Paving future's slopes with spray paint

After a short bushwalk in Bold Park with my older son, I crossed ways with these young spray-paint artists, who were redecorating the slopes of the Perry Lakes skate facilities. While enjoying the last few summer-like days of Perth’s Autumn, they were following some general sketches from a few pieces of paper here and there, but pretty much pushing each other towards improvising most of the colorful images that sprouted up and down the slopes of the skate bowl.

In a constructive initiative sponsored by the Cambridge Youth Centre, these young, creative people were literally paving the way for dozens of other youngsters, from all younger and older age groups, who would be criss-crossing the skate bowl throughout the next few months to come. Fueled by something that sounded like The Kills, shouting off a portable hi-fi, and by the pleasant warmth of a quiet Tuesday morning, they were creating a mosaic of images and ideas that would certainly keep future users of the facility motivated, and more than likely in a positive state of mind that will unfold the fun these young artists were having this morning, into the near future.

Photos (C) JH Alves.

I Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday

I've spent the last couple of years trying to find my way back into music, after a voluntary leave, consequence of deciding to bring together, and set the foundations of a family. The effort paid off, in the sense that now my younger one, who turns three in two months, has decided he wants to pick up an ukelele I bought on a recent trip to Hawaii, every time I get my guitar or bass to practice a little. Also, our older son, who is autistic, also quiets down or comes and sits beside me, plucking interestedly some strings, particularly when I plug in the bass for a practice session. (I don't really want more proof of a healthy/happy family than a three-year old so enthusiastic about music, and an autistic boy that interacts so nicely when music is in the air!)

The fact is that, despite some rather random but fulfilling episodes of practice, the stream of musicianship, which seemed to flow so easily in past years of my life, had apparently left me. The mental image that I usually cultivated, to cheer up whenever I felt lost the musical flow from sight, was that of some Dr. Evil commanding Fat Bastard to extract the mojo from a frozen Austin Powers. I eventually decided that my Dr. Evil, mojo sucker, was the lack of a local community of amateur musicians in Perth that I could join in a musical journey, like I so pleasantly had done before, a few years back, in Washington, DC.

A change of airs suddenly happened, as serendipity kicked in, a few weeks back. A few friends invited me and my wife to a concert where a new Brazilian jazz band would be playing, featuring a singer from Sao Paulo who had recently moved to Perth with her family. At the gig, we met the singer, and spoke a little. A week later, she came to our house with the whole family for lunch, and while the kids engaged quickly in a bi-lingual play in the backyard, I picked up my nylon-string guitar, and we had a go at a few songs. The connection was all there, and I suddenly felt things were flowing again.

A few phone calls and we decided we would try to set up a repertoire for a duo, with an eye at later bringing into scene a percussionist as well. So far we've arranged some 30 songs, and found out the shared pleasure of mixing Brazilian rhythms and songs with pop hits, as we did last night in a medley conecting The Police's "Every breath you take" with Jorge Benjor's "Ive Brussel". Maybe soon I'll post a recording to intensify and spread this new, liberating flow of music that we have discovered in Perth.

For the last two weeks, I've been reliving the same liberating feelings I had when, at 13, I was taught how to play the guitar in military school by a friend, now bassist of Rio de Janeiro's Farofa Carioca. The flow has suddenly risen from the undergrounds of my soul, to reach higher peaks of creativity. Perhaps this is a consequence of still another dimension of music's connecting power, as I now feel I am once more a small, but intense, part of a stream of musicians, present and past, who have lived and sung the liberating and reassuring powers of playing the acoustic guitar, which I rediscovered, is one of man's best friend.

While thinking about writing this post last night, serendipity once again made me bump into a video that translates much of the feelings I describe above, of how liberating and pleasant an instrument as simple/humble as an acoustic guitar can be. In the video, young and unbelievably energetic Brazilian singer Ana Cañas playfully sings while Liminha, the great Brazilian producer and one of my favorite and inspiring musicians of all times, gets loose on the guitar, liberating a lot of interesting creatures and micro universes via his live interactivity with Ana (check, at the end of the video, a great version for Gilberto Gil's "Chuckberry fields forever").

Thoughts lead to a multitude of other thoughts and memories. Here are some other things that came to mind, connecting my rediscovering the guitar with other musicians and their instruments, and to the flow out there:

• A guitar outsourcing reassurance and power to a shy man.
• BB King's Lucille.
• I pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday.
  
• Geraldo Vandre harnessing the powers of the masses with his guitar.
• Sergio Ricardo using his guitar to liberate his frustration.
• Jimmy's kiss, then sacrifice.
  

B B King: Secrets of a Bluesman's Longevity

Throughout the years, I've seen B. B. King performing live mostly through either television shows or, in the more recent years, footage of live concerts diffused via Internet. I could gradually see him transitioning from playing mostly standing, to sometimes sitting, then finally to sitting most of the time, as he slowly conceded to the demands of his fight against diabetes and, as a boy from 1925, to those of his age. A few features of his appearances, however, never changed: the sweetness of his guitar riffs and solos, the intense spark of joy emanated from his charismatic stage attitude and the power of his inspiration over his public.

I always admired that B. B. King was still that active and inspiring after so many years on the road. This week, I was finally able to unveil some of the secrets behind the longevity of this man and his music. The insight came after watching another documentary from a series about The Blues, organized by Martin Scorsese. This time, in the film "The Road to Memphis", director Richard Pearce reconstructs the life threads of "second-generation" Bluesmen B. B. King, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner, Bobby Rush and others, using as a focal point for their lives a concert they gave in Memphis for the Handy Awards, in 2002.

Pearce interweaves the individual threads of the Bluesmen onto a fabric that he unfolds to reveal several layers of musical history, which is also shown to reflect the history of American society itself. But the human dimension that the director is able to extract from his main characters, and their life on the road from town to town, and, finally, back to Memphis where thing all began, is to me what stands out most from the film. And that is where the secrets are revealed about the incredible longevity shared by all these Bluesmen at the time of footage (sadly, Rosco Gordon and Ike Turner are now deceased).

First, Pearce shows how these men grew out of poverty and oblivion to become immortalized through their music, because of their determination to change their world without having to sell their souls to the devil, like their predecessor founding fathers of The Blues -- many of whom died quite young -- were forced to do, due to the circumstances of the cotton fields. This determination, and persistence in not letting a light at the end of a very dark tunnel be extinguished, gave them a deep meaning to life.

Second, through the Blues, B. B. King and his mates were given the opportunity to form a fraternity, which opened a huge umbrella for all Black Americans to "freely" exercise their culture. Pearce's film shows that his main characters were on the center of this fraternity, which resonated loudly throughout the entire community. In between the lines, the film suggests that one of the main foundations of their "movement" was a strong camaraderie, and a generally non-violent kindness which reflected the attitude of their main source of inspiration and leading voice, Martin Luther King. Such ethos centered on camaraderie gave these men a deep sense of engagement.

Finally, BB King and his mates found in the Blues music the perfect environment to have fun. Fun which the film pictures as a contagious pleasure that the Bluesmen have had and shared selflessly with the public since starting their musical careers, some five decades ago.

At the end of the film, I was amazed to see how much its narrative unveiled, through the lives and achievements of B. B. King's "fraternity", some of the more fundamental concepts underlying recent scientific inquiries on the factors that make people believe their life is worth living. In fact, meaning, engagement and pleasure, which form the strongest threads of Pearce's narrative line, are also the three strongest indicators of the perception a person has of its own well-being. The interplay of such indicators, and their consequences to a person's mental health, satisfaction with personal and professional lives, and even longevity, are explored in works such as the paper "Three Ways to Happiness: Pleasure, Engagement and Meaning", in books such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow", Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", and, more generally, in some of the fundamental paradigms of the recent science of Positive Psychology.

The high levels of meaning, engagement and pleasure achieved the Bluesmen in Pearce's "The Road to Memphis", are consistent with those achieved by other, "ordinary" people like us, who were not only very successful, but also inspiring to their peers, and able to live very long and healthy lives. Such cases are vastly reported in compilations gathering recent Positive Psychology investigations.

All this seems a strong enough call to get out there now and do something constructive for our lives. Perhaps such an attitude would lead us not only to the secrets of B. B. King's longevity, but also to those of a life better worth living.

The cashew tree: Blues, maracatus and self-similarity

After watching, earlier this week, Martin Scorsese's documentary "The Blues: Feels Like Going Home", a multiplicity of images and thoughts came to mind bonding the film, to my memories and experiences as a musician. The documentary was first released in 2003 by American PBS TV, as part of a series of seven films portraying the Blues through the eyes of seven famous directors (Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders), and is now being revisited by Australia's ABC Blues Festival Project through its iView website

Prompted by the immediate recognition that one of the first clips of Scorsese's documentary, showing the Fife & Drum Music of the Mississipi, had a very similar musical "feel" to that of the Brazilian Bandas de Pifano and some of its maracatus, I was immediately taken back a few years, to a memory of visiting one of the most amazing sites in the world: Pirangi's cashew tree, today one of the biggest tourist attractions in the NE Region of Brazil. In my vision, Pirangi's cashew tree and the subject of Scorsese's documentary -- the Blues and, more generally, modern western popular music -- suggested some sort of self-similarity in both their genesis and geometries.

After being planted in 1888, Pirangi's tree suffered from two genetic mutations. First, the branches grew sideways, instead of upwards like other sister cashew trees planted in nearby patches of soil. Then, the sideways branches became so heavy, they touched down and grew into the ground. At that stage, buried branches suffered a second mutation, its trunk cells changing into root cells, which originated "new" trees, growing initially upwards, then again sideways, into the ground and so on, so forth. Now, more than 80 interconnected tree "units" cover an area of about 8,500 m2, with a perimeter of some 500m, altogether forming the biggest cashew tree in the world.

In terms of genesis, both Pirangi's cashew tree and the African musical origins of modern western music have initially suffered influences from degenerative-type "disorders", which blossomed into something that became not only generative, but inspiring and unique. In the Blues' case, the imposed "mutation" was provoked by the crime of slavery committed against African families, and the slave trade routes which ripped Africans from their homeland and culture centuries ago. After being transported in horrific conditions to several parts of the "New World", African slaves were forced into new soil. They then suffered cultural transformations that were responsible for the appearance of the Blues, and ultimately grew in all directions, to resurface as several different styles adding up to a substantial chunk of what is generally called today modern western popular music.

The amazing unifying vision that appeared in my mind's telly, while riding my bicycle to work the next day, was that of a "musical" tree, reflecting Pirangi's, but growing out of Africa, dipping its branches in the Atlantic Ocean, resurfacing near the coasts of North and South Americas, and the Caribbean, then dipping into the fertile soils of the Mississipi Delta, of the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, and the islands of Barbados, Trindad and Cuba. In these new places, they grew roots, new trees, and then branches that expanded and dipped back into the soils of virtually every country on earth today, where new roots, trees and branches continue to grow further, without losing their link to the original tree in Africa.

What a bike ride! Lucky Perth's traffic isn't anything like my hometown Rio de Janeiro, so my daydreaming wasn't a problem, and I did finally arrive safely at work.

After going back home and surfing a little more the net, I figured that such contagious expansion process, that I visualized in my "dangerous" bike ride, explains, according to musicologists, much of how most modern musical genres and styles have developed from their classical western, African or Indian, folk, sacred/canonical and pop musical ancestors. At every new stage of evolution of a "mother" genre or style, some parts of the genetic code of the ancestor is kept, in a way that some degree of self-similarity is held throughout the development process. So much that the Pirangi cashew tree now became, for me at least, an analogy for music and its evolution process throughout human history.

(Image: Celtic Tree of Life, borrowed from Welsh artist Jen Delyth ©1990: kelticdesigns.com)

Brian Eno, my son, music and generative thinking

"We will try to start something different here today. We will learn to sing and play some songs without any words", said Anita on a Saturday morning to a class of two-year old toddlers, each one hanging to their father or mother. The look on the faces of us parents that first day of class was somewhat skeptical, but no one could hide a glare of curiosity. The approach seemed unusual for most of us, who had learned since early years to identify our nursery rhymes through their titles and choruses.

I recall it took me several years to figure out that "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", the "ABC Song" and "Bah Bah Black Sheep" had all the same melody, with small variations, but completely different lyrics and stories. I went on, unsuspecting this was the case, throughout most of my childhood. After learning how to play the melodies of those three of my favorite English-tradition songs in the piano, I finally found out they were actually variations of the same song. I felt somewhat cheated.

"Children develop a better sense of music if they learn melodies and rhythm without any words to them, alongside the regular nursery rhyme repertoire", said Anita. The word "develop" definitely strung a resonant chord on most parents, so much that we are today centered on providing our kids the best opportunities for development, in a world that becomes more competitive and challenging at each turn. We, parents, were convinced, and from that day on we went from curious, to involved and, finally, some of us were able to enjoy with awe the truth behind Anita's words.

During the first few lessons, my boy was suddenly exposed to relatively complex rhythmic patterns and short sequences of notes stressing important intervals (mostly three-note chromatic ascents and descents, and major thirds and fifths), which were made palatable by means of puppets that would "say" sounds they had to repeat (things like "pa-paaaaa, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-paaa" etc). The theatrical play, and the absence of words actually seemed to make the kids more comfortable, and the responses were faster than we had seen previously, when another teacher had opted to use the more traditional learning-through-words approach.

After two or three weeks of lessons with Anita, our two-year old boy came up with some pretty amazing musical stunts. One of them was particularly illustrative of what was actually happening to these young kids, via the opportunity of learning Anita's "songs without words". We were having breakfast one day, and he had his favorite toy cars on the table, from the film "Cars": "Mater" and "Lightining McQueen". He was pretending McQueen was being towed by Mater, and started singing along over the melody of "The wheels of the bus go round and round":

Lighting McQueen is pulling Mate
Pulling Mate
Pulling Mate

I was still half asleep, but suddenly felt enlightned to understand that he was having a hugely creative moment, mostly as a response to learning things the proper way: music as a more fundamental stream of possibilities for expressing his thoughts and feelings, not necessarily attached to any particular set of words. Oh, boy, that surely made me feel better, and soothed my feelings of having being cheated when I was a kid after finding out that a few of my favorite nursery rhymes were all the same song!

My two-year old had created his own soundtrack, freely using a known melody to attach his own words, all consistent with the context of his pretend play (OK, OK, he did invert which car was being towed...). At that moment, I also saw a strong manifestation of an idea I had been toying around with in recent weeks, which connected my son's improvisation to the more formal concept of "generative thinking" (se, eg, Low and Hollis, 2003). (See also a neat article about kids and generative learning/thinking).

The experience I had with my son also connected us to the fundamentally generative nature of musical works created by Brian Eno , to recent developments made based on Eno's works which led to applications for the iPhone , and even to the underlying framework governing the development and the internal mechanics of computer games like Will Wright's Spore. By the way, the seed that had me going on this topic in the first place was actually an interactive interview/workshop I had seen a few months back featuring Brian Eno and Will Wright, together, discussing generative creation processes.

On Herbie Hancock, Jeff Beck and... Kevin Bacon

I don't particularly like or dislike Kevin Bacon's acting. But there's nothing I can do, he is more connected than I could ever imagine to two of my greatest music heroes. And the truth is, Bacon is closer to many more than we would think, or like... In a recent documentary aired by the Australian Broadcast Company (ABC), the new field of "network science" is examined, in its attempts to explain mathematically how the idea of six degrees of separation between people may, after all, be more than an urban myth.

The documentary, entitled "How Kevin Bacon cured cancer", argues that one of the first proofs of the networks concept came through a simple experiment showing that most Hollywood actors where connected to Kevin Bacon by at least or less than a handfull of other actors. That's where Kevin Bacon comes in. But what about him and Herbie Hancock and Jeff Beck??

It all has to do with the reason why this post is so connected to the previous one, about the Five Peace Band gig in Perth, and to what motivated me to start this blog in the first place: how people and events are so more connected to each other than we usually think. In last week's post, I said that the main reason for going to the Five Peace Band gig at King's Park was to see the drummer, Brian Blade. I also said that the gig was the second moment of musical bliss in Perth in less than a month, and that the first one had been seeing Jeff Beck's at the Perth Concert Hall (sure, a third one would have been seeing Neil Young at the Big Day Out, but I had to give that one a miss).

Well, Brian Blade would not be the drummer for Chick Corea and John McLaughlin's Five Peace Band if it had not been for Jeff Beck's concerts in Australia! Before Brian Blade came into the picture, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta was invited by John McLaughlin to record his new album, Industrial Zen, in 2006. When John and Chick created the Five Peace Band, around mid-2008, Vinnie was the natural choice, and became the band's first drummer. However, he had also accepted Jeff Beck's invitation for his tour of Australasia, in late 2008, and early 2009. When the Five Peace Band scheduled its tour of Australasia, Vinnie was no longer available, so that Brian Blade was invited to sub.

I was there, on 21 January, to watch Vinnie Colaiuta playing his firm, powerhouse style drums in Jeff Beck's Perth Concert Hall gig. Being there realized the dream I had since I was a kid of seeing Beck live. And a great surprise was to find out that he, at the age of 64, was still able to deliver as much punch from his guitar as he did in my perception of his music some 20+ years ago. I didn't yet know, but Beck's concert in Perth also allowed me the opportunity of seeing Brian Blade performing with the Five Peace Band, and all that right here in our backyard.

Now, Herbie Hancock connects in via six-degrees, or, if you prefer, the Kevin-Bacon paradigm (sorry, but there's more, actually connecting Kevin and Herbie below!). One of the main attractions of Jeff Beck's recent world tour is the unbelievably young and talented bass player Tal Wilkenfeld (who is actually Aussie, from Sydney). Tal is in her early 20's, and has such subtle charisma and amazing technique that, after Beck's gig, I was swept, and back home I searched the Internet for more on her playing.

Within the lots in the net about this young musician, I found a video of her recording with Herbie Hancock for BBC's Live in Abbey Road sessions. In that video, Herbie leads a band that also includes the great saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (again!) and singer Corinne Bailey Ray. It is one of the most beautiful interpretations of Joni Mitchell's song "River" that I have ever seen in my life.

That's a good place to stop writing on my awe about connectedness, so that I won't go on to the whos, hows and whats come out of connecting, back from Joni Mitchell, Brian Blade to Daniel Lanois, to Bob Dylan, to Willie Nelson, to Brian Eno and U2, Terry Bozzio, Tony Levin and Peter Gabriel, and then to the reasons why I started playing the bass during my teens...

PS1: Believe it or not, Herbie Hancock has a Kevin-Bacon-number of 2 (ie, he has two degrees of separation to the actor): Hancock played himself in the film Indecent Proposal alongside Oliver Platt, who was in the film Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon.

PS2: And... Jeff Beck also has a Kevin-Bacon-number = 2: Beck played a lead guitarrist of a band in the film Twins alongside cute Kelly Preston, who, in the film Death Sentence, is Helen, the sister of main character Nick, played by Kevin Bacon! (More KB numbers here,if you dare...)

Chick Corea and John McLaughlin in Perth

Last night I lived the second moment -- in only a month -- where bliss comes to a small, hidden Australian capital to attenuate its isolation from the broader musical universe out there. The first was Jeff Beck's enlightening gig at the Perth Concert Hall, on Jan 21st. Now, part of the Perth International Arts Festival, King's Park hosted a gig led by John McLaughlin and Chick Corea, a couple of the most well-known jazz players of our time. John and Chick's Five Peace Band delivered an unforgettable concert, with a huge bonus: backing these two ever-shining stars, Brian Blade (drums) and Christian McBride (bass) provided the power for connecting heavenly bodies into constellations.

Christian McBride showed unbelievable virtuosity, while still fulfilling his task as bassist to aggregate coherently the fast-paced statements of his fellow musicians. He played both the upright bass and a five-string fretless bass guitar to the highest levels, keeping pace, tone and seamless precision when going to and fro one or the other, while cruising through that night's repertoire. He would definitely qualify as the fastest upright bass player in the world: the speed in which he carved out of the double bass extremely complex and melodious solos were hard to believe, not to say follow at naked eye!

Speaking of speed, John McLaughlin showed that he is still king. But his main quality that sticked out most during the concert was that of a maestro, rather than the virtuoso. More than once I found the other musicians, including Corea, looking for McLaughlin's reassuring smile. He seemed conscious of that role, and kept a sober, almost solemn posture on stage. This was quite a different percepetion I had from the previous time I saw McLaughlin, playing his guitar in a cross-legged lotus position for nearly two-hours, in the almost festive mood of the Remember Shakti concerts, chasing around vanishingly fast notes thrown in the air by his Indian bandmate, the virtuoso mandolinist U. Srinivas.

Despite the attraction that any Chick Corea and/or John McLaughlin concerts have in themselves, the main driving force that led me to King's Park that night was to hear and see drummer Brian Blade. I had become an unconditional fan of this bloke after seeing Blade playing/interpreting magnificently the pop-rock song "Not Fighting Any More", in a sequence of the film "Here is what is", by the Canadian guitarrist and producer Daniel Lanois.

Blade demonstrated his great ability and comfort in being the guy who comes in to connect the dots, and gravitate around shining stars giving them their ultimate soulful edge, and in a sense, strongest meaning. And feeling comfortable as the connecting guy, he was free to take every opportunity to throw in here and there bits and pieces of solos and phrases that were tantalizing.

Having such tight but flexible safety net as a backing left Chick Corea free to fulfill his double act of being the third rhythm section guy, and one of the starring soloists. Corea's magnificent musicality recalled images I built of his musical essence since the first time I saw him, in a workshop at the Free Jazz Festival, in the late-80's. Then, he told a small audience about his conceptual framework: musical blocks that could be sequenced, swapped, superposed in a three-dimensional structure which he could visualize, leading him to a creative space where he assembled his compositions and moved around in his solos.

That rich musical imagery again flooded my mind throughout the concert, and particularly when one of Corea's more recent compositions, "Hymn to Andromeda", was performed. That was definitely one of the highlights of the night, where the pianist's musical universe became unveiled to an audience that seemed to be floating from their picnic mats and camping chairs, blending nicely into the backdrop of a beautiful, starry night in King's Park. The tune also gave saxophonist Kenny Garrett an opportunity to shine above his generally subtle presence.

The second big moment of the concert also came near the end, when all Five Peace Band-mates attacked in unison the hypnotic phrases of Jackie McLean's funky hit "Dr. Jekyll" (also quoted here and there as "Jackle" or "Jackyll"). The public was in such a hypnotic state, that even a few kookaburras in nearby trees seemed to be singing in tune. The number was introduced as one of Miles Davis' favorite pieces from the times McLaughlin and Corea recorded Davis' Bitches Brew, in the early 70's.

In spite of an unexpected cold breeze that caught more than half the audience unprepared, the public left that night, nearly 3 hours of jazz later, in a state of stoked joy that is rare in a culturally-famished place like Perth. After living through all this, I now fear for the rest of the year!