Authors: Alex Ross
Listen to This (30 page)
People always assumed that Frank Sinatra’s voice was a projection of his personality—that the voice and the man were one and the same. In fact, there was a long, quiet struggle between them. The trumped-up legend doesn’t jive with the underlying steadiness of Sinatra’s musicianship. We should remember his startling intelligence as a singer—the way he husbanded his good but not necessarily great voice into something joyful and profound. We should remember his phenomenal breath control—the way he spun out long, luxurious phrases without seeming to stop for air. (He
used to swim laps underwater, thinking about lyrics all the while.) We should remember his vocal courage—the way he saved his voice at mid-career by making virtues of the cracks that had appeared in his technique. We should remember his love of language—the way he dramatized words, brought dry polysyllables to life. (No other singer could make so much of the word “unphotographable.”) And we should remember his love of complex orchestral arrangements, his instinct for matching his voice to the instruments, his graciousness toward his regular players. The sweetest moment in Gay Talese’s classic
Esquire
profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is the singer’s greeting to Vincent DeRosa, the great L.A. studio horn player: “Vicenzo, how’s your little girl?”
used to swim laps underwater, thinking about lyrics all the while.) We should remember his vocal courage—the way he saved his voice at mid-career by making virtues of the cracks that had appeared in his technique. We should remember his love of language—the way he dramatized words, brought dry polysyllables to life. (No other singer could make so much of the word “unphotographable.”) And we should remember his love of complex orchestral arrangements, his instinct for matching his voice to the instruments, his graciousness toward his regular players. The sweetest moment in Gay Talese’s classic
Esquire
profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is the singer’s greeting to Vincent DeRosa, the great L.A. studio horn player: “Vicenzo, how’s your little girl?”
To some extent, yes, the voice was the man. Sinatra’s “swingin”’ songs act out in musical terms his Vegas persona. But the flip sides of those songs—desolate torchers like “In the Wee Small Hours,” “It’s a Lonesome Old Town,” and “September of My Years”—seem to come from nowhere. The source of that low, lonely thrum hasn’t been identified by Sinatra’s multiplying biographers; it may not have to be, because it was a musical effect, an expression of the baritone art. The voice was veering in the opposite direction from the legend: Sinatra was a lean young man who grew wealthy and stout, but it’s his younger voice that sounds plump and it’s his older voice that sounds thin and hungry. He knew all along—or at least until his effortful last years—that his voice was all that counted in the end. Now the voice is the only real thing we have left: the bright, sad man on the record player.
When Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the band Nirvana, killed himself on April 5 with a shotgun blast to the head, major media outlets gave the story wide play and warmed to its significance. Dan Rather, on the CBS network, led off hesitantly, his face full of dim amazement as he read aloud phrases like “the Seattle sound” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But ABC ventured bravely into interpretation, explaining the phenomenon of grunge music to “people over thirty” and obtaining one man-in-the-street reaction. “When you reach that kind of fame and you’re still miserable, there’s something wrong,” a long-haired stoner-looking dude observed.
And NBC’s correspondent ambitiously invoked “the violence, the drugs, and the diminished opportunities of an entire generation,” with Tom Brokaw, the network anchor, appending a regretful smirk. This was only the evening of the first day: the newsstands were soon heavy with fresh musings on the latest lost generation, the twilit twentysomethings, the new unhappiness.
And NBC’s correspondent ambitiously invoked “the violence, the drugs, and the diminished opportunities of an entire generation,” with Tom Brokaw, the network anchor, appending a regretful smirk. This was only the evening of the first day: the newsstands were soon heavy with fresh musings on the latest lost generation, the twilit twentysomethings, the new unhappiness.
From the outset of his career, the desperately individualistic Cobain was caught in a great media babble about grunge style and twentysomething discontent. His adamantly personal songs became exhibits in the nation’s ongoing symposium on generational identity—a fruitless project blending the principles of sociology and astrology. He was loudly and publicly tormented by his notoriety, his influence, his importance. Everything written about him and his wife, Courtney Love, seemed to wound him in some way
Yet he chose a way of death guaranteed to bring down a hailstorm of prying analytical chatter far in excess of anything he had experienced while he was alive. This is the paradoxical allure of suicide: to leave the chattering world behind and yet to stage-manage the exit so that one is talked about in the right way. This was also the paradox of Cobain’s pop-star career—his choice both to reject the mainstream and to attempt to redirect it. He thought he could take the road less traveled and then persuade everyone to follow him. It’s amazing he got as far as he did.
MTV, the video clubhouse that brought the Nirvanamania to fever pitch, identified the band with a problematic category called “alternative.” Alternative culture proposes that the establishment is reprehensible but that our substitute establishment can coexist with it, on the same commercial playing field. It differs from sixties notions of counterculture insofar as no one took it seriously even at the beginning; it sold out as a matter of principle. MTV seized on the “alternative” label as a way of laterally diversifying its offerings, much as soft-drink companies seek to invent new flavors.
Alternative music in the 1990s claimed descent from the punk-rock movement that crisscrossed America in the seventies and eighties. The claim rang false because punk in its pure form disavowed commercial success, a disavowal that united an otherwise motley array of youth subcultures: high-school misfits, skateboard kids, hardcore skinheads, doped-out
postcollegiate slackers. Punk’s obsession was autonomy—independent labels, clubs installed in suburban garages and warehouses, flyers and fanzines photocopied at temp jobs after hours. Some of the music was vulgar and dumb, some of it ruggedly inventive; rock finally had a viable avant-garde. In the eighties, this do-it-yourself network solidified into indie rock, anchored in college radio stations and alternative newspapers. Dumbness persisted, but there were always scattered bands picking out weird, rich chords and giving no thought to a major-label future.
postcollegiate slackers. Punk’s obsession was autonomy—independent labels, clubs installed in suburban garages and warehouses, flyers and fanzines photocopied at temp jobs after hours. Some of the music was vulgar and dumb, some of it ruggedly inventive; rock finally had a viable avant-garde. In the eighties, this do-it-yourself network solidified into indie rock, anchored in college radio stations and alternative newspapers. Dumbness persisted, but there were always scattered bands picking out weird, rich chords and giving no thought to a major-label future.
Nirvana, who enjoyed local celebrity on the indie scenes of Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle, Washington, before blundering into the mainstream, were perfectly poised between the margin and the center. The band didn’t have to dilute itself to make the transition, because its brand of grunge rock already drew more on the thunderous tread of hard rock and heavy metal than on the clean, fast, matter-of-fact attack of punk or hardcore. Where punk and indie bands generally made vocals secondary to the disordered clamor of guitars, Nirvana depended on Cobain’s resonantly snarling voice, an instrument full of commercial potential from the start. But the singer was resolutely punk in spirit. He undermined his own publicity campaigns and used his commercial clout to support lesser-known bands; he was planning to start his own label, Exploitation Records, and distribute the records himself while on tour.
The songs on Nirvana’s breakthrough second album,
Nevermind,
walked a difficult line between punk form and pop content. For the most part, they triumphed, and more than that they struck a nerve, not only with kids but with people in their twenties or older who recognized the mixture of components that went into the music. Dave Grohl, the dead-on drummer who kept Nirvana on an even keel, had a pragmatic view of the album’s appeal: “The songs were catchy and they were simple, just like an ABC song when you were a kid.” Cobain was a close, direct presence, everyone’s friendless friend. The songs, despite their sometimes messy roar, were cunningly fashioned, switching in midstream from meditation to melee.
Nevermind,
walked a difficult line between punk form and pop content. For the most part, they triumphed, and more than that they struck a nerve, not only with kids but with people in their twenties or older who recognized the mixture of components that went into the music. Dave Grohl, the dead-on drummer who kept Nirvana on an even keel, had a pragmatic view of the album’s appeal: “The songs were catchy and they were simple, just like an ABC song when you were a kid.” Cobain was a close, direct presence, everyone’s friendless friend. The songs, despite their sometimes messy roar, were cunningly fashioned, switching in midstream from meditation to melee.
It was in the fall of 1991 that Nirvana took hold of the nation’s youth and began selling records in the millions. It’s best not to analyze this sudden popularity too closely; as Michael Azerrad points out in his book
Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,
the kind of instantaneous word-of-mouth sensation that lifted the band to the top of the charts also buoyed
the careers of such differently talented personalities as Peter Frampton and Vanilla Ice. Adolescents are an omnipotent commercial force precisely because their tastes are so mercurial. In the deep dusk of the Reagan-Bush era, some segments of the youth demographic undoubtedly identified with Cobain’s punkish worldview, his sympathies and discontents, and, yes, the diminished opportunities of an entire generation. Others just got off on the crushing power of the sound.
Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,
the kind of instantaneous word-of-mouth sensation that lifted the band to the top of the charts also buoyed
the careers of such differently talented personalities as Peter Frampton and Vanilla Ice. Adolescents are an omnipotent commercial force precisely because their tastes are so mercurial. In the deep dusk of the Reagan-Bush era, some segments of the youth demographic undoubtedly identified with Cobain’s punkish worldview, his sympathies and discontents, and, yes, the diminished opportunities of an entire generation. Others just got off on the crushing power of the sound.
Cobain was at once irritated and intrigued by the randomness of his new audience. He lashed out at the “jock numbskulls, frat boys, and metal kids” (in Azerrad’s words) who jammed clubs and arenas for his post-
Nevermind
tours. But he also liked the idea of bending their minds toward his own punk ideals and left-leaning politics: “I wanted to fool people at first. I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n’ Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say.” After the initial period of fame, he let loose with social messages, not as heavy-handed or as earnest as R.E.M.’s or U2’s, but carefully aimed. He was happy to discover that high schools were divided between Nirvana kids and Guns n’ Roses kids.
Nevermind
tours. But he also liked the idea of bending their minds toward his own punk ideals and left-leaning politics: “I wanted to fool people at first. I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n’ Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say.” After the initial period of fame, he let loose with social messages, not as heavy-handed or as earnest as R.E.M.’s or U2’s, but carefully aimed. He was happy to discover that high schools were divided between Nirvana kids and Guns n’ Roses kids.
The zeal for subversion was well meant but naïve. By condemning racists, sexists, and homophobes in his audiences, he may have promoted the cause of politically correct language in certain high-school cliques, but he did not and could not attack the deep-seated prejudices simmering beneath that language. When he declared himself “gay in spirit,” as he did in an interview with the gay weekly
The Advocate,
he made a political toy out of fragile identity. And his renunciations of masculine aggression sounded hollow alongside a stage show that dealt in equipment-smashing mayhem.
The Advocate,
he made a political toy out of fragile identity. And his renunciations of masculine aggression sounded hollow alongside a stage show that dealt in equipment-smashing mayhem.
The attempt to carry out social engineering through rock lyrics is a dubious one. Rock and roll has never been and will never be a vehicle for social amelioration, despite many fond hopes. Music is robbed of its intentions and associations as it goes out into the great wide open; like a rumor passed through a crowd, it emerges utterly changed. Pop songs become the property of their fans and are marked with the circumstances of their consumption, not their creation. An unsought listenership can brand the music indelibly, as the Beatles discovered when Charles Manson embraced “Helter Skelter.” Or as Cobain discovered when a recording of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was played at a Guns n’ Roses show in Madison Square Garden while women in the audience were ogled on giant video screens.
In his suicide note, Cobain gestured toward all these crises, his lack of passion, and his disconnectedness from the broad rock audience. The story underneath is simpler and sadder: he was trying to get off drugs and found himself helpless without their support. He leaned on drugs long before he became famous, and the malevolent media circus of his last few years can’t be entirely blamed for his bad end. Even when he started out, he looked tired and haggard. The rest of the story lies between him and his dealer.
Killing himself as and when he did, Cobain at least managed to deliver a final jolt to the rock world he loved and loathed. Rock stars are glamorized for dying young, but they aren’t supposed to kill themselves on purpose. Greil Marcus’s invaluable compendium “Rock Death in the 1970s” records 116 untimely demises, only a handful of suicides among them. A transcendent drug-induced descent is the preferred exit. Certainly, the shotgun blast casts a different light on Cobain’s career; the lyrics all sound like suicide notes now. (“What else could I write / I don’t have the right / What else should I be / All apologies.”) He made his death unrhapsodizable.
The rage we feel at suicides may be motivated by love, but it is the love that comes of possession, not compassion. It is the urge of the crowd to repossess the defective individual. The most mordant words on the subject are still John Donne’s, in defense of righteous suicide: “No detestation nor dehortation against this sin of desperation (when it is a sin) can be too earnest. But yet since it may be without infidelity, it cannot be greater than that.” This sin cannot be greater than our own urge to rationalize and allegorize the recently dead, especially those who were somehow faithful to themselves.
LEARNING THE SCORE
THE CRISIS IN MUSIC EDUCATION
The first day I went out to Malcolm X Shabazz High School, in Newark, New Jersey, the corridors of the school were empty. When I told the guard at the entrance that I had an appointment to see Hassan Ralph Williams, the director of the Malcolm X Shabazz marching band, I was informed that the teachers and students were “at the memorial.” The memorial was for Dawud Roberts, a sixteen-year-old Shabazz football player, who, a few days before, on February 9, 2005, had suffered a fatal stab wound on Johnson Avenue, a few hundred feet from the school. Some students enjoy Williams’s class, which meets for three hours every afternoon, because they love playing music; others see it more pragmatically, as a way to get through the day unscathed.
A tall, suave, mellow-voiced man with a mustache and a gleaming shaved pate, Williams is a native of Ozark, Alabama. He served in the army for twenty-one years, leading marching bands in the 82nd Airborne Division and in the 25th Infantry. He then played jazz in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere with musicians such as Walter Bishop, Jr., and Woody Shaw. He got into teaching almost by accident, looking for work that would keep him busy between gigs. According to Donald Gatling, a longtime teacher at Shabazz, the school had a lackluster band when Williams arrived, in 1988. Now the Malcolm X Shabazz marching band is considered one of the better ones in the state, in demand for its pealing brass, explosive drum line, and manic energy.
The band room is decorated with the faces of jazz masters. Duke Ellington holds the place of honor, above the center of the blackboard. There are also placards stating the virtues of discipline, decorum, respect, and
attention. One of them says, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it.” A corner of the blackboard is posted with some student essays on the topic of Mozart’s Requiem. “Mozart died while trying to complete this piece about Death,” one student wrote. “How ironic.” In front of the blackboard are five computers, each equipped with the Sibelius composing program and various tools for teaching notation. Williams encourages the students to learn musical notation at the computer, and to write their own music.
attention. One of them says, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it.” A corner of the blackboard is posted with some student essays on the topic of Mozart’s Requiem. “Mozart died while trying to complete this piece about Death,” one student wrote. “How ironic.” In front of the blackboard are five computers, each equipped with the Sibelius composing program and various tools for teaching notation. Williams encourages the students to learn musical notation at the computer, and to write their own music.
When I walked in, the Shabazz band was rehearsing John Philip Sousa’s
The Stars and Stripes Forever.
The kids were making a happy noise, but details were getting lost. “Listen downward,” Williams kept saying, trying to get the upper lines in sync with the lower ones. He wanted the players to bring out Sousa’s dance rhythms, such as the habanera, and the songful, Italianate shape of his melodies. “A long time ago, before electricity and TV and radio, people used to dance to this,” Williams said. Two clarinetists responded by jumping out of their seats and dancing around, half gleefully and half sardonically.
The Stars and Stripes Forever.
The kids were making a happy noise, but details were getting lost. “Listen downward,” Williams kept saying, trying to get the upper lines in sync with the lower ones. He wanted the players to bring out Sousa’s dance rhythms, such as the habanera, and the songful, Italianate shape of his melodies. “A long time ago, before electricity and TV and radio, people used to dance to this,” Williams said. Two clarinetists responded by jumping out of their seats and dancing around, half gleefully and half sardonically.
Members of the Shabazz band, who range in age from eight to eighteen, work hard. They not only practice from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. each school day but also play most weekends, either at football games or at public events. In the summer, they go on the road to band camp. Williams does more than beat time; he teaches music history, social history, and black history. (Ninety-five percent of Shabazz students are African-American.) Sometimes he interrupts his usual attitude of jazz cool with a military bark. “This ain’t gonna roll,” he might roar when there is too much noise in the room. “This isn’t happening. You may look around and see a chair coming at your head!” But the drill-sergeant routines last only a few minutes, and the kids aren’t afraid to talk back. If Williams asks, “Who’s got the melody?” a girl might answer, “You do!” If he drops the name Wynton Marsalis, a few might shout out, “Who dat?” (They know.)
Later in the rehearsal, the piccolo players were struggling with the twirling solos that accompany Sousa’s most famous tune, the one to which the words “Three cheers for the red-white-and-blue” are sung, or, as Williams prefers to render it, “Be kind to our four-legged friends.” Jihad Moore, a tall junior with a crooked smile who wore a blue-and-white basketball jersey with the number 24, was amusing himself by making an imaginary pistol out of his piccolo, holding one end of it with his thumb
and gesturing toward the floor, gangsta-style. Williams was trying to get him to concentrate. He’d been telling Jihad that if he got to a certain level with the flute, or mastered a more unusual instrument like the oboe, he might be able to get into college on a scholarship. He sat Jihad next to another player, Kahliah Jordan, and had both students type their parts into the computers, using the Sibelius software. He figured that it would help them grasp the parts and memorize them.
and gesturing toward the floor, gangsta-style. Williams was trying to get him to concentrate. He’d been telling Jihad that if he got to a certain level with the flute, or mastered a more unusual instrument like the oboe, he might be able to get into college on a scholarship. He sat Jihad next to another player, Kahliah Jordan, and had both students type their parts into the computers, using the Sibelius software. He figured that it would help them grasp the parts and memorize them.
“Put a trill on that first A-flat,” he said, leaning over their shoulders.
Jihad frowned at his part and asked, “Do we have to write grandioso?”
“No, skip the grandiose”
Williams offered a new incentive. “I’ll take y’all to the International Buffet if you get this solo. Just the piccolos, at the International Buffet. But only if you all get it. If you all get this, we can wipe out any band on the planet.”
“I’ll wipe out any piccolo players,” Jihad answered enthusiastically.
The standout player in the band was a senior named Vernon Jones. A slender young man with bright eyes and wide cheekbones, Vernon was getting a brilliant singing sound out of his trumpet—which Williams had bought for him—and, whenever the others took breaks, he kept working away at tricky leaps and rapid runs. He was also a composer, and wrote music and made arrangements on the computers. Like many bands, Shabazz spices up its repertory with Top 40 songs, and Williams often relied on Vernon to find suitable songs and make idiomatic arrangements. Vernon needed only thirty minutes to knock out an arrangement of “I Believe I Can Fly”—a pungent, slightly weird orchestration, amped up by drums and brass, dense with jazzy harmonies. Vernon had been in Williams’s band since he was seven; he had been accepted at Rutgers, and his acceptance letter was taped to the blackboard.
Toward the end of the rehearsal, Williams stepped back and listened with his arms folded. He asked another of the trumpet players, a round-faced, wide-eyed eight-year-old named Keyshawn Mayo, to take over. Earlier in the day, Keyshawn had been offended that he had been demoted to a secondary part. “I can play first trumpet,” he said. “I’m the best person my age.” Now his face lit up, and he ran to the front. His small voice filled the room as he snapped his fingers: “And a five! And a six! And a seven and an eight!”
When President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002, he probably did not intend it to have a debilitating effect on arts education in the United States. The law rewards schools that meet certain testing standards in core subjects—reading, math, the sciences—and punishes those that fall short. By 2006, 71 percent of school districts had narrowed their elementary-school curricula in order to make up the difference, and the arts had repeatedly been deemed expendable. In California, between 1999 and 2004, the number of students enrolled in music courses fell by nearly half, from 1.1 million to 589,000. Music education had been disappearing from schools for decades, but No Child Left Behind transformed a slow decline into a precipitate fall.
Advocates have issued studies, pamphlets, and talking points that marshal alarming statistics on the diminishment of music programs and argue passionately for their preservation. But there is something maddeningly vague at the heart of the literature. Why must music be taught? The answer seems obvious in the case of Vernon Jones: he’s a natural musician, and, for him, the Shabazz band is the first step in what may turn out to be a major classical or jazz career. For most students, though, the usefulness of music class is much less clear. Anyone who has loved music from an early age feels certain that it has a unique and irreplaceable value, but it is difficult to translate that conviction into hard sociological data. Whenever advocates try to build a case for music on utilitarian grounds, they run up against fundamental uncertainties about the ultimate purpose of an art whose appeal is, as Plato anxiously observed, illogical and irrational.
The Mozart Effect has often been cited by proponents of music in schools. In 1993, researchers claimed that a group of thirty-six undergraduates who had been subjected to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos performed better than average on the abstract-and-spatial-reasoning section of the IQ test. Subsequent studies failed to reproduce this result. Nonetheless, the Mozart Effect inspired several books, a ream of newspaper articles, the pseudo-educational
Baby Mozart
video, and a shadowy-sounding organization called the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute. People love the idea that they might be able to make their kids smarter by switching on Mozart once a day; it’s seen as a shortcut to Parents’ Weekend at Harvard. But kids aren’t likely to fall in love with music that is administered to them like vitamins.
Baby Mozart
video, and a shadowy-sounding organization called the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute. People love the idea that they might be able to make their kids smarter by switching on Mozart once a day; it’s seen as a shortcut to Parents’ Weekend at Harvard. But kids aren’t likely to fall in love with music that is administered to them like vitamins.
Other studies suggest that music students score higher on proficiency tests, or that their math grades go up with each year of study, or that they are less likely to get in trouble with the law. But none of this pro-music science has stemmed the cuts in music programs. To the contrary, music invariably presents itself as the most tempting target. In California, the decline in visual-arts courses was minimal compared with that of music classes, and enrollments in theater and dance went up. According to the advocacy group Music for All, which in 2004 issued a dire report on the California crisis called “The Sound of Silence,” music programs “represented single, relatively significant, politically expedient targets for cuts.”
Part of the problem is that American music education has largely evolved out of classical-music culture, whose standoffish mentality long ago became self-defeating. Another problem is that music education lacks a powerful lobby. When politicians speak up for it, striking things happen. When Mike Huckabee was governor of Arkansas, he not only professed a love for music, as Bill Clinton often did, but devised legislation to bolster it. In 2005, Huckabee signed a law requiring every child in grades one through six to receive at least forty minutes a week of instruction in music and other arts. “In the true spirit of No Child Left Behind,” Huckabee explained, “leaving the arts out is beyond neglect and is virtual abuse of a child.”
Although Huckabee has had a few imitators—in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to rescue music and arts education in California—the national outlook remains grim. Public funding for anything related to the arts has been contentious since the 1880s, when the progressive patron Jeannette Thurber failed to persuade Congress to fund a national conservatory. For practitioners of classical music, jazz, folk music, and other tradition-minded disciplines that lack mainstream commercial appeal, the situation looks particularly bleak. How can they engage listeners who have heard almost nothing about the history and practice of the art in school? One alternative has increasingly become the norm: they can do the teaching themselves.
Around the same time I started going out to Malcolm X Shabazz in Newark, I met up in Brooklyn with a twenty-seven-year-old pianist named Soheil Nasseri, who had been visiting school assemblies around the city in an effort to incite interest in classical music. Nasseri’s trick was to start
the session by talking about hip-hop. At Fort Hamilton School in Bay Ridge, he caught the attention of the crowd by mentioning that he was a friend of the impresario Damon Dash, whose name drew respectful nods. Nasseri then invited a student named Jovan Parish onstage, gave him a hip-hop handshake, and had him rap over some minor-key piano chords. (There was a line about “my vocabulary skills are ill.”) It was up to the children to decide what this had to do with Beethoven’s Sonata in F-sharp, which Nasseri played next. Afterward, students offered a string of questions about Beethoven and the piano: “What do you do when you make mistakes?” “What’s the name of the piece that goes ‘buh-buh-buh-BUH’?” “Why don’t you compose yourself?” “When you play someone else’s music, aren’t you stealing?”
the session by talking about hip-hop. At Fort Hamilton School in Bay Ridge, he caught the attention of the crowd by mentioning that he was a friend of the impresario Damon Dash, whose name drew respectful nods. Nasseri then invited a student named Jovan Parish onstage, gave him a hip-hop handshake, and had him rap over some minor-key piano chords. (There was a line about “my vocabulary skills are ill.”) It was up to the children to decide what this had to do with Beethoven’s Sonata in F-sharp, which Nasseri played next. Afterward, students offered a string of questions about Beethoven and the piano: “What do you do when you make mistakes?” “What’s the name of the piece that goes ‘buh-buh-buh-BUH’?” “Why don’t you compose yourself?” “When you play someone else’s music, aren’t you stealing?”
These days, virtually every orchestra, opera house, chamber-music series, and jazz organization has an education department. Musicians are sent into schools to teach the basics and, in theory, to encourage an interest that will survive the rigors of adolescence, in the course of which any kid with a liking for classical music discovers that it’s considered stuffy, sissified, and terminally uncool. The effectiveness of “outreach” depends on the charisma of the person reaching out. Nasseri certainly has a knack for talking to kids. So, too, does David Robertson, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, whose guileless manner recalls the style of the late, great Fred Rogers. Michael Tilson Thomas, at the San Francisco Symphony, is a natural teacher, stirring memories of his longtime mentor, Leonard Bernstein.
Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, has a similar gift for discussing music in a sophisticated yet unaffected way. One day I watched Marsalis take command of an unruly crowd of schoolkids at the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem. He launched into a lecture on connections between jazz and modern art, the thesis of which was that jazz was a form of modernism, and he backed it up with pictures, performances, and a never-ending stream of talk. He dropped the names Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian, gave a shout-out to Frank Gehry, and supplied a lovely definition of the word “cosmopolitan” (“It means you fit in wherever you go”). He administered discipline (“I’m old school—no talking”), explained the blues as a kind of emotional vaccination (“The blues gives you a little to keep it away”), and interrupted an explication of the African practice of call-and-response to acknowledge a sneeze (“Bless you—call-and-response!”). One of the teachers in the audience said to a
colleague, “They ain’t gettin’ it. I couldn’t appreciate this when I was their age.” But, on the subway afterward, there was a positive buzz among the kids. One quoted a Marsalis aphorism to his friend: “You gotta have heat in everything you do.”
colleague, “They ain’t gettin’ it. I couldn’t appreciate this when I was their age.” But, on the subway afterward, there was a positive buzz among the kids. One quoted a Marsalis aphorism to his friend: “You gotta have heat in everything you do.”
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