This was sent to me by friend and teacher Bob Murphy

Welcome address to freshman class at Boston Conservatory given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory:

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very
good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they
imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be
more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's
remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said,
"You're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were
not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And
they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just
weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little
bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and
entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your
kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with
entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a
little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient
Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and
astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study
of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music
was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden
objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside
our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside
us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for
the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany.
He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a
cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a
place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a
violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these
specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand
prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous
masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why
would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing
music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water,
to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother
with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have
visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people
created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on
survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must
be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope,
without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were
not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit,
an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we
say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached
a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down
at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I
did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on
the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my
hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter?
Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what
happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless.
Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a
piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of
getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I
contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And
then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We
didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we
most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I
saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around
fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America
the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the
Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York
Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first
communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the
beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the
airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that
very night.

>From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part
of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe.
It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our
budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic
need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives,
one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way
for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio
for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it
as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a
film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you
know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make
you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our
conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good
therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no
music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some
really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very
predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of
emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the
wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if
the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40
percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of
moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move
around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so
that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you
imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue
but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right
moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly
the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music
stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the
understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand
concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were
important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it
made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played
for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers,
foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took
place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began,
as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World
War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was
shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the
pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program
notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we
decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out
and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair,
square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in
the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to
tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't
the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the
concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk
about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances
in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed
pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had
to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again,
but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in
an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched
my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes
which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords
so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop
away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about
this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this
memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I
didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came
out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost
pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that?
How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between
internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have
ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect,
somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost
friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is
why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class
when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge
your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would
imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your
emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my
friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and
bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that
is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you
do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician
isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an
entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue
worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a
spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works
with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come
into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I
expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this
planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of
equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a
military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the
religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war
as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is
to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit
together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do.
As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the
ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

Marathon and Charity

Well, I've been back from Las Vegas for a few days now after running the LV Marathon. It was great to see some old friends (the previously dubbed "idiot friends") who ran with (read in front of) me. The marathon itself was a pretty well run event and we stayed at the Mandalay Bay which was right at the start/finish line. So overall I would recommend this as a worthwhile marathon to do. I had forgotten how far 42.2 km really is. I had been dealing with a bit of a calf injury/tightness for the two weeks leading up to the run and didn't deal with it properly before hand. I really should have been seeing a massage therapist to get the damn thing fixed but alas.... Anyway, my calf cramped in the first 2km and from there on in it was just survival. i finished, albeit slowly. There is no possible way I could have stood the ribbing from my friends (one came 218th out of 15000)afterwards if I hadn't finished. It's a very humbling experience as a former higher level athlete to be arriving at the finish line with a whole lot of very brave people ...some running for the first time...some just running because it keeps their life in focus. I ran with one guy for a while whose daughter had died from AIDS at the age of 12 and had made him promise to run a marathon for her. Wow. How can you stop because of a silly calf cramp when this is happening around you. There was another guy with an artificial leg who had lost it to cancer and another guy who was running for some charity who was literally double my size and had a t-shirt on that said "Worlds strongest man"....I believed it.

I more than likely won't enter a marathon again, but, the previously mentioned friends have decided that there should be some sort of biannual event to get us together athletically so there will be more interesting adventures I'm sure.


So now on the charity front...this time of year many people look for ways to give to charity as a way to spread around some of the wealth that they have received in the past year. The local Food Bank is a great option as are many others. I'm going to throw my suggestion into the mix. The ArtsCan Circle (www.artscancircle.ca). Their mission statement reads as follows:

"The ArtsCan Circle is an independent, volunteer-run group working to link creative artists with Native youth at risk in Canada. Our hope is to encourage self-esteem amongst Native youth in isolated communities through a cooperative exploration of the arts."

In their about us section:

"The ArtsCan Circle was inspired by the work of Mike Stevens, a multi-talented harmonica player who has been traveling to communities in Labrador, at his own expense, to share his music with youth. On these visits, Mike has distributed hundreds of harmonicas to help his young listeners discover music for themselves.

Our aim is to support small groups of musicians and artists who will accompany Mike to work with kids in remote Northern communities. Through music and other creative arts, we hope to facilitate a positive outlet in communities suffering severe problems related to poverty, lack of work, family dysfunction, and solvent abuse.

Of course, we are not offering a solution to the deep malaise that affects these areas, but we hope to encourage a positive creative environment by bringing creative resources to troubled young people on an ongoing basis."

The reason that I like this charity is that they make no claims that they can change the world, only that they can give native kids in isolated territories some tools to keep themselves busy and out of trouble. One of the reasons for substance abuse and high suicide rate in isolated native communities is the lack of anything for kids to do...extreme boredom.The traditional daily tasks have been replaced by ...well... nothing. Mark Stevens saw that void and is attempting to do his part one small step and community at a time.

If you have any musical instrument,music books, or cash lying around doing nothing, please consider donating to the ArtsCan Circle. You can be sure that it will make a difference.

New guitar, life stuff, and shameless plug

It's been a while since my last post...but alas...I've been pretty busy. Some of my idiot friends have laid down the gauntlet to run the Las Vegas Marathon and I've been training for that. My new job has kept me busy and I'm still trying to keep the music thing going.

The marathon will be interesting. It's a flat course and it won't be too hot since it's in December and early in the morning. I've never run an official marathon before; I have run a number of halfs and I've run the marathon distance but that was years ago. It seems like it takes a lot longer to get in shape these days and a lot longer to lose weight....oh jeez..does that mean I'm getting older? Last weeks 32 km run turned into about 30km because of a minor route miscalculation. I'm running a lot in Stanley Park in Vancouver and the Sea Wall has been closed for a section due to the wind damge that happened last year. So...I had to detour and I ended up short...thankfully. 30km was far enough thank you very much. I'll try to get some pictures up when it's all done in December.

My wife Lee is hiking the Inca Trail as I write this. I'm envious. It's a long talked about, extensively planned, many times delayed trip with one of her friends from highschool. I'm leaving socks all over the floor in my own personal rebellion to her absence.

I just got a new guitar. It so happens that with my position with Graph Tech Guitar Labs there are some perks; namely deals on musical instruments that get painlessly deducted from your paycheque....very dangerous. So I got a Walden G570TB Grand Auditorium (picture above)(www.waldenguitars.com) and then upgraded the saddle and bridge pins to Graph Tech products. I put on a String Saver fully compensated saddle (PS-9280-C0) and Tusq bridge pins. So here's the shameless plug:

The guitar sounded good out of the box - VERY loud and crisp, but a touch thin in the top end. The bass was sharp and defined but the guitar was a bit of a sledgehammer. After replacing the saddle and bridge pins (BTW I went with black unlike the picture and it looks really good)the guitar sounds unbeleivable! I can't believe the finesse and sophistication of the sound. It's very balanced and refined. All the same sound is there but it's no longer a sledge hammer; it's like a fine crafted luxury car...to mix metaphors. I played it far too late last night jsut becouse it sounded so good and today my fingers are sore. Jsut a note about the String Saver saddle: Normally for acoustics I would recommend the Tusq saddle for more brightness, but since this guitar was already plenty bright, I opted for the ever so slightly softer and warmer tone of the SS....and purely for aesthetics I wanted black.

If you're interested in doing the same thing to your guitar just go to www.graphtech.com . Retail on the two upgrades is $10.95 for the saddle and $18.50 for the bridge pins. The guitar retails for a $399.00 which in my opinion represents one of the best deals doller for dollar for a guitar that would be great for beginners right up to a gigging pro who didn't want to bring their $5000 Martin out to a bar.

The other fun thing about the job at Graph Tech is that I've been put in charge of Artist Relations which means that I get to interact with some famous and soon to be famous folks who use our stuff. I'm sure that I'll have some updates on that soon enough.

Played a gig a couple of weeks back for a Korean wedding...they wanted jazz standards. The gig went really well despite the fact that the only English spoke through the mic was spoken by me! I had the very exciting experience of the audience paying very close attention, sighing when a familiar tune was played, and actually applauding!....at a wedding! Ahh if all gigs could be so good...good pay and an appreciative audience.

Another shameless plug:

My CD "Why Aren't You Doing This?" is available for digital download all over the place including iTunes and Napster and in physical form at www.cdbaby.com/colindarling

That's all for now


That;s all for now

CDs I play.

It's come to my realization that despite owning a lot of CDs and LPs, I invariably go to a select 30 or so most often. These CDs speak to me in some way depending on mood, time of day,etc. This is a very maleable list that grows and shrinks, changes and changes back, and could never be called a permanent "best of" or "all time favourites". It also is by no means a complete selection of the music I like and listen to...merely a list that I go to most often.

So here it is in no particular order:

Dixie Chicks – Home
Johnny Nash – The Reggae Collection
Sarah Vaughn – Live at Mr Kelly’s
Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
Simon and Garfunkle – Wednesday Morning 3am
Gene Pitney – Greatest Hits
The Grass Roots- Greatest Hits
Greenday- Dookie
George Thorogood – Move it On Over
The Beach Boys – Endless Summer
The Beach Boys- Pet Sounds
Donovan – Greatest Hits
Them- featuring Van Morrison
Tito Schipa- The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 and 2
Chet Baker – The best of Chet Baker Sings
Deep Purple- Machine Head
The Cowboy Junkies – Trinity Sessions
Sarah Vaughn – The George Gershwin Songbook Vol. 2
Thelonius Monk – with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
Lenny Breau – Cabin Fever
Tony Bennett – Perfectly Frank
Diana Krall – Steppin Out
The Chieftains – Another Country
Bruce Cockburn – Circles in the Stream
Loretta Lynn – Van Lear Rose
The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan
k.d. lang – Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Roy Forbes – Almost Overnight
Neil Young- Live at Massey Hall 1971
Bill Evans – Jazz Masters 5
KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope
The Beatles – Rubber Soul
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella and Basie On the Sunnyside of the Street.
Ella Fitzgerald - The Best of the Songbooks.

Yep; pretty diverse. I'm sure that I missed some that should make the list.

Rant

This is a little rant that I posted on Craigslist after getting really tired of seeing ads for musicians to play for free:


As a musician, I get more and more disturbed at the number of open mic, singing contest,jam nights, battle of the bands events, etc. that are popping up everywhere. The disturbing part is that these events are created not to benefit musicians, but rather, to benefit the venue or promotional company putting on the event. Most disturbing are the contests which require an entry fee. Now I have no problem with a venue conducting a jam night if that venue is a regular promoter and host of regular live music, if there is a host band that is paid and if on other nights musicians get paid decently to play. That would be a venue giving back (a little)...allowing amateurs to get a chance on stage. The problem occurs when a venue's only music comes from open mics and jams. That equates to slave labour. Musicians need to practice for hours to be competent enough to truly entertain a crowd; they need to purchase expensive equipment to be able to convey that entertainment. There is a venue in Toronto that has a great jam night every Tuesday, but every other night of the week they host up to three acts a night....all paid with a percentage of the till (20% !)+ the door or pass the jar whichever the band decides. Top pros show up for this jam night along with beginner acts. Top pros don't show up to jams at a venue that isn't a great supporter of live music. ( No it's not as much of a gamble than paying the musicians outright, but it does share the responsibility of getting bums in the seats quite equally between the musicians and the venue.)

Sometimes a venue will promise exposure. This is a crock. Do they have "free food nights" to give their food exposure? This rant is already too long, but....... If a venue doesn't support good professional musicians by paying decently then they only get mediocre talent. Mediocre talent doesn't entertain or attract clientele. The venue then believes that live music is a waste of time and money. And so the downward spiral begins.

Venues: pay decently and the best will make their way to your door. The best will attract customers.....and so on. It's a gamble that takes some commitment...but it will pay off. Live music needs quality, consistency, and variety.

Musicians: Practice. Be good at what you do. And don't accept lousy pay. If you do play for free, make sure that you and your audience are the only ones who benefit...not the venue or promoter. If a venue asks for a discount on their rates if they provide the PA, ask them if they provide a discount if you bring your own dishes. Don't support venues that treat musicians worse than they treat the bussers. Have contracts...they don't have to be complicated... and ensure that the venue knows that a contract protects both parties. Be professional and don't accept unprofessional treatment. Don't be lured by the promise of exposure...exposure to who?

I'm sure that there is more to say, but alas, I'm tired of typing.

Singer or vocalist?

You might think that they are one and the same. I used to think that. Some of the greatest call or called themselves singers. Some of the most mediocre call themselves vocalists. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Tony Bennett called themselves singers. Some critics have dubbed Ella and Sarah as vocalists but I think that is in reference to their unbelievable grasp of their instrument. Recently I've noticed something curious: young singers (especially jazz singers) calling themselves vocalists.... seemingly to sound more legitimate as an artist. The term jazz vocalist has started to rub me the wrong way, as if it's not important enough to be "just a singer". (I think sanitational engineer.) (A side note: Great violinists often refer to their million dollar Strad, Guarneri, and Amati violins as "fiddles")

Before I start to ramble on more than I already have....

Jazz singers....be singers. Sing the songs. Vocalization is for practice. Singing is for performance, enjoyment , and art. Scatting is fine, but the best scatters were/are not coincidentally great singers. Singing involves more than just notes; it involves interpretation of lyrics AND how the notes and lyrics go together...a monumental task to do it well. The more I learn, the more I realize how ridiculously difficult it is!

Update

It's been awhile. So let's see what has happened.....
Left True North Cycling. Those who know me can get the story over a beer. Otherwise my professionalism prevents a public posting of the company's issues.

I'm coaching at the rowing club again. I missed it and it's certainly nice to be doing it in the fantastic weather and setting of Deep Cove. As on of the other coaches said, "Where else would you rather be?"

I've started running again and it's been a slow grind back to some sort of fitness. As I've been saying to friends, " It's like running with a bear on your back who's carrying a vacuum cleaner." Over the past few weeks I've dropped about 15 lbs which equates to convincing the bear to put down the vacuum cleaner. This is a major coup as three ago I had finally convinced him to change to the 8lbs Oreck XL but he wouldn't give it up altogether. I'm entered in the Vancouver Scotia Half Marathon this month and it should be OK. I'll go under 2 hours. Passable but but far from my PB.

I've started to take steps to get out and play some music again. It's been too long and I think that I have something to offer again. I'm so tired of seeing mediocre talent being praised that I really want to be sure that what I'm doing is relevant and not just another competent but time wasting act. You know what I mean...the music that you listen to and say ," It's OK." ; then you forget it 5 minutes later. There are a lot of acts out there that play or sing the notes but don't give anything fresh to the tune. I'm not suggesting that everything should be cutting edge, but it shouldn't be cheap and boring either. You can have a bowl of cheap ice cream or you can have a bowl of Ben and Jerry's. They're both ice cream but....