Old King Glory

The children’s game “Old King Glory” was the game I played more than any other during my 45 years at The San Francisco School. I played it my first year teaching in 1975 and so looked forward to it being the last game I ever played there as an official music teacher in the school. Alas, the pandemic changed that. But still it holds a special resonance, climbing up a mountain that was “so high, it nearly touched the sky” and asking the people in the circle, be they children or adults, to follow me one by one to take in the marvelous view.

 

That’s what happened this past week in the Jazz Course, back in my old music room with fourteen beautiful souls ready to take the journey and also help point out the things that I might miss. As always, we are all each other’s teachers and students and while I’m often in the front of the line, having taken this journey so many times before, there are many times when I’m in the middle of the pack or even the back. And before we start the ascent, I’m in the circle as just one of many and when we reach the summit, we circle up again.

 

Like all climbs against gravity, it takes effort and intention and determination to take that next step when all the muscles are screaming to stop. Sometimes we slip into some swampy territory, get stuck in the mud, help lift each other and keep moving. On we went and in our closing circle, the testimonies poured forth about the small and big breakthroughs each one made, led by a teacher who knows the dangers and pitfalls and attends as possible to each one’s particular needs, supported and encouraged by the fellow climbers, surprised by the results of their own efforts, discovering that the “can’t do” weight strapped on their backs by uncaring teachers or parents or friends or dysfunctional systems or their own voices of self-doubt could be lifted off and they could dance feely, with a light step and heart. And then, having taken in the view surrounded by love and beauty, the class ends and we all begin our descent to lead our own students and children up the path when we return to our teaching life. 

 

The climbing the mountain metaphor holds up for me, but perhaps even more accurate is our commitment to build our own mountain. Stay tuned for the next post. 

 

Meanwhile, great thanks to each and every one of the people who traveled from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Colombia, the Yukon, Vancouver, Washington,  Oregon, Minnesota, Arizona, Fairfax and Oakland, California to take this glorious trip together. We are now forever united in Jazz, Joy and Justice. 

My Children's Book

 

One more day of the Jazz Course and another day today of tears, laughter and the sublime power of music. But at the end of the day, I wasn’t thinking of some grand statement about the uplift of children and hope for a despairing humanity. Instead, I was wondering why the avocado I bought on Sunday still wasn’t ripe by Thursday.

 

So I began plotting my first children’s book— The Avocado That Refused to Ripen. Even when put in a paper bag with apples, an ancient proven strategy, my avocado stubbornly refused to yield to my squeezes, as hard and determined as it was five days ago. Preventing me from making my anticipated taco dinner of which guacamole is an essential ingredient.

 

Why, oh why? That is the mystery plot I need to unthread and come up with a plausible answer. Stay tuned for the riveting best-seller soon to come. 

PS If you would like to illustrate it, let's meet at a Mexican restaurant to discuss. The guacamole is on me.

Fierce Protectors

 

I’m back in my home of homes. Teaching, for sure and renewing the marriage vows of my two loves, Orff and Jazz and the extra bonus of being in my old music room, that Sacred Space where I both witnessed and helped shepherd in miracle after miracle for 45 years. It is a joy beyond joys to tell the stories of some of those memorable miraculous moments and point to the place I stood where it happened. 

 

Yesterday was my second day in a row of trying to speak while the tears came forward, a skill I’ve had considerable experience in. The occasions when the waters start flowing are never predictable or planned, but a sure sign that the Ancestors are by my side and this particular moment is not business as usual, but the grace of stumbling onto something worthy of attention. The quality of listening in the room further testifies that we’ve dug down below the surface of mere fun and effective teaching strategies to the deeper layers of what it’s really about. 

 

I listened to a podcast from that wise elder Michael Meade yesterday when he talked about the need to activate two ancient and forever human faculties— toughness and tenderness. And as wisdom always suggests, we are not to choose between them, but feel which the occasion calls for and in what proportion. If we lean too heavily toward toughness, we run the risk of being hard-hearted and frozen and trapped in our own dogma. If too heavily to the latter, we can be run over by the very real forces of evil afoot in the world and unable to protect ourselves or our loved ones. We need both.

It reminded me of an exhibit I saw in the Newark Museum about the Tibetan deities called Fierce Protectors. Every day, the publicly sanctioned bullies try to beat down both the child within us and our actual children. We need a mother bear’s ferocity when protecting her cubs to hold our own not only against the obvious transgressions of civility, but our passive acceptance of robots caring for the elderly, driverless cars clogging our streets, chatgpt’s writing our break-up letters. 

 

So every day in my Jazz Class, I have my soap box moment of focused ranting and raving, preaching to the choir, but a choir that needs to hear how I talk about it and be reminded how to find their own way to speak up and refuse the nonsense all schools are foisting on both the children and the teachers. As the tears testify, such toughness is balanced by the tenderness that is equally essential to model unapologetically. When both are present, that’s when I know I’m teaching well.

 

And of course, laughter and fun as well. Yesterday’s highlight, among dozens, was teaching 1^stto 3^rdgrade kids from the school’s summer camp. Some remembered me from three years ago, the last group of 5-year-olds I taught, but many were new. No matter— we were best friends within the first two minutes of class and it only got better with each passing minute. I later told my Jazz Course students that I could apologize for expressing my feelings so strongly, but I won’t, because they are not opinions, but developed points of view crafted over the decades of trying to figure out what is really important in working with children. All my complaints about what is wrong in the world at large and schools in particular are balanced by my demonstration of what could be right as I lead the children from joy to joy, praise every little notable expression they offer, have unshakeable confidence in their musicality, their humanity, their capacity for resilience and let them know in no uncertain terms that I will be both their playful companion and their fierce protector.

 

Today we go to the other end of life’s arc and we will play, sing and dance with all my beloved friends at the Jewish Home for the Aged. Stay tuned for that report— though I can predict the adjectives that will pour forth—all synonyms of “WONDERFUL!”  

One Hour

There’s always one moment in my Jazz Course where deep—and necessary— grief enters the room and we all feel the weight of unbearable sorrow. It came yesterday, a troubled but needed and welcomed guest, appropriately enough as we entered the story of the blues. My invitation came in the form of describing the tour I took recently at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and the Whitney Plantation Tour I took in New Orleans some years back. I shared the unfathomable suffering of people locked in dark, damp dungeons for upward of three months, living (how was this possible?) amidst their own human waste with no light, no sunshine, little food. We get hangry if our restaurant meal arrives late, complain when it’s foggy for three days straight with no sun, feel our biorhythms getting off if we miss a few days of exercise and get distressed if our toilet doesn’t flush until the plumber comes. Are we even capable of imagining the full measure of such human-created misery? Can we imagine how we could survive? Put ourselves in those Cape Coast cells?

 

Picture yourself three months living in a cesspool. Then when you’re released from the dungeon and brought out to fresh air and sunshine, it lasts for an hour or so as you get shoved into the hold of ships where we enter another living hell in the long Middle Passage sea voyage. When you finally get our feet on land again, it’s in a new alien world where you will be stripped of everything that defines us as human beings— name, language, family, religion, music, the freedom to claim our own identity— sold as property, and made to work 12-15 hour days in hot sun doing back-breaking labor for no money, little food and at the whims of the mood of slave-masters who can beat you or rape you at their whim. And without having committed any crime,  you're sentenced to live in such horrific conditions not only our entire lifetime, but our children’s and children’s children and children’s children’s children, all the way down the relentless long tunnel of human misery for some 400 years. 

 

And why? So people in a land far away can drink coffee with sugar and have a smoke afterwards. Frivolous human leisure activities that not only are unnecessary, but actually bad for your health. And when the laws that upheld and sustained this purposefully manufactured chain of deprivation, agony and wretched sorrow called chattel slavery were finally changed, the narrative of a God who approved and an economic system that depended upon it continued to wreak havoc with the Black Codes, Jim Crow, lunching without consequences, School to Prison Pipeline, Police Brutality and murder, all publicly sanctioned and approved and backed by new laws from the people who stood to benefit from it. If anyone knows a story more horrendous and gruesome than that, I’d like to hear it. 

 

You can imagine the feeling in the room after I spoke. I then turned to Rhonda Benin, a beautiful black woman in the course who sang with Linda Tillery’s Cultural Heritage Choir and asked her to sing a Field Holler, that ancestor of the Blues, to translate all of this into the Sorrow Songs enslaved human beings sang to bear up and survive. She did and the Ancestors came to listen and our tears poured out. Where to go from there?

 

Exactly where black Americans have always gone and white Americans always resisted— down into the Grief in the muck and the mire and then rising up to the heavens toward love and forgiveness (but never forgetting). And so I began to sing this song with its corresponding motions and the invitation to invite someone else to go down with me, who then invites someone else until we are all in it together.

 

Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer. Crying and a’weepin’ over all she has done.

Rise, Sally, rise, won’t you wipe those cryin’ eyes, won’t you

Turn to the East, Sally, turn to the West, Sally, turn to the very one that you love the best.

 

We hugged our neighbors when the game ended and went on to sing some blues.

 

Earlier, Rhonda told the story of visiting a plantation where they whitewashed the real story and talked, as so many do (except the Whitney) about the architecture and such. At the end of the tour, a smiling white woman asked Rhonda how she enjoyed it and Rhonda confessed that it was difficult. The woman said, “Oh, come on, when are you people going to get over it?” 

 

In some thirty states here in 2023, me telling the story I just told would have endangered my job. Terrified that the truth is coming out, the Republicans are scrambling to get the next bill in that forbids teachers from teaching anything that might make some of the (white) students or their parents feel uncomfortable. One complaint from someone whose poor traumatized tender soul takes offense is enough to fire the offending teacher. 

 

To which I reply:

 

“Let the offended person, child or parent or Plantation tour guide,  spend one hour in the conditions of Cape Coast castle or in the ship’s holds of the Middle Passage or in the forced labor camps called Plantations picking cotton in the hot sun, and then we’ll talk. One hour. Until then, sit down, shut up and listen to the truth. Open your heart to the grief and rise up into love. That’s the education we’ve refused and the one that might finally heal us and move us forward.”

My friends, more than ever, it's time to speak up and speak out and then sing and dance together toward the redemption we all need and deserve. May it be so.

 

Like Being in Love

“What a day this has been, what a rare mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love…”

 

This the song I listened to driving back from the second day of my Jazz Course. Perfectly appropriate for the occasion. Such a joy to get to teach this class again after a four-year forced respite.

 

The first 5-day Jazz Course I ever taught combining my two loves of Orff and Jazz was in 1988 at Hamlin University in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am thankful to Orff teacher Jane Frazee for inviting me to do so and yet more thankful that she agreed to run the course (at a reduced salary, as appropriate) when I only had six students registered. Off we went into this previously unexplored territory and at the end, they gifted me with a Lake Wobegon T-shirt where they had embroidered, “The First Six.” I took this as a prophetic vision that this was a class that would continue on and make a splash in the world of music education. 

 

Continue it did, every year in San Francisco from 1990 to 2018 and on to other sites as well— Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Montreal, Halifax in Canada, to Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, to Iceland, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Germany, to Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore. The last live Jazz Course— and the most extraordinary of them all— was in New Orleans in 2019. The splash I hoped for is more like a drip in the big picture, but nevertheless, I persist.

 

Then the pandemic, the post-pandemic reluctance to gather in live courses and finally, this live version back in one of my truest homes, the music room of The San Francisco School. Driving there the first day and standing in a circle with the 14 participants, I expected bells to ring and the heavens to open up, but truth be told, driving there felt like a reflex as familiar as putting on an old beloved shirt and though the music room greeted me warmly, it has changed enough that I needed to adjust a bit. That said and done, I loved sitting again in my old pink chair and playing the bass xylophone that is still going strong after 49 years and partly responsible for me landing my job at the school. 

 

For years, I fretted about fitting everything I had to say about this enormous subject, sharing every game, dance, song and instrumental arrangement I thought everyone should know into a mere five or six days. Now I am relaxed picking a few key things, taking time with them, going more deeply into them and feeling comfortable with “leave them wanting more.” And so I happily turn toward Day Three with a solid plan in mind and clear knowledge that each minute of the seven hours will be a delight.

 

And so, the First Six, you were right. The Jazz Course lives on! 

The Good Samaritan

While I was away, my daughter Kerala came down to SF. Apparently, she drove our car one day and got rear-ended— not her fault. The other day, my wife met with the insurance agent who said she could collect some money and fix the bumper dents or just collect the money and do nothing if she wanted.

 

Our Prius car, built to crumple when bumping into something driving at .0001 miles per hour, is filled with dents and scratches, front and back. This could have been an opportunity to piggyback on the little accident and get a few others smoothed out.

 

Instead, my wife reported that she asked the insurance man if the other driver’s insurance rates would go up if we collected. He replied the obvious— “Yes.” And my wife, the good Samaritan, decided we could live with another dent and declined the money on behalf of this woman. 

 

I was impressed. Of course, this puts her on the list of anti-American practice and labels her a fool in our capitalistic get-what-you-can and everyone-for-themselves mentality. I believe she might even be tried for treason in some people’s books. Me, I’m proud of her and only suggested she let the woman know, not to get thanks or appreciation, but to encourage her to pay it forward to the next person if the situation is reversed. But of course, she’s not allowed to —God forbid— contact the other driver. 

 

So we just drive happily on in our dented car knowing someone’s insurance rates won’t change. That’s a good feeling.

Where I'm Needed

  

Writing these posts is mostly a daily discipline, my ritual fishing expedition into the reflective and linguistic layers of the brain to see what will bite today. So it has been a bit odd to be writing these Ghana Chronicle posts a couple of weeks after they happened and neglecting what I’m actually doing at the moment. And oddly, I haven’t missed it much.

 

But today was a day worthy of report, back to that sense of being wholly of use. May I confess something here? As any reader can tell, I LOVED being in Ghana, but truth be told, I’m not a very important person there. My whole shtick about effective music education, the importance of ritual and celebration, building a culture of belonging and welcome, has no resonance with the Ghanaians beyond, “Well, duh!!!” As a musician—particularly in Ewe music— I’m barely at the kindergarten level. I do feel I contributed something useful to the Ghana xylophone classes, but again, the group would have been fine with just Aaron teaching. And don’t get me wrong— all of this is good, an important reminder to humble down and just enjoy being whoever I am in company with my fellow humans without any need to feel important or admired. 

 

But let’s face it. I like being in charge and I particularly like feeling needed and useful. This entire week, I’ve taught two groups of 8 to 10 year old kids at the Oberlin Dance Collective Summer Camp. A new gig for me and intriguing to just see who shows up and what I can do with them in four short hours over four days. I had some vague plans of what amidst the hundreds of activities in my repertoire I might do with them, but knew that the first step was just to see where they were— musically, dance-wise, attention-wise etc. And to resist the urge to compare them to the Ghanaian kids I had just left!

 

First off, except for a few little edgy moments of testing the behavioral waters, the kids were mostly with the program, willing to try things and work through a few challenging moments. After five days, they amply fulfilled my number one teaching goal— to start where they are and move forward to where they hadn’t yet been, combining my knowledge of how to help them with their effort to improve. Where they were at the beginning wasn’t, of course, their fault, but it is worth noticing that some had never done clapping plays with partners, didn’t know simple nursery rhymes like “Pease Porridge Hot,” a few had severe inabilities to keep the beat and most had trouble crafting a coherent pentatonic scale solo. All of which is the fault of both schools and culture that has failed to give them the basic tools of musical expression. 

 

So that was my job and that’s why I felt useful. In the morning of the last day, I rehearsed the two groups together, stitching together the separate pieces— Table Rhythms, arrangements of two nursery rhymes with improvisation and my multi-media arrangement of Step Back Baby— with little dramatic connecting parts. After a lovely lunch with my sister, who was there at the same time teaching a class to mature dancers who simply wanted to keep in touch with a passion from their earlier life, I went back to the Jewish Home to play with my friends Javier and Cathy, our lovely piano-clarinet-violin trio. I had been five weeks away and they were so happy to welcome us back and we were even happier to see them all again. Over an hour of sweet, sweet music bringing comfort, beauty, energy and respite from life’s chaos to us all. From that time with 88 and 98 year olds, back to the dance studio for the afternoon performance with 8 year-olds, which was delightful.  As you might imagine, it was a day in which I felt useful.

 

As much as I love going to Ghana, they don’t need me there. But here, where we’ve lost so much of what is truly important in this life, my voice and work and presence feels needed. And I am happy to offer it all. On to the Jazz Course!