I live in a county (Montgomery County, Maryland) with a very large and diverse immigrant population. There are streets in Silver Spring where you can hear 20 languages spoken during a one-block sidewalk stroll. So when I was awarded a grant to compose a piece for spoken word on the subject of the immigrant experience here, I thought it would be easy to find personal stories. And it might have been, a couple of years ago. But the level of fear I encountered while interviewing people who had immigrated to this country was striking. Even among people with legal residency or citizenship, many told me they worried that bringing attention to their experiences might endanger them. I can’t say I blame them: We’ve seen plenty of headlines lately about federal authorities imprisoning and even deporting legal residents and naturalized citizens. In the end, I decided to focus my piece on the story of one man who made the terrifying journey from Guatemala and through the Sonoran desert as a child. The “score” for this piece is written for piano, guitar and cajón (rhumba box) along with various other hand percussion. I hope I can musically do justice to his story, and his courage.
– Charlie's Blog –
Be Like the Swan
Last week, I was in France for a wedding, and a side trip took me to the Loire Valley. While walking along the river in the charming town of Blois, I caught sight of two swans gliding upstream. The Loire has a swift and strong current, so I knew the swans had to be paddling furiously under the water’s surface, but up above it, they maintained a completely calm, beatific look. I thought of one of my favorite words, sprezzatura: the ability to make a difficult task look easy. And that put me in mind of one of my favorite trombone players, Joe Jackson, who is conveniently in my jazz band. Two months ago, Chaise Lounge played a concert with the Pan American Symphony Orchestra, and one of the pieces on the program was Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion,” with Joe playing the solo usually performed on violin. This beautiful, impossibly high lyrical piece would leave most trombone players in tears, but for Joe, it seemed effortless. Of course, I knew his “effortlessness” came from 30+ years of devoted attention to his craft. But the best players, like swans swimming gracefully upstream, can make you forget everything but that beautiful performance.
In Need of Art
My friend Susan recently hired me to play at the opening of an art exhibit she’d curated. It turned out to be a beautiful gig, in no small part because my jazz trio was surrounded by so many vibrant prints and silkscreens from around the world. I fell in love with one of the pieces: a print of a woman in a turban by a Cuban artist named Choco. I couldn’t stop thinking about the piece and, after I got home, I called Susan up and bought it.
It is curious how we need art. In the order of food, shelter, clothing, it is understood to be pretty far down the list of primal needs. But maybe it’s not. Cavemen made cave paintings, after all, and Lord knows they had more pressing things to do, like fighting off saber-toothed tigers. Perhaps the need for art runs on a parallel track to our survival instincts. We can be hungry and still long to see beauty.
The print I love is now hanging on my dining room wall, and it makes every other piece of art in the room look brand new. And every time I look at it I am fed. As we go through our days making work to feed our families (and possibly our egos), it’s good to remember that we might be feeding the human spirit as well.
Him & Jim
My latest play just opened in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Him & Jim is a comedy about what happens when a divine stranger wanders into an unremarkable auto parts shop. My partner-in-crime in this project is director Ara Barlieb. I wrote the play alone, but Ara gave it life, and from what I am hearing he is taking it in directions that I never even imagined. And yet I trust Ara enough to know that whatever he and his talented cast invents, it will make sense with the play. More than make sense: It will make the play a better one.
Retablos Premiere
Last week, maestro David Fanning and the National String Symphonia brought my piece, Retablos, to life for the first time at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The piece features a fiendishly difficult percussion part that requires the percussionist to leap from the bass drum to the vibraphone, to various temple blocks, and back to ten other instruments. For the soloist, Mark Carson, it was an exercise in choreography and stamina as much as it was in musicality. Mark and I (but mostly Mark) worked off and on for months to make sure that this percussion part was playable. The result was a fluid and, honestly, gorgeous performance. The NSS will perform it again in Baltimore on March 11.
Votes for Women
19: The Musical, a carnival ride of a project about the passage of the 19th Amendment, is still taking shape. Last weekend, singers Millie Scarlett, Katie Ganem, and Maria Ciarrochi performed three new songs from the show at The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monumentin Washington DC in honor of Women’s History Month. Lyricist Jennifer Schwed and writer Doug Bradshaw have been the visionaries behind this project, which we hope to keep building and workshopping over the course of the next year. At our Saturday matinee shows, we were blessed with enthusiastic and curious audiences, including one extremely lively bachelorette party all in purple (the color of the suffragists). Could attending historical feminist musical theater offerings be a new bridal trend? For the sake of this show, I sincerely hope so.
Rocketship Premiere
I’m happy to announce that on March 18, the Capitol City Symphony will be premiering a jaunty and nostalgic 12-minute piece of mine called My Own Personal Rocketship. Maestra Victoria Gau will conduct. There’s a second piece of mine on the program: one movement of my symphony, The Blue Chevrolet. It’s a family concert complete with pre-show instrument petting zoo, so if you’ve got kiddos in DC to entertain that day, I hope you’ll zoom by. It’s at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with shows at 4 and 6 pm.
Ye Olde Accordion Repair Shoppe
This sounds like the start of an accordion joke: My accordion seemed to be out of tune. But seriously, it did. So I searched the internet for help and came up with Busso’s Accordion Shop in Alexandria, Virginia. Now, I must admit that my accordion playing is limited. I play it like a piano with my right hand, and have never really mastered all the buttons on the lefthand side—or at least not so far. So I was somewhat nervous going into the bellows of the beast, but it turned out that the shop’s proprietor, Frank Busso, is a non-judgmental champ of a guy. He confirmed that my accordion was, indeed, out of tune and needed fixing. While I was at the shop, I got the chance to play a really good instrument: a top-of-the-line Titano. I also added a destination to my travel bucket list: Castelfidardo, Italy, the international capital of accordion builders. I hope that when I finally get there, they will welcome me as a brother.
The Next Generation (of Orchestra Goers)
A while back, I was commissioned to write a piece that would introduce kids to the sections of the orchestra, and in December, I had the pleasure of seeing it premiered by Maestra Victoria Gau and the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Over the course of a week, Give Me the Orchestra was played for nearly 10,000 second-graders from Montgomery County, Maryland. The piece involves some call-and-response between the students and the orchestra, and what a response it was! I don’t think I have ever had a piece of music get such an enthusiastic reception. I’d love to see this one played more broadly.
The Future Is Now
A few days ago, I started my work day on a long Skype call with a friend in Paris who is working on bringing my jazz band, Chaise Lounge, to France for a tour. As soon as that call ended, I was added to a Zoom.us video conference with a filmmaker and a corporate client. From our three different cities, we shared film edit files and made comments and adjustments as we listened. In real time! Just a few years ago, that would have taken days of travel and a mind-numbing amount of back-and-forth revisions. After the conference call was over, I made my final adjustments to the score in ProTools and sent the stereo .wav files to the filmmaker via a large file transfer site called Hightail. I marveled at the technology that keeps collapsing the time it takes to do this work, and the distance among those of us who do it. I then took out my pen and wrote several thank-you notes, put them in envelopes, and left them for the postman. For some things, slower is better. I hope your new year is starting off well, at whatever speed you are starting it.