Sometimes I think I have a bit of a "Zelig" thing going... you know, the Woody Allen movie where this character Zelig shows up in all different times in important events in history.  Or maybe it’s more like a Forest Gump thing...

I’ll flesh this stuff out later - but it’s all kind of weird... and totally coincidental.

• I was in the first movie ever made for TV, See How They Run.
• I built the second website for the Smithsonian, their first for a museum.
• In college, I played Hamlet to Marilu Henner’s Gertrude. (big asterisk to come...)
• I played the music of Janis Joplin with Sam Andrew and Snooky Flowers. After Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered in SF, we played for an angry crowd at SF City Hall of 100,000 mourners.
• I was in Christopher Hampton’s American debut play, When Did You Last See My Mother.
• I was a model in the 1964 World’s Fair in the Bell Telephone exhibit.
• My father, an actor, was actually IN Zelig...
• I interviewed Leonard Bernstein the summer before he died, in what may have been his last interview. I attended his last concert, and his memorial service, where members of orchestras he's led played the Overture to Candide, without a conductor - like an Air Force maneuver with the "missing man..."

I've been thinking about this a bit more - and in some ways, maybe this is more like Kevin Bacon and the six degrees of separation.  Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody... so if my dad worked with Woody Allen, or I played music with somebody who played music with Janis Joplin, then it just connects me, as everybody is connected to things I care about...

Maybe this is as good a place as any to start a production journal for a project I’m working on at AARP Radio... related to the music of 1968. 

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March 15, 2008.

wouldn’t it be nice if you could create these journals in a sort of "blog" style?  Oh well...

All the elements of the 1968 web sidebar are now recorded.  I had the privilege of talking to jazz historian Phil Schaap yesterday.  If anyone in the world knows more about jazz, I’d like to hear about it.  And Phil is not only knowledgeable, his love and respect for the music and the players shines through in everything he says.

We talked about Louis Armstrong, and a big hit of the year 1968 - What a Wonderful World.  Now I’m ready to write and mix these pieces, and post them next Friday - I hope!  We’ll have Laura Nyro and Stoned Soul Picnic, Sam Andrew talking about when he and Janis Joplin left Big Brother and the Holding Company and formed the Kosmic Blues Band, and if I can get approval to post a concert I recorded, we’ll have a classical music element as well, with Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist work In C.

Stay tuned!

Feb, 2008

It was a great year, of course, for music, and the first thing that occured to me was to do a feature story on Laura Nyro’s Stoned Soul Picnic.  I believe you could have heard both her own version and the Fifth Dimension’s hit version that year. 

What I’ll have to leave out of the piece that I’m working on is that i met Nyro in 1968.  Here’s how:

I was a student at the High School of Music and Art in 1968, and in the 67-68 school year, my seatmate in chorus was Jan Nigro, Laura Nyro’s brother.  We had fun cutting up in class together, and both of us had sturdy but undistinguished basses.

One day after school, he took me home with him to the Bronx.  We were looking forward to getting into some trouble that day - but that's a story I'll have to tell you in person...

Jan’s sister, Laura Nyro was home that day, and not quite yet a star, and I got to listen to her play the piano and hang out at her home... I only wish I remember what she was playing!

Anyway - if I can I’ll put a link here to the 1968 music web sidebar, and I’ll let you know what other songs I’ll be working on. 

BTW, the real story of this is that I’ve interviewed Judy Kuhn, Broadway chanteuse, who has a new album out of Laura Nyro’s music, and she’ll be the focus of this little segment... coming this Spring... to AARP Radio.