music university in Salzburg, Austria. But the singing soon took a toll on his voice.
“I was in really deep vocal trouble and didn’t realize it,” Susu-Mago recalls. “I had lost a good portion of my range. I was constantly suffering from raw throats, from hoarseness and fatigue.”
Susu-Mago arrived in Chicago in 1966 and discovered a way to heal his damaged voice. A voice teacher introduced him to the Douglas Stanley Method, a singing technique that emphasizes control of voice and breathing muscles.
With his voice healed, Susu-Mago started teaching vocal performance at Kendall College in Evanston in 1971. But soon he was teaching more students on the side than in class, so in 1973 he opened his own studio near the Dempster El station.
Susu-Mago’s unique application of the Stanley Method helped draw students to his studio. To better utilize the method, he sometimes physically manipulates his students’ tongue muscles using a specially designed instrument in a technique he lightheartedly calls “poking and prodding.”
“You show the muscles in slow motion or very clumsily what they should be doing and then step back,” Susu-Mago said. “Anybody who uses (the Stanley Method) well does well by people who work with him.”
Nijole Sparkis remembers working with Susu-Mago in the 1970s when she was studying music at DePaul University in Chicago. She said the Stanley Method did miracles for her. It increased her vocal range from one to four octaves and helped her sing arias.
“Doug Susu-Mago did more for me than all of the teachers I’ve studied with combined,” said Sparkis, now a professional singer in Los Angeles. “After he manipulated my tongue, my voice would feel completely different coming out.”
As his students developed careers and moved around the country, Susu-Mago resolved to stay as close to them as he could.
In 1980 he opened a studio in Los Angeles, where Sparkis worked with him for some time. A decade later, he expanded into Nashville, Tenn. When he visits there, his students greet him at the airport.
“I pretty much established myself as one of the best in (Chicago),” Susu-Mago said. “It was the idea of seeing whether I can establish myself in another location.”
Still, Susu-Mago, a resident of Highland Park, Ill., spends most of his time working in downtown Evanston, where he moved the studio in 1997. He has cut back visits to Nashville to only once every two months, but he takes frequent trips to Los Angeles, about once every two weeks.
Despite frequent praise and prestigious studios around the country, Susu-Mago manages to keep a low profile. He doesn’t advertise. He only accepts new students if his existing students recommend them. Even as far back as the late 1970s, Sparkis was put on his waiting list and waited for a year to work with Susu-Mago.
“For me, it doesn’t feel important to walk into a room and have people say, ‘Whoa, that’s him,'” Susu-Mago said. “On the rare occasion that it happens, it makes me feel uncomfortable.”
Susu-Mago is hoping to get his message through a book he published earlier this year. “Freeing the Voice from the Left Brain, Vol. 1: Song Without Words” comes with a CD and explores the relationship between the mind and the voice. Susu-Mago also has delved into composing music. For Father’s Day in 2000, he wrote a choral work for 40 voices that was performed in the First Congregational Church of Evanston.
Teaching people who are having trouble with their voices, however, remains Susu-Mago’s passion. Despite his age, he has no plans to retire any time soon.
“To be able to say to someone, ‘I can get you out of this mess,’ it’s more satisfying than standing on stage and singing in front of the public,” he said.
