Onward

The last day of my 65^th year finds me awake too early with Nova Scotia jet lag and preparing for a day of marvelous jazz with 15 teachers, 18 4-year olds and later, the elders at the Jewish Home. What could be better? Well, it could be in a country where people refuse to accept a leader who uses every occasion to try to glorify himself at the expense of other beautiful souls and has so little shame that he’ll turn a talk with Boy Scouts into a political rant. And have said Boy Scouts cheering instead of booing or sitting in stone silence or afterwards, making an organizational public statement that this was unacceptable. Everyone with a beating heart is posting on Facebook their disgust at this man, but I believe we need to trumpet out the same for everyone who lets his remarks and actions pass. Not only did those people elect him, but they feed his pathological sickness. This is not a time to be silent.

And so I speak up strongly in my little gathering in my Jazz Course, with the extra bonus of such joy on the other side of the necessary grief of this country’s sad, sick story of genocide, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, war for profit, unchecked greed, purposeful perpetual ignorance passed on in schools. And the people respond. No one tells me to keep politics out of my jazz teaching. They can recognize Truth when it enters the room and understand that I’m not looking for agreement on my political position, but making sure the stories come out that allow people to form a coherent and informed political position. And when it comes to the history of jazz, there are plenty of stories!

What a miracle that everything I’ve cared about in this life—from music, community celebration, social justice, joy and laughter, grief and sorrow, the full-of-wonder freshness of the 3-year old, the emerging passion and dreams of the 13-year old, the in-the-thick-of it energy of the 33-year old, the wisdom and fullness of the 93-year old—are all woven together in one multicolored dream cloth of each day of my teaching life. 65 is the official and mandatory retirement year in most of Europe and in that respect, I’m grateful that I live in the U.S.A.!!! When it comes to teaching and living, I’m just getting warmed up.

And so I close with the word that closes many of my letters to friends and colleagues, if Fate be so kind as to grant me this possibility:

Onward!

Playground of Possibility

One of the great pleasures of this work is watching people—adults or children—release their fears and doubts and go to a place of possibility they have never visited. Yesterday, one of the teachers in the Jazz Course decided to try the stand-up bass and was so moved by his accomplishment that he asked us to take a photo so he could remember the moment.

For me, this is par for the course. The music room is—or should be— a place of safety, a place free of unnecessary fears, a place to try stuff out and see how it goes, a playground of possibility. It’s a place for kids (or adults) to discover things about themselves that they didn’t know before or had dreamed about, but never touched. It’s a place to draw forth, to lead out (the root meanings of “education”) those potentials hiding in the basement or tucked away in the attic and bring them out into the light to see what they look like and feel like and what they might have to offer. They may discover that these hidden potentials deserve a seat at the table with the already known parts of themselves or may rise to the status of head chef or may prove to be just a temporary guest. Whichever doesn’t matter, what matters is that they were given a chance to have their say and not neglected or pushed away or demeaned.

The Orff approach is particularly well-suited to this kind of invitation, touching so many parts of what a human being can experience and express and savor. Dozens of different instruments to try out, music entered through multiple doors—singing, dancing, conducting, playing, body percussion, vocal percussion, speech-chant-poetry, drama and beyond, the constant invitation to invent, improvise, compose, choreograph something new. In the Orff playground of possibility, folks are swinging, sliding, climbing, tunneling, building, see-sawing, splashing and more and no one is standing over them with a clipboard marking down numbers or directing them with the order of events and amount of time spent at each station.

Like real playgrounds, Orff courses for teachers should have a sign: “Adults must be accompanied by children.” That is, their happy, wounded, dreaming, neglected, funny child within come to reclaim its wonder and curiosity and sensual joy and fully partake as they once did or didn’t, but now can. To live anew the old Tom Robbins’ quote:

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Christmas in July

It’s four days until my 66^th birthday and I’ve never been happier. I’m no stranger to the ravages of time—the wattled neck, the swelling belly, the hair long gone, the backwards counting from some statistical life expectancy and so on. But never have I been more grateful for the gifts of time. Gifts only made possible by the blessing of long life and a determination to not waste a second of our precious time. Why don’t more people talk about this? Why do we spend so much time idolizing the follies of Youth?

In my 2nd day of my 4^th Jazz Course and that lifetime-ago intuition that I could set a room on fire with happy people playing, singing and dancing has reached a maturity that only years—and ongoing attention to disciplined practice—can reap. I sit on my meditation cushion imagining the day to come and the 30 different ways I can release laughter, joy, deep thought and tender feeling, picking and choosing which combination the day suggests. I think ahead to the week and what I might do with a demonstration class of 4-year olds and what songs we will sing later that day with the 94 year olds. I plan which pieces my band will play in our concert for the kids and teachers and what new ways we might involve the audience. And having taught three jazz courses in other places—each one as delightful as a 6-year-old’s Christmas morning—I am just so damn happy to not only get the chance to do it again, but to do it in my own music room, my home for 42 years, with the instruments I’ve so carefully and lovingly collected and with the sound I’m used to and find so satisfying.

I walked into school with a slight sensation that “Hey, it’s still summer! Too early to be here!”

But that soon changed to the feeling, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to leave this place.” The preschool kids greeted me with “Dougie!”, the grand piano in the music room never sounded better, the pleasure of sharing this remarkable piece of paradise with some 50 teachers come to study Orff Schulwerk in three different classes continued to feel so satisfying. All the surrounding voices keep whispering “When are you going to retire?” and I keep answering, “Show me something better than this and I’ll consider it.”

Off to Day Two.

In the Details

Wisdom tells us that we should not move through life seeking the approval of others, counting our Facebook “likes,” fishing for compliments in the hopes that something outside of ourselves will tell us that we are lovable and worthy. But what does Wisdom know? Of course we are constantly checking in on how others react to us and what they approve and what they complement! And while it’s true that we should always seek second opinions (the guy who wrote up Fred Astaire’s screen test said, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Can dance a little.”), ultimately we probably do need to consult something beyond approval of others, some inner guide that tells us we’re on the right track.

But don’t we cherish those moments when we feel seen and known and affirmed? Like when Milt Jackson listened to my 5^th graders playing my arrangement of “The Cookie Jar” and I asked him at the end, “Well, what did you think?” His reply: “Oh, man! That was marvelous!” was all the affirmation I needed to confirm that I had stumbled on something important in my mixing of Orff Schulwerk and Jazz.

A lovely African-Canadian woman in my recent Halifax Jazz Course gave me another cherished comment in a note she wrote:

“I was moved by the practical competencies of carefully crafted microsteps of progress that led us, as a group, to achieve graciously, each from our own level of understanding and experience, musical products that were satisfying and fulfilling, even at the most elementary, beginning stages of jazz expression.”

Wow. Such eloquent expression here: “Practical competencies of carefully crafted microsteps of progress.” Besides the musical alliteration of the hard c’s and the cr’s, she got a huge part of what I’m trying to pass on. There’s the soulful, vibration-to-vibration whole body, voice and spirit that a teacher transmits and perhaps that’s the most powerful and important. But for music teachers who are in it for the long haul, crafting curriculums with young children over years and hundreds of lessons, charismatic delivery often is not enough. The devil is in the details—and so is the angel!

And so I care greatly about those details, those “carefully crafted microsteps of progress” and care that teachers understand that while personal style and musical charisma is unique to each of us and not possible to precisely imitate, the actual detailed steps about how to break down information and build it up again is openly available to all. My book Now’s the Time is the opposite of a random collection of arrangement and activities. Each game, activity, piece of music is complete in itself, but also grows out of the thing before and leads to the thing that follows.

Thank you, Gail, for both your own spirited and infectiously fun participation and your wisdom to see the importance of sequence and carefully thought-out steps. When artful expression and scientific pedagogy join, we indeed (as you say) can open the “hearts, minds and soul of the children we teach.”

Progress

I’m a firm believer in Martin Luther King’s faith that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I believe that there is a general trend of evolution of human consciousness and that we are getting smarter, kinder and more aware and awake. Of course, hard to keep the faith in the face of 45 and there’s no question that it seems like we often go one step forward and two steps back. I mean, just compare Trump’s inarticulate speech to Thomas Jefferson’s or the soft rock music I heard in the Leipzig Church to Bach or Snoop Dog’s lyrics to Rumi’s poems. Plenty of reason to be cynical and think that the trend is backwards.

But on the other hand, no one practices human sacrifice anymore. It used to be commonly accepted that if there was a drought, of course it was because the gods needed a couple of virgins thrown into the volcano. I mean, duh! everyone knows that will solve the problem! No way you can convince me that leeches sucking my blood aren’t going to heal my sickness and come on, the slaves are so darn happy down there on the plantation, why would you ever want to abolish slavery? You must be out of your mind if you think a woman has the intellectual capacity to vote, never mind run a country. And how could you not think that smoking is the coolest thing ever?!! Anyone that challenged these commonly accepted thoughts and practices was considered crazy. And then we grew up. Well, most of us.

The Pier 21 Museum in Halifax has a great exhibit about Canadian Immigration, done in the form of a timeline. Most of it was the depressing story of inclusion and exclusion, who’s in the club, who’s out, who can open the door, who will find it locked, who can step through the door and still be treated shabbily. No surprise that there were lots of Chinese Exclusion Acts, that runaway slaves were allowed in and then suffered more barbs of racist exclusion, that indigenous people were torn from their own land without a second thought. Then there were the homosexuals and communists grouped with the drug dealers and drug traffickers and then the disabled and sickly paired with married women (huh?). In short, the same old, same old hierarchy of skin color, sexual preference, gender, class.

But suddenly, in 1971 (thanks to Pierre Trudeau), it all changed and Canada formally proclaimed the first official multicultural policy, boldly stating that they now welcomed diversity. The timeline got a lot happier after that and it is true that Toronto, where I teach year after year, apparently is the world’s most multicultural city. So that’s progress, yes?

And then yesterday, I flew United from Boston to San Francisco and imagine my shock when the flight attendants came down the aisle with a hot meal!! On a domestic flight!! Hadn’t seen that for the last 10 or 15 years! What changed? The flight attendant said it was a new policy on flights over 5 hours long, but only in Economy Plus (and of course, First and Business class). I felt a little weird thinking that a few rows behind me, the peasant passengers would not partake, but hey, I’ve paid my flight dues to get the privilege! Ha ha! Maybe the next step in evolution of consciousness with trickle all the way down to the last row someday. One can only dream.

So that’s my report on progress. And, by the way, lest you’re too shocked that I didn’t share my meal with those behind me and angry at my privilege, I was the only one whose luggage didn’t arrive. Like I said, one step forward, two steps back.