music

Ziggy in the Living Room

~ Susan Knoppow ~ Leave a comment

Most celebrity deaths don’t affect me. Somehow this one punched me in the gut. My husband came downstairs for breakfast and asked if I’d heard: David Bowie died of cancer. He’d been sick for 18 months, and managed to keep it out of the news.ziggy lyrics.png

For a kid leading a pretty average life, I loved Bowie. I’ve had Ziggy Stardust running through my head all day. Really? Of all the lyrics, these are the ones I’m stuck with? Ah, well, we can’t always choose our memories.

Here’s a better one: I’ve been out running errands. Who knows what or where. Groceries? Target? As I enter the door from the driveway, a wall of sound greets me: Bowie blasting in the living room, and my children going about their business, at least one singing along.

So glad we introduced them way back when.

It’s the soundtrack of my youth: odd, confusing and a little bit crazy (the soundtrack, that is; not the youth. I was nothing if not well-behaved.)

Thanks, David Bowie. Much appreciated.

Drum Solo

~ Susan Knoppow ~ 5 Comments

Last night at Cliff Bell’s in Detroit, I listened to a watercolor emerge on canvas, an oil painting, a collage of color and texture.

gayelynn cliff bells 1-5The drum solo moved forward for minutes … thundering loud then soft as a whisper. It was denim and suede, sandpaper, a still lake at dusk. Pine scent and snow, a dented hubcap, diesel fumes, hands entwined, a woman alone.

I’ve heard this band before – Straight Ahead – but it’s been many years. The drummer, Gayelynn McKinney, is my son’s teacher, a coincidence of time and place, of stumbling into The Lesson Rooms looking for an instructor at an opportune moment.

Two years later, five years after starting to play, he is becoming a musician. I remember that realization as a young adolescent – the emerging awareness that the weekly lesson was a check-in point. It wasn’t the “thing.” The thing was practice, mastery, repeating the pattern over and over until it lived in my breath and fingers. It was line, arc, motion, stillness and surprise.

J, S, M after recitalMy children live in music. They sing and drum and play piano. My daughter dreams of mastering my old guitar – the one I never really learned to play. They know there is a clarinet in the basement and that the piano in the living room came from my second grade teacher. They wear concert t-shirts and memorize lyrics. They sit still, and usually they like what they hear.

Last night I watched a woman live in her music. The room fell away for a moment, and everyone listened.