Honoring the Departed

It has been a particularly brutal few months, with some eight people I knew fairly well going on to the Other World. Seems I hear about someone who died or who is seriously ill most every week. Makes sense as the price one pays for longevity— the people you know disappearing like an ongoing game of musical chairs and never knowing who’s next. 

 

I’ve been fortunate to have a life relatively sheltered from death. I believe the first person I knew who left was my grandmother when I was perhaps 8 years old and then my grandfather when I was 12. I never went to a funeral or memorial service until I was 28 or so, when a preschooler I taught had a tragic accident in a hot tub. There were a few big losses like my beloved Orff teacher Avon dying at a too-young 51, me 39 at the time. A suicide from one of my Men’s Group members when I turned 50. Then my parents and my wife’s parents and so on. You know the list. 

 

Some ten years ago, I decided to try to keep track of the people I knew personally who had passed on, partly for a little Day of the Dead project I devised for myself. I divided the list into family, friends, neighbors, people from the school where I worked for so long, people from the Orff world, old classmates from my high school and college. Between working at that school and teaching here, there and everywhere in the Orff world, I know a lot of people and these two lists were the longest of them all— some 65 from school and 55 from the Orff Community. Altogether, there are some 200 people on the list and every November, I read through it again and spend some time remembering them all. 

 

Does anybody else do this? Just curious. If indeed you believe the Ancestors are always with us and through our remembrance, we keep them at least somewhat alive, then it seems like a good idea. Just a thought to consider.

 

As you might guess, it’s not a list I’m happy to see grow, but of course, it will. Meanwhile, may we all take good care of ourselves as best we can. 

  

Happy Earth Day!

I’m looking forward to the day when some generation would look at this little “rap” I composed in 1984 and wonder, “What the heck was that about? Of course we take care of our precious little planet!”

 

Well, certainly not in my lifetime. But to help nudge us toward that imagined distant day, sing this with your kids today or your neighbors or the people at your workplace. 

 

No Time for Singing

The gap between what is and what could and should be yawned yet wider yesterday. My wife and I had dinner at some ex-neighbor’s house last night, a couple with two girls and in many ways—as they themselves put it— an earlier version of ourselves. We share the experience of two daughters, having lived on 2^nd Avenue (they moved just a 10-minute walk away), have a mutual love and passion for Golden Gate Park (she wrote a kid’s book about the ABC’s of Golden Gate Park and was instrumental in keeping the JFK road car-free), enjoying camping with the family and share a commitment to raise kids as appliance-free-as possible. This was the family that suggested the pandemic neighborhood sing I led and continue to do four years later every few months. 

Their children, now in 2^nd and 5^th grade, go to a lovely alternative public school and some two years ago, I suggested I come to do guest singing in their daughter’s classes. I did and after the 5^th grade class, I got this note from this student that I had never met before and only spent that 30 minutes singing with. 

Of course, that note is not about me, but translates to: “Thanks for giving me something that I needed that made me so happy.”

 

But the last time I was scheduled to sing, the 5^th grade teacher—herself very enthusiastic about my visits and supportive— said that she couldn’t take 30 minutes out of her day because the kids had state tests coming up. Last night, I again suggested to my friends that I could sing tomorrow on Earth Day and was told that again, there was testing and the teacher was stressed out to the maximum and in fact, there wasn’t 30 minutes to spare anytime between now and the end of school. 

 

There you have it. I’m reminded of the joke of the pious man who came every day to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem three times a day for 45 years to pray. When asked what he prayed about, he replied: “That all religions finally understand that they have different names for the same God, that children respect their parents, that parents create a loving home for their children, that we humans stop fouling our environmental nest, that we stop telling the stories that keep the “isms” alive, etc.” When asked how it felt to be praying for those same things over all those years, he was unequivocal:

 

“Like I’m talking to a fuckin’ wall!”

 

All these posts about the schools we could have and should have and for what? This is a progressive school in San Francisco! And the teacher feels under so much pressure she can’t give the kids a 30-minute respite to sing joyfully. (Which, by the way, would be a brilliant strategy to re-charge their system and help prepare them to take any test the state throws their way.) It’s extraordinary to think that the monster of “testing” is still loose in the land, that ferocious beast that has absolutely nothing to do with children learning what they need to know in the way they need to learn it and know it. This good teacher suffering from stress because of people in the state who live and work far away from her children and know nothing about who they are and what they need and care nothing about either— well, that’s not healthy. She will pass that stress on to the kids, who did nothing to deserve it and the stressed kids will bring their anxiety back into their homes and again, it’s a Lose-Lose-Lose situation that we keep doing—for what, exactly?

 

And in case you’re not up on the current research, read Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture to look at the links between chronic stress and autoimmune diseases, depression, inflammation, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and yet more. But we don’t need medical research to tell us that stress debilitates us, leads us into a state of distress, feeds our anxiety, cripples our sense of self-worth and effective functioning. In short, the polar opposite of what singing together offers us.

 

No time to sing? Think again. 

Farewell to Toronto

After three weeks of rain, cold, overcast skies, Toronto finally seriously turned the corner to a sunny, warm and flower-blooming Spring. On my last day! Walking around the neighborhood after the glorious concert and last classes with the kids it felt like a different place entirely. Weather can do that. 

 

Though I’ve come here almost once a year for over twenty years, it’s not easy to get a handle on this big, sprawling city. I got to know a ten-block radius near the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor St. all those years and this year, another ten blocks on Danforth St. in Greektown and then the walk on Lawrence Avenue from the subway stop to the school. Truth be told, it’s a hard city for me to get a handle on. Though known as one of the world’s most multicultural cities, it doesn’t seem to have concentrated neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Chinatown, Japantown, Italian North Beach, Latin Mission St., Russian Hill and such. (Greektown excepted). Maybe that’s a good thing, as the population is more mixed in with each other. The downtown feels like a random assortment of high-rise office buildings and condos, without an easily identifiable skyline and few iconic buildings beyond the CN Tower. I took a morning to try to explore the waterfront, expecting a Fisherman’s Wharf kind of scene, but it was a confusing mix of non-descript buildings. 

 

I’m sure that there are intriguing and enticing neighborhoods I don’t know about and next trip, I’ll ask my friends to tour me through them. One thing I notice is the plethora of brick buildings, hardly any of which we have in San Francisco. I’m quite familiar with them from my New Jersey childhood, but whether there or in Toronto, they feel quite heavy and dark in combination with the overcast skies and I could feel that sinking into my psyche. 

 

None of this is to insult Toronto or the Torontonians who live there. The few hundred I know from all these years of workshops are wonderful people and there’s no question that the restaurant scene certainly reflects that multi-cultural population. And the subways! All praise to this system where taking two trains one-way and then back again for three weeks was consistently a pleasant and extraordinarily efficient experience. I literally never had to wait more than two minutes for the next train. And with each of the ten cars pretty full, meaning that people really use their public transportation. Hurray for that! I noticed that there were less on Monday and Fridays and apparently, in the hybrid work scene those are the days that people work from home. 

 

So farewell to Toronto and I suspect we will keep seeing each other. Until then, may Spring burst fully open, the skies be blue, the weather warm and the trees wholly leaved.  

What I Was Born For

I’m thinking of John Irving’s book A Prayer for Owen Meany. Though I don’t remember the details, Owen had some strange character quirks that finally revealed their purpose in a climactic scene in which he saves a group of children in a way no one else could have done. As if every moment in his life was moving inexorably to that one moment. That sense of “This is what I was born for.”

 

What if today was the epic climax of my own journey? If every beckoning finger that I followed, every fork in the road I took, every choice I made and every choice that seemed to be made for me was just a prelude leading up to today? To this 45-minute performance with eight 4^th to 6^th grade classes and 160 kids that I put together in less than three weeks. If that turned out to be the entire reason for my incarnation, I believe I would accept it gratefully.

 

With no dress rehearsal in the actual space and two or three classes per grade to put it together, the kids came through with flying colors. My Little Suede Shoes, Come Butter Come, Mo Betta Blues, Boom Chick a Boom, Step Back Baby, Humpty Dumpty, Wa-Nyema, representing a wide swath of culture and musical style (Jazz, Mother Goose, games from the U.S., Virgin Islands, Mexico, Japan) and mixing clapping plays, body percussion, songs, dances, drama, Orff Ensemble, just about every box of dynamic and inspired music education and education in general was checked. The head of school commented afterwards, “I had goosebumps almost the whole time” and told me one child sitting next to her said, “My hands hurt from clapping so much,” and another responded, “My face hurts from smiling so much.” 

 

The concert was over by 9:15 and I still had a full day ahead of me. Three more hour-long classes with the 5^th graders. We played a little game where each had to choose one word to describe their feeling before, during or after  the performance and say it on the beat, with everyone echoing. Amongst the choices were “Amazing, fantabulous, joyful, happy, cheerful, proud, nervous, excited, scared, relaxed.”

 

I used some of the time to read more chapters from my Jazz, Joy & Justice book— Nat King Cole, Nina Simone— as well as telling them the story of the time Art Tatum’s sister invited me into the house where Art grew up. They gifted me with the same kind of attentive listening they showed for some previous readings.

 

Finally, we arrived at the closing game, where each in turn gets to go into the middle and “show us your motion” while we sing and clap. A final circle passing a hand-squeeze around and a goodbye hi-five with each, ending the three weeks the way I like, like a piece of music with its satisfying closing chords. Some chose to hug me instead of hi-five and many pleaded, “When are you coming back?” A few minutes after one class ended, a child came back to collect some waterbottles some other kids had left and explained that they sent her to do it because they were out in the hall crying. Finally, I went out to meet the cab and just as I was getting in, I heard this commotion from a window. The kids had gathered for one more goodbye! 

I don’t feel done with my work here on Earth and am in no hurry to see about giving workshops on the other side of the Pearly Gates. But if this day had been destined to be my Swan Song, I would be content. Thank you to all the children, teachers and especially kids at the Havergal College Junior School in Toronto, Canada. It has been a sheer delight. 

Book Review

I had such high hopes for my “Jazz, Joy & Justice” book and to date, the response has been underwhelming. I was hoping that at least all the music teachers I’ve trained in the Bay Area would rush to buy copies for their students and hey, why not invite the author, who lives nearby, to come speak? Since it was published in September, not a single such invite has come my way.

 

Likewise, no book reviews and invites to speak on radio or TV. Well, actually there was one TV Interview invite that I accepted, only to discover that I had to pay them a significant sum of money for the honor and privilege. Which I did, because I felt the book is worthy of a “whatever it takes” approach to publicity. (You can see the interview here: : Jazz, Joy and Justice on Spotlight with Logan Crawford).

 

But here teaching in Toronto, the first authentic reviews have now come in. I was hired to do what I do best—teach live hands-on music to kids of all ages, get them up joyfully playing, singing and dancing and even performing (tomorrow) with great kid energy and exuberance, but also fabulous music well-played. All that I have done. 

 

But since the 5^th grader’s theme is jazz, I left a little space to introduce my book and read from it. And I got three meaningful reviews:

 

In the first, I read about the mostly unknown musician Hazel Scott. The kids were somewhat intrigued by her story, but without knowing who she was or hearing and seeing what she did, their connection with her was a little abstract. Then came the punchline of showing the video of her playing two pianos at once in a Hollywood movie. Their mouths were agape with amazement and the story of how her career was cut short by racism, sexism and the Communist hysteria of the 50’s now sparked their outrage. One girl said, 

“Can I buy that book? I think that was really interesting!” First review.

 

In another class, I reversed the order and showed several videos of Sammy Davis Jr. Then when I read his chapter with the phrase, “How could one person have all that talent?!” they knew exactly what I meant as they saw him sing, scat sing, impersonate singers, play drums, vibraphone, trombone and piano and hey, might as well tap dance! Now they were really interested in— and again, shocked by— the story of his fellow soldiers in World War II beating him up every day as they fought side by side for “American freedom.” At the end, one girl shouted out, “Read another one!” Second review.

 

The last review came today after the 6^th grade class played Charlie Parker’s My Little Suede Shoes. After playing it, we gathered to hear his chapter in my book and the kids ended up being 100% with me that if we’re going to play someone’s music and enjoy it so much, we should learn something about her or him. And if that story involves the devastating effects of the white supremacy narrative, it’s the least we can do to consider how people making this music suffered from that and vow to change that story. This review came not from comments but from a quality of silence that spoke volumes about the importance of kids hearing these stories. When I began to read, there was a little fussing and side-talk amongst the kids spread out on the floor, but as I got deeper into the story, it got very quiet. 

 

I’m well acquainted with that rare quality of silence that sometimes is present in a talk or poetry reading or a concert. Indeed, after a shared poetry reading, two poets once asked each other if they felt the power in that room. One said, “It was as if they were listening like their lives depended on it.” Perhaps that’s a bit much to attribute to these 6^th grade girls, but I can testify that there was a feeling in that room far deeper than “business as usual.” And that meant the world to me.

 

I told the kids that that’s why I wrote this for kids. The adults are too busy rehearsing their fixed point of views to give these things the time and attention they deserve, but kids—like they showed me today— are really willing to think about these things. And then go back to Youtube to see and hear this joyous music yet again.

 

If the New York Review of Books ever calls me, I’ll send them to the kids.

  

Reclaiming Identity

Hey, I have an idea!! Let’s turn over our intelligence to something that has no beating heart or moral compass. Let’s excuse people from having to think independently or hold difficult conversations, as they outsource it all. Let’s create a world where nuanced thinking and the ability to spontaneously react like a great jazz musician is neither needed nor valued. If something doesn’t fit on the limited menu options, it’s not worth discussing. Let’s shut ourselves in our personal echo chamber that only echoes back the things we mindlessly accepted as true and never hear another voice. 

 

I started writing this about AI, but to be fair, all of the above also well describes a sub-species of human beings known as Republicans. (Go through the list again and imagine each.) So maybe it’s not a question of machine vs. human, given the pitiful versions of ourselves so many are proving to be. But theoretically at least, the humans have a chance of changing themselves in ways that the machines never can and never will. So instead of investing all our “curiosity, inventiveness, relentlessness and ingenuity” (see E.B. White in the last post) on building the next machines, let’s invest it in our human potential. Starting with growing better children.

 

While writing this at a break in the school where I’m teaching, a child comes in and poses a riddle: “What can be stolen but never taken?” A pause and then the intriguing answer; “Identity.” BOOM! There you go. AI and its extended family are doing their damn best to steal our identity, but the core of our humanity can never wholly be taken from us. However deep in the recesses it may be hidden from those who armor themselves against independent thought, sincere feeling, joy and sorrow, there is at least a flicker of humanity still sparkling in even the worst of us. It is said that Hitler was kind to his dog.

(Though frankly, haven’t seen that flicker yet in our own neo-power-mad version.) 

 

To preserve our identity gifted to us when we chose a human incarnation, there must be some semblance of our mammalian instinct to nurture and protect, our neo-cortic capacity to think logically and rationally, our mythological ability to imagine and dream. When we outsource it all to the machines of our own creation, we are participating in the theft of who we are at our core. 

 

Our human qualities—again, curiosity, inventiveness, relentlessness and ingenuity— can be used, even without our intention, for both good and evil. The choice is where to aim them. Let me suggest we put them in service of our highest capacities, the things that not only are essential to survive but are equally necessary for us to thrive. To live lightly and lovingly and laughingly on this great, green, grand and glorious earth.