The Sweet Music of Africville Stories

On Saturday night we had a treat.  Our friend Sylvia had told us about it earlier in the week, and I had bought tickets, but we hadn’t had time to think too much about it.  That absence of a heightened sense of anticipation or expectation made it even more of a treat and us even more ready to be transported by the event.  Which we were!

We arrived at the Maritime Conservatory and went upstairs to the familiar terrain of the Lilian Piercey Concert Hall where we had often heard wonderful classical and cabaret concerts, often featuring people we knew.  There was a good-sized crowd, but as so often happens the first two rows were pretty much empty.  We saw Sylvia waving so we sat just in front of her and her sisters in the second row and waited for the concert to start.  The stage was arranged with a piano on the left, a skeletal electric stand-up bass in the middle, and a drum kit on the right.  In front were two mikes, one centre stage and the other next to the curtain on the right.  It was a jazz setup.

After the intro by Charla Williams the band came out, led by Joe Sealy.  Joe spoke quietly about the piece, Africville Stories, based on his earlier Africville Suite, and the fact that it would be narrated by his good friend Jackie Richardson, who gave a sweet smile.  Paul Novotny, the bass player with his suit and skinny Brubeck style necktie, also smiled, and Dave Burton took his serious seat in back of the drum set.  The mike on the right side was vacant as Joe sat at the piano and Jackie started the story.

Her voice had a resonance and a depth of musicality, and she pulled us right into the narrative.  And then the music started.  Well!  There were hums and murmurs and aha’s from among us as Jackie started to sing.  The music built and her volume built and the excitement in the room built as she sang “Deep down inside” and she got deep down inside and pulled us all there with her until the murmurs got louder and the energy built and by the time she found her way to the end of the piece we were all standing and clapping and shouting.  The place was jumping like I’d never seen it jump before!

And that was just the first of the Africville stories!  We sat ourselves down and settled down for the next story and its song.  There were no vocals, but Chris Mitchell came on to pick up one of his saxophones and start singing with it, and the band took off with him.  Jackie was at the edge of the stage, hardly able to contain herself, Joe at the piano was playing back to Chris, Paul on the bass was strumming and grinning, Dave’s drums were under and over and around every move they all made, and we were approaching bliss out there on the floor.

The show went on, more stories, more great songs, solos that held you in their subtle and inevitable grasp, and lyrical lyrics where Jackie soared and rumbled and whispered, until our hands were sore from clapping and our voices hoarse from shouting out.  It was ninety minutes of musical energy filled with sadness and joy, soulful solace for the brutal loss of the community of Africville and soulful celebration of the memory of place and people and spirit, and it was accomplished through the sweet power of Joe’s composition and everyone’s beautiful music.

At the end, when we finally stopped shouting and whistling and clapping, we ended up looking around in a state of wonder.  Sylvia said she had heard Jackie before but never like this.  I said she was transported.  And she was.  And we all were.

It was a place to be.  Wish you could have been there too.   

Entering the Zone

Yesterday morning our friend L. drove Lorraine and me to the airport to enter the zone, or, in other words, to embark on a journey by air.  I hadn’t really believed until this morning that we were actually leaving, though the weighing of suitcases last night and last minute check marks on the task lists suggested it was really happening.  However, it’s not until you enter the zone that you actually understand the fact that you are going.

Once you are inside the zone there is little that you actually decide for yourself; basically you do what the people in charge of your travel tell you to.  It can be a bore, and it can be exhausting, but there can be moments of magic inside that zone.  I think part of the reason for it is that you are transported out of your quotidian existence, where the list of tasks you need to complete can weigh on your time, into a zone where there’s not much you can do except relax and free your mind to explore.

Here were some of my highlights from inside that zone:

The July 4 issue of The New Yorker (my chosen zone reading) had some good Talk of the Town pieces, including one on Afghanistan, which took me back to the conversations I’ve been having over the past week with F., a doctor from there who has left the country he loves because of the danger and corruption and heartbreak that he has witnessed there.  Then I read a piece on Jeff Nunokawa which made me want to read his short literary essays and commentaries on Facebook and another on Kirsten Hively and neon signs that made me think of a few noteworthy ones in Halifax I might want to photograph.  The EDL article made me glad not to be in England, and the one on Han Han got me wanting to check out his blog.

I interrupted this reading periodically to look out my window, which was on the south side of the plane, and wrote in my journal:

the world outside my window is a dream

green forests blue lakes

farmland and rivers in the clear air

two shining bays on the far horizon

then the blue blue Fundy straight below

I examined the slightly freckled male pattern baldness of the man in 28A.

I listened to Lorraine in 29B laughing out loud at something in Morning Glory.

When I got tired of reading, I listened to Janis J.singing Cry Baby and thought about the summer when Cream, The Doors, and Janis all played Vancouver, and I had money for only one concert.  I still regret my choice, though I did get to see Morrison take a dive on the stage at an "intense" moment in one of his songs.

After Toronto the air was hazy and I watched Unknown, kind of a waste of time with a couple of annoyingly impossible car chases, but held together with some interesting plot twists, a cute and clever Diane Kruger, and a very nice scene between Bruno Ganz, formerly of Stasi, and Frank Langella, member of “Section 15”.

Bright sun over the Prairies so that I sneezed when I lifted the blind – reminded me of a Quirks and Quarks show years ago where a Swedish researcher determined that a neural pathway in the nose can be stimulated by sunshine and cause that reflex.

Clouds floated out to the horizon over flat farmland, green and brown fields, and dark patches that looked like woodlots but turned out to be cloud shadows.

I listened to Clapton Unplugged and thought of my good friend K. who has loved Eric deeply for much of his life.  Then we came to Running on Faith as I sat next to my partner of 41 years and thought of our good fortune in this world, to love and to be loved.  Try listening to it here.

And finally we landed, picked up our bags, emerged from the zone into the bright light of western sun where the air feels just a little thinner and a little drier, and embarked on the next stage of this journey, once more outside of the zone.

Happy birthday, Bob

Today is Bob’s birthday and he is 70.  That is something to celebrate.  Here are a few things I did today in his honour:

I thought a lot about the summer of 1964 when I would hitchhike to Toronto with my friend Cal on Friday afternoon and crash at an SCM summer project in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Trinity Square.  As a young undergraduate from Halifax, it was my first opportunity to meet Trots, Leninists, and Marxists (the project was called a Peace Camp) and hang out with them on our weekends in the big city.  It was also the first time I heard Dylan sing, down in the rectory basement with the SCM radicals.  Cal was disdainful of Bob’s voice and did some pretty funny imitations, and I have to admit that I didn’t really get what everyone was blown away by.

And I thought about when I joined the Columbia Record Club in the fall of ’66 after moving to Vancouver and had my own apartment and a record player from a second hand store on Fourth.  My first order included Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it all Back Home, and Blonde on Blonde along with nine other albums, all for one cent, and it was then that I began to understand what people who talked about Bob were talking about.

I remembered how Desire was for us the landmark musical event of the 1970’s and how our five year old daughter loved to sit in the front seat of our van and sing the first verse of Highway 61 Revisited at the top of her lungs as we drove across Canada in the summer of 1984.

Lol and I both listened to Rick Terfry this afternoon on Drive as he played old Dylan and Dylan covers and clips of people talking about working with Bob.

This evening we also both went to a reading by Andy Wainwright of a fiction piece he had recently completed called “The Old Master”.  It was about a 16^th century Dutch painter, but the story of this painter’s artistic life and creative processes was clearly and subtly connected to the story of Bob’s life and work and artistic development and processes.  It was interesting to listen to the ways that Andy alluded to Bob through the painter’s imagery and actions and to follow the interplay between the two “old masters”, the painter and Bob, that Andy was exploring.

I made two notes during the reading, “discography” and “hagiography”.  Discography is pretty obvious, since so much of Andy’s story and of what we presume to know or understand of Bob is measured out by what we hear in his albums, the works he has made throughout the various stages of his life.  And hagiography is also obvious, since the age of threescore and ten suggests that a time has been reached for reflection and assessment and summing up.  Bob’s no saint and has steadfastly resisted sainthood; however, all of the hagiographers still struggle to come to terms with what he is,  though Bob himself will never easily be summed up; say what you will about him, you’ll usually find out that “he’s not there”, so to speak.

I particularly liked Lorraine’s comment/question after the reading as she asked Andy to reread the ending of the story where there were images of two women and then wondered aloud about the fact that though Bob grew up through the 60’s and the changes brought about in the status of women there seemed to be so little written about him by women.  Andy responded that he thought Bob was not a misogynist and mentioned the book that Suzy Retolo wrote recently about her relationship with Bob, but neither comment really touched on the fact that when it comes to writing about Bob and his work, he really is, as Lorraine put it, “a guy’s guy”.

Here is a fact Andy mentioned that is worth noting:  Bob has been quoted in more court decisions than any other artist.  I might have guessed Shakespeare for that achievement, which just goes to show how profoundly Bob’s words have shaped our age.

Here and here are a couple of commentaries, both by guys, about today that are worth noting.

And here’s a wish: Happy birthday, Bob, and may you be forever young.

Close to Tears

It has been a rough week, one that has kept me close to tears at times, even though I have little or nothing to complain about in my own life.

On Tuesday morning I was doing my regular shift in the laptop lab at the Halifax Refugee Clinic when a young woman came upstairs to use a computer.  She was Ethiopian, a human rights activist there who had completed a semester of study here in Nova Scotia and then been told that she must report to the Security Services when she returned home.  Needless to say she has not returned, even though she has a husband and two young sons there, and is looking at making a claim for refugee status here.  The impossibility of her situation, and her sad quiet courage in the face of it, left me moved and close to tears, just as I had been for days thinking of the desperation of life in Egypt and the courage of the demonstrators there.

On Wednesday I watched coverage of the pro-Mubarak thugs riding into Tahrir Square armed with swords and sticks and attacking the peaceful protestors.  This was after I had marveled at the admirable restraint shown by those protestors, their quiet determination and persistence in the face of a stubborn and implacable foe.  As Lorraine said every time some television commentator spoke about an end to the protests, “They can’t go home.”  And they haven’t, in spite of the violence of Wednesday’s actions and the danger they were in.  Whenever I think of the lives we observed in that poor beaten down country and of the courage these protesters show, I am moved again and find myself with that familiar thickening of the throat as I am close to tears.

Today I had a wonderful ski with my brother and his wife through a long and beautiful trail under blue sky and bright sun on perfect snow.  After that we went to a fundraiser called Coldest Night of the Year at the Fo’c’sle Tavern in Chester where lots of local performers were playing and singing.  I was taken by a rocking rendition of Bob’s My God They Killed Him, a young girl soulfully singing Summertime and Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone, some nice blues riffs, and good beer and pub snacks. 

The place was packed, and I watched a couple come in, she slight and covered with a head scarf, he tall and solid, both possibly Egyptian.  They were different from everyone else in the crowd as they stood watching and listening, and I wondered what meaning they made of our rock and blues and folk nostalgia.  Then the choral group that had been singing old sentimental favourites closed their segment with Hymn to Freedom (you can hear Oscar Peterson play it here, and Dione Taylor sing it here – listen to these and you too will be close to tears). 

The conductor pointed out that it was in honour of African Heritage Month, and I thought about Africa.  I thought of its northern edges with their quiet and determined revolutions, its Ethiopia where the ruling party gained 99.6% in a recent “election” and secret police can detain or disappear people they don’t care for, and the Diaspora that uprooted so many of its people but ended up enriching the lives of us non-Africans so hugely, and once again I found myself close to tears. 

I have no answers to any of this, and I know that tears are not enough, but I can pay attention and help where I can, and I can hope for a better week and a better world.

Small Broken Lightnesses of Being

A couple of weeks ago I was standing on our upper deck with my friend S. looking down at shrubs and bushes in front of our house.  In particular, we were watching a small brown bird, clearly a sparrow, which had landed on one of them.  He asked me what kind I thought it was, and I said, Maybe a song sparrow, though I wasn’t sure.  I told him that I thought a song sparrow had nested inside that bush the last couple of seasons, but we both agreed that the size of this one didn’t seem quite right.

S. had told me a while ago about sitting very still on their deck with some birdseed in his palm and having a chickadee light there to feed.  I like this meaning of “light” as a verb; it says so much about the kind of touch this small bird makes on the hand that feeds it.  If there is magic in the world, perhaps it can be understood in the lightness of this touch.  I also admire S. for his patient stillness and willingness to wait for the bird to come to him and for the pleasure he found in it.

I thought about this a few days later when I saw a small shape lying on our main deck in front of the tall windows.  It was a white-throated sparrow, or what is usually called a white-throat.  There is much that I love about white-throats, but the loveliest is its song.  It reminds me of climbing the granite slope behind our old cottage in Purcell’s Cove many decades ago and hearing the white throats sing up there in the jack pines.  I knew the sound long before I knew the bird and learned how to mimic the five clear and haunting notes of one of its characteristic songs.  I can never hear a white-throat singing without thinking of those times and that place.  You can listen to the one I can whistle here.  You can see and hear it sing its other lovely song here.

I picked up the dead white-throat and noticed how its head flopped in my hand, its neck clearly broken.  I marveled at its compact shape, the neatness of its small white bib, the variations of brown in its flight feathers, the poignancy of its legs and feet, and the lovely lightness of its small being.  I know that birds have hollow bones and bodies that are lighter than you think they are going to be, but I am still amazed at the feel of one when it is lying in my palm.  It is always a small wonder.

I know that our windows are a hazard because of their height and the amount of sky they reflect, and birds do fly into them, though not always fatally.  At times I have watched small stunned creatures recover and fly away, and when I find small smears of feathers on the windows, or on the glass panels of the deck, I always hope that these birds managed to survive their impacts. 

A few years ago I found a sharp-shinned hawk on a path below our house.  It was lying on its side in the space between the blueberry bushes with every feather seeming to be in place and no sign of what might have killed it.  I carried its perfect lightness of being up the path and buried it at the edge of the garden, thinking of the beauty of its flight pattern, the mottling of its breast, and the sharp strength of its talons.

And I buried the white-throat, also in the garden.  I whistled its song as I filled the hole.

Since then I have noticed another one perched on that same shrub in front of the house.  I have tried whistling to it.  I am still hopeful it will whistle back.

Treat Night

Tonight was a treat night, a treat we had waited for since early October; it was a concert at the Cohn with Jesse Cook and his band. They put on a great show, and the audience, which was largely our demographic, the ones that the Grey Power commercials are aimed at, “boomers”, our friend W said, but I think of us as “geezers”, that audience loved it. We clapped and whistled and swayed and yelled. It was, like I said, a great show.

We bought our tickets last fall and chose seats in the second row of the balcony, which turned out to be a great place to watch and listen from. Lorraine suggested we bring binoculars, and though we didn’t need them, it was wonderful to be able to peer at the players close up. It was a guitar show, but it was also a percussion show, as well as a violin show, and we were both reminded of the great concerts of Mercan Dede in Istanbul where he shared the stage and sound space so generously with the amazing players he had gathered together for his performances.

There were many very high highlights in this show, but the one that brought tears to my eyes was the closing number. It was a performance of Fall at Your Feet, which you can listen to here, but unfortunately you’ll get just the gist of it and you won’t hear what we heard tonight.

First, you need to know that the good old Rebecca Cohn’s audience from our vantage point in the balcony was pretty much a sea of grey hair. And, for the “rumba party” segment of the show, the whole audience was on its feet, not exactly dancing, but swaying and clapping and shuffling its feet to the Latin rhythms and great guitars. When the band walked off at the end, we were still standing and clapping and yelling and whistling, and of course they all came back and did one more number that really rocked the place.

Then they all came to the front of the stage and Jesse asked if we could hear OK in the balcony without mikes (which we could), and then they started a quiet clapping rhythm with only Jesse’s acoustic guitar playing and Chris Church, who is from here and whose parents and high school math teacher were in the crowd, began to sing. Chris’ violin had been one of the great elements of the show, but his voice here, straining a little without a mike, was soulful and evocative.

And next to him was Chendy Leon Jr, the great young Cuban-Canadian percussionist, who led the gentle handclapping rhythm, and then, in a moment of pure poetry, sang the sweetest harmonies next to Chris’ vocals. We had watched Chendy play all night, often couldn’t take our eyes off him as he played, but this was the true moment.

I wish you too could have heard it. It was a song and a moment we toasted when we got home with Havana Club rum, neat with a slice of lime and a touch of bitters, truly a great one!

Inside a Song

I’ve been listening to the soundtrack of “I’m Not There” for the past few days; in fact, I’ve been listening mostly to Disc 2 of the soundtrack; in fact, if the truth be told, I’ve been living inside Disc 2 of that soundtrack for almost a week now.

It’s in the car and it plays every time I drive. I listen to the lovingly rendered versions of Dylan’s songs by a variety of artists and am taken especially by the acoustic ones with beautiful guitar picking and the voices that explore the amazing range and subtlety of Bob’s lyrics in ways I haven’t heard before. There are treats waiting throughout this CD and I know now when each is coming, sometimes going back and replaying a song just to be immersed in it again. And again. However, I don’t jump ahead – there must be something in me that makes me go through the somewhat less favourite cuts (I notice that I still inadvertently use the terminology of vinyl when I am talking about the tracks) because those treats I know are ahead are worth the wait.

So it’s clear that I have found this disc of the soundtrack powerful and compelling. But it is cut (track) #17 that is for me the most compelling. I first heard it in St. Catherine’s in the background of our activities there when JE played the soundtrack and burned copies for us, and it engaged me. I heard it again when we were back home and it was playing when friends were over for dinner. I hadn’t yet explored the names of the artists on the CD so I didn’t know whose that lovely ethereal voice on #17 was. I turned up the sound and asked if anyone knew who the vocalist was. JJ who is an amazing vocal artist herself said she thought it was male and possibly African-American but not someone she knew. And no one else knew either.

The next day I looked it up on the trusty wikipedia and learned that it was Antony Hagerty, male, yes, I guess, but neither African nor American. If you want to know more, check out the soundtrack here and the artist on #17 here. You will know if you looked or if you already know the soundtrack that the song is “Knockin on Heaven’s Door”. If you want to know why I found/find this version so compelling, you can watch and listen here.

I have loved that song ever since I first heard it, and my favourite version for a couple of decades has been the one Bob did on his Australia tour with a great chorus of backup singers including, I believe, Queen Latifah (and now I can’t find that memorable video anywhere). It was my favourite, but as I mentioned above, I’ve been living inside Disc 2 for a while and especially inside cut #17.

Actually I decided that if there were ever a memorial event for me I would want Antony’s version of the song to be part of it. Shortly after deciding that, I finished the article I was reading in The New Yorker about performance artist Marina Abramovic, and learned that she invited Antony to a party and announced that she planned to have him sing "My Way" at all three of her funerals (read the article).

No matter, all I want is this CD with this version of this song, not because there’s any heaven with a door in it to knock on, but because that voice and Bob’s words say something about what we might think of, what we might feel, what we might live for. That’s all.

Love is touching souls

In September of 2006 I met my IB English A2 class, known as 11-J, at The Koç School in Istanbul for the first time and for our first lessons together. The beginning unit of our program was poetry, and I was excited to get into it. I introduced them to a poem by Joni Mitchell called A Case of You. Here’s how it goes (in case you don’t know it); it's worth a careful read:

Just before our love got lost you said,
"I am as constant as a northern star."
And I said, "Constantly in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar."
On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
With your face sketched on it twice
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh I would still be on my feet

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time you told me, you said,
"Love is touching souls"
Surely you touched mine
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you, darling
Still, I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said,
"Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed"
Oh but you are in my blood
You're my holy wine
You're so bitter, bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

If you are interested, you can see and hear Joni perform it here.

Partly I wanted to teach something about effective use of simile and sustained metaphor, but mostly I wanted to give my class a chance to experience some of the wonders of how poetry can work as an expression of love and loss. I can't remember now exactly how it went or how much they got from my lesson, but I still can’t hear the song without thinking of those wonderful kids I met in 11-J and the two years of English classes we spent together.

And I can’t hear the song now without thinking of Leonard. I think the idea was suggested in a blog I read about Cohen where the connection was made with Joni, a connection I had, perhaps surprisingly, never made. Whether or not the song is about the end of her relationship with Leonard, or with someone else (James Taylor may be a candidate), I can’t listen to or read the opening, “Just before our love got lost”, without thinking of the two of them teetering on the edge of breaking up, his assertion of constancy, the clever flip of her dismissal, and her departure for the bar.

There’s nothing much more to say really. I am left with the nostalgic memory of my 11-J/12-J students, now serious and grown up and well into their second years of university study, and of our still wonderful Canadian poets and performers, Joni and Leonard, perhaps still a little in each other’s “blood like holy wine”. And we are all left with the song/poem that says it all and says it so well, whether it's Joni or k.d. or Diana Krall singing it, and the thought that, sometimes at least, “Love is touching souls”.

Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Last week Leonard Cohen performed two concerts in Istanbul, the first time that he has played there. Earlier in the summer Loreena McKennitt also played Istanbul, one more great Canadian performer (with, of course, Hugh Marsh in her ensemble), so we have been well represented musically there this year – just need Neil and Joni, I guess, to complete that picture. You can read some interesting accounts of Leonard’s performances in the reviews and reactions listed by Dr. Guy in his blog here. They seem to have been good concerts, much appreciated by the Istanbul audiences, one of which included my good friend Ann and her daughter Çağla, who went for the best seats. There’s a nice view of “Hallelujah” here -- I hope that Ann and Çağla saw and heard as well as that.

I was quite familiar with Leonard’s work back in the 60’s, initially from the poems his teacher/mentor Irving Layton selected for the 1962 anthology of Canadian love poetry, Love Where the Nights are Long (still worth the price of admission!). I had my own copy of The Spice-Box of Earth, the one that had a cutout window in the paper cover showing Leonard’s picture inside, as did Lorraine when we first got together a few years later. Leonard’s poems were important to all of us young lovers and romantics as we tried to figure out who and how we were. Read “The Cuckold’s Song” to see why. Or this:

Song

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover

We all read Beautiful Losers and talked endlessly about Catherine and that great mantra “God is alive; magic is afoot”. Leonard was present in our lives, even though, as Warren T pointed out, he didn’t have the rhythmic or verbal complexity of Bob (he meant Mr. D but it could also have been our other hero Creeley); Warren was right, of course, but for us Leonard was still cool.

When we heard in 1967 that Leonard was coming to UBC to do a reading, we were all going. When we got into the lecture theatre, we waited. Leonard was not sitting down front to be introduced like at most readings – he wasn’t in the hall at all. We waited. When he came out from the wings, he was carrying a guitar -- no book, no sheaves of paper – just a guitar, and that small smile you will recognize if you ever saw him perform. He began with “Suzanne” and he owned us.

Later in the old caff we sat around tables while he told us that it was his birthday, his 33rd, and that he was happy to be in Vancouver, and he reminded us of the fact that Jesus was crucified in his 33rd year. He pointed out that such a thing was not part of his own plan, though he certainly toys with such ideas in “Dress Rehearsal Rag”, which we all knew from the copy of Judy Collins’ “In my Life” I was given for my birthday that year. The next year up in Sechelt Jon F. played and sang Cohen songs beatifically at our campfires on the beach at Sergeant’s Bay, etching songs like “Sisters of Mercy” and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” into my consciousness forever.

I have followed Leonard’s work over the years but haven’t been to a concert since that first one back at UBC. I’m glad he is doing them and glad that Ann and Çağla got to go to one last week. After all he is still, at close to 75, very cool and always worth a listen.

Sir Paul McCartney comes to Halifax

Last Saturday night Sir Paul McCartney played a concert in Halifax on the Commons. It was the only Canadian stop on his current tour which takes him down the east coast of the US to play six venues, including New York and Boston and ending in Dallas toward the end of August. It’s not a strenuous tour schedule, but I guess if you are Sir Paul you can do it at your own pace. Our next door neighbours, Red and Sharon, bought tickets for the concert, as did our friend Heather, but we decided not to even though Lorraine was President of the Calgary Beatles Fan Club in 1963 and had a special affection for Paul, as he was known to all of us back then.

We didn’t buy tickets, but we were fortunate enough to receive an invitation from Robin to attend his party “Baby let me drive your balcony”, said balcony facing the Commons close to the corner of Cunard and Robie where the stage was set up. We decided to go since, after all, it was an event and a party, and, after all, Lorraine had been President and a big fan, and, after all, I had had a Beatles haircut for a short time in my undergrad years, and, after all, we knew those old songs so well. There was a crowd at Robin’s, both an art crowd (we were part of this group) and a social worker crowd, many of them colleagues and friends of Robin’s partner, plenty of food and drink, and a great view from the balcony of the traffic jamming up, the long tractor trailer support units, two policeman looking elegant on two lovely horses (though Jackie reminded me that they are often used in crowd control, which did put a different spin on the image), the back of the stage, and a sea of people waving and swaying.

The concert was a good one, with a huge crowd and a set list that had enough favourites sprinkled through it to keep everyone we could see in the main audience pretty happy – and it kept us happy enough too. There was a limit of six on Robin’s balcony so people had to do rotations there, but there was no restriction on Robin’s bed which was next to his open window. It gave a great view, so we could watch Paul’s torso from behind through a gap in the backdrop as he moved around on stage – he’s not a dancer like Mick but he does sway some and step back and forth – and the sound was great. Every song was played note for note, pause for pause, syllable for syllable, and harmony for harmony like the originals that were burned in our memories, so Jackie, a social worker I seem to see about once a decade, and I were able to sing along without missing a beat. Her sad story was that her parents had refused to let her attend a Beatles concert in Paris in 1964 with her high school because they were worried what might happen to her, but her happy story was that Sir Paul had built this concert around the Beatles songbook, and now, 45 years later, she could hear him sing almost as he would have sung back then with John, George, and Ringo.

One crowd favourite with a local flavour was the Celtic ballad “Mull of Kintyre”, which you can watch here, a great version complete with our own pipe and drum band, the 78th Highlanders. An easy one for Sir Paul was “Hey Jude” because he got the audience to do most of the singing, which they didn’t mind at all. And “Yesterday” was rendered with the same aching nostalgia it has always evoked, which did not stop any of us from singing along. Jackie and I agreed that “Helter Skelter” simply felt wrong without John (though I've since learned that the song is all Paul), and we talked seriously – Jackie is an old “leftie” – about class analysis, honouring blues roots and people of colour (not many in the audience we could see), and the fact that Sergeant Pepper’s was played as a straight thank you and good-bye at the end, with not a hint of the irony of the original.

Our political commentary was halted at one point by an amazing fireworks display, which put the whole thing into concert spectacle context as we all stared out the window and said, Oh wow! It was a time, as people say around here, a fine time, and we all shared something, some recollection of a Beatles time or place, that made it worth going for. Thanks for that, Sir Paul.

National Poetry Month

This is the first day of National Poetry Month. If you are interested, you can receive a poem by e-mail every day of the month, from either The Academy of American Poets (sign up here) or Alfred A. Knopf (sign up here). I am sure there are other sites – in fact, some years ago I sent out a poem every day throughout April to a small list of people – but I have found these two to be particularly interesting and rewarding; for example, the Academy’s offering today is a fine small piece by Jack Gilbert called Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina about the memory of getting water from his grandfather’s well, while Knopf sent one of Updike’s recent poems Half Moon Small Cloud. If you check out the sites, you’ll be able to read both of these works.

My choice for today is actually a song by Conor Oberst, and it is worth a read first:

Landlocked Blues

If you walk away, I’ll walk away
First tell me which road you will take
I don’t want to risk our paths crossing some day
So you walk that way, I’ll walk this way

And the future hangs over our heads
And it moves with each current event
Until it falls all around like a cold steady rain
Just stay in when it’s looking this way

And the moon’s laying low in the sky
Forcing everything metal to shine
And the sidewalk holds diamonds like the jewelry store case
They argue walk this way, no, walk this way

And Laura’s asleep in my bed
As I’m leaving she wakes up and says
“I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave
Baby don’t go away, come here”

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say “enough is enough,
If you walk away, I’ll walk away”
And he shot me dead

I found a liquid cure
From my landlocked blues
It’ll pass away like a slow parade
It’s leaving but I don’t know how soon

And the world’s got me dizzy again
You think after 22 years I’d be used to the spin
And it only feels worse when I stay in one place
So I’m always pacing around or walking away
I keep drinking the ink from my pen
And I’m balancing history books up on my head
But it all boils down to one quotable phrase
If you love something, give it away

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

We made love on the living room floor
With the noise in the background of a televised war
And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say
“If we walk away, they’ll walk away”

But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom’s a joke
We’re just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch the sad comic display
If you’re still free start running away
Cause we’re coming for you!

I’ve grown tired of holding this pose
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home
So I’m making a deal with the devils of fame
Saying “let me walk away, please”
You’ll be free child once you have died
From the shackles of language and measurable time
And then we can trade places, play musical graves
Till then walk away, walk away

So I’m up at dawn
Putting on my shoes
I just want to make a clean escape
I’m leaving but I don’t know where to
I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to


and after you read it, give it a listen – enjoy!

Hugh Marsh, a fan letter

There is a sound you may notice if you listen to Loreena McKennitt, Michael Occhipinti, Bruce Cockburn, or Mercan Dede -- all Canadians, by the way, or in Mercan’s case, partly Canadian at least. You may notice the same kind of sound when you pay attention to the music in the background of any number of films, a sound that can be eerily fantastic, softly meditative, or soaringly emotive, the sound of Hugh Marsh, the great (also Canadian) improvisational jazz violinist. What always strikes me about Hugh’s music, wherever I hear it or think about hearing it, is its rightness. His music always feels absolutely right (in somewhat the same way Emmylou’s voice always does) in its sensitivity to sound and situation, but it does more than that; its magic is the way it consistently extends the range and the depth of what is possible in the piece you are listening to.

We first saw Hugh Marsh perform back in the 90's at the Rebecca Cohn in Halifax. We didn't go to the concert to hear Hugh; in fact, we hadn’t even heard of him and had driven with our kids (who were becoming young adults by then) from Truro to see a Loreena McKennitt concert, around the time of The Mask and the Mirror. It was a nice hall for a concert, not too big, good sound, a friendly spot, and Loreena looked wonderfully medieval with her long blond hair, her slender fingers plucking the harp, and her ethereal voice exploring those richly textured songs with tall (electronic) candles flaring all around the stage. It was a fine show that really captured the great sound of her songs, but one thing that truly stood out for all of us was the catlike presence of the violinist in the band. It was impossible as you watched him play not to pick out from all the threads of the music his distinctive sound and the way it danced with and around all the other sounds of each piece. That was Hugh.

Lorraine and I saw him again a few years later when we happened upon a noonday concert down at the waterfront during the Atlantic Jazz Festival. Here was a tight little jazz band, led by Michael Occhipinti and his guitar, playing pieces from Creation Dream, Occhipinti’s melodic exploration of Bruce Cockburn’s songs, and our hearts lifted again at the sight and sound of Hugh and his athletic violin. For the rest of the Festival we were like stalkers, tracking down every performance and workshop to get more of the band and more of Hugh’s musical intelligence and emotion. We bought the cd and listened to it often, and I can still remember later that summer, while I was sitting at sunset in our rented Trans Am down a little road in Halfmoon Bay, watching the silhouette of a heron standing on a huge log boom and waiting for darkness to fall enough for Lorraine to finish the photograph she was making, the soft lament of Hugh’s violin in the ending of "Homme Brûlant" and the wonder of the music he was making.

Finally, after we moved to Istanbul, we listened to various works by Mercan Dede, the young Sufi composer and player, and heard in the textures of all the voices and sounds Mercan collaborates with, the unmistakable violin of our Hugh. We went to several Mercan Dede concerts, including one featuring songs from Su at Yeni Melek (The New Angel) where Hugh was in the audience but not on the stage, but never managed to catch his appearances with Mercan. However, his sound is there, it is available, it can be heard, so check it out. Here is a nice little vignette with Steve Bell. You too can become a Hugh Marsh follower!

A pond I could skate away on

I closed my last post with words I borrowed -- and if you followed the link, with a performance -- from the consistently wonderful Joni M. I put them there not because “I made my baby cry” (as she said she did), but because those words “I wish I had a river/I could skate away on” and their music have always resonated with me in winter. What resonates is of course Joni’s own voice, the clear and yearning ache of it, her words, and the thought of her coming of age in Saskatoon and the bitterness of the winters there that would freeze rivers and coulees for endless miles of flying on your skates into whatever kind of ecstasy or oblivion you were seeking.

We did go skating yesterday with our new skates on the Frog Pond, tightening them up with our chilled fingers on the wooden step and heading out, tentatively at first. If you want to know the physics of how skating actually works, check here; if you want to know the physiology, tie a pair on yourself, tightly, and step onto the ice. My father called me Jellylegs when I was a kid, and I've never been a great skater (if you want to see one, look here), but I've always enjoyed the stride and the glide as you begin to fly.

The ice was good, certainly solid enough, but not perfect. In places you could see grey tracks from where someone had walked across the pond after the last snow, some parts were still rough, but at least the bubbles under the new ice were frozen hard, no moving water there, no crackling sounds. Long lines of open cracks ran all across the pond surface, joining each other in great zigs and zags, and sometimes the ice groaned or boomed under us, but we still were able to build our speed up until we were flying with the wind at our backs across stretches of a (mostly) clear smooth pond we could skate away on.

Skating back across the pond felt a bit like sailing, as if you needed to tack your way up, because straight into the wind was like trying to skate up a hill. There was plenty of room for tacking manoeuvres, however, since we had the whole pond to ourselves, and we etched our sharp tracks with those new blades all over, except for the southerly edges of the pond where the sun on the shore had warmed it up enough to show small strips of dark water. There was neither ecstasy nor oblivion in it, but there was bright sun and blue winter sky, and the lovely bulges of ice around and over the backs of the large rocks that broke the pond's surface, the pines with their red needles littering the shore, and the sensation of stretching and moving and flying on a broad reach across the pond.

Tonight there is wet snow and later rain. Tomorrow they say it will be plus ten. It is March in Nova Scotia and it will get cold again. The skates will stay in the car and we will see what happens. Until then I will hold in my mind the image of Toby, our son, on his first skate earlier this year, flying off across Papermill Lake, turning, and flying back toward us, his joy so wide and unencumbered it shone.

They say it's your birthday

They say it's your birthday, and today it is -- mine, that is, as well as Levi's in St. Catharine's and Lou Reed's, who should be living in New York, I'd guess, though he may have moved on to a nicer meteorological climate at this time in his life. Must be Dr. Seuss's too from the look of Google this morning. Levi might have turned three today, though I'm not sure since I don't really know him -- it's just that his parents are friends of my son and daughter-in-law, and they went to his party yesterday because it was Sunday and a good day for a party -- and Lou is 65 today, a year ahead of me, and I hope he is fine. I wonder if he and Laurie Anderson are still friends (you decide: look here). I have to admit that when I first heard about the two of them, I felt some small pangs (that's the word we use, isn't it?), some small pangs of jealousy. That's because I had for years carried a secret crush on her, inspired by her voice and the quick mind behind her lyrics and (of course) a photo of her, albeit about 30 years younger, on one of her album covers.

I took two cartons of albums to a used record store on Friday. I had already sold our turntable on Kijiji because we hadn't used it in more than a decade, and now it was time to get rid of the albums. Laurie A. was in there, as well as several of the albums I bought right after I moved to Vancouver in 1966 and joined the Columbia Record Club, lured by their offer of 12 record albums for one cent. Those were the days when you didn't worry about commitments to buy four records a year or whatever it was that Columbia wanted you to agree to, and there were enough records on their list, which featured as I remember tiny coloured pictures of each album cover, to make me take the time to join. I should be clear that when I say you didn't worry, I didn't necessarily mean you, my invisible reader, but rather the collective "you" of the person I was becoming and of the people I knew and spent time with back in that place and time. It was a very attractive offer from Columbia, and not just because of the price (which was right, of course!); those little pictures on the brochure were something special! So I checked off the little boxes on the list, based on the names of albums or artists I wanted to own as well as on the miniature jewels of the album covers.

When I went through the box on Friday I still had a very scuffed Blonde on Blonde double album I had got from that order, as well as a newer cleaner copy, Bringing it All Back Home, Otis Redding Sings Blue (this one had the amazing cut of I've Been Lovin You Too Long with its incredible brass crescendos -- I think that's the right word for those rising waves of sound -- that carry his lovely lamenting voice almost to the edge of what is possible to express), December's Children, and the Best of the Supremes and of the Temptations. There may have been more, but that's half of my twelve from Columbia more than 42 years ago. I don't know what I thought I'd get for them, and the guy at the store said he'd try to look at them on the weekend if things got quieter. They must have because he phoned me Saturday morning to say that he couldn't use any of them, some were badly worn or warped on the edges they'd stood on and some of the covers were mouldy and I needed to get them out of there, so I'll probably pick them up today and say another good-bye to my old and improperly stored vinyl. They may be no good for anything, at least in his store, but they were for me nice touchstones of some times and places. I still love the memory of those little pictures in the brochure, and I've pretty much gotten over those pangs from the Laurie and Lou thing by now.

They say it's your birthday, said the Beatles, and they had a separate song for this particular one. Who would have thought that I would still have it in my head when I actually was 64? Well I am and I do, it feels pretty good to be here, and it's nowhere near as old as I used to think it was.