June Is Bustin' Out All Over

Well, not quite. The roses are in full blossom, the bougainvillea are bursting with color. the lettuce plants grown from seed on the deck are poking their heads out. But still I wake up with that San Francisco chill in the air. And it rained today. On June 1^st. Memo to the San Francisco Weather Gods—“Rainy Season Ends in April!!”

And then there’s the dark clouds of report cards standing between me and the light of summer sunshine. But hey, we’ve officially crossed into June and that sings of graduations, weddings, peaches on their way and summer’s freedom. All those notable cycles of closing and opening, the satisfaction of completion and the promise of new beginnings. It’s an exciting time. Though right now I feel far from a day at the beach, I can catch the faint scent of it in the air.

I thought I might write about summer here, but my fingers had other plans. After writing today’s title, I paused and wondered, “Would all my readers know where today’s title came from? Would they instantly recognize that song from Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein? Would they know that Rodgers first teamed with Lorenz Hart? Would they know something about the relationship between jazz and musical theater? Would they have heard Sonny Rollins’ version of The Surrey With the Fringe on Top or John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things? Would they be familiar with Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ Porgy and Bess album, heard Dave Brubeck’s renditions of West Side Story tunes?”

In the midst of the many pointless things children captive in school have to spend their time learning, has anyone considered the treasured subjects no school ever teaches? For example, the history of musical theater in the United States of America. I think I could make a pretty good case that a thorough study of musical theater would reveal more about our country’s history and culture than just about any other subject—with the added perk of great music, great lyrics, great dancing, stories ranging from the silly to the sublime, the evolution of media technologies…well, really I don’t see any stopping point.

In fact, I started to tell the story in the rough draft of this Blog and saw that it would run for pages beyond pages. From the Minstrel Shows of the 1800’s to the Vaudeville of the turn of the century to the New York Broadway revues of the 20’s to the Hollywood musicals in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and yes, on through the 60’s until today—it really is quite a remarkable story. (By the by, the 60’s are where I would stop the bus, the decade that ended the jazz-popular song-Broadway show connection. You can find just about any jazz artist today still performing and recording Bye Bye Blackbird from 1928, but none working with the material from Jesus Christ Superstar, Les Mis or High School Musical.) Stitched into the fabric of the hundreds of songs penned and played in a half-century of musical theater is the entire bizarre, twisted and occasionally inspirational history of race relations, the blurred lines between folk, popular and classical music, the evolution of an American culture distinct from both its European and African roots.

But it’s not just about history. The music, especially in the hands of sophisticated jazz artists, holds up—no period pieces or mere dip back to nostalgia, but the constant re-working of evocative harmonies, swinging and haunting melodies and memorable poetic lyrics by each new generation of jazz artists. The distance between Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanian’s rendition of Cole Porter’s Love for Sale, Billie Holiday’s version with Oscar Peterson and Denny Zeitlin’s solo piano version is considerable, in itself a microcosm of jazz history.

I didn’t grow up as a Musicals buff, but I saw my share—The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, South Pacific, The Music Man, The King and I, The Sound of Music, West Side Story and more. And though I mostly played Bach on the organ and Beethoven on the piano, I did have a book of Jerome Kern songs (which I still have, complete with gold stars from my piano teacher) that I enjoyed playing. Who could have imagined that all these many years later, this repertoire of songs would become such intimate friends? When I’m not playing them for my Mom and friends at the Jewish Home, I’m back in my living room trying to figure out the next song they requested that I didn’t know. The Vocal Real Book is as close to my daily Bible reading as I can imagine and my goal to memorize some 300 songs is the horizon I gaze at from the piano bench. Not only is the music itself a daily balm for the ears, but the invitation to fill in the spaces and find the notes not written, the improvisation that is the bread-and-butter of jazz playing, makes them ever fresh and intriguing.

And then there’s the lyrics. I’ve discovered that as much as I love poetry and reading and writing, the music swallows the text hide and hair in my brain. I have to make a special effort to pay attention and learn the words—and when I do, the rewards are considerable (except for the terribly unsatisfying lines in It Never Entered My Mind with “orange juice for one,” “saying the maiden’s prayer again” and “ scratching my back myself). I really can’t get started on this without another 25 pages, but just to give one of my favorite couplets from Love Is Just Around the Corner:

“Venus de Milo, was known for all her charms.

But strictly between us, you’re cuter than Venus,

And what’s more, you’ve got arms!”

See what I mean? Not only funny and clever, but now we have to study a bit of art history to get it.

Though a thousand ways to say “I Love You” in 32 bars (and all the variants of “I did love you, I didn’t, you didn’t, we did and then we didn’t, we should have, we shouldn’t have, etc. etc. and yet again, etc.") is the subject of 95% of the songs, there are many themes of the human experience not only spoken poetically, but coupled with memorable melodies to keep us company in our joy, sorrow, amazement or despair. Right now, I’m doing my repertoire of “Happy Songs” with the kids at school and how they love it. “Side by Side, Sunnyside of the Street, Accentuate the Positive, Pick Yourself Up, High Hopes, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Put on a Happy Face, When You’re Smiling” and more. 

At our Grandparent’s Day, we sang some of these songs and I told the story of the 2^nd graders who were all frustrated by a math problem. One threw down his paper and sighed in despair, “This is impossible!!” Then one of the girls started singing, “Nothing’s impossible I have found…” and they all chimed in. Inspired by the song, they got back to work. The girl who sang was now in 5^th grade and she exclaimed to the grandparents, “I remember that!” And then her friend chimed in and said, “And we solved it, too!”

And so on June 1^st, I woke up singing “June is bustin’ out all over…” and when it rained, I could have sung Stormy Weather or Gentle Rain or Garden in the Rain or Come Rain or Come Shine or Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to get lost in a storm). I did some contra dance with the 2^nd grade today and though the style is different, I could have told them which way to turn by singing Let’s Face the Music and Dance. 

I had my last pre-school singing time for the year today (big sad face here!) and I could have sung The Song Is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On). You get the idea. A song for every occasion.

But there is one subject I’ve never heard addressed in the entire history of popular jazz standards. 

Report cards. 

So on a chilly June San Francisco evening, I better start writing mine.

The Good Ol' Days Part II

I spoke too soon. Just after affirming here and now as “as good as it gets,” I noticed that Cover to Cover Bookstore on 24^th and Castro in San Francisco was going out of business. Mark, the owner, was out on the sidewalk and the store was empty, with the last five shelves of books outside and selling for a $1 per book. This bookstore had been a staple of the neighborhood for a couple of decades and no one was happy it was leaving. What particularly struck me while I was browsing the bargains was the number of people chatting with Mark, thanking him for what he had given and concerned about what he was going to do now. He seemed to know just about every one who passed by and they all stopped to chat, offering both condolences and appreciation.

I got back on my bike, headed up 24^th St. and passed the Mystery Bookstore with its sign, “Oldest Mystery Bookstore in the U.S.A.” That lifted my heart until I noticed another sign: “50% off. Closing Sale.” Aargh! What’s going on here?

Well, simply what has been going on for a while. Our obsession with ease and efficiency and preference for big corporate over Mom and Pop continues to take its toll. Consumerism without relationship. Workers who get a paycheck, but don’t know anything about their trade beyond what shows up on the computer screen. Browsing in cyberspace, but without the pleasure of thumbing through the pages of a book, feeling its heft and weight and smell. Hunting through shelves until something pops out and suddenly you know that’s the book you’re meant to read now. Conversing with the cashier who comments on your choice and perhaps recommends other possibilities— well, Amazon.com tells you, “if you liked this, then consider that,” but who exactly is talking? We’ll never know. And if our favorite Website closes, there’ll be no one out on the street to talk to about it and shake their hand to thank them.

As a kid, my mother took me shopping to Sam and Andy’s vegetable store. We got what we needed for the week’s dinners, but we also got to catch up with Sam (never did meet Andy and have often wonder "What happened to him?"), find out what’s fresh, what’s seasonable, hear the news of his family, tell the news of ours. I usually got a free peach or pear—and this went on for 20 years. Last time I was in New Jersey, the store was still there, with Sam’s son having taken it over. These days, that is a minor miracle.

What I’m starting to miss is the small chit-chat, the time spent in silent company with other browsers, the sense of a place with character and personality —Green Apple bookstore felt distinct from Cover to Cover, the Clay Theater different from the Castro, the Owl and Monkey Café not at all like the Zephyr café. Every Borders is mostly just another Borders, every Multiplex Cinema just like every other, every Starbucks just like the one across the street. And then when we take the next shopping trip into Cyberspace, we are exactly nowhere at all. Makes me long for “the good ol’ days!” (Though the irony of that longing while writing this Blog online is not lost on me.)

Though there’s every reason to be cynical about our determination to exile Sam and Andy, to be discouraged by the immense economic success of Walmart and Costco and subsequent cultural decline that comes with it, to be depressed by the epidemic closing of the independent bookstores, the one-screen movie theaters, the one-of-a-kind roadside cafes, still I am an optimist at heart. We flawed humans continue to make poor choices, suckered in by the advertising folks and hungry for a bargain at the click of a button, but somewhere in our emotional wiring lies an intuitive sense that something is missing, that we’ve sold a part of our precious social real estate.

Again, we might compensate in yet weirder ways—meeting folks in cyber-chat rooms or hibernating in our electronic fantasy worlds—but mostly, something rises up to compensate—like Farmer’s Markets, for example. We’ve shown that we’re perfectly willing to pay three times as much money for an organic locally-grown tomato, not only for its juicy authentic tomato-ness far superior to its anemic supermarket cousin, but for the conviviality of the buzz of human beings exchanging goods in the open air, with music playing and vendors urging you to taste their co-creation like proud parents.

Now, there is a veritable explosion of books written about such choices, some of them best-sellers like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But it still is sad that you won’t be able to buy them at Cover to Cover Bookstore. 

These Are the Good Ol' Days

At a recent staff meeting devoted to the topic of “maintaining school culture amidst changing times,” I surprised myself by standing up and saying, “I’m not nostalgic for the program we used to have. I think in many ways the school is better than ever—these are the good ol’ days!”

And in some ways, that’s true. Though I listen to old cassette tapes and the pieces I did with the kids back then mostly hold up, I think the music program at The SF School is better than ever (due in large part to the incredible work of colleagues Sofia and James). And I believe that’s also true of many programs and aspects of the school. When people stick around for a while, they do often build from a base of “good” to a next step of “better.” And when new teachers come in, they build from that inherited base that saves them from having to reinvent many wheels and allows them to concentrate on their driving.

And yet, all creative work—and good education is creative work—is subject to the rise and fall of inspiration and particular constellations of culture. What certain units of school study now gain in clarity and focus, they might lose in freshness and discovery. So the equation is never simple and requires constant attention to the delicate balance between the experimental and the tried-and-true.

The surprise of my statement came from my frequent complaints that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, with signed legal requirements before entering the basket and a GPS-encoded destination complete with pre-programmed itinerary—guaranteed to bring no surprise or mystery. At the same time that I think the programs at my school are mostly improving, there is a great deal of loss as well—mostly, increased pressure from the outside to dot every i and cross every t in the standard and uniform manner of every other school and the yet more worrisome sense that the new generation of administrators don’t see the danger of looking to “best practices of corporations” as the guiding light of decision-making. What makes a dynamic living culture is vision, risk, trust in our capacities to mess around and try things out, guided by that flimsiest and yet, sturdiest of our capacities, the ability to dream. To hold true to an image of how it’s s’posed to be and do whatever it takes to fulfill that promise. And when I think about the Golden Ages of human culture, it always has something to do with that fresh energy of dipping into the bottomless well of the imagination not knowing what the final form will take, but trusting in the process of arriving.

This theme of “the Golden Age—then or now?” was a major thread in Woody Allen’s fabulous new movie, Midnight in Paris. Driving home, my wife asked me if there was a time when I would have preferred to live, a question so provocative that it was fifteen minutes of talking before I was ready to turn around and ask, “And you?” (Making her sorry she asked. And even sorrier that I hadn’t asked back earlier! Oops!) But though I also have been fascinated by Paris in the 20’s, by Harlem in the 40’s, by San Francisco in the 60’s (just missed it), it wasn’t so much about returning nostalgically to an earlier time, but more about the excitement of living in the midst of a living, vital culture out on the edge of mainstream.

I remember the period, say between 1964 and 1972, when we eagerly awaited the new album not from one artist, but dozens—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Beach Boys, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin. The Supremes, The Temptations, Crosby-Stills-Nash-Young, Simon and Garfunkel, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Doors, Credence Clearwater Revival, The  Youngbloods, The Byrds,  Santana, Incredible String Band, Donovan, Cat Stevens, Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins. As the Weavers said, ”Wasn’t that a time!” Compare that to the rock groups of the Reagan Years (1980-88) and the contrast is stunning.

That was a period I actually lived through. But if I could be a fly on the wall in a different era, as Woody Allen’s character was, I wouldn’t mind hanging out on New York’s 52^nd St. in the late 40’s, where jazz clubs featured Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as some of the young jazz cats who worked their ideas out at further uptown at Minton’s in Harlem—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Milt Jackson, Charles Mingus.

And I agree with Woody’s character that the 20’s were a time of great cultural explosion, not only in Paris, but elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. as well. Indeed, in my book “The ABC’s of Education,” I include a list of notable artistic accomplishments between 1921 and 1925 that includes major publications by W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Marie Rilke, Gertrude Stein, e.e.cummings, Robert Frost, Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis. In the art world, Picasso, Braque, Salvador Dali, Georgia O-Keefe, Stuart Davis were busy at work, in the music world, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern composed major works, Louis Armstrong was in Chicago and then New York, George Gershwin premiered Rhapsody in Blue. Josephine Baker was dancing in Paris, Isadora Duncan in Greece and Russia, Martha Graham formed her own company. And in 1924, a young Carl Orff collaborated with dancer/artist Dorothee Gunther to begin the experiments that led to my job and life’s path (thank you, Carl). Exciting times all.

What they all have in common is that sensation of being on the edge, at the end of one world dying and another just being born. The 20’s and 40’s cultural explosions came in the aftermath of two world wars, the 60’s in the midst of trying to prevent a third one. And note who’s leading the cultural shifts (or at least serving as antennae to speak what’s in the air) —the artists. Not the insurance adjusters, lawyers, media moguls, the marketing folks, the corporate executives. Artists. And in cultures where the pace of change has been slower and no counter-culture is necessary because the whole culture is alive and vibrant—I’m thinking of Bali, for example—it is the daily renewal of art in all its faces that is keeping it all going. Not art as a specialized subject, but at the center of life well-lived, where “art” is simply doing things well with care, attention, color and life.

One of the big points of the film is that when you’re in the midst of it all, it’s sometimes hard to feel that “these are the good ol’ days.” Key characters in the film keep looking back to when it was even better—at least in their imagination. Every generation feels the pinch of their times, the things that restrict, narrow, diminish us. Here are a few sentences I might have written yesterday: “The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciation.” Who actually said that? W.B. Yeats. In 1901.

I do feel that in my own small world, I have tasted the excitement of making it up as we went along as we did at The San Francisco School for several decades. We made mistakes that I would never care to repeat, but they were always our mistakes and thus, authentic and leading us to a new, improved version. Now we’re in danger of inheriting someone else’s mistakes as we lose trust in our own judgment and intelligence and try to square off all our rough edges by following advice from loan companies and Independent School Associations.

Same in the Orff world. The course I direct is the grandchild of the course I took with Avon Gillespie and it is a better course in dozens of tangible ways. But even here, we have to be vigilant about losing the experimental atmosphere that made Avon’s work so exciting and memorable. We need to constantly renew ourselves at the altar of possibility and watch out for being too complacent—“this is how we do it, this is how it works.” And we certainly would be wise to fiercely resist adapting our radical approach to fit into the narrow hallways of National Standards and Smart-Board technologies.

Go see the film and talk with your friends; “What time would you have liked to live in? Why?” (By the way, my wife’s answer when I finally shut up was to hang out with the Bay Area Figurative painters in the 1950’s). The point of looking back to the past is to renew the qualities gone underground in the present to bring them forth in new forms for the future. And you may quote me.

These indeed are “the good ol’ days” if we pay attention in the right ways.

One-sided Lover's Quarrel

Don’t get too excited here—no gossip or relationship revelations are forthcoming. The lover’s quarrel refers to the Robert Frost statement “I’ve had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” I’ve always related to that phrase, but had to amend it for my six-word autobiography: “Called world to quarrel—no answer.”

I seem to be feeling that more and more, hungry to engage on a bigger stage of discourse than the 30-person Orff workshop or 10-person school staff meeting. Around a year ago, I found out that anybody could be nominated for a Ted Talk, those 20-minute videos circulating on cyberspace that feature known and lesser-known folks speaking from their little corner of expertise. So I invited my friends to nominate me, hoping to give a talk like one I’ve actually given at a few international schools, Powerpoint and all:  “Why Music Matters.” Many in fact did write in to nominate me, but Ted didn’t answer.

A few years back, I went to hear Terry Gross speak and found out that her husband wrote a book on the Blues (which I had read), that she loved teachers and that an alum parent from my school had some contact with her. So I dropped his name, sent her my jazz book combining teaching, blues and jazz and…no answer.

Today, I got an e-mail that seemed to be inviting me to be a featured speaker at an International Schools Conference in Portugal. I’ve presented music workshops at the last three such conferences and often felt as I listened to the Keynote Speaker that I would like to do that some day and have something at least as interesting to contribute as the next breakthrough in technology and how it will change schools. I wrote back to ask for clarification, but alas, instead of the talk to 2,000 teachers, it was simply confirming my music workshops with the 15 teachers I’ve come to know.

Now don’t get me wrong. Gary Snyder’s Zen teacher once said: “In Zen, there are only two things. You sit and sweep the garden. It doesn't matter how big the garden is" and in my day-to-day teaching, that is the true north of my compass. Whether teaching eight second-graders, seven preschool teachers from the Urban Sprouts Day School, singing with Fran, Edie, Laya and my Mom at the senior home or doing an Orff workshop for 750 teachers in Texas (the first three I did this week, the last some years ago at a TMEA Conference), it’s all the same.

But if you think you have something worthy to offer, who wouldn’t be thrilled with a wider audience? 

I haven’t heard of an author complaining about being on the best-seller list or a jazz musician refuse to play a concert hall and choose a smoky dive instead (or these days, non-smoking dive). But the key word here is “worthy.” Maybe the world is right not to care whether Joey or Samantha had a fun music class or got to dance the polka today. Maybe I don’t have anything very important to say after all and I’m not articulate enough to be worthy of presenting it. It’s possible.

But still I hope. So when I got a call from Who’s Who the other day interviewing me for acceptance, the timing seemed right. I was vulnerable from all the recent events that made me feel exiled and was ripe for recognition. To my credit, I did hesitate as I gave my Visa Card numbers for the hefty price of inclusion, but not long enough. I should have been wary of the modifier “Biltmore’s” Who’s Who and remember quickly looking online while giving my numbers. The Website was attractive, though of course, the whole thing deserved more scrutiny. Yet my hunger for affirmation overshadowed my caution and it wasn’t until the next day that I wondered whether I had taken our new school motto “Assume Good Intentions” a little too literally. So with a bad case of buyer’s remorse, I looked more thoroughly online and saw many warnings of “Scam! Scam! Scam!” I then called Visa to find out my options, called and wrote Biltmore’s to ask for immediate withdrawal from their exalted club—and of course, no answer from the latter yet. Or probably ever. Oh well.

Meanwhile, in every book, article or blog I write, every class I teach, every song I play for my Mom and with the kids, I’m calling up the world like a secret lover, to praise, quarrel or simply converse— and mostly leaving messages on an answering machine that no one ever checks. Perhaps someday they’ll answer, perhaps they never will, perhaps they already are and I’m not noticing. In any case, it’s none of my business—my job is just to keep doing what I do, saying what I say and be grateful for the opportunity.

And now, a word from our sponsor…

For those who know me, it’s no secret that I’m slow to respond to new technologies. I still don’t have a cell phone and continue to resist Facebook. That said and done, I was using a fax/modem back in 1991 with my Mac SE 100, got one of those hooded blue iMac computers in 1999 so I could join e-mail and I believe that I was the first amongst all my friend to get an iPod, simply because it was so much easier to take on international Orff workshop travel than those books of CD’s.

“The right tool for the right job at the right time” is mostly my techno motto and though I wrote my first book by hand (never published) in Indonesian notebooks while lying in bed in Java with hepatitis in 1979 and the first draft of my jazz book on a typewriter, I’m quite happy with the writing and re-writing capabilities of computers these past twenty years. And thrilled with the technology of this Blog, allowing me to empty my head every couple of days with the fringe benefit that perhaps someone might read it. Really, it’s my long-time fantasy of having a newspaper column without having to go to journalism school.

But when I looked on a friend’s Facebook page, I could feel the palpable energy of the community of “friends” who share the same plot of cyber ground and respond instantly to various messages and announcements. I’ve looked at it before and was turned off by detailed accounts of the fine filet of salmon someone just enjoyed or how little Bobby ate all his oatmeal, but there are certainly things I’d love to publicly announce and get the sensation that someone’s reading and responding. The Blog is a more sedate room in the Cyber mansion, as I think it should be—hopefully, entries with a bit more to chew on than the quick energy hit of the next awesome, cool or super moment in the day.

And yet, there are a couple of things I’d love to share, even if only twenty people read them. Most are time-sensitive and thus, probably more Facebook-friendly than Blog-worthy (what a weird new language we’ve created!), but I include them below nonetheless.

In short:

• Check out daughter Kerala’s performance of one of her stories of near-death in Bolivia.

http://vimeo.com/23555697

• Check out daughter Talia’s blog about the trials and triumphs of teaching English to 1^st graders at a 

bi-lingual school in Buenos Aires. http://taliagoodkin.blogspot.com

• Mark June 2^nd on your calendar and come to Middle School Salzburg Group performance, the preview of the show these 17 wonderful kids will do at the Orff Symposium in Salzburg, Austria. Tickets at the door for $20 (helping to fund the trip), 7:30 start time at Lick-Wilmerding Theater, 755 Ocean Ave., SF. (For those in Europe this summer, come to that show on Sunday, July 10^th!)

• Mark your calendar for July 30^th,  to come to my 60^th birthday concert at St. Aidan’s Church in SF.

• Check my Website (www.douggoodkin.com) for information about my colleague Sofía López-Ibor’s extraordinary book Blue Is the Sea: Music, Dance and Visual Arts that  I’ve just published under my Pentatonic Press Co. One recent reader (who is in the book business) said, “My two initial reactions are that no one has ever published a book like this, and that is it so beautiful it makes me want to weep.”

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

I Love Kelly Park!

No, Kelly Park is not the name of a new addition to the San Francisco Doug-tour, some hidden green treasure nestled in the hills above North Beach. It’s the name of the pianist in the Terence Brewer Band I saw recently in Yoshi’s Oakland. As I sat listening to him play, I thought “I can do that,” a rare reaction when listening to jazz pianists. Which meant that theoretically, I could be “Yoshi’s-worthy.” (Though I must admit that he played the hell out of “Caravan” and left me gasping in the dust he kicked up.) I think this is one of the ways we figure out which beckoning path is true— see someone in the public eye who has earned the right to be in the public eye and imagine yourself doing the same.

That’s what happened to me when after a mere few years of teaching, I watched a nationally famous Orff teacher give a workshop and not only felt that I could have given the workshop, but could have done it better. No arrogance here, just a trusting of the forces that are working through us to be heard and seen. Conversely, I went one night years back to see my piano teacher Art Lande at the Great American Music Hall and remember standing outside looking at his name on the marquee and trying to imagine my own up there some day. No matter how hard I squinted, I simply couldn’t see it. And so I took a left turn off of the highway of Jazz Performer and stayed on the Yellow Brick Road to the magical land of Orff Schulwerk teacher. A good choice, and in fact, the only choice and at the end of the day, one must wonder whether one chooses or is chosen.

Freed from the pressure of making it in the jazz world, I continued to play for my own pleasure and throughout the years, give an occasional house concert or rent the Community Music Center and lean heavily on my friends to fill a few seats. And occasionally, especially when I didn’t try to sound like my favorite jazz pianists and just play what I could hear and feel with my own two ears and hands, the music would connect with the audience and we were lifted out of clock time into the place where music makes its true home. Not a place of adoration of how fast someone’s fingers can move, but a place to remember what we seem to always forget—that in that moment when time stops and we are gathered into a place of deep belonging, all sins are forgiven, all folly is made right, all our childhood dreams come true. For as long as the notes ring out, we are home.

The maddening thing is that you can’t play music and bring people to that place from good intentions and sensitive feelings only. You do have to move your fingers fast and sacrifice a lot of sunny days chained to your instrument. So lest I get too confident watching Kelly Park (a fine pianist, don’t get me wrong), I also went to hear the Bill Charlap Trio in Yoshi’s San Francisco and then Elaine Elias at Yerba Buena Center ( a rare week of three jazz concerts!) and they both kicked my butt back to the Stone Age. 10,000 more hours minimum to just peek in the door of their mastery and control at a time in life when I don’t have a lot of 10,000 hours to spare.

We need those reminders too. I always tell my students that the mark of a good workshop is that it affirmed you and kicked your butt at the same time. Just affirmation doesn’t get you up early and out on the trail, just butt-kicking is just plain discouraging.

So thanks Bill, Elaine and Kelly. I have more to say here, but I’m going to practice the piano.

Tough Vulnerability, Gentle Ferocity

What is it like to have your best friends be between 80 and 95? Inspiring, to say the least. And what I love most of all is the gradual erosion of all those walls of niceness and careful choosing of words and getting straight to the heart of it. “You’re out of your mind!” “Hey, you, get over here and pay attention to me!” “I’ve had enough of that!” Similar to the honesty of three-year olds, but more tough and grizzled and cooked through with a lifetime of sparring with the world. Not trying to impress or get ahead or worry about offending someone. When you enter elderhood, you receive your license to “tell it straight” and damn anyone who demands sugar-coating.

I, for one, find it refreshing. And don’t get me wrong. Most of the conversation in-between the songs is appreciative and loving and fun, but when time is short and mortality is looking over your shoulder, no one has patience for playing games and amen to that!

I grew up in New Jersey and was well-versed with the New York taxi-cab driver style of conversation, but truth be told, found it a bit too harsh and grating. So I came to mellow California and lived on the edge of the New Age, where soft and gentle was the guiding aesthetic and everyone spoke with good intentions at a decibel level just below my current hearing. In-between the two was the great passion of my Spanish friends, the cutting “dozens” of my African-American friends, the loud chatter of my Jewish relatives.

But I have to say that the California-culture equation of a raised voice as a plea for anger-management classes, of conflict as an alarm to shut down fast or at least press Snooze, of disagreement as distasteful, is starting to wear on me. I love the story of the Italian teacher trying to oversee the transplanting of the Reggio-Emilio education approach to the United States. When asked about the difference between American and Italian culture, she replied: “Here you see disagreement as the end of the conversation. In Italy, it’s the beginning.”

Circumstances have thrown me in the boxing ring and every day lately, I need to dance around with my fists raised, throw and block punches just to survive. And truth be told, there is something exhilarating in it. I’m alive. I’m alert. I’m using every muscle in the body and every synapse in the brain. And though I sometimes get knocked silly and my mouth is bleeding and the blows keep catching me by surprise, I’m still standing and in the ring. That counts for something and feels more real than living a dull safe life where I’ve managed never to offend anyone.

But even as I grow stronger in my determination to stand up for a lifetime of cultivated values, I’m also finding the soft and gentle side that comes through when I play jazz ballads on the piano more tender than ever before. Not a posed, wimpy mellowness that comes from skirting around or damping down conflict, but a muscular gentleness, a passionate tenderness when I step from the boxing ring to the piano. Rumi has a poem about it:

“Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

You would be paralyzed…”

So during the day, the fist is clenched: “Power to the people! Umoja! El Pueblo, Unido, Jamás Será Vencido!” and at night, it spreads open on the piano keyboard and sings out the heartbreaking beauty of “That Old Black Magic” or “Haunted Heart” or “Embraceable You” and everything that was closed in defense during the day opens like a flower in the morning sun.

And so it is with my elder friends. The look on my mother’s face when I play these ballads for her is pure openness and reception, the innocence of a baby re-forged from the wrinkles of experience. And when she’s had enough, she has no qualms about telling me—“Douglas! No more playing! Let’s get ice cream!” 

Ah, elderhood. I can’t wait to be even more feisty and outraged and impatient with ignorance and stupidity—and more tender and caring at the same time.