Teamwork

Ms. White's Class
Sierramont Middle School. San Jose, California



My friend Stephen is a musician, producer and recording engineer. I accompanied him to San Jose today to record the performances of Sierramont Middle School’s music department, comprised of three orchestras and a choir. Their teacher is the estimable Ms. White.

18% of Sierramont students take a musical elective, whether it be choir or orchestral practice, and it was inspiring to watch these youngsters singing and playing their hearts out (admittedly for school credit.) The school orchestras applied themselves with impressive concentration, and as the school choir sang, their faces were filled with joy.

A sign on the wall of Ms. White‘s class reads ‘Teamwork: Listening, thinking, working together’, and that seemed to sum things up pretty well.

Early musical training is of immense benefit to young minds. It helps develop brain areas involved in language and reasoning, and students who study the arts receive higher grades and are more successful on standardized tests.

Students of the arts also learn to think creatively and to reject outdated assumptions. Since studying the arts exposes children to other cultures, it teaches them to be empathetic towards others.

In addition, students of music learn craftsmanship, teamwork, discipline, and the concrete rewards of hard work. Crucially, music performance teaches youngsters to conquer fear and take risks, providing them with a means of self-expression.

The dedication of Ms.White was an inspiration. I wish I had had a music teacher like her when I was a teen. This energetic and committed educator moved to San Jose from the American midwest in order to communicate a love of music and foster a sense of co-operation among her students. I must say she has succeeded admirably, and I am certain she will soon be adding to the impressive collection of trophies already decorating the shelves of her music room.

Eight Miles High

North-West Airlines Flight 9728
Somewhere between Osaka and Honolulu

I'm on my way to Los Angeles via Honolulu, cruising at an altitude of 42,000 feet. That's eight miles high: "When you touch down /You’ll find that it’s stranger than known."

I don't feel so good. I just had the worst airline meal of my life, after giving the wrong answer to the question, “Chicken or Beef?” I chose the beef after playing paper, rock, scissors with myself.

Endeavoring to distract my thoughts from the heinous crime perpetrated on my digestive tract I set my iPod to 'shuffle' mode.

1. 4 Minute Warning - Radiohead
In a democratic band vote this was vetoed from the initial version of In Rainbows, proving that generally five heads are indeed better than one. “This is just a nightmare”, sings Thom Yorke. He should try the beef.

2. Down is the New Up- Radiohead
Another In Rainbows reject, and in perfect synchronicity the plane plummets ninety feet as we hit turbulence, prompting nervous gasps around the cabin. I feel the beef trying to do an about-turn and I remember: I really don’t like flying. This track proves that the rejects of mega-bands are only marginally more interesting than those of no-hopers. Are we in Honolulu yet?

3. Mr. Grieves - The Pixies
Hmm. This oldie still packs a vicarious punch, but as the plane ducks and weaves its way through the turbulence, negative thoughts continue to percolate in my mind. I recall loudQUIETloud, the 2006 Pixies documentary which proved that famous musicians are just as boring and dysfunctional as we lesser mortals.

4. Girls on LSD - Tom Petty
Reminds me of a girl who had a cat named Alexander and a goldfish named Sebastian. She was my first true love. On rainy days we sat in bars or walked on the beach. She was raised on a ranch and told me, “You don’t know much about animals, do you?” As usual, she was right. Talking of animals....

5. The Past is a Grotesque Animal - Of Montreal
No one with an iota of life experience could dispute the truth of this assertion. Sometimes you knock things down only to build them up again. Even if you succeed, there will always be something missing, in particular the purity and innocent joy which made it special in the first place.

6. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - Wilco
The singer’s egomania and self-delusion merges with my own, and I wonder if I will end this flight in one piece, or in many pieces. As my pal Red used to say, the devil has his price to pay.

7. Dusty Nothing - Black Mountain
As this one pummels my senses, the plane stabilizes and I begin to feel better. Have all my epiphanic, life-defining moments been refracted through a musical lens? Can the only possible meaning to existence be reached through the amorphously precise and hazy joy that is musical expression? Nah.

8. It Stoned Me - Van Morrison
As the plane banks steeply I glimpse the Pacific shimmering many miles below, and I am gripped by a feeling of inexpressible gratitude. This is a song which communicates the majesty of pure experience, and I sense the vast gulf which separates Van from a multitude of artists who can never hope to approach his genius. As I look down I see Maui sparkling in the distance, and it truly stones me.

Listen: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"

Reasons to Believe

Live: The Arcade Fire
Namba Hatch, Osaka

As they confront through their art the burdens of modern life - fear, responsibility, the fragility of love - Arcade Fire remind us that there are reasons to believe.

It’s not so much what they say as the way they say it – with a big shouty "YES!" teetering precariously on the edge between joy and hysteria. It's their raging desire to offer salvation from the modern nightmare which explains why they have managed to forge an almost evangelical bond with their audience.

Try as you might to withstand their melodrama, Arcade Fire’s immense, ambitious sound - featuring a whirlwind of mandolins, violins, organs, horns, sirens and hurdy-gurdys - has an unstoppable forward motion which delivers a joyful catharsis. As I discovered last night, resistance is futile.

The band begin their set with a haunting, restrained version of Neon Bible before shifting into top gear with the propulsive Black Mirror.

Then comes the epic tragedy of Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) mourning those "names we used to know." It's followed by the fatalistic and heartbreaking Intervention: “every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” Yet somehow - as in the irresistible singalong choruses of Rebellion (Lies) and Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) - the message remains one of hope.

It’s a rousing, committed performance, the musicianship never less than superb and the band’s legendary showmanship very much in evidence.

Having said that, sometimes less is more and it comes as a mighty relief when Arcade Fire allow their music to breathe on slower numbers like the wisely sad Ocean of Noise: “All the reasons I gave/Were just lies to buy myself some time."

The emotional honesty is compelling, inspiring a deep sense of liberation. I exit the auditorium and fade back into the neon cityscape, feeling only connection and compassion, those remarkable songs of hope and survival echoing in my mind.

Far Out

Noh Theater Performance
Kyoto Kongoh Nohgakudou



Noh, Japan's classic musical drama, has been performed since the 14th century. A friend recently invited me to a performance at Kyoto’s Kongoh Nohgakudou, directly opposite the Imperial Palace.

Although I was curious to witness this uniquely Japanese experience, I was a little hesitant about attending. I’d heard Noh described as an interminably tedious endurance trial with little in the way of drama or action, performed in a mostly unintelligible form of ancient Japanese.

How wrong those descriptions were. This was one of the most unique, mind-blowing things I’ve seen in Japan.

The 250 plays in the Noh repertoire depict mythic stories concerning vengeance, madness, spirits and supernatural worlds. Performances last four hours or more - they can be a tad exhausting - and consist of two plays separated by a humorous interlude known as kyogen.

The first play we saw - Soshiarai Komachi - concerns a poetess wrongly accused of plagiarism by a jealous rival.

It doesn’t sound like much of a story, but seen in the flesh it was quite compelling. Our heroine cleverly proves her innocence and recovers her honor.

The second play was no less fascinating, though I had no clue what it was about. My culturally savvy companion informed me that all was not well in the land of the rising sun. He knew this because there were priests, a poem on a stick, and a menacing looking demon who took forever to exit the stage. When he finally did leave, everybody stopped whooping, lay down their fans and suddenly it was all over.

I was fascinated to discover that, by tradition, Noh actors and musicians never rehearse together. Each actor, musician, and choral chanter practices his or her contribution independently or under the tutelage of a senior member.

Neither are performances entirely scripted. There's a good deal of improvisation and negotiation. Thus the tempo of the performance is set by the interactions of all the performers together. It’s all got something to do with the traditional Japanese aesthetic of transience, or "ichi-go ichi-e" ("one time, one meeting").

For all its inherently traditional, stylized drama, Noh is spectacularly weird. During the final act the leading actor, or shite, dressed in a costume resembling a giant chicken, his chest decorated with four turquoise pom-poms, repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly, it went on for all of twenty minutes!) addressed the hayashi (musicians) with the following bizarre intonation:

“YEEeeeeOOooooooooooooooW!”

The hayashi then replied with random drum beats and a rolling “HOoooooooooooaaa!” sound. Far out.

To this western viewer, despite Noh’s traditional roots, its minimalist aesthetic and unwitting surrealism gve it an "alternative" even Pythonesque feel. This is hardly surprising since the Noh-play creates its own “reality” which is simultaneously opposed to realism. Its virtual dream space simultaneously evokes solemnity, transcendence, mystification and amusement.

If that’s not alternative, I don’t know what is. There's nothing quite like Noh, and should you ever visit Japan, I heartily recommend you experience its bizarre wonders for yourself.

VIDEO: An Invitation to Noh

Inner Calm

Van Morrison (Spiritual/Jazz/Celtic Soul)
LP: Common One (Warner Bros / Wea, 1980)

At one point in the mid-80s I was stuck in the East End of London trying to work my way back to the USA. Jobs were hard to come by but I eventually found employ as a road sweeper.

I've had a lot of crummy jobs in my time, but this one takes the biscuit. My beat was Commercial Road - possibly the filthiest street in London. As huge lorries pounded by I’d choke on their belching fumes and curse them under my breath.

Street-cleaning isn’t the most glamorous of professions and I’d pull the odd scam to make life more bearable. One was hiding my brush and barrow in a side street early in the morning and scarpering off home for the rest of the day. I’d return later in the afternoon and innocently return my barrow to the yard to clock out. “All finished, then?” the foreman would say. “Good lad.”

The merchants of East London were very kind to us barrow boys. A greasy cafe on Leman Street gave me free bacon sandwiches in return for a preferential sweep. The Indian food vendors along Brick Lane would ply me with samosas and papri chaat, dispensing advice. "Do not despair, any job is a good job," a chirpy fellow from Bombay assured me.

As I miserably swept my way through London, my companion and salvation was Van Morrison’s Common One LP. Listening on my battered Sony Walkman, this transcendent Celtic Soul music provided me with an ecstatic escape from the grime.

Though Common One is for me a watermark Morrison record, it was unappreciated on its release. Recorded in a French monastery, it steered away from the tightly structured songs Van had been composing, marking a radical return toward the spacious, spiritual searching of the Astral Weeks period. Even today it’s one of my favorite Morrison albums, and features several Van classics.

The hypnotic, spiritual, In Haunts of Ancient Peace set the tone for Van’s musical quest in the decade to follow and transported me away from Commercial Road to a higher plane. Similarly, Summertime in England, Van’s tribute to the romantic tradition of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, lifted me to loftier, poetic heights, with its incantations of “suffering so fine” and the sublime moment when Van testifies, “I wanna go to church right now.”

I was deeply affected by this ambitious, holy music. Almost in a trance, I went about my work with a beatific smile. Passers-by would shoot strange glances at me, thinking, “What the hell does he have to smile about?”

They were perhaps not aware that, no matter how desperate the circumstances, music - especially transcendent music like this - has a way of lifting you out of your despondency. They couldn’t know it but, amid all the dust and grime, I had found inner calm in a Celtic Soul paradise.

Deliciously Dark

Movie: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Directed by: Tim Burton



Part One: Staying Power

I have to admit I’m not a great fan of musicals. Generally speaking they don’t - as an artistic experience - provide me with me the emotional satisfaction of more ‘serious’ musical forms. Though I can easily suspend disbelief and marvel at actors suddenly breaking into song without warning, the characters in musicals rarely rise above the level of caricature, and the story line of the classic musical displays an overarching romanticism which nowadays seems hokey.

Having said that, there’s no denying the genre’s great entertainment value and staying power. It's been going strong since the late 1920s, when Busby Berkeley used ideas from the drills he had practiced as a soldier during the First World War to transform traditional dance numbers.

Following that, astonishing talents such as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly dominated entertainment during the musical's 'golden era'. Movies such as The Wizard of Oz, (1939), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and On the Town (1949) provided much needed escapist entertainment during the depression, war and post-war periods. The dazzling ballet sequences in An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) expanded the vocabulary of modern dance.

But then came rock ‘n’ roll, and following the 1950s, the musical film declined in popularity. The freedom and youth associated with rock ‘n’ roll made the values expressed in the musical seem stuffy and antiquated.

But this is to deny the social consciousness of writers like Oscar Hammerstein. His Carousel (1956) mocks the hypocrisy of social class, while South Pacific (1958) attacks racial prejudice. Indeed, the dominant theme of the musical in the last four decades has been one of tolerance and social awareness, as in West Side Story (1961).

New life was breathed into the genre by modernizers like Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Stephen Sondheim. Kirkwood & Dante's A Chorus Line had its roots in group therapy, and issues such as religious and class struggles, national identity, political biography, bohemianism and gay rights were directly addressed in Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cabaret, Evita, Phantom of the Opera and Rent. The revival of the musical has continued into the present century with movies like Moulin Rouge, Chicago and now Sweeney Todd.

Part Two: Nightmare on Fleet Street

Last night I witnessed Hollywood’s latest musical offering, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Like me, star Johnny Depp isn't keen on musicals, but as he has remarked, how many chances do you get to see a movie about a serial killer who supplies his neighbor with the ghoulish ingredients of her meat pies?

Depp in fact adopts a wonderfully punky approach as the mad barber Sweeney and is a passable singer. That's just as well since there’s precious little dialogue in Sweeney Todd - it’s actually an operetta rather than a musical.

I must say that the movie rather dragged for me in its early stages. I found few of the songs memorable and my interest was maintained mainly by the director’s customarily stunning visual style. However Sweeney Todd suddenly bursts into life during a splendidly gruesome third act in which each character receives their bloody comeuppance.

For me the best thing about this deliciously dark film was Helena Bonham Carter, who steals every scene as Sweeney’s sidekick Mrs. Lovett. In fact Bonham-Carter seems to have a knack for doing this in just about every movie she appears in. I only realized last night she’s one of my favorite movie stars and I 'd love to see her pick up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Watching the movie here in Kyoto, it was interesting to observe the stoic reactions of a mainly Japanese audience. There’s lashings of black humor throughout Sweeney Todd, but it doesn't seem to play well in Japan.

During the hilarious scene where Sweeney impassively dispatches a succession of customers with his cutthroat razor, my companion and I were the only audience members erupting into gales of laughter.

As the closing credits were rolling, we had already left the theater. Tears of mirth in our eyes, we ran as fast we could to our favorite British bar for a pint of ale and a deliciously filling meat pie.

Freak Out

Before air guitar there was...the freak out.

When I was a fourteen year-old high school kid I really wanted to be cool. Being a bespectacled, sensitive teenager sucked.

I kidded myself that I didn’t care. But secretly I yearned to be an insider, like the freaks with long hair who self-importantly carried 'prog-rock' albums in the school hallway.

The heavy improvisatory form of music known as 'rock' had emerged in the late sixties, and the freaks were at just the right age to appreciate it. 'Rock' marked an emphasis away from pop's instantaneous emotional appeal toward self importance and overstatement.

But if the grandiose complacency of 'prog-rock' was sapping the energy from pop culture, most young teens were oblivious. Prog and blues-rock seemed to offer a stairway to heaven, all one could ever aspire to or desire.

During the school 'disco' you’d be invited - if you were cool enough - to participate in a male bonding ritual known as the freak out. Standing in a circle of your freaky peers, it involved rocking backwards and forward in the same spot while convulsively shaking your hands - a la Joe Cocker - playing air guitar and flailing your limbs in a display of serious rock abandon.

Each moment of the freak-out was loaded with symbolic meaning. As the hallowed hour approached, a bedenimed figure would sidle up to you and whisper, "Psst. Youth. Wanna freak out?"

The whole evening had been a prelude to this collective celebration of greasy hair, flares and acne. The freaks assembled front of stage for their moment of glory.

Freaks wouldn’t be seen dead 'dancing' to soul or glam. Invariably it was a guitar wig-out 'rock classic' like Status Quo's Caroline, Bad Company's Can't Get Enough (the extended version, of course) or Black Sabbath's Paranoid (the freak out anthem) which would drive them into ecstasies of dementia.

My buddy Tony Heseltine had a brother called John who was particularly adept at the freak out. He had long dark hair, wore a perfectly faded denim jacket and jeans, and his technique was impeccable. During one freak out I remember watching with a mixture of admiration and bemusement as he delicately fingered the slide guitar introduction to Lynyryd Skynyrd's Freebird, his eyes closed in an ecstasy of axe worship.

As the song grew in intensity, John's performance matched it lick for lick. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen because it was pure and unforced, emerging out of a deep love for the music and the culture which surrounded it. Meanwhile his comrades were likewise attaining their own freaky nirvana.

But the days of the freak out were numbered. Punk was just around the corner and before you knew it the new wave had blown the axe gods out of the water. Just when I’d managed to grow my hair to the required length. Goddamn.

A few freaks determinedly clung onto their hippie-dom, ending up as civil servants or acid casualties. Others left it all behind and went off to college, where no one could guess their secret past. Many became punks or new-wavers, preferring to forget their freaky feelings and pretend they’d always sported short spiky hair and straight leg pants.

But once a freak, always a freak, and in their hearts there's a tiny corner which is forever devoted to prog-rock and air guitar. When they're alone, ex-freaks will secretly tune into Classic Rock FM and furtively headbang to Quo, Zep and Sabbath. And when the opening riff to Paranoid comes screaming over the airwaves they'll grin and quietly remember, “Yeah, man, I really used to freak out.”

VIDEO: Black Sabbath Paranoid, 1970. Watch Ozzy freak out: