The Humanitarian Musician

Last night, I had the grand pleasure and great privilege of seeing drummer Herlin Riley perform at Yoshi’s Jazz Club. Thanks to my NOLA Jazz Course coordinator Allen Dejan, I got to meet Herlin in 2019, both as a guest artist in my course and then performing with Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor. His musicianship was astounding, but even more so, his warmth and generosity. I saw him again in San Francisco when he performed with Ahmad Jamal and then came to my school to play for and with the kids. (There’s a short clip of that in The Secret Song movie). He came again in the 2024 Nola Jazz Course, but unfortunately was out of town for the recent 2026 one. 

 

Last night’s concert was, as they say, “off the chain” and I decided to write him a little letter of appreciation. Here it is:

Herlin!

 

I have written 11 books, a couple of hundred articles and over 5,000 Blogposts— but I’m having trouble finding words sufficient to praise your extraordinary performance last night!!! The opening was exactly what I wish for in any music gathering— a celebratory, welcoming parade with hot rhythm and great dance moves and exuberant spirit that draws us all into the party. With the fireworks made yet more explosive by the hard-earned virtuosic technique of each instrumentalist— with you at the lead!. Not to show off, but to serve the occasion by adding yet more power, color, brightness, spirit and soul to it all. The choice of contrasting grooves and feelings and tempos in all the pieces that followed led us into every corner of our emotions, feelings that society wants to stay in a bland, polite middle, but are yearning for the permission to come out and dance. Permission you freely granted! 

 

I was particularly struck by your composition Rush Hour because driving to Yoshi’s, I had just spent an agonizing hour and a half stuck in San Francisco traffic, creeping one inch at a time and finally just screaming inside my car. When the sax soloist took that raw energy and cooked into an honest frustration transformed by art, I could wholly relate!

 

I love that Monk tune (Bright Mississippi), taking Sweet Georgia Brown into territory she had never visited and loved that opening groove to You Don’t Know What Love Is leading us by the back door into the beautiful tender ballad. And then your wisdom in ending as we begun— get the audience on their feet and riding the groove out from Music Time to Clock Time. Clearly, a New Orleans legacy, but also the way I like to run my Orff classes with children and adults. And I also tell them the exact same thing you said to us: “My hope is that you go out feeling better than when you came in.” And you came through on that promise times 100!

 

I’ve seen many jazz drummers in my life and they indeed are often the heartbeat of the band and constantly astound me with their capacity to hold the groove, to lead, to respond, to coordinate four limbs far beyond what most of us could ever imagine. But I have to say that you are at the top of the list, using every touch and timbre of the drum set palette with such infectious exuberance and delicate control. 

 

And as if that weren’t enough, you are one of the most warm and welcoming human beings I know! My last book is titled The Humanitarian Musician and you are the poster person for that needed combination! (And if you’d be willing to give me your address, I’d be delighted to send it to you.)

 

As I said, the words fall far too short, but I decided to attempt them anyway, following the airport model: “If you see something, say something.” When God comes in the house in that Art Tatum kind of way, we are obliged to notice and praise and give thanks. 

 

Thanks again, Herlin, for all you do and all you are.

 

In deep appreciation,

 

Doug 

Accentuate the Positive

 

One of the units in the SF School Singing Times I called “Happy Songs.” Jazz songs mostly from the Depression that encouraged people to not despair and look on the “sunnyside of life.” A short list: 

• Accentuate the Positive

• Best Things in Life are Free 

• Blue Skies

• High Hopes

• My Favorite Things

• Pennies from Heaven

• Pick Yourself Up

• Put on a Happy Face

• Shine on Your Shoes

• Side By Side 

• Sunny Side of the Street

• When You’re Smiling

• Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

 

One could argue that these are on the naïve side and better to sing the Blues and go through the grief rather than tap dance around it. But nevertheless, these songs work.  You can’t help but feel a needed uplift singing them. And even more so if you see a little clip of the movies they were featured in: Fred and Ginger singing/ dancing Pick Yourself Up in Swing Time, Frank Sinatra singing High Hopes in A Hole in the Head, Dick van Dyke and Janet Leigh dancing/singing Put on a Happy Face in Bye Bye Birdie and Julie Andrews singing My Favorite Things in The Sound of Music. Music teachers and parents alike, may I highly recommend that you share both the songs and the movie clips (or whole movies) with the kids? I almost guarantee they’ll love it. 

 

Not only do these songs help when the world’s weight is on our shoulders, but also they remind us in happy times like this recent election that we indeed “picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off and started all over again,” that we little ants never thought we had the power to sink a rubber tree plant and suddenly, “Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant,” sunk by our unflagging high hopes and hard work, that the hope that “grey skies are going to clear up” and “blue skies (and a blue tsunami!) are smiling on me” finally came true. Etc.

 

So yesterday, my second day of subbing back at the old school, James and I sang some of the above in honor of the occasion. At the end of the Singing Time, a teacher had six 5^th grade boys stay after to discuss their lack of focus and decision to fool around. Good for him! In our misguided efforts to “understand” the kids, too many teachers and parents these days are letting unacceptable behavior slide. 

 

But truth be told, I hadn’t notice their bad behavior. Why? Because without effort, I took the advice of “Accentuate the Positive” and spent the whole time looking at one 4^th grade girl singing with such unabashed happiness and infectious passion. She invited my full attention and I was happy to give it to her.

A poet once spoke about how he had suffered through a long, exhausting trip with bad weather and cancelled flights to finally arrive at his poetry reading with 20 people who showed up— and most of them looked bored. But he noticed one person listening as if his life depended on it and that’s where he directed his attention. Just one person was worth all the trials and tribulations.  

 

A good lesson for us all. 

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!