Hail to the Keith!

I first met Keith Terry sometime around 1984. Orff colleague Maddie Hogan, seeing my interest in body percussion, introduced us and it was one of those life-changing meetings. I’d like to think for both of us in some ways, because as I began to incorporate Keith’s Body Music in my teaching with kids and workshops with adults, I also connected him with the Orff world and opened up many opportunities for him to teach music teachers far and wide. 

 

Last night, I had the supreme pleasure of viewing the film Through the Body made about his life’s work. A tall order, but filmmaker Andrew Reissiger did a superb job in capturing the extraordinary outreach Keith achieved when he produced the first International Body Music Festival in San Francisco in 2008 and went on to produce some ten more in the SF Bay Area/ Sao Paolo, Brazil/ Istanbul, Turkey/ Paris, France/ Athens, Greece/ Ubud, Bali/ Dzodze, Ghana/ Quebec, Canada. An extraordinary gathering of people worldwide who take pleasure in performing vibrant rhythms on their bodies, combined with movement, vocal percussion and song. 

 

To see Black and White and Asian Americans on stage with Brazilian, French, Spanish, Cuban, Greek, Turkish, South African, Ghanaian, Balinese and yet more folks worldwide, so joyfully engaged and connected in both improvised and composed music for the body and voice is to witness the world as we —well, most of us—would wish it to be. And Keith was the connecting link in it all.

 

During the question/answer time following the film, I paid homage to the Keith with these comments:

 

Keith, when I met you over 40 years ago, I was told that someone asked your young daughter what her Dad did. And she replied without hesitation, “Oh, he hits himself all over his body while dancing on top of bubblewrap.” And bless you, that’s exactly what you’ve continued to do these last four decades and the world is richer for it. There’s a William Stafford poem called The Way It Is:

 

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

And you never have. While all the world and your mortgage payments were trying to convince you to get a real job, you held on to that thread that was given to you and never once let it go. That takes great courage and dedication and perseverance. And as if that wasn’t enough, you found people who held similar threads and became the master weaver bringing them together in the extraordinary tapestry of the International Body Music Festival. Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dream-coat would have been jealous of your superior garment that emerged. 

 

You are clearly a master of childlike play (see bubblewrap above) combined with  exquisite artistry earned through hours and hours of practicing your craft. A  craft with many ancestors in the world’s body percussion practices, but none that synthesized the art form into a full-blown Body Music. That was you entering the forest where there was no path and trailblazing a way to a new art form. 

 

But as if that weren’t enough, you also had to sacrifice hours when you could have been composing, playing, choreographing, performing, to the nitty-gritty details of actually producing a Festival. Contacting all the artists, dealing with those gnarly Visa issues, coordinating housing and airport pick-ups and meals, finding venues for performance, the thousand and one tasks of organization, including finding the right helpers to assist you in this mammoth undertaking. And mind you, not as a one-time Festival but one produced year after year—and in different countries at that! How you did that all is simply mind-boggling, but at the root is the lifelong commitment to hold on to that thread and keep weaving it into the next yard of fabric, doing “whatever it takes.” 

 

Then there’s the merch! CD’s, books, DVD’s that need to be made, stored, advertised, sold. All the time being a devoted husband, father and son taking care of your aging Mom. And taking care of yourself amidst many health challenges. Hollywood keeps distracting us with their stupid pantheon of Superheroes and completely ignores the “superpowers” of people like you and all the marvelous people you’ve gathered. 

 

No one should ever play the song Hail to the Chief these days when that Chief is using his power to wreak such harm, hurt and havoc. But I believe your hard-earned spiritual authority far exceeds his puny political authority. You are the Chief of Body Music Nation, using your talent and power in service of life and love. And so forget that lame old Hail to the Chief song played by a military band. When you enter a room, all should play Hail to the Keith! with a raucous explosion of rhythms on the body performed by the zany, wild, troublemakers-in-school who spend their days making weird sounds with their mouth and hands. May it be so!!