Thanks Mom, The American Jazz Museum , Mrs. Maisel and Blossom

In the very first entry of this blog (2014) I shared how my father was the person most responsible for my love of classical music. Today, I want to pay tribute to my mom, Judi Hazlett. She too has had a profound effect on my musical life. When a group of musicians from the University of Texas came to Pillow Elementary in 1973 to give a performance-demonstration, and I fell in love with the sound of the violin and wanted to start violin lessons, it was my mom who most closely shared this journey with me. She was the one who drove me to violin lessons, symphony rehearsals and concerts...year after year. She's also the one who encouraged me to practice. On top of that, she was also driving my sister to ballet lessons and working as a volunteer at the Austin Civic Ballet. Judi took the picture above. It is my first concert ever....a group of first year violin students playing Twinkle Star on stage at the LBJ Library Auditorium. (I am up there somewhere.)

This past weekend, she was once again in the audience for one of my concerts...this time for the Heritage Philharmonic. Forty six years later, I am still playing the violin, and my mom is still my biggest supporter. I caught a glimpse of her from the stage shortly before the concert started and it hit me like a ton of bricks how blessed and lucky I am. Not just that she was there to hear the concert....but how great a mom she is...how wonderful a person she is. She is the most loving and genuine person on earth and in that brief moment, I felt like that third grader on stage playing Twinkle Star, knowing that his mom was out there cheering for him. She has the same passion for music in her heart that my dad did and that I do  She is a true blessing. Love you mom.

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There was an article in the Kansas City Star on February 24, 2019 about the American Jazz Museum in the historic 18th and Vine District of Kansas City. It was from the Star's editorial board and they were making the point that the Jazz Museum needs to finally stand on it's own feet...taxpayers should not be asked for more money to keep it afloat. I have been to the American Jazz Museum, and while I want to be enthusiastic about any attempt to enlighten and promote music in our world, this museum did not inspire me. And the idea of museums for any genre of music frankly does not appeal to me. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland may be the best known and most successful such museum. I have not been there, and I don't have any desire to go either. I don't know where or how one could build a classical music museum....Vienna? New York? London? Paris? Moscow? Kansas City does have a strong jazz history. I can see why KC makes sense for such a museum. But jazz as a genre has almost as small a place in our culture as classical music. It is a hard sell, and brick 'n mortar establishments require a great deal of start-up capital and significant annual operating revenue to survive. The American Jazz museum opened in 1997. Why doesn't it have a flourishing endowment after almost a quarter of a century of operation? Maybe there just isn't enough interest to sustain such a museum. Twenty-two years has shown that there is not.

https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article226638919.html

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Don't get me wrong, I like jazz a great deal, and have written about it many times since I started this blog. So here is another jazz post for you.
My wife and I recently watched a great show called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It is on Amazon and there are two seasons to see, with more on the way. The show is very funny and it brilliantly captures the period of the late 50's and early 60's...styles, colors, and music. Here is a piece from udiscovermusic that highlights the music from Season 2.

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/marvelous-mrs-maisel-season-two/

On this list, I want to point out Blossom Dearie. Blossom had a very unique voice that can't be mistaken for anyone else's. She studied piano as a youngster and according to her website, was encouraged by her family to attend the Peabody Conservatory, but she went a different direction at that critical juncture and began her jazz career instead. It worked out well for her. Her website also states that her favorite piece of music growing up was Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.
I came to her music pretty late...I'd say it was about 15 years ago that I was introduced to her for the first time..
Here is the song from Season 2 of Mrs. Maisel, "Some Other Time."

Puma, Dvorak, Dawson, and Tchaikovsky uses the "N" word.

This is Puma. She is a gift from above. When we said good-bye to Shadow in November, it left a big hole of our hearts...I still miss her so much. But that same month, my son Jack found a stray kitten by his apartment at college. A tiny little creature she was, who came out of nowhere and has become a part of our family. She is Jack's cat, yes, but he brought her home to stay with us over the Christmas holidays. She also comes to visit us when he and his roommates go on road trips for baseball season....Cheryl and I are her cat-sitters. I have absolutely fallen in love with this cat. She has helped to fill the void left by Shadow. It was like she was sent here to do just that....When Puma visits, she gets to listen to a lot of classical music, which I think she really likes. Here she is relaxing to Dvorak's Symphony number 1.

I just completed a Dvorak listening challenge...all 9 of his symphonies in one week in order from 1 to 9. I feel confident in saying that Puma is probably the only cat in the greater Kansas City Metro Area who has accomplished this feat as well.

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In honor of Black History Month, I'd like to share some music with you by William Levi Dawson. My friend Byl led me to Dawson;s music awhile back. (Thank you Byl!).

Anyway, as part of Black History Month, the music of William Levi Dawson should be celebrated. Here is a brief biography from an article I found online about his life.

William Levi Dawson (1899–1990) is remembered chiefly for his masterful choral arrangements of Negro spirituals and for his multi-decade leadership of the Tuskegee Institute Choir. In 1934, however, his career seemed to be headed in a very different direction: Leopold Stokowski programmed Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony on four Philadelphia Orchestra concerts that met with acclaim from critics and audiences alike. The broadcast of one of these concerts on the Columbia Broadcasting System had a particularly powerful impact on the many African Americans in the radio audience. Materials in the William Levi Dawson Collection at Emory University illuminate both the momentousness of the symphony's debut and its provocatively minor impact on the trajectory of its composer's career. This article examines the premiere of the Negro Folk Symphony as a groundbreaking event both public and personal, offers an explanation for the symphony's startlingly rapid descent into obscurity, and argues that this effective and fascinating work merits renewed attention from conductors and scholars today

Classical music has many hundreds of years of history…and sadly, it is not a genre that has been very inclusive of people of color. But it does have more diversity than most people realize..more than I did for sure. And I think we need to celebrate the contributions of great African American composers like William Levi Dawson. Take a listen to his music and share it with others.

On a side note of personal interest to me….Mr. Dawson earned his music degree here in Kansas City, and taught school in the Kansas City Public Schools. My grandfather was a student in KCPS during the time that Dawson taught here…..I would like to dream that they crossed paths, but sadly, that is unlikely because of the segregation of schools. My grandfather later became superintendent of schools in Kansas City in 1956.

Here is a recording of the Negro Folk Symphony (1934). It is just wonderful.

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In April 1891, Pyotr Tchaikovsky was in New York City, where he was received with great fanfare. He conducted some of his own music during the grand opening week of Carnegie Hall. "The enthusiasm is far greater than than anything I have met with, even in Russia. I was recalled over and over again; handkerchiefs were waved, cheers resounded---in fact, it is easy to see that I have taken the Americans by storm." - a diary entry of April 27, 1891.
But during his stay in America, he made another observation in a letter to his brother, Modeste, dated April 15, 1891. "After a bath, I dressed, dined against my inclination, and went for a stroll down Broadway. An extraordinary street. Houses of one and two stories alternate with some nine-storied buildings. Most original. I was struck with the number of nigger faces I saw." And in a letter dated April 12, 1878, Tchaikovsky described an unpleasant train trip:  "...a conversation with a very importunate gentleman, bent on convincing me that the policy of England was the most humane in the world; the crowd of dirty Jews with their accompanying odours; the numbers of young conscripts who traveled in our train, with their farewell scenes with their wives and mothers at every station---all these things spoilt my pleasure in returning to my beloved native land."

Was Tchaikovsky, one of my all-time favorite composers, racist and antisemitic?  From his words above, it sounds like he was indeed. Am I going to stop listening to his music? No way. But I must admit when I read these letters the first time, I was shocked. No one wants to believe that people who create great beauty can also have a dark side, or be horribly flawed. But they can be, and probably are. 

Classics in Film and Commercials

The State of Nebraska has a new commercial to promote tourism. The ad is called "Flyover Country" and the music is from the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/I57Q/nebraska-tourism-commission-flyover-country

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Roma is a fantastic movie that I almost didn't watch. I heard a piece on NPR about how Alfonso Cuaron had a deal with Netflix to make it. But in order for a film to earn a nomination for an Academy Award, it must play in theaters too. Here's that story.

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/673661569/with-an-eye-on-oscars-netflix-sent-roma-to-theaters-first

Anyway, my wife and I watched it on Netflix. I knew it was in Spanish with English subtitles, and was filmed in black and white. About twenty minutes into the film, I was not into it. I looked at my watch. I looked at my wife, who gave me that look asking me "do you like it?" (she is not a foreign language film aficionado by any means). I looked back at her with my eyes saying "no". I didn't think I was going to make it through the entire film. But I slowly got sucked in. I crossed over some invisible threshold and became completely immersed and emotionally invested. By the end of the film, I realized that I had just watched something very special. This may be one of the greatest pieces of film making in my lifetime....a Citizen Kane of our time. It just took me awhile to get there. I highly recommend it. And one of the great scenes of the movie uses the music of Hector Berlioz to great effect:

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/roma-scene-alfonso-cuaron-1203094312/

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Tchaikovsky started writing his first symphony in 1866 shortly after he moved to Moscow. It was completed and premiered in 1868. He wrote six symphonies, and 4-6 are generally his best known and most performed...no surprise, because they are incredible. But his First Symphony, known as the "Winter Symphony" is a great start. Here is an interesting take on it:

Throughout his life, Tchaikovsky retained a fondness for the First Symphony. Despite regarding it as an immature first foray into the art of the Symphony, he also felt that it was "in some ways richer than many of his later works."

Bohrer, Isabel A., "A Comparative Analysis of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s First and Sixth Symphonies" (2018). Honors College. 320. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/320

I want to call your attention to a very unusual passage in the First Movement. It starts at about the 6:10 mark of the video clip. The cellos/basses are alone with a quiet phrase by themselves. Then the French horns enter...

The first horn voices what sounds like an G on my piano....then the second horn comes in and plays a note a half step up from that...an A-flat. It's not just a passing tone, quickly moving by. Tchaikovsky sits on this semitone for a full measure, which is the most dissonant interval known to man! For me, it is pure genius because it stretches the fabric of sound, and reveals a resolution that satisfies one's curiosity and longing. Tchaikovsky is certainly a master of melody, but against a backdrop of dissonance such as this, his melodic beauty is even greater.

MLK

Today is the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. Schools are closed, as are government offices. It is, and should be, a day to reflect on his remarkable life. I am thankful that my parents taught me not to see color...nor race....nor to judge people on this basis. I vividly remember coming home from school in 1971 and saying the "N" word in front of my mother....I had met a young man at school who was black. She looked at me and shook her head. "We don't use that word. That's a bad word." I asked "why?" Other kids at school called him that. She said again..."It's a bad word. Don't ever say that word again." Well, I said it again to see what happened. I was immediately grounded and sent to my room.
That is a small sample of the grace and love that my parents tried to instill in me. The color of a person's skin does not matter....period. They both came from and grew up in the segregated world of America with parents who did not believe in equality of the races. But somehow they emerged from that upbringing with a different view, and by the time I came along they were ready to teach me not to be a racist. I am thankful for many things in my life...and that moment I just told you about is one of the most important to me. This was three years after MLK Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. My parents shared the words of MLK with me...his message of equality and fairness. His dream. Those words still echo in my mind.
My son Jack went to Memphis with his girlfriend Kylie last summer....her grandmother lives there. When they came back, he could not stop talking about their visit to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel. He brought back a poster that he had framed and I could tell that what he experienced there had a profound affect on him. I must go there too.
I tried to teach my children the same thing my parents taught me about race. They don't see color when it comes to people. They just see people.
John Coltrane is one of my favorite jazz musicians of all time. He was deeply moved by Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, and later that year wrote a song called Alabama to eulogize the 4 children killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham by the KKK. This is a musical interpretation of Dr. King's eulogy...a very powerful and evocative response to hatred.

In 1966, Coltrane recorded a song called Reverend King that appeared on his 1968 album Cosmic Music. Here is a great interpretation of it with a photo montage of Dr. King.

Lastly, here is some additional background about both from Joseph Ross:
https://josephross.net/?p=2380

Hymnals, Something Great from Schumann, and Charlie Parker's Grave

Last week, I went to my church's "Traditional" worship service. The majority of our worshipers go to the "Contemporary" worship service which is held at a new facility. As the name implies, the Traditional service is more....well, traditional. Organ-piano and choir are the musical base for this service. Bells and orchestral accompaniment are also regularly used. The service is held in a sanctuary that looks and feels like most others I have worshiped in, including the church I was baptized in as a baby. Pews, candles, and stained glass too. Our "Contemporary" service is held in a brand new building in a large hall that has chairs on the floor facing a stage where the service takes place. The music consists primarily of bass, drums, keyboards, guitars, and vocals. Theatrical lighting and smoke machines are also part of the production.
Two distinctly different services, both serving the same God. One similarity between both types of service is the use of of projection screens for lyrics to the songs being sung. The congregations stand and look up to see the lyrics instead of having to use hymnals. Remember those?
I watched a brief interview with Paul McCartney this week. He talked about the fact that he does not know how to read music...none of the Beatles did. He's 76 years old, has made some of the best music in all of history, and to this day he can't read a note of music. I would have thought that somewhere along the line he would have taken some time to learn this skill that I learned as a young child. It is not that hard...I don't think so anyway. But I was lucky to have formal music theory and literature training along with violin and piano lessons starting at a young age. For many, maybe most, this is not the case. But going to church used to be a way anyone could at least see what music notation looks like...in the hymnal. Right above the words, the dots and lines are the road map for the song. If nothing else, it is beautiful to look at, this language of beautiful sounds.
Last week at church, in the Traditional sanctuary, the computer crashed and the projection system was not be able to put the words up on the screen. What would we do???? Our Worship Director (Jerry) came over to talk to me before the service and gave me the bad news...we would have to use the hymnals...those dusty books on the back of the pews. Old school. I reminded him that hymnals have worked for hundreds of years. We would be fine. And in fact, it was a breath of fresh air. Seeing the music again...not just words on a screen....was such a treat.

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There's a wonderful musical phrase in Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major (1842) that sounds like it came from the future. I asked my friend Dr. Reynold Simpson, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, to explain what I was hearing. He replied: "It's the re-transition of the movement, the moment in the development that the composer has pushed the harmony as far as it will go and now it must find it's way back to the tonic via the dominant. It is the moment of some of the most inventive harmonies in tonal music and you've found one that is really fantastic."

The section I am talking about starts right at the 5:00 mark. The entire composition is wonderful.

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The great jazz musician Charlie Parker was born and raised right here in Kansas City (born in KC, KS in 1920 and raised in KC, MO). He is also buried here, in Lincoln Cemetery which is not easy to find. Good luck trying to find it using your GPS because I tried GPS twice this week and failed both times. I used what little memory I have of visiting his grave in 1996 to eventually find it again. Given his stature, it is sad that his resting place is so hard to find. But I found it and paid my respects again to this giant of the music world. If you want to go yourself, give me a shout and I will tell you how to get there.

Music is Life, Estas Tonne, Paganini bails out Berlioz and The Getaway

I am starting out of order. The above video from YouTube is from a guitarist named Estas Tonne. I discovered his music in 2016, by chance...it popped up on my suggestion list on YouTube. It has a transcendental quality to it. At the time, I was going through some physical challenges with my back that made my other passion, running, very difficult. This music became part of my therapy...everyday I would listen to it while I did my physical therapy. It was holistic.
I don't know where I would be...what I would do...who I would be...if I didn't have music in my life. I feel it, use it, breathe it. There is music for every occasion. It comes from everywhere.
I may take it to extremes. But one person who knows how I feel is the great Yo-Yo Ma. My friend Webb Chiles, the greatest sailor on the planet, shared this article with me...I thank him. Webb knows what I mean about music...it means as much to him too. For Ma, when asked "What is music for" he has the perfect answer; "It is to help me through life." Ditto.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/yo-yo-mas-days-of-action


I was reading some letters by Hector Berlioz. He was good friends with the great violinist-guitarist Nicolo Paganini. Turns out that Paganini loaned Berlioz a lot of money in 1838.

December 18, 1838

"My dear friend, Beethoven dead, none but Berlioz could restore him to life; and I, who have tasted your divine compositions, worthy of a genius such as yours, consider it my duty to beg you to accept, in token of my homage, 20,000 francs which will be paid to you by Baron de Rothschild on presentation of the enclosed. Believe me always, your affectionate Nicolo Paganini."

Berlioz wrote back: "Noble and great artist. How can I express my gratitude to you? I am not rich, but, believe me, the good opinion of a man of genius, such as you are, touches me a thousand times more nearly than the regal generosity of your gift. Words fail me, but I shall hasten to embrace you as soon as I can leave my bed, to which I am still confined." -H. Berlioz.

I will share another piece of music that is deeply ingrained in me....this is from the 1972 film The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Quincy Jones wrote the score for the film. This tune is called Free. The great Toots Thielemans plays the harmonica. I lived in Austin, TX when this film was released. This scene was filmed on the San Marcos river not far from Austin, and I spent some fun times there floating on tubes in the hot Texas sun. This music, for reasons I can't explain, means a lot to me. I come back to it often.

Queen-Bohemian Rhapsody

Cheryl and I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody last night. It's the story of Freddie Mercury and the band Queen. Overall, I thought it was a great movie. Rami Malek gives an wonderful performance as Freddie Mercury. So what's the point? Several.
I was alive and well aware of Queen at their peak in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I watched their performance at Live Aid on TV in 1985 as it happened. This Live Aid performance is the peak moment of the movie....the band giving a performance for the ages. And as presented in the movie, it is breathtaking. But in 1985....meh......
I was not a fan. I was like the critics who excoriated Queen albums for being pompous...overbearing...pretentious. To me, Freddie Mercury seemed more like a Liberace-type front man than other great front men like Robert Plant or Mick Jagger. I just didn't get it.
Man, was I wrong..
Freddie Mercury was a truly awesome performer. And so were the rest of the musicians in the band (Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May). This movie touched me a great deal. My relationship to the music and story of Freddie Mercury and Queen is not unlike so many other stories of creative people whose work is not appreciated when it is first presented, at least critically. But after the passage of time, the true genius emerges.
More than any other aspect of their career and this movie, I was touched most by Freddie Mercury's ability to connect with a stadium of 100,000 people. He had a gift for making every individual feel like they were important...part of the show. That is a very special gift. You can see it here in the Live Aid performance from 1985:

There are a number of creative liberties the filmmakers took with the true history of the band. One big one for me was the idea that Queen had been idle for several years prior to Live Aid, and they were terrified of facing such a huge audience not having played together for years. This was not actually the case. Queen released an album in 1984 called The Works, which features the songs Radio Ga Ga and Hammer to Fall, both of which they performed at Live Aid. The band had been on tour throughout 1984 and 1985 in support of this album. They were not rusty, and their laser-like performance shows just how locked in they were.
The other topic that the movie addressed in a tasteful way was Freddie Mercury's reckless lifestyle. He dove headfirst into a hedonistic pursuit of sex-drugs-rock n roll that ultimately led to his contraction of AIDS. I read a pretty graphic tell-all a few years ago about his lifestyle in the early 1980's. It left me feeling very cold and empty. The people he surrounded himself with were not concerned about his best interests. It is sad to see someone with so much talent and amazing gifts fall into the abyss.
Another thing the movie changed from real life was the timing of his sickness. In the movie, he tells the band he has AIDS shortly before they perform at Live Aid in 1985. In reality, he was not diagnosed with AIDS until late 1987. He passed away in 1991.
Brian May is a terrific guitarist. What I admire most about his playing is his sound and his control of it. Sure, he is a great player technically speaking, but his use of high octave chords with max distortion created a sound unlike any other guitarist. He also switches between lead playing and chord playing effortlessly...seamlessly. And, Brian May also loves classical music! Here is a segment from an interview he gave on June 3, 2017 with Charlotte Green from ClassicFM:

BRIAN:  Ah, I love Holst, “Planets”. I think he was divinely inspired. He was a schoolteacher.  How amazing, you know, and suddenly he’s written this incredible cosmic music.  I’ve always loved it from when I was a kid and I was only about 10 years old I think when I wrote a little soliloquy, which I read into a microphone with the accompaniment of ‘Saturn’, and nobody’s ever heard that.  Maybe they will one day.  But it was designed to be a soundtrack for a Planetarium show – that was the idea – so maybe one day I’ll do that but I’ve always loved it.  To me it’s absolutely evocative and as I say it is something completely out of this world.  I can’t imagine how, I can’t imagine how it was imagined to be honest.  You know it’s, it’s not constructed intellectually as far as I can see.  It’s one of these things which some somehow he instinctively plucked out of the air.  There’s so much unusual stuff in Holst’s pieces, you know.  There’s a lot of dissonance, which wasn’t very prevalent at that time but it wasn’t dissonance for its own sake as it perhaps became later- well this is my theory anyway.  Everything that’s in there seems to kind of jolt you into, into being out there in the cosmos.  I can’t say enough about it really.  It’s the most wonderful piece of music all of it you know the whole suite is brilliant.  Interesting that he didn’t do Pluto and, of course, Pluto is now not regarded as a planet anyway so there’s no need to put Pluto in there.  I got bit upset when somebody did that.  I went to the Albert Hall and saw it all and at the end of it they played this Pluto piece, which I thought was completely inappropriate.  Sorry guys, but I just thought it doesn’t work. Get it out of here.  So I don’t think anyone’s going to do that anymore,.

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