Ravinia 2021 - Issue 4

RA9INIA R8SSELL -EN.INS (3RE9I28S S3READ 723 RIGH7) RA9INIA -IM S7EERE (723 LE)7) BHQ )ROGV ɽUVW played Ravinia in 2004 OHIW DQG most recently in 201 ULJKW +LV SHSWHPEHU 1 concert will be his ɽUVW DW WKH IHVWLYDO with an orchestra. “Arts education is kind of the only real restart button we might have.” You quarantined in Australia, and in an interview you said, “I think everyone VKRXOG WU\ WR ɶQG DQ\ SRVVLEOH VLOYHU OLQLQJ LQ WKLV UHDOO\ FKDOOHQJLQJ, DZIXO moment in history. Hopefully we’ll come out of it with something we didn’t KDYH Ȉ OQH WKLQJ \RX FDPH RXW ZLWK ZDV WKH VRQJ ȇɠɟɠɟ Ȉ IW QDLOV ZKDW I, IRU one, felt about last year, with the lyric ‘What the actual fuck?’ And it’s a waltz. How did that song come about? I had spent some time with Ricki Lee Jones. I love Ricki. We had a summer of hanging out for whatever reason. It was awesome, and I learned a lot. She’s so brilliant. She knew I liked waltzes in my music. She said that if you want to emote something, but you kind of want to distance yourself from it a little bit, like the kind of person that would talk about the human condition rather than their own feelings and let people sort it out, the waltz is a nice kind of old-man way of stay- ing at arm’s length so you don’t get too messy. I thought that’s what this song needs; it doesn’t need someone wallowing in the year. You want to be able to say the things you feel about it, but still feel like you can have a little bit of a bittersweet laugh. Before writing it, I gave up the idea that it would stand the test of time. It ain’t for any other year. We don’t know what’s going to happen next year; it might be worse. I got tired of being afraid of writing a song for fear that the song would date itself before I could sing it. I think that’s a real problem, and part of the reason a lot of songwriters in our era are not writing topical, activist, news-oriented political songs. It’s simply because unless it’s a theme that is so much bigger—like writing for a monthly magazine as opposed to writing for the internet—if you’re a musician, it needs to be huge or go the fuck home. I wrote part of a song called ‘Four Seasons’ about the Four Seasons Landscaping incident. As I was writing it, I thought I could put it on the internet and it would be a thing for a day. Things are moving so fast. The whole point of the song was, as awful as things have been and as awful as the news is, boy, that sure gave me a laugh. People in Australia didn’t know about it. It wasn’t news over there because they’re actually report- ing news that might affect people’s lives. I would show people pictures of Rudy Giuliani next to a dildo shop and they would be, ‘Is that really happening?’ On your podcast, Lightning Bugs , you talk with creative artists about creativity and their processes. Have these conversations changed the way you create? It has given me an opportunity to hear different people’s takes on it. What I get out of working with other artists and talking to them, the main overarching theme I get out of it, is we’re all hacks. Like, seriously. You talk to any of us; none of us know what we’re doing. It’s shooting in the dark until something sticks. I look back at stuff I’ve made and I have no idea how I’ve done it. I’m glad I’m not on my own podcast, I couldn’t articulate it. You are very active in arts education, and even before the pandemic, it would EH DPRQJ WKH ɶUVW WKLQJV FXW LQ VFKRROV AIWHU D \HDU RI UHPRWH OHDUQLQJ, MXVW how important is arts education? Well, I think it’s as dramatic as this: It’s kind of the only real restart button we might have to civilization. People have to start listening and being able to com- municate in actual complete sentences, and complete sentences are done really well in the arts. We just don’t know how to deal in the novel environment we’ve created; we’re just not up to the task. What we need is to have a great reset where people learn how to communicate artistically and value creativity and get back to some storytelling or [there will be no getting any of it back]. Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times , Chicago Tribune , and Los Angeles Times , as well as on RogerEbert.com. The first Ravinia concert he attended without his parents was Procol Harum in 1970. classroom. This, for example, is the essence of Reach Teach Play’s Music Discovery Program: the teaching artists open the children’s ears and eyes to a world of music they might other- wise never encounter. The effect is transformative, according to Heather Smith-Van- duan, a teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School in the Tri-Taylor neighborhood on Chicago’s near southwest side. Ra- vinia has partnered with the school since 2009. Smith-Vanduan, now ,rvinJȅs resident Pusic teacher first encountered Raviniaȅs visiting artists while working at Irving as a teacher’s assistant and then as a third-grade teacher. “We had some wonderful artists from Ravinia,” she said. “All of them were fantastic. But this one artist, Matt Lewis, he was really like a rock star when he walked in the door. The kids would scream,” she added with a laugh. “He would walk in playing his guitar, and we would get started right away. It was like the sun walked in. The kids would just light up. The energy in the room was palpable.” SPith 9anduan first connected with the school which her children attended, in 1999 as a parent volunteer. She and her husband are longtime Tri-Taylor residents, and she’s noticed that many local parents send their children to private schools rather than Irving, their neighborhood public school. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 24