Rupture and rapture in a city hospital

“Mr Allen, to my surprise, the scans reveal that you have a ruptured appendix”.

The control panel on my bed – like being in 1st class!

This is the news I received while lying on a gurney in the noisy and chaotic E.R part of the Pacific Hospital last Friday evening. I had cycled there at 6pm and left my bike fastened to a lamp post outside, not expecting to be admitted to hospital. A lack of excruciating pain had prompted the  doctor’s surprise at the prognosis. Two hours after his announcement, at 1am, a nurse wheeled me upstairs to bed and placed me on antibiotics through a drip. I decided to get as much rest as possible to prepare for what lay ahead…

One week earlier,  I had woken up with abdominal pains, following a dinner at a raw food restaurant (the “raw” part is probably not entirely redundant in this story).  Over the next three days, the pain worsened, but then, strangely by Thursday,  had subsided. By Friday, that little redundant attachment to my colon had burst.

Saturday morning, 7am: “Mr Allen they’re calling you for surgery”.

8.30am – while lying in the pre-surgery room, I chat to Michael  the 43-year-old anesthesiologist. He is a cool guy who tells me about a good wine-tasting place on Hayes street (I have forgotten its name).  Five minutes later as I lie on the operating table, my vision starts to whirl…

11.30am – after an 1hr30 appendectomy keyhole operation, I am back in my room recovering.

The view as I looked up

You may be surprised to hear that the next few days were a wonderful time of recovery. Yes, there was the pain. However I was getting a first hand view of the inner workings of an American hospital and how nurses and doctors devote their career to caring for other people. Plus I was beginning to appreciate life literally one step at a time.

But first a word about some of the wonderful people I met.

At 95 years old, my first roommate Alexander didn’t look a day over 80 and his wife Vicky (who has been a nurse for 37 years) was some three decades younger than him.  The African-American gentleman, who had served in the navy during the 2nd World War and has a pacemaker, was in the hospital for a hernia operation, which went well. A day later, he was already able to walk faster than me, and by the third day was singing a song behind the dividing curtain!

My next bedroom companion was Jim, 79, who had worked in the grocery and then the real estate industries. He and I had so much fun. At one time he made a joke about a sly talking parrot, and the ensuing laughter caused me great pain, but it was worth it! One day when I was feeling better, I called to the nurses that they should take photos of us and use them for the hospital poster campaigns, as we represented genuinely happy, smiling patients.

Jim, doing an arm exercise to help the time go by

It’s funny how your whole outlook as a patient depends on your nurses. Friendliness is one thing, and important, but more crucial is whether this person will react quickly and effectively in an emergency. In a 24-hour period, you will have three different shifts of nurses attending you and you will instinctively trust some more than others. Lori, our night nurse, was my favourite. From Alabama, and with a self-confessed obsession for buying any furniture on Craig’s List she can get her hands on, she was very kind, humorous and dealt very effectively with my middle-of-the-night pain episodes.

My daily walks helped my intestines settle again!

An operation on the abdomen causes an awful lot of bloating and the best remedy is walking, however slowly. Part of my daily routines was getting up to amble along the corridors, where i became a regular sight. Dressed in a robe, and walking in a slow, almost majestic way, I rather felt like a parading emperor and would have practised my regal wave, had it not been for the cushion I clutched against my stomach like a teddy bear. On the first of these jaunts, I saw daylight for the first time in three days. It was a glorious sunny day and a blissful sight!

Other “firsts” that created equal rapture included the first time I was able to sit in a chair after days in bed, my first solid meal ( in four days). Another was on my final morning, when I was able to have a shower – the first in five days – heaven! And of course  – my discharge from hospital.

A road trip to Joshua Tree

For my blog entry this time, I want to show you some of the photos of our trip down to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California. My friend Clement and I hired a Beetle and drove down the Pacific highway, via L.A. and Venice Beach. Joining our friend Matt in the Park, we camped in this beautiful part of the world for three nights. We then drove back to San Francisco, a beautiful journey that took 15 hours!

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Recording…

I sit here in my little apartment in San Francisco and, headphones on, listen to the beginnings of what will be the Spoken Jay EP. After spending 20 hours over a whirlwind weekend tracking guitars, keys, percussion, drums, bass and vocals, we have come up with something that I am excited about.

Practising the chords before recording

Spoken Jay is the band which has become a collaboration between Dan Blum and myself. Together, we have come up with and crafted the songs, spending hours and hours before even reaching the studio, getting everything ready and structured so we know what we’re doing with the songs once in front of the mics.

As I think back over our time spent at Broken Radio, a recording studio where R.E.M and Tom Waits have recorded, I feel great. We had twice been unsuccessful in trying to find a date and studio that would accommodate everyone. Then, finally a few months after our initial planned recording, we were able to get a slot to record in one of the best studios in San Francisco!

It all started on Saturday evening at around 6pm, when we arrived at what is an innocuous-looking building on a scruffy downtown street, and started setting up the drums and mics in the main room. It may sound strange to a non-musician, but the space at Broken Radio sounds amazing. Due to its design and layout, it just seems to capture sound in such a pure way.

In the control room

But it was the team effort that made everything possible. Gabe and Ryan were the engineers ensuring everything was sounding good. Jeff (bass), Dan (drums) and I (guitar) jammed out the songs and then it was time to do the overdubs, ie layering certain guitar and other sounds.

Dan is a talented musician and throughout the weekend, he played drums, Rhodes, organ, piano and even tried his hand at backing vocals. I focused on mere guitars –  and a shaker!

However, throughout all the excitement of creativity and experimentation, the highlight of the two days for me was when the whole team along with a couple of guests gathered round a single mic to sing some backing vocals on one of the choruses.  It was a deeply moving experience (even though we stood still). Here were friends all facing each other, singing the lyrics to my song.

It was a beautiful moment.

And then we all stood round in a circle and sang

Suffice to say we still have a lot of work to do, but we are on track and I, for one, am looking forward to letting you hear these songs, once released to the world… so watch this space!

 

In the studio - Dan working out a part on the organ

Seven Layers…

It’s a very special experience witnessing how your songs develop and grow, from the seed of creativity to a blooming plant that in some cases can expand out of control while in others, will become beautiful.

Seven Layers of the Soul came to me after I went to see a spiritual adviser, not long after I moved to San Francisco. I know it sounds very new age, but I was curious to arrange a consultation with this woman, as she had been recommended to me by a friend from here, whose opinion I trust, and I needed some guidance.

I cycled down (and of course, up) to the posh Cow Hollow neighbourhood where she has her practice, and sat in a chair opposite her, not knowing quite what to expect. She closed her eyes and literally read my soul!

She told me that some believe that our spirit has layers or auras – seven to be precise. For each layer that she unpeeled, she described exactly what was troubling me in my life. She said people’s souls or higher self – including mine –   paint pictures for her which she then interprets. No two images are the same, she said.

In my case, she described buzzing insects around my head, and how in one vision, she saw me standing next to a horse, dressed in armour.

The next morning I woke up with all these images in my head and got an overwhelming desire to write them down. As I did so, I felt I needed to turn this into a song and, picking up a guitar, I just stumbled across the chords that seemed to go perfectly with the words.

Fast forward a few months to January 2011. Having tracked the vocals, bass, guitars, tonight was the second evening in a row that Dan Blum (my musical partner) and I have been working on some of the minutiae of the song. Like carving a sculpture out of a tree, we chipped away, reversing and adding sounds, getting rid of unwanted knots, creating swells that introduce another section, slowly shaping the raw material into something artistic and (hopefully) enjoyable to listen to. We aimed to create details that are subtle but not boring, diverse but not overly-complex and above all, unexpected.

These four-hours sessions have been particularly exciting and Seven Layers will be the first single that Dan and I release. Watch this space.

American excitement

A seemingly American trait I have observed many times since moving to the US is  – “whooping”. By this, I mean a vocal demonstration of excitement characterized by a “whoo” uttered by a woman or man (the latter generally using a falsetto voice). Whooping is brought on by any event that causes spontaneous excitement. Obviously, sporting events naturally induce this reaction in fans, but other little random events in every day Californian life also seem to generate these squeals of excitement.

And so, standing in line at 9h30am on a Wednesday morning in the lift queue at a ski resort called Kirkwood, some four hours east of San Francisco by car, I heard whooping.  You see, this was a perfect powder day, one of those rare natural occurrences  when you are served a plentiful portion of powder snow to ski on, and blue sky.  For skiers and especially snowboarders – this is something very, very, exciting. It was not surprising, therefore, that as we waited for the chairlift to open and saw above us a perfect mountain with all its virgin snow, we were getting excited. Naturally, the whoop whoop erupted as the lifts opened.

But having the role of instigating whooping is a whole new ball game. Last week I was entrusted this responsibility in a forum that often calls for this form of expression – the filming of a live TV show. The show called California Live Mic, featured a series of live concerts and was filmed in a music studio called Loudville, located in Sausalito just north of San Francisco.

Loudville is an awesome place. As well as having studios used for voice overs and other commercial work, its main live area  (which houses a grand piano) is used to film and record this live music performance that features some very talented artists from the area. Using great mics and an extremely professional set-up, the sound is recorded in Pro Tools then sent out to a Final Cut session, where it is added to the video images, then streamed out as a live 75-minute show on the internet.

This is where the show was filmed

My job was to make sure everything was running smoothly upstairs, where some 30 invited guests watched the show below from a balcony area. At predefined moments,  the remote-controlled cameras would pan upstairs and it was important that, especially at those times, the crowd were cheering and (at least seen to be) enjoying themselves. This involved a lot of motivational whooping/clapping-inducing techniques and briefing the audience as much as possible, telling them what was coming up next and how they should be conducting themselves.

I had a lot of fun and, as they consumed more alcohol, the job presented certain challenges (such as requests to visit the WC at inappropriate times)!

The studio also features an impressive array of the most fabulous paintings, all created by Loudville owner Mark Keller, who presents the show. After the event, he showed me some of his works. “For this one [featuring an elderly man playing a guitar], I used my hands as models,” he explained. He showed me another, featuring tango dancers in the streets of Argentina.

But as the studio lights were dimmed and after a heady mix of great music, art and whooping, it was time to go home.

Climbing the career mountain

A few years ago when I worked as a journalist, I did my first pitch to the BBC for a radio interview of two men who had just become the first brothers to reach the summit of Everest together. Ben and Tom are my friends, making the interview easier, and after hearing about their adventures and misadventures (Ben suffered severe frostbite on four of his toes), I asked Tom how he was able to do it.

“It’s all about small steps,” I remember him saying. You focus on a rock a few metres ahead of you and focus your energy into getting there, he explained. Once you arrive, you pat yourself on the back, then set your sights on the next landmark and so on. It had immediately occurred to me that this is what life is like, and recently, in the same way, I am realising more and more that to build anything, you need to do so piece by piece.

Take the world of music for instance. Long gone are the days when someone comes up to you and says “Hey I love what you do, let me support your endeavour (and give you a fat cheque)”.  This last sentence might seem somewhat hyperbolic, but the fact remains that, in the heyday of the music industry, a label A&R guy (aka a music scout) might attend your concert and on liking the band may well approach you afterwards, eventually offering you a record deal.

As we all know, this is no longer the case.

Today more than ever, it is about personal contact: building up individual relationships one at a time either in person or on social networking to get your stuff heard and appreciated. Every one you meet could be your future colleague, producer or band member. Word of mouth is still a hugely important way of spreading your reputation or music and no less so through Social Networking and Twitter. These are also building blocks.

Last week I had a meeting with Pyramind composer Paul Lipson.  Despite being extremely busy, he managed to find half an hour to answer some of my questions and give me some pointers on what it takes to be a composer. He told me the following true story.

A cello player is practising in a rehearsal room at one of the best music conservatories in the country. The cellist focuses on some simple notes and  plays them repeatedly, seemingly struggling to get the right sound. This is a school of elites – among the best in the world – and two mocking musicians outside the small space joke about how someone can be struggling at this level on such basics. Suddenly, the music stops, the door opens and out comes the best concert cellist in the school. She smiles as she walks past them and takes a break.

The point is this  brilliant musician uses her practice time to do just that – practise the parts of her rendition that she struggles most with. Paul suggested that as a composer you should rejoice in sounding terrible while practising so that when the time comes for you to perform, you excel.

He gave me several other invaluable tips such as how to read clients, how to have high standards but not too high, and not spending too much time making decisions with your music (or anything else for that matter).  However, in my view, his most  notable advice was about mastering your fear.

Tom and Ben as they climbed up the last few hundred metres in mind-numbing night temperatures of -50 degrees were scared yes, but what could they do but carry on up, step by step until they reached the top? The same applies to our daily lives, and in a sense Paul translated this mountain story to ordinary life. Everyone is afraid, but it’s about not letting it paralyze you, he said. And just as Tom had explained to me, this composer who himself attended the same college as the cellist where he practised eight hours a day, told me it’s all about little successes and rewarding yourself as you climb up this treacherous mountain.

This adventure in music

“I will never again listen to music in the same way”. These were the words I would often hear uttered by fellow students who were a few months into the course when I first arrived.

Well I now know what they mean.

Six months into the programme at Pyramind, and my own perception of music has radically changed. Being blessed with a discerning ear, I have for many years been able to pick out a bass line in a track, or noticed an interesting ride pattern on a drumkit in a song, but now I have reached a place where I am beginning to understand what happens behind the scenes in both live musical performance and CDs. There is so, so much more to music than I had ever imagined. Bearing in mind that a sound wave is a three-dimensional waveform that can be born in many different frequencies and travels through anything but a vacuum, I now catch myself regularly thinking about sound in a visual as way as aural way when I wander down the street and hear traffic, go to a live concert or am in the recording studio.

Take Friday night for instance.  I experienced something that no one living here should miss out on – a concert at the Fillmore. I saw Mavis Staples but, before talking about my musical adventure listening to her,  let me first set the scene.

The historic San Francisco venue on Fillmore street is legendary. As you enter you are are faced with a container of red apples, that are free. I asked one of the stewards about this and he told me that the late Bill Graham, founder of the venue, was all about giving to the audience, and the gift of an apple was one way of endorsing this.

The Fillmore is the place that all musicians want to perform at, as all the big names have played there. Janis Joplin, Santana, Miles Davis, The Who. You name it, they have performed in this 1200-capacity hall. To prove it, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of posters that advertise these bands’ gigs in the bar upstairs. Each are as colourful and psychedelic as the next: rows upon rows of beautifully designed posters, some dating back to the sixties, line the walls.

This was my first time here and who better to see perform than Mavis Staples. This 71-year-old black lady who is sparkling with energy is a Gospel/ soul singer with a deep voice and a big heart. Seeing her joke with the audience, shake some of their hands, and introduce her musicians with such pride, and above all singing the most beautiful songs about resilience and strength (she is a big player in the civil rights movement), I equated her performance to something similar to seeing Aretha Franklin. The whole gig was like a family get-together for the star. She invited some of her friends on stage to sing (Billy Bragg who opened for her, joined in on one of her songs). She also let her band jam out for three tracks by themselves (they are awesome musicians) in the middle of the concert as she rested to the side of the stage. Often, she would speak to the audience and throw out knowing grins to  someone in the crowd, as she caught their smile.

And then the acoustics! The sound that came out of the speakers and joined the wonderful acoustics of the room, were a joy to the ears. With my newly-formed perception of music, I found myself observing the sound engineer at the rear of the room and watched how, with his head down, he controlled the whole show with eight fingers resting on faders, his head down and his ears obviously alert. I could see one of the backing singers at times playing a tambourine, or a guitarist changing guitars – something that an engineer would take into account in the EQ ing (the frequencies he will include in the mix).

I have so much more to tell about my musical adventures – concerts, festivals, as well as some of the talent on my course and will write about some of these musical experiences I have had in the weeks to come. In the meantime If you like this blog, let me know! It will inspire me to write more often…

Ten cool things I like about about San Francisco

– The 60s retro trams that are still in operation in this city. All are different colours (yes, sorry that’s how we spell ‘colour’ in the UK) and they are so, so groovy! Love ’em.

– The Kabuki movie theatre off Fillmore where, on certain evenings each week, you can take alcohol and food into the cinema. The seats are huge, very comfy and are paired up, plus have tables in between them – a nice nesting place for a fresh gin and tonic. It’s like being in First Class. The movie I watched – the American – was 13 dollars, so good value!

– Getting around on foot: unlike some American cities, this is a walking city and you can hike pretty much all over the city. Watch out for the hills though. Some are so steep that the sidewalk has steps on it! Plus I love the way the name of the street is ingrained in the concrete beneath your feet so you have less chance of getting lost when you’re drunk.

– The spontaneous live music you inadvertently stumble across as you stroll around San Francisco. I particularly like listening to an awesome jazz band that plays on Sunday mornings next to the Farmers’ market off Fillmore, but there also a handful of open mic nights and plenty of gigs (still haven’t been to the famous Fillmore to see a show though!). A couple of weeks ago, a 50-year-old man with purple-tinged hair set up his sparkling drum kit on the promenade in front of the beach and started playing. He was rocking out!

I love that the dog is getting shirty with the drummer

– The fact that there is ALWAYS something going on here, so much so that you are spoilt for choice. Oftentimes there is a free music festival of some sort, flea markets spring up randomly, and sometimes whole neighbourhoods shut down their streets to cars and stage concerts, food stalls, bars (it’s called Sunday streets).

– Dolores Park when it’s sunny. Certainly in my time here, it’s been pretty rare to experience a perfect sunny day, but when this happens about ten days a year, a fun place to chill is Dolores Park! Located in the Mission district, this park gets packed. The patch of grass on a slope  that overlooks the city is mostly populated by hipsters. These “trendy” scenesters  invariably show off multiple tatoos, have their keys on a chain on the exterior of their trousers, and wear skin-tight jeans. But, as well as these dudes, there is a colourful many other types of people of all shapes and sizes. Last time I was there, a guy with a mohawk was openly selling cookies containing dubious ingredients (OK, they contained hash). Another musician had brought his whole drum kit, set it up on the grass and was jamming with his band. Then there was a hula hoop session where hips were swinging. Everyone is there to have a good time and there are picnickers, revellers, and it’s a really great people-watching place to hang out.

– Spontenous sales of random household goods: in San Francisco you can pretty much dump any possession (within reason) on the street and someone will probably make it theirs. This is a fabulous form of recycling while allowing someone else to benefit from your cast-offs. For instance, tired of sitting in the same office chair? Just leave it in the street – someone will be glad of it. I have found some cool stuff. My office chair, plates and two bedside tables (none of which are shabby) I found on the street.

– In the same vein, anyone is allowed to spontaneously have a garage sale or lay out on the pavement the items they want to sell. This you see a lot.

– I know I have mentioned it before, but Golden Gate Park is a really great place to hang out on a weekend. There are rollerbladers congregating in a designated spot who dance round to music, there are runners, dog-walkers, cyclists, dance lessons, a drum circle. You name it, it’s there.

– Critical Mass – once a month hundreds and hundreds of cyclists get together and cycle through the city as a protest to gas-guzzling vehicles. They disrupt the traffic and annoy more than one driver!

– The architecture, including the GG bridge (I know, that’s eleven things).

Colours of the buildings= I like.

10,000 hours

I know, it’s been a while since I last wrote! So I am grabbing this opportunity to set down my thoughts in between two stints of piano practice. I have a test tomorrow on scales, arpeggios etc. so been stroking the ivories! (no am not referring to my teeth although I have been grinding them). Sitting in front of my two screens and make-shift home studio,  I am listening to Pandora.com, one of my favourite music websites (check it out if you don’t know it – you type in a name of a band you like and it then conjures up a playlist of all the similar-sounding music it can muster).

So what’s been happening in my life? Well things are gradually getting harder on my course. I seem to be in a permanent state of excitement and despair. Excitement at learning some cool things, like how to create some awesome sounds and how to sample and distort weird and wonderful audio; despair, in fits and starts, at being overwhelmed with information. We are currently learning about everything form the inner workings of compression plug-ins, to virtually re-wiring the back of a software sequencer and sometimes my head feels like it is about to explode.

But all in all, am learning that I just have to trust myself, trust my abilities and not expect to understand all this right away. It will sink in, I am told. I am also reminded on a daily basis by observing other students and those that are successful, that without pain there is no gain. They say that a master of his/her art puts in somewhere in the order of 10,000 hours of work. That requires a total commitment to your passion.

Was freaking out yesterday about how much I still have to learn but it’s all about small steps and I realised this when I went swimming. When I first started moving through the water, I felt sluggish and my muscles ached. But after getting into it, I started to feel better, stronger and after a fashion was totally focused and effortlessly propelled myself forward. I feel and hope that my music production skills will progress in a similar way!

Last week I also attended a number of very interesting lectures and events. Paul Lipson, who is a composer at Pyramind, the music production company and school where I study, gave us a talk on his life and career.

It was very inspiring.

He told us how he decided to get into music from a very young age and ended up in  one of the top colleges in the country with the best of the best, playing guitar, where he practised eight hours a day. He is now a successful composer. Something he told us particularly resonated in me. He said he had been scared many times throughout his career, for instance when he would have to deliver a huge score for a film or video game. He admitted he had experienced self-doubt too but said that such fear had to be faced and you couldn’t let it get the better of you or it would destroy your creativity. The solution, he believed: to know yourself and have a solid musical foundation to rely on. So that is what I am working on.

I have also been mapping out my career further. We have some teachers here that really want us to be successful so they are imparting all the knowledge they can to set us on our way. So, one of my immediate projects is to release my Spoken Jay material digitally and promote it. Watch this space (in the meantime listen here: http://soundcloud.com/spoken-jay/sets). Comments and feedback welcome!

Still loving this city! This place is inspiring!

Encounters at a weekend farmers’ market

Picture an old lady in her eighties clad in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers, playing an unusual looking guitar while activating a dancing wooden cat automaton with her foot. She is surrounded by small children who are loving the 1920s jazz sound emanating from her cassette player, the performance, and especially the cat with its arms that swing round. As she strums along to the music, she occasionally looks up from underneath her baseball cap and smiles.

This is one of a handful of farmers’ market in San Francisco and as well as the fabulous fresh organic produce you can buy here, you sometimes encounter some great characters. Jackie Jones is one of them. As I watch her play I notice that her instrument seems to be constructed out of an old washboard, an observation the octogenarian confirms later after I crouch down and talk to her. She shows me how she assembled the six-string instrument by buying a neck of an old Taylor guitar and fixing it to a narrow extended wooden block that she then screwed onto the washboard. « Once washing machines arrived I didn’t need this any more but didn-t want to throw it out,» she says. Acquiring an old bridge and single pick-up that used to belong to a fifties Fender Jaguar guitar, she then added the strings and hooked up the electric wiring to a switch and volume control.

She tells me she started playing at this farmers’ market, located in a parking lot next beside the freeway, 11 years ago when she received her first social security cheque, and says she is glad to at last be her own boss, despite regretting not owning an iPod to select the songs more effectively. Then out of the blue, she says: « Every day I want to spend as much time as possible making music».

I found this very touching. Here is a woman who was still young at heart. She is a good guitar-player, is as sharp as a tack, and still lives for her passion, which undoubtedly keeps her going. This is how I feel about music.

Wandering from stall to stall you’ll not go far before meeting someone friendly who will try and sell you blood red oranges, rainbow chard (a type pf spinach) or several varieties of hummus. Two smiling stall workers explain they left their farm not far from Santa Cruz at four this morning to get here for the opening of the market at 6am. The story is probably the same at most stalls.

After doing the rounds and stocking up on vegetables we are drawn to the sound of a djembe playing. As we approach a guy who, sitting in front of his drum, pounds away and smiles. I join in and we jam. Later we meet Aisha, the Guanaean woman who imports these instruments from her country. She flashes her perfect white teeth often and calls me her brother. Aisha is a beautiful African lady dressed in a yellow ethnic dress, has perfect dreadlocks and with her thick African accent says she has been coming to America on and off since she was nineteen – twenty years ago. « I am princess Aisha and come from Tamale, » she proclaims. I mention in passing that Ghana is, as we speak, playing the US in the World Cup but she is blissfully unaware of any such match, expaining that she has no television. Instead, she introduces us to Chris, the djembe player. He is a very peaceful guy and a Yoga teacher. «Chris is a good person – I felt this when I first met him, » she says.

I look forward to returning to this market for the great organic vegetables and fruit, but also because each week there is a drum circle at Aisha’s stall.