Numbers Nerd

My daughter has accused me of many things in her post-teenage years, but came up with a new one yesterday— a numbers nerd. And she’s right. I’m overly fascinated with things like my odometer turning to 222,222, dates like 1/31/13, phone numbers like 987-6789.

And yes, I was aware when I passed my 500^th blog, am waiting for my 94 followers to reach 100, keep checking the number of video views on my TEDx talk (as of today, 4,093). Sometimes my Brief Vitae reads like a math puzzle— 8 books, 38 years at one school, 39 countries teaching the Orff approach, but who’s counting? Well, I am, I guess.

So now a confession. With one hour left in May, Pacific time, I really want to push my 19 entries to 20. Just feels right. So what better way to do it than confess my nerdy love affair with numbers? Mostly I think I’m about celebrating all the things that can’t be measured and quantified and yet, I’m fascinated and occasionally obsessed with measuring and quantifying some of them.

So there you have it. I now have my 20^th blog for May and outed myself as a numbers nerd. I feel so much better now! 35 times better, to be exact, than the 74 times I thought about confessing, all in exactly 173 words.

Jazz Jeopardy

When St. Peter meets me at the gates and asks me what I have to show for this incarnation, I think “I played Jazz Jeopardy with kids” is as good a ticket into heaven as any. I started this back in the early ‘80’s at Cazadero Music Camp and it has been a regular feature of my 8^th grade year-long jazz study for at least 25 years. I played it on Tuesday with the kids and then gave them the individual final exam on Wednesday. I’m always shocked to discover that they seem to know so much when they play the game and forget it all the next day, but of course, that’s the old teacher syndrome of asking the kids, “What was Duke Ellington’s piano teacher’s name?” and one kid answers “Mrs.Clinkscales” and you’re so relieved that someone got it that you assume they all now understand. When in fact, it was one kid out of sixteen and that kid got it because you forgot to erase it from the board from the previous class!

So the individual final exam is the real deal, not as much fun as the group Jazz Jeopardy, but good to get a reality check on what the kids actually absorbed from your semester of effort initiating them into this enormous world. And also pretty amusing. Some of the answers I got filling in the blank of “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that ______” included “beat, rhythm, ring, thing, D (?!!), and love.” And yes, more than one child answered the question “What is the B section of the jazz standard called?” with “The B section.” Well, yes, but.

So if you’re taking the time to read this blog, why not give yourself the test and see how you’d stack up next to my 8^th graders? There was a listening section that I’ll have to leave out here and a personal reflection that I may save for a future blog, so you’re getting the short version. Test your jazz literacy and then Google the answers after you’ve scored yourself. 20 questions, five points a question, the average score of my 8^th graders was 80.

Good luck!

8th GRADE JAZZ FINAL—May 29, 2013            NAME __________________

I:  JAZZ HISTORY

1.  Which Southern city has been called The Birthplace of Jazz?

2.  Whose musical career started in a reform school for kids?

3. Who was nicknamed Satchmo?

4. What was the name of the theater in Harlem where Ella Fitzgerald won a contest?

5. What children’s song did Ella sing with the Chick Webb Band that helped make her name known?

6. Ella sang the above song in a movie called “Ride “em Cowboy” staring a comedy duo also famous for their “Who’s on First?” routine. What were their names?

7.  With migration, the center of jazz in the late ‘20’s and the 1930’s moved from New Orleans to which neighborhood in New York?

8. What was the name of a popular dance style in the 1930’s and who was it named for?

9.  What was the famous ballroom in Harlem where the above style was danced?

10. Who got a job at a local café after singing a song and making the patrons cry?

11. Which famous piano player was born in Toledo, Ohio?

12. What was the name of the fabulous tap-dancing brothers featured in Stormy Weather?

II. JAZZ THEORY

1. Write a third line to this blues verse (no one answer— invent your own following the basic guidelines of blues poetry).

            "My baby left this mornin', just about half-past four,

              My baby left this mornin', just about half-past four,

             __________________________________________”

2. Using the I, IV and V chords, fill in the 12-bar blues progression

            /       /        /      /      /      /      /      /      /      /       /      /

         1         2          3         4        5        6        7         8       9      10      11       12

3. How many bars in a jazz standard AABA form? (Think of a song like “Side by Side.”)

4. What are the five notes in the basic blues scale in the key of G?

5. What is the word for a short, repeated melodic pattern in jazz?

6. What is the B section of the jazz standard called?

7. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that ________.”

 8. What are the three instruments in the “rhythm section?” 

In Praise of Grief

It was a typical i-Pod moment driving in the car—randomly scrolling the alphabet without looking and just landing somewhere and listening to whatever comes on. I hit upon the burning guitar of Jimmy Rosenberg, the 15-year old gypsy wonder from the group Sinti (whatever happened to him?) playing Que Pasa? The next thing that came up was “Questions.” It was from a talk given by Martin Prechtel on Grief and Praise and one of the wisest, funniest and most soul-stirring talks I’ve had the privilege to hear. He is an American, part Swiss-German, part-Native American, who was initiated as a shaman by a Mayan tribe in Guatemala. In this talk, he explained to us “have-a-nice-day-Americans” that grief and praise in this Mayan culture are the same thing, or at least share the same root. People incapable of proper grieving (the kind that when you’re through, “you don’t look so good”) are also incapable of proper praising. And in a downwardly spiraling cycle, people who aren’t properly praised, as children or adults, carry yet more grief and are blocked from praising others.

The praise he’s talking about is not the pat on the back “good job!” variety (though that has its place). It’s about seeing deeply into the heart and soul of a person’s beauty and letting them know in many different ways that you see them, hear them, know them, celebrate them, understand a part of them, love them. Sometimes praise means simply giving folks an opportunity to express themselves in the form that suits their character.

The other day, I went to visit my Mom and my 98-year old friend Ben, who asked for my “advice.” Apparently, a doctor or someone told him he should stop playing piano, but having not played if for several months, he’s finding that he’s missing it. I knew Ben had played piano most every day of his later life and told him that it was essential to his spirit. I got off the bench, rolled him up the keys and requested “Besame Mucho.” Off he went and then continued with two more. He did seem a little winded from the effort, but he was smiling ear-to-ear in happiness and kep shaking my hand with tears welling up thanking me for encouraging him. Not a big effort on my part, just making a space for his Spirit to be set free.

Seems so simple. Why don’t we all give each other such permission and praise? Probably because the moment we open ourselves to joy we realize that sorrow is close behind. To affirm life is to love something so much it hurts and it will hurt because everything we love is bound by mortality. Inside the exuberant Yes! of affirming praise is the seed of loss and the grief of saying goodbye. So we opt for the safe middle ground and surround ourselves with all the strategies and distractions to keep the extremes at bay.

There’s more to Martin Prechtel’s story, the part about doing this work on behalf of those who we have lost, the spirits in the other world who need both our grief and our praise. When we pay our dues to the ancestors, they do their part to keep us alive and soulful. When we sing from the belly or weep with heaving sobs, they come to check it out.They love to congregate around the gospel church and tend to stay away from Walmart. But that’s another story.

I know I have many stones of grief waiting to turn to water and too much that has been left unpraised. But where I have managed to open doors to people’s musicality or encouraged them directly or by example to take the death-defiant risk of expressing the heart of who they are, it is by the grace of all that I have met with the full measure of my sorrow and the full measure of my joy.

The New Honor Roll

It has been quite a week in my old home town— um, school. I managed to squeeze in two old traditions I began some 35 years ago— The Samba Contest and The Cookie Jar Contest. The first is a Brazilian-style mini-Carnaval with cross-graded (and sometimes cross-dressed!) kids choreographing their own samba routine in groups of two to eight. The dancers are between first and fifth grade and they practice for four or five days during their precious recess time. The 6^th grade splits into judges, decorators and musicians in the “batterie” percussion ensemble.

On the day of the contest, the drums are thundering, the bells are firing, the samba whistle is blowing and the music room is awash with colorful movement and spirited singing. At the end, the judges announce the winners. Everyone is a “winner” in some category— best costume, best style, most gymnastic, best choreographed and my favorite from this year—best “swag”— and then there also is an overall first, second and third place winner. All get cool hand-made certificates and some post-samba snacks. It’s really quite a spectacle and just having kids dancing to kids playing live music is remarkable enough these days.

Then came the Cookie Jar Contest, 12-kids who made it to the finals in this game of rhythm, speech and sharp attention. One slip of the tongue or pause in the rhythm and you’re out, your dreams of Cookie Jar glory shattered— until next year. The winner gets—you guessed it— a cookie jar (thanks Cost Plus!) filled with cookies. All participants again get a certificate and have a little post-contest cookie party.

I’ve offered up The Frozen Logger competition— the chance for any kid to get up in front of the whole elementary school and attempt to sing all eleven verses of The Frozen Logger folk song by memory. Some kids asked for the words to study, but so far no takers— I may have to let this one go for this year.

Coming up is the Mud Pie Celebration, a whole class of kids singing “The Mud Pie Song” ( the “One Bottle of Pop” song with new words I made up) and then sitting in absolute stillness and silence looking down at their mudpie dessert (chococalte sauce over ice cream with crumbled Oreo cookies) in a state of “complete control.” If anyone moves or laughs, the teachers snatch their mudpie away. My job is to see if I can get them cracking up with such mature statements as “stinky socks!" or belly-button juice!” It’s a sight to behold.

And so, while most schools continue with their narrow view of what’s worthy of celebration in the human mind, body and heart, the old tired Honor Roll and Athletic Trophies, we aim to expand the possibilities with samba, cookie jars, frozen loggers and mudpies. Why not celebrate kids’ ability to express themselves collectively through organized spirited movement? To honor them for grace under pressure, keeping attentice in the midst of the cookie jar storm. To acknowledge them for memory and song and effort made to remember and perform? To celebrate their ability to sit calm and composed while ice cream melts in front of their eyes and sadistic music teachers try to make them laugh?

The world as it is is divided between the “My child is on the honor roll at…” bumper sticker and “My child can beat up your honor roll child” sticker. (Or the one I saw today: “My child skateboards better than your honor roll child.”) I’m looking forward to the day when cars abound with “Cookie Jar Champion 2013!”, “Frozen Logger expert!”, “My child is a mudpie yogi” or “My child danced exuberantly in the 2014 samba contest.”Or the one my Mom could put on her wheelchair: “My child has published over 500 blogs — and still won’t shut up!”

My friends, there are lots of ways to shine in this world. Let’s enjoy them!

I'll See You in My Dreams

I’ve taken the most marvelous trips lately back to places that I’ve known and loved. My childhood home in Roselle, New Jersey, my college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a school in the North Carolina mountains, the Zen Center atop Mt. Baldy outside L.A. and a village in Bali, for starters. In each place, I’ve felt the effortless glow of being precisely where I need to be, held and cradled by the very landscape, graced with a renewed sense of wonder and intimately connected with the houses, streets, trees.

I imagine we all have sacred sites like this in our lives where we passed through an important initiation or fell in love with a person, a passion, a place or experienced a fleeting passage through a door that would define our life to come. When we re-visit them, we recall the beauty of that time, the excitement, the transcendent emotions. And so each night this past week, I’ve had the good fortune to return to one of these places without having to book accommodations or endure long plane rides. Simply go there in my dreams— and awaken refreshed.

Amazing what goes on beneath the surface of the conscious mind. Some benevolent dreamkeeper is taking me back to these lands of deep belonging and giving me the chance to renew my membership in my present home and community. Last night included sharing a workshop with my elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Salcito. I was thrilled to know that he was 92 (in my dream) and still going strong. I remembered he owed me a prize that he had never delivered for winning the pie-eating contest when I was 9-years old and was about to ask him to pay up and take me out for dessert when I so rudely woke up. Guess I’ll have to let that one go.

In this life where we struggle to control and direct everything, there is so much that is out of our hands. The weather, our health, our partner’s life habits, for example. But particularly our dreams. Back to the “who’s in charge?” question. Our conscious mind has no coin in the land in dreams, except to suggest all the things it’s leaving out so some other director can compensate. It is extraordinary to me how quickly things from the world above appear in the world below— like writing a blog in a dream, for example— but always on their own terms in their own strange dream language.

Imagine if we could program our own dreams! That would be a power that I’m certain we would quickly abuse and turn into disaster. So even as we have become gods in the upper world in ways that would astonish our ancestors, we are frail and vulnerable children always in the land of dreams. Lately, I’ve been led by the hand to the many homes I have known and it is a blessing. Where shall I go tonight?

A Worthy Opponent

Every day, 88 soldiers stand ready to aim their guns at me and kill any vestige of self-satisfaction I might have. They march me mercilessly through their boot camp, make me scale walls and wriggle under fences, jump from rock to rock in churning waters. If I drift into dream, they shout in my face. If I don’t bring dream into exercise, they whisper threats in my ear. It’s an integrated black and white army and the soldiers come from both sides of the tracks, training in ghettos and palaces, ramshackle churches and soaring cathedrals. If I manage to make it through a drill without a scratch, get a perfect score in the obstacle course, there’s no guarantee that the next time I won’t be thrown to the ground, dispirited and discouraged. But it’s the war I signed up for and there is great glory in doing battle with this 88-soldier troupe known as (did you guess it?)— the piano.

Anyone reading this month’s blogs must have noticed my discrete (as much as I’m capable of being discrete!) references to another kind of struggle, drawn into the vortex of small skirmishes that diminish any sense of honor or dignity. I’ve been thrown to the ground by fear, ignorance, mean-spiritedness, narrowmindedness, and all my attempts to engage only bring more shame and pettiness and draw me deeper into the downward spiral, None of it needed to happen, none of it should have happened by my moral compass of what is just and true and right, but that’s the world we all must inhabit by virtue of sharing the planet. Had I been higher on the Sainthood or Bodhisattva scale, I could have absorbed it and paid it the scant attention it deserved. I think of the Zen story of a monk who was accused of fathering a child and mandated to raise him. He responded “Is that so?” and accepted the child. A year later, they discovered he indeed wasn’t the father and took the child away. He responded again, “Is that so?” and went on with his life. Well, sounds good in a Zen book, but who amongst us is so calmly detached? I ended up spending so much time paying out to Caesar that God got left behind in the background. That was my failure.

The poet Rilke wrote the most extraordinary anthem of choosing worthy battles in a poem called The Man Watching (this translation by Robert Bly), admonishing us to disengage from trying to win the petty ones.

“What we choose to fight is so tiny!

  What fights with us is so great!…

  When we win, it’s with small things

  And the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.

I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:

When the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings,

He felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight)

Went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand,

That kneaded him as if to change his shape.

Winning does not tempt that man.

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,

By constantly greater beings.”

So yesterday, I turned back to the worthy opponents of those 88 keys and did glorious battle with Fauré, Scriabin, Mendelsohn, Monk, Billy Strayhorn and others. I felt those deep chords of music under my fingers, patiently got up again when thrown to the ground, endured a string of defeats, won a few minor victories and stood up thoroughly kneaded and changed—taller, stronger, larger and ready to enter the fray again the next day. Which is here now. Charge!!

Whose In Charge?

I keep waiting for my guest to go, but nearly six weeks later, there’s no sign of him leaving the house. He’s eating up all my thoughts, putting his dirty feet on my furniture and every time he’s around, my heart starts pounding in a way that’s making me nervous— this can’t be good for me. If it happens just before bed, I know I’m in for it, jolted awake by my guest’s loud music at 2:30 in the morning.

At the same time that I’m fed up with him, I’m fascinated by this heart-pounding signal. It’s a surefire sign that he’s telling me something profound that I need to pay attention to. It’s entirely out of my “executive function” control. I can’t will it away with rational thought, subdue it with meditation, step to the side of it with Scarlatti on the piano, send it away with wine, whiskey or other substances (none of which I partake of anyway). It helps a little to walk and ride my bike, but not much— he’s right there with me every step and wheel turn.

You know the fairy tales when the evil person dumps a bunch of seeds on the ground and says, “Sort these before morning or else” ? This guest is a seed-sorter and writing, writing, writing helps a little bit. Talking helps as well. But the guest won’t leave until he dances with the right people and if they aren’t following the steps, he sits in the corner and waits. Eating all my food.

If wine doesn’t help, neither does whining and in the midst of pain and suffering, I’m fascinated by these bodily signals (heart-pounding) that have their own wisdom and agenda. We have this illusion that our rational minds are in charge, but the Gnostics, Freud and others suggest that there are many voices conversing in our heads and hearts and Mr. Executive isn’t always the one to pay attention to. Ah, there’s a seed-sorting. Which voice is worthy of our attention and when and how much? If you have an answer, drop me a line. Meanwhile, be still, my beating heart.