Sparks from the Fire

I sat on the subway coming home, weary from my last day of jury duty, relieved not to have made the 15-day trial I almost made.  I had done my two long days of sitting and waiting.  At our first stop, Canal Street, she got on and took stage in the middle of the car not six feet in front of me.  She announced, “Get ready, people, cause I’m a’gonna sing.”

Everybody on the car basically groaned and checked out their shoes, looking away in weariness and embarrassment. I’m sorry to say I did the same.  She was a female bum – here in NYC we have our share.  She was clearly a crack victim – 45-55, filthy dirty dress, ripped and tattered, shoes that no human being should ever have to wear, and she carried with her an indelicate perfume.  Her face was very swollen on one side disfiguring her look and her hair had not been brushed in weeks.

As I looked down, she started to sing.

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Pardon my absence, but I’ve been up to my eyebrows in music.

Just this last weekend I had the great privilege to produce and direct a concert of Inspirational music for TMC Youth, an organization dedicated to opening up the horizons of spirituality for the youth of today.

In a 3-day weekend gathering of over 200 young people from mainly the East coast, but also from as far away as Africa and Europe, my task was to put together and spearhead an hour and a half of Inspirational music entertainment for their Saturday night blow-out.

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What a strange thing it is that we do. Singing. To organize our thoughts and sentences into structured rhythms. To further organize the words and syllables into predetermined pitches on top of those rhythms and then sometimes hold those syllables and pitches to inordinate degrees. I’ve always felt that it is an odd method of human communication.

Animals do a form of it as well. They howl, they roar, they moan. And each of these moments in time expresses deeply their primitive feelings. We sometimes mimic them in their feelings.

As a song writer, I have often thought deeply about this strange expression of human emotion and communication called singing. In the musical theater I was taught that when the emotion of the moment becomes so high that dialogue can no longer handle it, it is then that a song is born, that the character moves into singing because mere words just do not suffice. When this happens naturally, the audience easily accepts the stylistic evolving into music and song.
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