Riding the Wave

I have never surfed in my life and I think I can safely cross that off my bucket list. But I admire a sport that depends upon following the flow of the natural world for success. No mechanical devices pedaling uphill nor fossil-fueled boosts to move from one place to another. Just reading the break of the wave and trying to— well, surf— its momentum. 

 

Again, I’m no scientist, but I imagine a whole ocean behind that one brief moment of the wave’s breaking, all sorts of currents feeding into that split-second crash. And these folks with a simple board figuring out how to navigate it all for that thrill of the perfect ride. 

 

Here I am back in my old school. Some five weeks ago, a week teaching my colleague James’ classes and now another week with Sofia’s students. The same pleasure of making music, singing songs and dancing dances with kids of all ages (well, 3 to 14) who are well prepared to do it all competently, joyfully and often, expertly. 7^th graders who can master the basics of Pachelbell’s canon complete with their own improvised/composed variations in a mere two classes. 3^rd graders who can learn a Serbian song through solfege, improvise dynamic movements with partners and then figure out how to play it on xylophones. In one class. 4^th graders who can learn three partner folk-dance mixers without a single moment fussing about holding hands or which partner they got. Preschoolers singing songs about turkeys, ducks, chickens, potatoes and rutabagas with great delight, elementary kids singing with passion This Land Is Your Land while looking at slides of a new government that is more diverse than at any time in our 250-year history, singing America the Beautiful and meaning it, My Country Tis of Theeand remembering Martin Luther King’s reference that it’s time to let freedom ring. And then go effortlessly from the profound to the silly as we sang Barnyard Dance where the vegetables hold a late-night party. 

I imagine all of this made possible by the 51-year ocean of the music program that I started in 1975 still going on as strong as ever and allowing me to come back to sub and keep surfing the wave of that history. Without wiping out!

May it keep flowing!

1968

All night long, those mysterious dream voices insisted that my next Blogpost title be “1968.” In the dream, I kept asking, “Why?” But without saying it directly, the voices said, “That’s your job to find out.”

 

So here I am. 1968. Most definitely, a significant year in our history. Without looking up a thing, I already know at least four major events: 

• The assassination of Martin Luther King.

• The assassination of Bobby Kennedy. 

• The escalation of the Vietnam War.

• The riots at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. 

• Nixon beats Humphrey in Presidential election

 

 

Then more with a little online help to remind me: 

            • Student protests in Paris

• Mexico City Olympics and Tommy Smith and John Carlos stripped of gold and silver medals for raising the Black Power in the ceremony.

• Bob Beamon breaks long jump record by over two feet!

• Helen Keller/ John Steinbeck die

 

In popular music: 

            • Beatles release Hey Jude single and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club 

              Band album

            • Rolling Stones release Beggars Banquet

• Band Led Zeppelin / Crosby, Stills and Nash are formed

            • Last concert by the Cream/ Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the 

               Holding Company. 

 

In jazz: 

            • Miles Davis ablums: Filles de Kilimanjaro/ Nefertiti/ Miles in the Sky

            • Chick Corea: Now He Sings, Now He Sobs

            • Herbie Hancock: Speak Like a Child

            • Wes Montgomery dies

 

In movies: 

            • 2001: A Space Odyssey

            • Funny Girl

            • Bullitt

            • Rosemary’s Baby

            • The Odd Couple

            • The Lion in Winter

 

In television: 

• Mr. Rogers first airing.

• Andy Griffith Show last airing

 

And so on. If you’re in my generation, these iconic moments stored in your cellular memory will kick up, for better or worse. I turned 17 in July of that year, finishing my junior year in high school and beginning my senior. All of 

that was forming my future self-to-be, stirring my outrage about social injustice, confirming the insanity of war and racism, confirming the importance of speaking out and showing up, while also noting the end of my Andy Griffith Show innocence and at the time, dismissing Mister Roger’s naiveté, and later, admiring so much his integrity and attempt to sow seeds of kindness in the next generation of children. 

 

Unfortunately, this lifelong happen of simultaneously living and reflecting (through writing) my life hadn’t kicked in yet. It wouldn’t until college. So except for one article in my high school newspaper, I don’t have much evidence of my emerging values of the time. Heck, I have no idea what I did that summer between junior and senior year. Not only no journal entries, but no photos either. Oh, well. No problem, except it doesn’t help provide any clues as to why my dream insisted on 1968. 

The least I can say is this. It was a turbulent time and a time of planting seeds for great change. Change that I felt had blossomed in necessary ways and pushed the moral arc towards justice, followed by the shock of the last ten years. But as noted in the post Last Gasp, there indeed has been signs that we’re finally learning what we need to learn in spite of all the media spin which helps perpetuate the toxic narratives and practices. Perhaps that was the point? 

The Full Dimension of Loss

It was a near-perfect homecoming. Back to my familiar zazen pillow and oatmeal breakfast. The pleasure of unpacking. The delight of shopping at Trader Joe’s. A lunchtime phone conversation with my daughter in Portland. Then off to get a haircut, take a new bus to my daughter’s house in San Francisco and a lovely walk in McLaren Park near her house.

 

That’s where we stumbled into a Day of the Dead celebration and I marveled at the beautiful tributes to loved ones passed on. (see photos). Here is a culture that knows how to properly mourn the dead, with such care, attention and artistry. No mass formula or pre-made bought altars, but each one unique and personal. The use of different colored seeds and flowers connecting the design with the simple bounties of the natural world alongside food, candles, stones, photos of the deceased, sometimes clothes they wore and more. 

 

I’ve had the privilege of attending funerals in Ghana and Bali, where it’s music and dance that carry the full dimension of loss, its heartbreaking sorrow and great joy that you had the good fortune to share life with the person who has passed on. Alongside the New Orleans funerals (which I’ve only seen on film, but not attended live), dynamic, soul-stirring music and dance that touch the depths of emotion and allow all gathered together to feel it all down to their bones. No polite little sermons with finger food, but life at its most raw and vibrant. 

 

This a bit on my mind I as just attended the Memory Hour at the recent Orff Conference honoring six Orff teachers who passed on this year, each one with whom I had some kind of contact. Most were five or ten years on either side of my age. The people who spoke about them were sincere and tender, speaking often with cracking voices and some appropriate tears and that felt right. 

But for somebody (me) so deeply invested in ritual and wanting to rip the façade off of polite society when the occasion calls for wailing and exulting, it just didn’t feel wholly right. I prefer flowing tears that gush so forcefully that you don’t look good, alongside belly laughter and tender silences. If anybody present there reads this, please know none of this is a personal criticism. 

 

But the lighting was wrong, the sterile hotel room was wrong, the random round tables with people sitting with backs to others was wrong, the speeches read from phones was wrong, the sight-read canons that fell short of music’s fuller possibility was wrong. I know at least one of the departed had a deeper three-hour ceremony held elsewhere and I imagine and hope the others did as well. But to try to hold such momentous passings in this hour-long container in the brightly lit room just fell so short of the artistry grief deserves that it made me wonder if it’s worth doing at all. When we do these things too casually and then rush out to the next workshop, I imagine the Spirit of the departed feels confused and disappointed. In some traditions, they believe that it is the depth of the laughter and tears and music and dance and attention that helps carry the dead person's spirit across to the land where their ancestors await them with open arms. Funerals and memorial services are partly to help those left behind bear up, but in these traditions, they also help the one who passed on complete the journey to the Land of the Ancestors. I don't think our little hour got them too far on that trip.

 

Again, I know (and hope) that memorial services elsewhere held the deeper dimension, but it just makes me wonder if we could do these things differently at future Orff Conferences. Devote a longer time to make Day of the Dead style altars, sing the songs or dance the dances our departed colleagues loved, with depth and gusto, unleash the full storm of our feelings within the artistic containers that allow us to feel the full dimension of loss. 

 

Just a thought.

Dancing Lessons from God

 

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.“ 

                                       — Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle

 

The last day of both the Orff Conference and the end of my three-week Orff-tour arrived. Two excellent workshops from students of mine, a Memory Hour for five departed Orff colleagues, a talk with two other teachers who trained at the SF Orff Course and I’m at the Richmond Airport ready to wing home. 

 

Thought today how in-between workshops, I’d wander the halls, stop in at the Exhibits, decide to check it on the lunch situation, just randomly (apparently) following my own footsteps  and without fail, running into—with no previous appointment— someone I either needed to talk with or simply was delighted to talk with or both. I got the feeling that I was following some higher power’s dance steps that made such meetings both necessary and inevitable. 

 

It helps that I know so many people, people who studied with me at the SF Levels training or New Orleans/ Memphis Jazz Courses or Orff Afrique in Ghana. People who had attended my workshops over these many years of Conferences or met me at a Chapter workshop or read my books or listened to my podcast etc. etc. People who were fellow teacher-trainers who I saw each year at these Conferences. And in just about every case, a brief profound connection far beyond the casual “How’s it going?”

 

Just another affirmation that when you let go of over-planning and trust serendipity, just wandering through a Convention Center can indeed feel like “dancing lessons from God.” Vonnegut’s book creates a religion called Bokonism, whose adherents embrace spontaneous, strange, or unplanned journeys with a sense of playful surrender. Even if they feel clumsy or unsure of the steps at first, they lean into the chaotic rhythm of life. 

Time and again, I feel the wisdom and pleasure of this approach to life. Of course, I also plan a lot and that’s its own necessity and pleasure. But like wandering through a bookstore and stumbling on the perfect book, I love the feeling of just following my feet. At this Conference, it led to so many connections and re-connections, pleasures of the past remembered, seeds of the future sown. Selfies to send to people we know in common, talks that reveal that we indeed know some people in common. Often the sense that a mere few minute conversation says precisely the things we both need to hear and consider.

 

Soon back to the routine of my familiar home life, but already not routine as I sub back at my old school this week and go on a Men’s Group routine the next week and drive to Portland for Thanksgiving the next week. Not the best for a settled rhythm, but the variety that feels like I’m continuing my traveling, doing the things I love with the people I love. 

 

Thanks for it all!

All in the Family

I have often felt like people in other countries where I teach— Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Spain, Thailand, China and many others—seem to get me, appreciate what I have to offer, describe profoundly what resonates with them far beyond the superficial and off-the-point, “You’re awesome!”

 

Fresh from such articulate enthusiasm in Greece, Turkey and England, I wondered if coming to the annual American Orff Conference might feel like a bit of a let-down. Some of this is connected to my constant disappointment in American people as evidenced in voting patterns throughout my life and especially the last ten years. Some of it is holding my fellow citizens to a higher standard because we share, after all, the same homeland. Some of it is certain real national characteristics—the world as one big shopping mall and life as endless and often pointless consumption— leak in everywhere. Including the way we think about education in general and teaching music in particular. Some is the felt presence of all the ghosts wandering about because we have refused to own our barbarous past and properly grieve our ancestors’ errors. Some is our naïve and dangerous faith that technology will save us, The Jetsons our sad vision of Utopia. The list is long. 

 

In my home organization of the American Orff Schulwerk Association, I’ve had a long and complicated relationship that truth be told, many others have probably felt as well. As I once said in an interview, “AOSA is a home with a family feeling and also a family’s dysfunction— I’ve at once felt like the ignored or misunderstood kid, the rebellious teenager, the betrayed husband, the beloved father, the weird uncle, the respected grandfather. But in the end, AOSA is the home in the way that Robert Frost says it in his poem The Death of the Hired Man: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’”

 

Family indeed. We all have to come to grips with the family we land in, whether we think it was some deep karmic choice inextricably twisted into our life’s story or some random accident of birth. I remember lying in a bed in Java, Indonesia, a half century ago with gamelan music playing outside the gates and then listening to a cassette tape of Art Tatum playing a jazz standard and knowing that no matter how much I appreciate the beauties of “the other,” this was my home and had me dreaming of sitting at the Thanksgiving table. 

 

After the miracle of the refreshing waters of the blue tsunami, washing away for the moment all the disappointments and betrayals and bad choices and the illusion of red and blue states, I feel renewed faith in and love for my family. Both fellow Americans and fellow American Orff teachers. As I walk the halls of the conference, I hug many of the old timers, some of whom look me in the eye and say unabashedly, “I love you.” And I can sincerely reply, “Back atcha!” And others I don’t know stop me in the hall to express appreciation for my podcast or movie or books or workshop I taught years ago that they attended. I often feel that my role has been to hold our collective feet to the fire of Orff and Keetman’s vision and that has made some uncomfortable. And so I bounce back and forth between outcast and respected leader. This conference I felt the respect and appreciation coming through from others and from me to them. That sense that we’re all doing our best to do our best, even as we all can get pulled off the path into the power-point screens, the surface material, the confining rubrics, the shopping mentality, the obsession with making everyone feel “safe” at the expense of being properly challenged. I hope to continue to model resistance to those bewitching sirens and invite others to do the same. But at least for now, coming from a place of mutual appreciation and respect. 

 

It’s a good feeling as I turn to the last day of my 43^rd Conference. Viva, viva, la musica! 

Last Gasp

The history of the country which has largely been ignored in schools and then recently banned is a simple story of white supremacy married to patriarchy and unchecked capitalist greed (need one word here!) that purposefully puts profit over people. Our wealth and power has been built entirely on decimating the original inhabitants who caretook the land we came to ravage and pillage, the stolen labor force who did the work for free, the women who raised the kids and served the meals and kept the houses so husbands could go do their work of systemic brutalization of people and the land, the immigrants who brought energy and culture and great food and great music and so much more. 

With Native Americans banned to reservations, enslaved blacks doing the unpaid labor of providing cotton, sugar, tobacco and such and then the poorly paid labor of raising white children, working in our factories, fighting our wars, the women deemed the property of their husbands and nursing the sick and teaching the young, the working class doing the backbreaking and dangerous work while bosses got rich, etc. etc. and etc. All of them marginalized, kept out of positions of power and beaten down and stuck with labels of lazy, shiftless, criminal, while white men born on third base kept boasting about hitting a triple. It’s a sad, sad story and as long as its sustaining narratives were kept hidden, untaught, banned, spun by Fox news to gullible consumers, nothing would ever change. 

 

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron said, “Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to learn.” The rise of Trump and Trumpism showed clearly that Obama’s victory did not drive the lesson home deeply enough into the psyche of the American people and the Toddler King’s resurgence in 2024 showed how very, very far we still had to go. Those Americans with still functioning brain cells, a heart capable of feeling and a conscience capable of recognizing immorality and indecency were baffled that we seem to have learned nothing. 

 

Until now. We just had to give the Repugnatins enough rope to hang themselves before we awakened out of our stupor and as the recent election shows, that’s what seemed to turn the tide. This election represented the last gasp of a dying animal whose time for extinction has finally come. 

 

Of course, not to be naïve. The dinosaurs will double down and re-group to spin their narrative in new ways to brainwash a population not wholly capable of critical thinking and caring kindness. I’m not imagining any moral re-awakening of conscience of people and parties who spent every minute armoring themselves against facing their own failings and pointing all their guns outward at the evil villians-du-jour out to perform trans operations on innocent schoolchildren.

 

But just perhaps the public will stop drinking that Kool Aid. The election results clearly point to that. All those marginalized groups mentioned in the first paragraph now have a seat—many seats!— at the table. (see below)

 

And I, for one, welcome them heartily. Of course, an ethnic or gender or sexual identity doesn’t automatically guarantee good-hearted, clear-thinking, morally upright people (ie, the recent news about Cesar Chavez), but it clearly breaks the stranglehold of white privileged males who time and time again have shown their incapacity to care about others and just be decent human beings. 

 

To paraphrase Wynton Marsalis’ quote: “Jazz is what America could become if it ever became itself.”— “This is what American could become—has just now become— when it matches the promise of ‘all are created equal’ with the opportunity of all American citizens to sit together and make the dream real.”

 

Here are some leaders of our new country. Let’s go, America!!

Relief

Amongst a thousand other feelings, it is a great relief to not have to keep trying to explain the inexplicable to friends in other lands when they ask, “WTF, America?!!!! How can so many choose to shoot themselves in the foot—again!— and then wonder why they have to limp through a decimated land?” Of course, I’ve had no easy answer and have been exhausted from trying to analyze and make sense of that which makes no sense whatsoever. Beyond the great effectiveness of Fox News brainwashing and propaganda that make the old Russian techniques seem like child’s play. 

 

But I do always point the camera away from the news my friends abroad get to the news they don’t— the extraordinary numbers who turned up for all the No Kings Rallies, the courage of the Minnesotans, the reality that just about every single person I know personally—and that includes the thousands of music teachers in every state— have been aghast as they are. And a little reminder that the people are not their government. As my friends in Turkey, China, Brazil before a few weeks ago, Venezuela and beyond are well aware.

 

But now. How proud I felt to re-enter my land at the Washington Dulles Airport, with my U.S. passport in hand without shame, a land I can now re-claim as something worthy and indeed, inspiring. We stood up, spoke out, organized, showed up to vote— and the result is spectacular. The air we breathe feels refreshed like it is after a thunderstorm and everything feels different. The bad guys—and gals— are on retreat and though we can’t relax, knowing they will regroup to cause more havoc, we are prepared. 

 

And who knows? Maybe some of them will finally realize that it’s more fun to love than hate, to be kind than cruel, less exhausting to keep all the walls up and fears flowing than just relax and welcome each other. We can’t be naïve, but we can hope to bring them around. 

 

Meanwhile, it’s 4:30 in the morning at the home of my lifetime buddy and colleague, Rick Layton and even in the slight fog of almost 24 hours awake last night, such a delight to catch up. This morning off to my 43^rd Orff Conference and looking forward to the embraces with old and new friends to share the relief and exultation. Life is sweet.