Snag yourself some documentary

Snag is offering a pre-election Film Festival, screening dozens of documentaries on everything from climate to education to straight-forward politics.

Check out this one, on the movement in the Hudson Valley (where I grew up) to clean up the river.

Earthdance!

No matter where you're reading this from, you can go to Earthdance this weekend.

Earthdance is one of those times when unification trumps narcissism. This is a trans-global dance party, with events from Argentina to Zambia, but we're fortunate in having the Hub Event, the center of it all, just up the coast at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville. It unites world music, jamband, electronica, folk and reggae on five stages over three days.

Find your local Earthdance event - from Argentina to Zambia - on the main website.

Celebrating Lenny Bernstein

Where was I twenty years ago? Covering Leonard Bernstein's 70th Birthday bash at Tanglewood...

Leonard Bernstein at 70
Tanglewood, August 25-28
By Jeremy Bloom

There is an irony to the career of Leonard Bernstein, celebrated this past weekend with a whole series of concerts and parties at the Tanglewood Music Center, where that career began.

By the end of Thursday night's gala multi-starred celebration, it was obvious what an impact “Lenny” (as everyone calls him) has had in every area of music, from conducting the works of Copeland, Stravinski and Mahler to his own writing for the classical halls, the Hollywood screen, the Broadway stage.

There is so much wonderful material to draw on - songs from his early broadway shows, On the Town and Wonderful Town; his ballet collaboration with Jerome Robbins, Fancy Free; his film score for On the Waterfront: and of course, the unforgettable melodies of West Side Story and Candide.

"Poor Lenny, ten gifts too many,'' was the sad refrain of the lyrics specially penned for the evening by collaborator and friend Stephen Sondheim.

And yet, this is the man who once criticized Gershwin as being merely a pop composer whose music would not dwell among the immortals. Bernstein wants very much to be remembered as a serious classical composer. But of the 36 works performed over the course of the weekend, only four were from among his classical writings - and all four were choral works or songs, including the jazzy Mass. His heavier pieces, such as his Age of Anxiety Symphony, were passed over completely.

So what? Let's let Lenny and his psychiatrist and the historians sort it out. Thursday night, there was no doubt about how his contemporaries feel about him.

One after another, the people he has touched took the stage to thank their friend and mentor with a memory, a joke, and a gift of song - a Who's Who of 20th century music, from cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, older than Lenny himself, to the 16-year-old Japanese wunderkind violinist, Midori; more than 50 singers, conductors, composers and musicians.

"I was at the Nureyev birthday celebration in New York last year,'' said one tuxedoed gentleman who had laid out $5,000 for top tickets for the week, ""and it was nothing like this. No one else has this depth of talent to draw on. These aren't just performers he's worked with - these are all his friends.''

Or, as Greek minister of culture Melina Mercouri put it, one of dozens of world figures sending greetings to the birthday boy: "To say, bless you? You were born blessed.''

Remembering Lena

Another of my "Greatest Hits"

Cafe Society
(Appeared in The New York Times, 1991)
By Jeremy Bloom

“There is a cloud of weirdness that hangs over Saratoga Springs,” says the singer-songwriter Bruce (Utah) Phillips. He should know, having spent most of the mid-'60s period he calls “the great folk music scare” in the small upstate New York city, along with Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Rosalie Sorrels, Bob Dylan, Spalding Gray and others.

They gathered spontaneously around Lena Spencer and Caffe Lena, the small Bohemian coffeehouse she ran in Saratoga Springs from 1960 until her death in 1989. The oldest continuously-running coffeehouse in the country, Caffe Lena endures as almost a time capsule - and a natural documentary subject.

In 1989, a BBC-TV crew filmed performances and interviews with some of the many musicians who considered Spencer a friend and her “caffe” a surrogate home. The result, titled “Caffe Lena”, will be broadcast at midnight Thursday on WNET (NY).

Arlo Guthrie is on hand for the film, as he always was for Spencer - he jokes about his role as financial angel for the often-broke cafe, saying he knew things were O.K. with Lena when he didn't hear from her.

Rosalie Sorrels lived with Spencer, and her children stayed with Spencer when she was on the road (Spencer never had any children of her own, but after her husband left her, the cafe provided an ever-shifting family). Ms. Sorrels' contribution to the documentary is a soulful performance of Mr. Phillips' “I Could Be the Rain” with blues-rocker David Bromberg playing lead guitar; it's the kind of collaboration that happened all the time in the early days.

Spalding Gray got his first acting job in a short-lived theater company which Spencer founded and then folded at the cafe during what he describes as the surreal summer of 1966. He has vivid memories of late nights with Spencer piloting the Ouija board.

“The theater productions were done with such inspired madness,” he told an interviewer. “The backyard looseness of it really set the tone for the Wooster Group's work,” he added, referring to the avant-garde theater he founded in New York in 1975 with Elizabeth LeCompte, who was waitressing at Caffe Lena when they met.

And then there was Spencer herself. She presided at the top of the stairs with the myopic regality of a Persian cat. “Do you have a reservation?” she would ask each visitor in the refined tones of an Italian immigrant's daughter who has trained for the stage.

Like her friend Bob Dylan (he played the cafe in 1962, but is not seen in the film), Spencer was at heart a private person. “She was a strange, warm, mothering character,” Mr. Gray recalls fondly. “One of the few I've met in America.”

Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

Utah Phillips has passed away.

He was a hell of a guy, a storyteller, singer, raconteur, and union man.

"Don't mourn, organize"

Here's a piece I did on Utah some twenty years ago...


Labour of Love
Utah Phillips spreads the word – and the ashes – of Joe Hill

By Jeremy Bloom

“If you want to do something good for yourself, go to Utah and get thrown out.”

U. Utah Phillips knows from whence he speaks. In 1968, he got 6,000 votes as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Utah (Eldridge Cleaver headed the national ticket as Presidential nominee). For some reason, in 1969 Phillips found himself persona non grata in Mormon Utah.

He left - and ended up becoming a nationally-know (or at least notorious) raconteur, folksinger, and Union activist with the Industrial Workers of the World – aka, “The Wobblies”.

Which was how it happened that he found himself in Washington, DC (“Or Mordor, as we like to call it”) recently, on a special mission to pick up a very unusual parcel: the ashes of Joe Hill.

For those unfamiliar with “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” or the Wobblies, Phillips is glad to explain. After all, stories and songs are his living.

“Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, essentially for writing songs,” he says. “He was the Wobbly Bard.”

The IWW was doing organizing up in the silver mines, and the governor of Utah had vowed to break the union. Joe, an organizer as well as a songwriter, was framed on a murder charge and executed.

His final wish: that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in every state but Utah. He is also reputed to have asked his friends to get his body over the state line into Wyoming, so he wouldn’t “be caught dead in Utah.”

(This is trademark Utah Philips: Tell ‘em a story, make ‘em laugh, and then slip in the message.)
Joe’s last request to his friends has become famous: “Don’t mourn, organize”.

It was that business about scattering his ashes, though.

“An extraordinary experience, you know, to have Joe’s ashes in my hand,” he said, simply. “They were so kind to me. The woman down at the National Archive was a mole back in the inner recesses, by name Aloha South. She’d been there 27 years. The ashes were in a little ceramic jar. And there was the torn envelope.”

But what were the ashes of Joe Hill doing in the National Archive? With Aloha South’s help, Phillips was able to piece together the story of the lost, lonely packet.

“We were in the first world war in 1917, and there was a big red scare,” he said. “They passed the Espionage Act June 15, 1917, and the FBI, through the Postmaster General, sent out the word to postmasters all over the country. They got in the habit of taking anything they thought looked suspicious and sending it to the FBI.”

Joe's ashes were parceled out into 47 packets for mailing to to the various states. But one of the packets became torn during the mailing, and the suspicious Chicago postmaster alerted the Feds. Perhaps it was illegal to mail an anarchist over a state line…

The ashes found their way into the National Archive in 1944. Their existence was common knowledge in the archive, but the world outside didn’t find out until last year, when the catalogue was published, and someone noticed and notified the IWW. The last of Joe was rescued from a bureaucratic burial, which left the question: What do with him?


“I really think the ashes ought to go to the farm workers in California”, was Phillips’ opinion. “That’s a living struggle with a superb record, consistent with what Joe and the IWW is about.”

Actually, he had another idea… inspired when an old-timer came up at a concert and asked, "Could you do a couple of lines of ‘Joe Hill’?"

“Well,” said Utah, laughing through his grey Santa Claus beard, "we could get a mirror and a razor blade… don’t tell anyone in my union I said that. They’re a humorless bunch.”


Utah Phillips sings Joe Hill's "There is Power in The Union."

Sounds Strange Department

"If music be the food of love... veg on!"
Why not a vegetable orchestra?

"Nothing's Gonna Change My World"

What a great song. And what a wonderful idea...

NASA beams Beatles' song into space

The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space next week, NASA said.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an "amazing" achievement and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono called it the "beginning of a new age".

The transmission of the song over the space agency's Deep Space Network on Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded the song.

The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, NASA said.

In a message to the space agency, Sir Paul said: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Yes We Can

I've come around to Obama.

In part, this video is why. The man is an inspiration. And we need that in these times.

Totally Stokes

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

Composer Tobin Stokes is used to working across multiple genres.

The former Powell River resident has composed classical music, choral and scores for film and television. But the score he wrote last year for the miniseries Captain Cook, Obsession and Discovery, really pushed the envelope.

"It took everything," said Stokes. "Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and Canada each has its own aboriginal music that had to be incorporated. And of course Cook started in England, so the producers wanted to have music by Johann Christian Bach worked in, much more formal."

(There's more...)

He said it's tricky balancing that many different styles and influences, but it makes for a wonderful challenge.

"The show needs to be congealing through the music," said Stokes. "So I take each of those influences and try to build it into the overall plan. What's interesting about Cook is that in the third voyage he starts to fall apart. So I took all the themes I'd developed in the first episodes and deconstructed them in strange ways. It was a lot of fun."

The miniseries has already aired on Australian Television, earning rave reviews, an audience of more than one million viewers, and several awards. In Canada, episodes one and two will air back-to-back on History Television at 8 pm and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 19, and episodes three and four will air at 8 and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 26.

Those familiar with Stokes' work will not be surprised to learn that the score involved choral music. Growing up in Powell River, Stokes was an active participant in the International Choral Kathaumixw festivals, which have been a major influence on his life and work.

And he, in turn, has been a major influence on the festival. His composition, The Spacious Firmament, is sung by a thousand-voice choir at each Kathaumixw's opening and closing ceremonies.

"Choral is my favorite form of music," he said. "I think when a person is singing, they're using their own instrument. The music goes right from brain, to voice, out into the air, and then to the ears of the audience. So, it's the purest form and it gives me so much satisfaction."

His original plan for the Captain Cook score had been to record the choral sections with the Powell River Academy Chamber Singers. "They have the facilities and a great choir that can learn stuff on the spot," he said. "They're very adaptable and eager, and wonderful to work with. Unfortunately, the scheduling didn't work out."

It's been a very busy year for Stokes. Apart from the Captain Cook project, he also scored the film http://www.mountainsidefilms.com/savingluna/, about an orphaned orca that lived in the Gold River area. The film will be shown at the Powell River Film Festival at 12:30 pm on Friday, February 8.

"My score features some of the same singers and some of the same aboriginal people as the Captain Cook series did," said Stokes.

He also had a piano concerto to compose for a world premiere with the Victoria Symphony on November 26, 2007. "With delays in the Captain Cook series, I barely managed to finish it in time," he said.

The production company liked his score for Captain Cook so much that they've brought him on board for its next project, a miniseries about another sailing scientist, Charles Darwin. Stokes is also scoring a documentary about famous Canadian photographer Ted Grant.

His next big project is an opera.

"It's about the first Europeans coming to Nootka, to Vancouver Island," he said. "I'm not sure yet, but somehow we're going to present some of it at Kathaumixw."

End the War

Folks are marching today.

"Bring 'em home, bring 'em home..."