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Adjoa Skinner, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and Summer 2010 Avocado Jungle Artist In Residence.

Our music blogger, Dan Rickabus, had a great interview with one of these special people: singer-songwriter (and Avocado Jungle Artist In Residence) Adjoa Skinner. Adjoa is filled with the kind of genuine exuberance and drive and spirit you’d like to bottle and sell because it would make millions. And while she can’t bottle her energy, she can record her music, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if that made her millions one day, too—although she talks about her life as if she’s already won the lottery.

Born in Lancaster, New York (near Buffalo), Adjoa grew up in an extremely musical family. Her mother and stepfather were in a band together that played weddings and other events. Her father’s family wasn’t made up of professional musicians, but they sang in four-part harmony at family events. They were, as Adjoa tells it, “kind of like the Partridge Family without money.” She jumped right into “the biz,” making her first on-stage appearance as a baby in the musical Oliver at the age of two and auditioning for her first session work (a commercial voiceover) a seven.

Now, at twenty-eight, it is clear she has lived and breathed this stuff all her life. She compares her sound to contemporaries like Regina Spektor and Sarah Bareilles, but says she’s a big fan of Sting and Peter Gabriel. An agile and soulful singer, a multi-instrumentalist, and a songwriter—in her own words a “jazz soul singer songwriter”—her influences and tastes make lots of sense when you hear the control, the style, and the maturity of her voice. Her step-dad used to make her mix CDs with Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Ricky Lee Jones, Jeff Buckley, Elton John… not your typical listening material for a girl who went to middle school in the nineties. But Adjoa ate it up, and now these classic sounds are part of the foundation for her songwriting, and for that pervasive note of wisdom in her voice.

A few of my favorite quotes from Adjoa in this interview:

“I listen to people having conversations, and I start to rhyme their conversations in my head. So… I’m kind of a big nerd.”

“The greatest thing that I get back from listening back to all of the recordings [I make], for me, is remembering the moments that I shared with these people that I really love and am so honored to work with.”

“My Mom is so fun to watch. I think one of the greatest things that I hope I get from her is her joy, the way that she makes people feel so comfortable.”

There’s plenty more to hear in this interview—conducted by the ever-amiable Dan Rickabus—including Adjoa’s profound answer to the deep closing question, “What are you searching for?” (I won’t spoil that one. You’ll just have to listen for yourself.) The two seem to enjoy their conversation a lot, and we at the Avocado Jungle are glad to give you the opportunity to enjoy it as well.

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Listen to a song from Adjoa’s EP, Nothin’ More To Say: Never.

Visit adjoaskinner.com.

It has been a while since I’ve heard the sound of an old record on the turntable with all of its scratches and ticks and pops, but I think I recently heard its digital equivalent. My Skype connection to Roni Segoly in his home in Israel was noisy and his words thus difficult to understand on occasion—not so much, I hope, that his message gets missed. Our talk in mid-June yielded a recording I wish were better, but through all the noise it was still quite inspiring and I’m happy now to be sharing it with you.

Roni is a member of Combatants For Peace, an activist group based in the Middle East which calls for a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the creation of two separate states, each with Jerusalem as the capital. The most unique thing about this group, however, is that it consists of former Israeli military and former Palestinian militants who have been there and done that and decided on following a different path—people who are standing up for what they believe in with bravery and fortitude in circumstances that range from difficult to life-threatening and desperate.

Our talk covered the topics of news and success. On the media, Roni explained that the Israeli media—with few exceptions—are broadcasting what the government wants people to hear. They are to some extent a propaganda machine: in step with the official talking points, offering very little criticism. At the same time, limited media exposure has still been enough, along with barrels of elbow grease, to grow CFP from the original couple dozen members in 2005 to around eight hundred today. These descriptions paint Israel as a fascinating halfway point between our own media culture, free and eager to print criticism and investigate every little wrongdoing, and a truly restrictive or even oppressive regime like North Korea and Russia.

And on success, as you might expect, Roni was quick to broadly summarize that CFP is not a success and will not be until the goals on which they were founded are achieved. But he added that in the incremental successes that represent steps along the path, he is proud of the successes of CFP in growing in size, gaining media exposure, and broadcasting their message.

Asked to consider the chances for success in the greater mission, Roni first explained that he considers himself an optimist and feels that the enormous pressure the world is currently exerting on both the Israeli and Palestinian governments has been effective, creating less room for these governments to maneuver. He also thinks a broader base of people are accepting that the two-state solution “because they understand it is the only way.” And in a moment of surprising candor, Roni offered this view of how the conflict will be resolved:

I’m sorry to say but I hope that the Israeli gov’t will just crush, will break under the pressure. I’m not sure what will happen after. I hope it will be good. But I think [all parties] should just keep on pressing and pressing and pressing until they break.

And all of this comes from the mouth of a man clearly dedicated to his cause. After a few years with the group, this husband and father of three tells me he is leaving his comfortable full-time job — a senior position in a high-tech company with a good salary — to become a full-time activist for Combatants and a few other causes. He cites the famous Ghandi quote about “being the change you wish to see in the world” and explains that true success in life entails “the need to fulfill your own mission and do what you believe in.”

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The Combatants For Peace website.

Listen to an NPR interview in 2008 with two of the founders of Combatants For Peace.

When you consider all the television channels that are now widely available (over a hundred in the average home) I think the tiny number of truly iconic new programs says a great deal about the nature of the process of creating a television show. One such iconic show was the Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, widely hailed as a really exceptional series. (Time’s #1 show on TV in 2005, for example.) Happy to be along for the ride from the start was composer Bear McCreary, then in his mid-twenties.

To say that the show was a success would clearly be a big understatement. To say the same for Bear McCreary’s career may be an understatement of the same magnitude. Now thirty-one years old, Bear has scored the entirety of the Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles series, and is now scoring Eureka, Caprica, and Human Target. I had the great pleasure of an interview with Bear and asked him some questions about success.

One thing I have to say about Bear and success is that he seems to be a lucky, lucky man who has also truly earned his station. This is a man who, through a chance encounter at a Rotary Club lunch in his hometown in Washington state, ended up meeting legendary film composer Elmer Bernstein, entering his tutelage and eventually assisting him in his work. Bear is the first to admit there is no bigger stroke of luck for an aspiring composer than that, and as he tells it there have been numerous other richly fortuitous circumstances that propelled his career forward. But windfalls like the Elmer Bernstein association could have led nowhere—or even to bad places—had Bear not been severly talented, exceptionally passionate about composing, and extraordinarily hard working. He mentioned in our interview that he frequently works 12 to 16 hour days and has had just one day in 2010 when he wasn’t working.

One day off in the last seven months.

In offering his advice on success Bear McCreary references that passion and work ethic, warning that if you are not passionate about what you do, if you do not work very hard, you will still be competing against “guys like me.” He says this without a trace of arrogance or entitlement. He humbly defines success for himself as the point at which he can expect to make a living as a working musician for the forseeable future, a point which he is grateful to say he has now reached. But his assertion about finding success is convincing. He makes a Simon Cowell point without any of the Simon Cowell-ness: if you don’t got the game, don’t come out to play. Only he phrases it in a much more positive light, encouraging those truly interested in career success to pursue that success in a field where their passion will fuel the hard work needed to really make it.

Career achievement may be somewhat simple to quantify, but I’ve always found the reasons behind it are far more complex. I’d like to close by offering that it’s possible Bear’s affability and eloquence played a significant part. With the same skills, the same passion and the same luck, but a grouchy, difficult demeanor, would fewer people have chosen to work with him? Would he have gotten this far?

I encourage you to listen to this fascinating interview, the audio track for which is itself an example of Bear’s good nature. Near the end, and already around the twenty-minute limit I had promised him, my recording setup failed me. I was relieved beyond words to find the audio up to that point had been preserved, but my computer had crashed and was not letting me continue the session.

I was ready to call it a day and just tag on a sad explanation later but instead Bear offered to field my last few questions over the phone, record his answers on his iPhone, and send them to me. It may seem like a small gesture, but it’s one I would not expect from most enormously successful people in the middle of another 16-hour workday. So that will explain the change in audio quality at the end of my recording, and at the same time, it may at least partially explain why Bear McCreary finds himself on his way to becoming one of the most inarguably important television composers of our time.

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Read Bear’s blog.

Visit Bear’s website.

Buy Bear’s music on iTunes. (As a drummer and a fan of the sci-fi sound, I can’t recommend the Battlestar soundtracks enough. I enjoy season 1 for it’s relative lightness and simplicity and season 3 for its ambitiousness—and both for their excellently written, performed, and recorded percussion parts. I haven’t got season 4 yet, which Bear feels is his best.)

That was a time—covering most of our species’ history—when evolution still acted on us to pretty much the same extent as any other animal. We lived to be 15 or 20 or maybe 30. We got eaten by wild animals, died of horrible infections, and struggled each day to find food and shelter and to reproduce and make more of ourselves. In these conditions, those better equipped to survive did, and passed those traits that made them successful on to their children. Those who failed at this brutal game were taken out of the gene pool. This barely happens now, and it is a function instead of medicine, agriculture, weaponry and societal structure that we live such long and peaceful lives. And these long, peaceful lives give us lots of chances to stray off the short, narrow path of survival and procreation we were built and programmed to travel. These long, peaceful lives sometimes lead us to turn our formerly useful instincts and behaviors against ourselves.

That is the Caveman Hypothesis. It’s the idea that maybe we can cure some of what ails us by taking things back, oh, twenty or thirty thousand years. Weird idea, I know. Hopefully you’ll stick with me and give it a chance.

Some quick thoughts on how the Caveman Hypothesis applies to this idea that we are living in a horrible, chaotic time—or even the biblical “end times”. Our most incredible physiological gift as a species has got to be the brain. Our brains are immensely powerful—even in raw computational ability they’re still more powerful than the fastest computers, though perhaps not for long—and process huge amounts of sensory information many times per second. At a young age, babies and children are building up brain connections that represent their memory and understanding of the world around them. By adolescence, these connections actually begin to thin out, pruning away excess information. The same happens in visual discrimination. The brain spends a while as we grow up learning to ignore things that are not useful information. (If you think about it, we couldn’t spend every moment noticing every detail of everything we see. We don’t focus too much on insignificant detail because, well, in the caveman days, we’d get eaten.)

I really think this is the basis for what we’ve got in any age: a preponderance of doomsday predictions and a marked prevalence of the notion that the good old days were better than the present. As we age, our unpleasant memories fade away, since the pleasant ones make us feel good and therefore get more use. At the same time, we’re excercising our caveman instincts to be wary and to look for the things around us that endanger our survival. Our lives of peace and relative luxury allow this instinct to get a little out of control, and I think that manifests as a tendency to worry and focus on the bad things. So every day we’re faced with our preoccupation with what’s wrong and worrisome in the moment, and how it contrasts with our fading blissful memories of our past.

Since nobody wants to fill their time up with hunting with spears, running from tigers, and rubbing sticks together to make a fire, we have to accept that these instincts will never again have adequate purpose to keep them from running rampant. Instead, our best chance is to man up (or woman up, of course) and just remind ourselves that our lives are greater than the sum of our fears.

I challenge you, then: Stare down some of your fears about the present—some of your worst. Give them a good looking-over and ask if you are spending a little too much time a little too close to them. There were plenty of things wrong with the past, and there are plenty of things right with now. It just isn’t quite as instinctive to notice them.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m doing this with one of my own worries right now: the health care plan. The recently passed health care overhaul may not be perfect, it may not accomplish all we think it ought, and I suppose it could even do some damage. But regardless, Americans tend to find a way, and wrongs will be righted. And frankly, in the process, I’m sure more rights will be wronged. For every second I spend thinking about it, I lose a second to fix a problem, create something good, or spend time with people I love. So good riddance.

Each of us is on some sort of search for the truth, however passive or however deeply submerged beneath the layers of things like activity, pretense, prejudice and denial. Despite our inherent preference for patterns and habits and stasis, we ultimately encounter greater truth in those unanticipated, vulnerable moments scattered throughout life and it throws a wrench in the works of our world view. This column is meant to examine the reasons we fail or succeed at finding the truth when we need it.

The AVJ is on a fun three-week arc now, considering “the good old days” this past week, the bright side of now this coming week, and our best hope for the future a week from now. On the topic of the past, I think it’s important to begin with the notion that great work and great thought almost always rests on the work and thought of the past. History is always with us as the foundation of our present condition. Anyone who decries the importance of understanding our past has to face the fact that Einsteins, Regans, FDRs, Ghandis, Kings, and Armstrongs (Louis or Neil, take your pick) all stood on the shoulders of the giants before them—and more fairly, on soil tilled by countless people and events of all kinds. Great thinkers and doers don’t think or do in a vacuum. They work and create in the atmosphere of the past.

At the moment we are facing a whole bunch of problems that feel new. Global terrorism networks. Rogue states with nukes. A wide variety of rampant infections and diseases from swine flu to AIDS to cancer. The huge recession of the past few years. Of course, understanding and addressing these problems individually (and preventing their recurrence) is vastly more likely if we learn from the past. But instead of wondering why any of these specific issues is an issue or how to solve it, I want to consider the package as a whole. How can so many of our problems feel so new all at once? Has it always been this way?

I have one simple answer for this: No. Things are different. That’s not to say all of these problems are entirely unique to this moment. That’s far from true. But I believe that not only is the pace of change accelerating, but that it’s accelerating on a curve. A steep curve. I’m sure I’m not the only one who believes this. Consider the last century or so from the point of view of a young girl.

In her great-great-grandparents’ time, commercial and military flight came into existence. The automobile replaced the horse-and-buggy. The telephone replaced the telegraph. The interstate highway system was begun. The first radio broadcast took place. The first television broadcast took place. Women were given the right to vote, and later entered the workplace on a large scale. The first rockets were launched. The atomic bomb was dropped (twice). Audio recording became commonplace. Jazz and swing came to be.

In her grandparents’ time, computers shrank from the size of a room to the size of a television. Television went from black and white to color. Radio went from AM to FM. The hydrogen bomb was developed. The cold war raged. A president was assassinated. The civil rights movement was born and matured. Men first walked on the moon. The Vietnam War, Nixon, and the media combined to destroy Americans’ trust in authority. Credit cards went from nonexistent to commonplace. Rock’n'roll came about.

In her parents’ time, computers shrank from the size of a television to tiny handheld devices. Terrorism took hold and proliferated. The microwave was invented. The telephone went from rotary-dial to touchtone to cordless to cellphone to smart phone. Music moved from record to 8-track to cassette to CD to mp3. Movies evolved from theatrical experiences to VHS cassettes to DVDs to mpeg files. Video games went from brand new to ubiquitous. The internet went from a tiny network of enthusiasts and the military to being omnipresent. The space shuttle program began. A space station was built. The modern popular environmentalist movement was born. Rap and hip hop came about.

Looking at the list of things just from the last 30 years or so, it seems the scope and the potential for negative impact on the world exceeds those of the previous 70 years. The scariest things in terms of raw impact on society, to me, are the power of the internet and video games to remove face-to-face interpersonal interaction from our days; the nebulous and anonymous nature of the internet and of terrorism; and the ability of modern media and the internet to make available a truly mind-blowing quantity and variety of goods and information while making it less likely that the goods or information found will be of quality. The increase in speed and miniaturization and the ubiquitousness of media and advertising has precipitated a terrifying preoccupation with convenience, vanity and self-amusement. And to top it all off, parents are notably less likely to enforce limits, teach manners and respect, impart the significance of hard work, and live near extended family who lend support and grounding to the nuclear family.

How can all of this not affect that little girl? She’s hard-wired to prefer habits and patterns, as well as to worship her parents and learn from everything they say and do. Yet she’s growing up with parents who are providing less guidance in a world that’s changing faster than ever. She’ll grow up watching people sacrifice their lives in hateful attacks against others, having virtually limitless options for finding information (and misinformation), and crowded by an ever-growing population that will need more manners and respect to get along—not less. And she’ll have less of an opportunity to talk about it all with her family and friends because both of her parents work or are divorced, she doesn’t live anywhere near auntie or grandma, and the internet and video games and cell phones seem to suck up all her time (and everyone else’s) anyway. Just multiply this little girl times 20 or 30 million and you may have a sort of average of the next generation and the experience of their formative years.

This sets us up for some good old-fashioned learning from the past. In the past, change was happening at a slower pace but there was a broader and more consistent family structure, there were fewer distractions from social interaction and productive work and play, a greater emphasis was placed on respect and propriety, and media and advertising were less ubiquitous and invasive and unavoidable. These are things we have some power over. There are many other variables we cannot control, like the threat of terrorism. And this is not to say that everything was just rosy in the past. I’m not longing for the days of rampant workplace discrimination or racial segregation, or a time when it was your business and nobody else’s if you beat your wife. But I think we can restore some measure of the good without reverting to the bad. Perhaps we just have to think of it more as a remodel for tomorrow than a return to the ways of yesterday.

We are faced with choices every day that can bring about this change. Some of them sound, sadly, “old-fashioned,” but “new” isn’t synonymous with “better.” Who wouldn’t like a world with a little more ettiquette? Just say “please” and “thank you” more often! Who wouldn’t like a little less of the mindless drone of TV and video games? Turn it off and read or talk! Who wouldn’t benefit from a bigger, stronger circle of family and friends to rely on? Make a phone call to grandma! Talk things out patiently and candidly with your wife! Society-wide solutions are more complicated than this. But for us as human beings, it really is just that simple.

So I think that in this case of searching for the truth—trying to understand why things feel like they’re spiraling out of control around us—the very fact that things are actually changing at a frightening pace can be a distraction from the fact that we still have the power create some of that stability and comfort we long for. I suppose the rest will have to made up for by learning to accept change, deal with it gracefully and intelligently, and maybe even relish it. But it’s okay, even healthy, to want some patterns and predictability in our lives. I’m happy to say that I feel the responsibility for those things still rests with us.

once i sat and watched the summer
sun set on a cactus — this at
best a risky practice — and i
felt icarus might enjoy the
news, so, bored, i schemed to use the
reverberant canyon lands
of arizona

they would carry him the word that
in some backward way his hubric
plan would be completed; sun would
come to him deflated, now
defeated, beaten on the heated
summer evening sands
of arizona

— Jeremy Scott Olsen

In time I’ll have to throttle up and go.
I’m just two steps too slow.
(My dancing days are gone, you know.)

I raise a fist but should be swinging two;
all of my neighbors do,
gray blurs between the green and blue.

Buried in gold the young betray the old;
the old embrace the mold,
seek solace in what we’ve been sold.

But I suspect the fold unfolds itself
to hide its green-blue wealth
in rotten fruit on a rotten shelf

where it persists, unseen, in perfect health.

— Jeremy Scott Olsen

In case you missed them, here are links to:

the first part of the interview,
his performance of the Mozart D Minor Concerto, and
the second part of the interview.

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Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 – I. Allegretto
Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 – II. Lento
Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 – III. Moderato
Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 – IV. Allegro con brio

Derek Polischuk, piano
Richard Illman, trumpet
Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra
Shostakovich Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 35
recorded in October of 2006 at the Wharton Center for Performing Arts in East Lansing, Michigan.

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This is an intriguing piece, and more challenging to listen to than the Mozart. The performance and the recording are both great and allow you to hear quite well one thing Derek suggests listening for—conversation between the piano, the trumpet and the orchestra. This is also a fun piece to see through the lens of music history. In the interview, Derek talks about how the Russian Shostakovich was covertly trying to be true to his personal artistic sensibilities while overtly catering to the nationalistic and old-fashioned standards of a horrific dictatorship. So this piece comes across as a strange “Where’s Waldo” of progressive ideas hidden among centuries-old musical structures and traditions. I think Derek and the orchestra do a fine job of making it all work—committing to the difficult dichotomy that stemmed straight from the composer’s frustrating artistic experience. Tune your ears in to this fun and unusual tour of the language of music and you’re in for a good time.

In March I had the pleasure of an interview with him. It was long enough to divide into two parts. This is the second part. It’s fairly short and focuses exclusively on Shostakovich’s Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 35. As with the Mozart concerto in the first segment of our interview, here Derek offers a few thoughts on how to listen to this quirky and challenging piece of twentieth century orchestral music.

Performing with Derek is trumpet player Richard Illman and the Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra. You can find the recording of his performance of this symphony in four movements here.

Here’s the second and final part of our interview: Part 2 of the interview.

Before you click, consider listening to part one of the interview, and his performance of the Mozart D Minor Concerto, both posted several days ago. For more about Derek, visit his online staff profile at MSU. If you’re into teaching or learning piano, follow his Piano Pedagogy Blog.