Morrison to Present Chamber Music Theater

Actress Shinnerrie Jackson (from the event page for the performance being discussed)

The next program in the 2019–2020 season of the Morrison Artists Series, presented by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University (SFSU) will depart from the usual expectations for a chamber music concert. The music will be performed by a trio; but the trio will consist of cello, piano, and percussion, a New York-based group called THE CORE ENSEMBLE. They will be joined by actress Shinnerrie Jackson to perform a full-length musical theater work entitled Ain’t I A Woman! The text was created by Kim Hines to examine the life and times of four powerful African-American women: novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, folk artist Clementine Hunter, and civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer. The musical score is drawn from the heartfelt spirituals and blues of the Deep South, the urban vitality of the Jazz Age, and contemporary concert music by African-American composers such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Diane Monroe.

Like all Morrison chamber music events, this concert will take place in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk to the west from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. It will held in Knuth Hall at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 15. Tickets are free but advance registration is highly desirable. Reservations may be made through the event page for this performance. As usual, there will be a pre-concert lecture, which will begin 2 p.m., also in Knuth Hall. Representatives of THE CORE ENSEMBLE will participate with SFSU Artistic Director Cyrus Ginwala as interlocutor. The talk requires neither registration nor tickets.

Musicians and Addiction

I found it interesting that two consecutive interviews in Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones were not only outspoken on the question of the problem of addiction among musicians but also very much of the same mind.  Both interviewees were leaders in their work, Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie;  and both approached the whole interview process with clear seriousness of purpose.  Therefore, even though both of these interviews are about forty years old, it seems worth considering what they have to say on what is still a controversial subject.

Since I found Gillespie to be the better spokesman on this topic, let me reproduce his position:

If you study statistics you’ll find more drug addiction in the medical profession than among musicians.  But musicians have bigger names;  if a doctor gets busted, they cure him, nobody knows about it, while if a musician gets busted, it’s on the front page of the newspapers.

Gillespie gave this interview in 1970, and I have no idea how much the numbers have changed since then.  However, from the perspective of the present day, I find it interesting that the question of addiction in the medical profession was virtually untouched until Showtime decided to use it as the basis for the plot of Nurse Jackie.  Given my personal feelings about the consciousness industry and how it works, I would guess that there were any number of initiatives in play to distract the news media from pursuing stories on this subject.  Somehow it always seemed better to pick on patients succumbing to addiction as a result of treatment, encouraging the mindset that those patients lacked the personal discipline of medical professionals.

Still, Gillespie is right about the vulnerability of having a high profile.  The news media always prefer stories with familiar names;  and success in the performing arts has more to do with familiarity of name (which, in turn, is often a product of some major promotion campaign) than with the talent behind the name.  Once the name is familiar, whether it is Charlie Parker or Madonna, it becomes a magnet for “bad news content.”  One might say that we are a culture of idol-builders;  but, after the idols are built, we seem to take equal pleasure in worshipping them and smashing them.  We are no different from the child who wants every toy he sees but gives no thought to taking care of it once he has it.

Loss of Meaning at the International Monetary Fund

For those of us who prefer plain English to the language of economists, the statement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), just reported on the BBC News Web site, will probably sound perplexing:

The recovery has solidified, but unemployment remains high.

It turns out that the first clause in this sentence presumes that recovery is based on a single quantitative value, the projected rate of economic growth.  This says nothing about those without jobs, let alone those who have lost their homes through foreclosure and those who cannot make monthly payments necessary for rent and groceries, not to mention health care.

Put another way, this is a usage of the noun “recovery” that is directed at investors (particularly those with large quantities to invest).  Furthermore, it is a forecast, which may or may not be substantiated by the same base of credible data that the weatherman uses every night to tell you whether it will rain the next day.  The difference is that the weatherman is usually sensible enough to advise you on the proper precautions to take.  The IMF does no such thing.  It just puts out a statement about the behavior of numbers that are at best a “fiction of convenience” and seldom pretend to have anything to do with abstractions such as “value” or “quality of life.”

This raises an interesting ontological question, if this episode is to be regarded as a matter of loss of meaning.  If the mission of BBC News is to report relevant news to the general public, is an account of a statement released by the IMF (delivered “raw” without commentary or interpretation) a responsible act of reporting?  One might say that the IMF is sufficiently recognized as a major institution in the financial sector that it would be irresponsible to neglect its forecasts.  However, this takes us down the slippery slope dealing with how most major news organizations chose to “report” (scare quotes intended) about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I suppose my own opinion is that there is never anything wrong with reporting hard data, but most of those data are incomprehensible.  Thus, the general public is unlikely to get very far with them without mediating interpretation of the data.  The problem with most reporting is that it never makes clear where the data end and the interpreting begins, let alone the who and how of the interpreting process.  (Here in San Francisco we now get television reports that explicitly cite the use of computer models for weather forecasting, even going so far as to use the plural.  The reporters never give details about the models, but at least they are more explicit about the need for interpretation than most “news” reporters.)  Furthermore, even more critical than the who and how is the why of interpreting.  Every human interpreter is a motivated agent.  What we learned from the weapons-of-mass-destruction mess was the extent to which motive can interfere with the reliability of an interpretation.  One would think that a few paragraphs about a statement released by the IMF would be rather innocuous;  but, if we recognize that there are neither explicit data points nor any acknowledgement of interpretative processes in those paragraphs, it seems reasonable to classify even this modest blip on the news wire as irresponsible.

Remembering Ellen Stewart

I was never a patron of the original Café La MaMa at 321 East Ninth Street in Manhattan, which Ellen Stewart opened in 1961.  By the time I became a “regular,” Stewart’s organization had become the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.);  and I was voraciously devouring performances at the facility on East Fourth Street, often satisfying my appetite for food and drink a short walk away at Max’s Kansas City.  I cannot begin to enumerate all the events I attended, let alone choose any favorites.  However, given my subsequent move into multimedia research, I suspect that my most salient memory was of a solo drum recital given by Max Roach during which an artist improvised images on a computer, which were projected behind Roach sitting at his drum set.

This was all at a time when I also saw Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway.  I mention this in particular because Patrick Healy just posted an obituary for Ellen Stewart on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times, reporting that she died in Beth Israel Hospital this morning at the age of 91.  Healy echoed the observation in the extended obituary that Torch Song Trilogy was created at La MaMa;  but neither account mentions the background story in the Broadway program book, which claimed that Stewart’s first reaction to the first play in this set was to tell Fierstein that he was out of his mind (or words to that effect) if he expected her to let him perform under her banner.  This was, of course, just her way of saying that the play still needed work.  Fierstein went back to the drawing board (for those who know the second play, it might be more appropriate to say “went back to his knitting”);  and the rest, as they say, is history.

I suppose that what this anecdote says is that Stewart was never afraid of anything that was outrageously different.  However, she was only interested in those who could be different without being boring.  This would make her a model of that kind of connoisseurship that Fran Lebowitz valued so much in Martin Scorsese’s documentary Public Speaking.  It is because it is increasingly hard to find people with that sense of value that Stewart will be missed.