Tag Archives: singing

Singing Man

By Posted in Life, Music Tagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Walking to shule early on a shabbat morning in spring, walking along, swinging along, here’s my neighbour approaching, walking along, swinging along, along with Jarrah his handsome, brainless hound.
‘Hello Hugo.’
‘Hello Howard.’
We discuss the terror raids. A Sydney paper runs the headline: SYDNEY UNDER SEIGE. I wonder aloud about a climate of alarmism. Hugo trusts the government to protect the people. I trust any government to protect itself. We agree to disagree.
‘Bye Hugo.’
‘Bye Howard.’

Walking long, swinging along Meadow Street, swinging towards the park, there’s a man ahead of me, singing. He’s walking along, singing along, singing aloud, singing with sunny uncaring, his ears clasped by headphones. A brown man, tall, a head of tight dark curls, his voice ringing out in the swinging morning.
I walk behind and I wonder. What is this singing, what the tongue, what type of singing? Some droning, drawn-out notes, long phrases, thick gutturals: might be mid-eastern, might be something different..
I swing faster, draw alongside, address the singing man; ‘What are you singing?’
The singing man smiles, stops his singing, removes his earphones. ‘Listen’, he says, his accent unemphatic, possibly sub-continental. He clasps my ears with his ‘phones. Soft rushes of sibilant sounds – unaccompanied percussion – fill my ears.
‘That’s not the music, that’s just the rhythm, the backing. I make the music, my song…’
‘Is the song your own? Do you compose it?’
‘Yes.’ Another smile. “I will record it in a sound studio, make a tape and try to sell it.”
‘What are you singing about?’
‘A beautiful girl, so beautiful she shames the sun.’
‘Will you sing it for me?’
The man smiles, replaces his earphones, bursts into song, full-throated, and we swing together along Meadow Street. The singing man creates waves of sound, rhythmic, patterned. I can discern the lines, pick out sound rhymes.
It is lovely.
‘Will you translate for me?’

‘” Do not go out ino the sun, my beauty,
Do not go into the sun;
If you go into the sun, my beauty,
The sun will look pale,
You will shame the beauty of the sun”‘

‘Thank you. That is beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’

We swing together along Meadow Street. When we reach the corner, I say goodbye. ‘Good luck with your song.’
I turn the corner, heading for the park and for shule beyond.
The man calls to me, ‘Have a good shabbat.’

Meeting Moses in the Wilderness

By Posted in First Australians, friendship, Life, Short stories Tagged , , , , , , , 7 Comments

A winter’s afternoon in a northern outback town. The sun broiling my white skin in the current slow-roast mode. At the taxi rank outside Coles I stand, waiting, midst my regretted plastic bags filled with food purchases. A few metres distant stands a compact Aboriginal lady with her bags, also waiting for a cab. A roaring from the middle of the street, busy with Friday afternoon traffic. The roars emerge from the centre of a bearded black face. The face sits atop a tall and rangy frame. Long limbs convey trunk and roaring face across the street between moving vehicles that pass and part as the Red Sea waters. Mister Beard’s legs weave in a singular, sinuous, almost swimming gait. He makes shore just beyond the waiting lady, who half turns to him, speaks a quick, quiet word to him, at which he desists from his roaring.

As the man passes the woman his whispered promise to her drifts on the warm air to my ears: “No humbug!”

Approaching me now the man is taller and wider than I appreciated. His articulated body parts have a folding, telescoping tendency, now unseen, now seen briefly, in the fluidity of his motion. The man stops at half a metre distant, I atop the kerb, he on the roadway. He bends forward, lowering a shaggy head to the level of my face. “Goood Afternooon”, he croons winningly, his large and elastic lips sliding into smiling. “I will tell you my story, story of my country.”
The man checks his speech to extend an upper limb towards me. The hand that grasps my own (size eight surgical glove, “large” in an operating theatre) hand now hides mine entirely. Soft, cool, its palm a pale honey shade, that expansive hand shakes my own: “Welcome to country”, it says.
The winning voice speaks again: “What is your name, sir?
“Howard.”
“Howard – a good name: the Prophet Howard. I am” – a deep bow, the crooning speech – “I am Mohhses…the Prophet Howard and the Prophet Moses!”
“Well Moses, it’s good to meet you. And Moses is a good name, a very good name. I am not so sure about the Prophet Howard. The last Howard leader we had was John Howard.
Moses’ wide face contracts in thought, opening again into full flowering grin: “No, not so good really”. A gust of laughter blows a fruity aromatic breeze to my nose.
“Sir – Howard – would you lend me two, three dollars?”
My brain falters as my hand dives to the bottom of my hip pocket where the coins gravitate during shopping.
“Just four dollars, five.”
My thinking self doesn’t buy alcohol for a drink-ruined man. But here he is, ‘Mohhses’, in his large physicality, in his irresistible humanness. Here he stands, but a breath distant from me.
Human impulse and slow judgement wrestle within me, a longish bout apparently, for now Moses moves unexpectedly, half a step backwards, as his knees flex, his torso descends, his head recedes downwards, down toward the tarmac.
A sudden shout breaks from me as my arms grasp and yank the man’s shoulders: “No! No! Moses don’t you ever do that! Don’t you kneel before me.”
The man rises. His rueful grin concedes, “well, that ruse didn’t work”. My own voice, murmuring now my small mean thoughts, “Moses, I don’t think you really mean I should ‘lend’ you money. Don’t you mean ‘give’?”
The face is at rest, now pensive, now lit anew: “I will sing you a song. My song. I come from Kohhhlahhhmbarooo.”
Moses pauses as he feels the weight of a cluster of small brazen coins entering his palm from mine.

Now the man sings. Listening acutely for the secrets of country, I stand poised on the pavement, even as my cab approaches.
The singing voice is sweet, the phrases protracted, Moses in motion with the rhythm of the song and the ruin of his proprioception. The honeyed voice, draws sound from the great body, sound that flows and undulates in no tongue familiar to my ears.
The cab is upon me, an electric window slides down and a Philippino face asks me, “Where to, mate?”
And Moses sings on. Now the words take shape. “Do nooot forsaaaake me, o my daaaarling…”
I thank the man from Kolamburu and hide my hand in his. We shake, I reclaim my limb and climb into the car. As we drive away, Moses sings on, “On this ouuuuuur wedddddding daaaaaay….”

You are Invited

By Posted in Books, Howard's published work, Life, Music, My Father's Compass Tagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Once upon a time a redheaded warbler sang a song to a crowd of people gathered to hear her and readings from a book about two redheaded twins. As she sang the crowd chewed on antithetical foods – carrots and Jaffas, small, red spheroids of joy.

The singer was Clare Bowditch, songwriter, mother of twins-plus-one, social activist, actor, philosopher and articulate introspector.

The reader was Howard Goldenberg, author, marathon runner, marathon eater, marathon talker. He read (affectingly) from his new book, a novel about “Jaffas” and his identical twin “Carrots”, two boys who grow with souls enmeshed. One is kidnapped and the two must struggle to find how to lo live as individuals. The author makes them and their parents suffer; he makes the reader suffer; and after adventures in the Aboriginal outback (in ‘country’), Howard allows all (or almost all) to trace an arc of redemption.

The crowd had come to Readings in Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn, not to eat lollies, nor to chew on root vegies, but to hear and see Clare, to be near her in the intimate space (one of Melbourne’s sacred sites) of Readings bookshop.

Why Clare? Becauser of her twins? Because of old friendship between singer and author going back to her teen years? Because the singer – like the boys in “Carrots and Jaffas” lost a sibling in early childhood? Because of red hair?

The true reason is the Bowditch heart, the same that pulled in the crowd. The heart that can say, “I’ve had enough claps” and “I’ve always drawn from the pool of suffering for my art.”

As Emily Dickenson says: I like a look of suffering/because I know it’s true.

Clare Bowditch sings true songs. In the same way “Carrots and Jaffas” is a true story.

Did I say the event has taken place? That part was not true. It is still to come:

READINGS HAWTHORN, THURSDAY 22 MAY AT 6.30 FOR 7.00 PM. ALL WELCOME

Report from Womadelaide

By Posted in Life, Music, Travel Tagged , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Early visits to Womadelaide exposed audiences to plentiful Jewish song, to Ladino and Hebrew, to Jewish and Israeli musicians, cantors, singers and folklorists.

Since Israel’s Gaza operations I find the Womadelaide landscape depleted of that Jewish and Israeli richness. That portion of the landscape has narrowed, possibly as a pioneering and undeclared expression of BDS, possibly as a coincidence. Of late Jewish people have encountered a lot of coincidence.

***

The guitarist of Tinpan Orange walks quietly onto the stage, as one might who lacks a foreskin.

I know his state: I circumcised him. (Does Womadelaide realise?)

The prepuceless one sings discreetly, sweetly, alongside the keyboardist and the violinist, as Emily his sister, publicly pregnant and wearing fruit and flowers in her hair, takes centre stage.

I know and love them so I have nothing dispassionate to say about this group, but the Frenchman sitting next to me on the grass murmurs his pleasure in the small quietness that follows every song.

At the conclusion of the concert the Frenchman stands and stretches, and we exchange slow smiles as we do after sleeping on a plane; as we do

upon waking with a person whose name we will never know, one with whom we have shared an hour of pleasure. The Frenchman says: I am at this festival three days now, and I listen to many concerts. This one is the most beautiful. This is the best, with Hanggai.

Hanggai is a gaggle of old Mongols that fiddle and bellow and sing. A couple of men of picturesque antiquity occupy either extremity of front stage wearing rags that upon closer examination are national dress. The two bow their traditional fiddles with a solemnity that belies the leaping tempi of their tunes. Behind them are instrumentalists, half-seen, whose clamorous attack upon percussion never amounts to an assertion of personality or individuality. The bellows at centre stage is a weight lifter, semi-nude in his cut-away jerkin of dyed and carved cowhide. His latissumus dorsi and pectoralis muscles are exclamation marks, his biceps are upper case. He strides to and from the edge of the stage, a lion pacing out his territory, his voice a roar.

He enjoys a good deal of self-approval in his imagined kingdom. We in the audience are charmed and amused.

And then Hanggai sings. A drone flows and rises from somewhere, higher notes join with a pounding bass, rhythmic sounds gain power and tempo, building and building to a pitch that swamps physiology: my chest is an echo chamber that pounds and vibrates to a beating from without. What is that sound? That deep, deep vibration coming from under ground, or rumbling from clouds unseen? On it drones, constant yet syllabic, hinting at a human source.

I glance to the thin old men, seated, as all leap and throb and swing about them. Sedate, studious, swinging chicken wing arms in their bowing, fiddling and singing.

From one of the two that sound emerges, that throat singing which is the group’s aural autograph. The throat releases its unearthing power through a mouth that smiles withal. I rest my pleasuring eyes upon the fiddlers: their eyes, their sparkling eyes, are gay. 

Carminho is introduced as a fado singer. She personifies (as I am informed by the braziliophone seated behind me) a classic grammatical contradiction. That is, “fado” signifies a singer is in the masculine gender while this singer is feminine. Every line, every phrase of her Portuguese lament (never really a song) seems to end in the “u” sound (heard as in “tutu”, but spelled “o”, the suffix of the masculine). After applause that never rises beyond the perfunctory, the singer thanks us: “Obligattu/o”. A woman would properly say “Obligatta”, murmurs the braziliophone. The singer is a woman lamenting, even thanking, in a man’s grammar.

I sit on the grass, one of a teeming multitude, all steaming in the Adelaide heat. The woman starts with a moan that rises quickly to a scream, her willow frame erect even as her voice shakes and shrieks and dissolves into staccato sobs. Portuguese seems to be a relative of Spanish – here, greeting a loved one, Carminho sings buon dia, amor –(good day, beloved) – but the words lack the flowing sweetness of Spanish. Portuguese, at least in fado, must be chewed and swallowed or spat out. Fado, like the Argentine bandoneon, is an instrument without a single happy note. And that is what we have come here for. For the fado, the Portuguese cry of pain, of fate. But I find this singer lacking in depth. She lacks – or neglects – the lower vocal register. However all about on the grass are figures and faces that are rapt, absorbed. Only half engaged myself I muse upon the crowd. Here are olive-skinned faces old enough to remember sons, brothers, husbands, lost in the colonies, in the wars, in Angola and Mozambique. And here are African faces, African voices conversing in Portuguese: these might have been the colonized. Fado carries the griefs of their losses too.

Afterwards my family and I exchange impressions. I am the only one who feels disappointed. Remembering Maritza, haunted by Maritza who sang here four or five years ago, I experienced anti-climax today. For me, Maritza’s is the authentic sound: I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.

My family recalls Maritza too and concedes the difference. That’s why they enjoyed Carminho better. Carminho is not a complete stranger to the light, to human joy.

Finally, Pokey La Farge. Pokey is as good as his name. This man is the antithesis of the fado singer, his music the roughhouse stuff of mid-west America. Harmonicas wail and rattle, fiddles fiddle, other strings are plucked in a frenzy, while bow-tied in his chequered shirt and his braces, Pokey paces the stage exhaling his riotous self-satisfaction in rollicking song.

And we in the audience, we inhale it deeply. The only times a saw a crowd of people so deeply and broadly happy were 1968, 1990 and 2010. And on those occasions the heavens smiled too, for Collingwood had won the premiership.

Robert Hillman’s ‘Gurrumul’ – Review by Howard Goldenberg

By Posted in Books, Family, First Australians, Life, Literature, Opinion, Work by Others Tagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Gurrumul by Robert Hillman Publisher: ABC Books

Gurrumul by Robert Hillman
Publisher: ABC Books

If autobiography is the least reliable genre in fiction then the authorized Life sits at its flakiest edge. That this is not true of Hillman’s “Gurrumul” is on account of the slipperiness of the subject.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu emerges as shy, remote, elusive, cryptic, mischievous – an outer island in an archipelago of tongues. He does not so much emerge as submerge himself. Blind from birth, Gurrumul seems at times to be mute by choice. At others he makes himself perfectly clear to a whitefella, especially when working with his intimate collaborator, Michael Hohnen.

By book’s end Gurrumul remains hidden; only his music and the beauty of his features – a beauty we can enjoy and he can never perceive – speak to us.

No biographer could truly represent this life, (nor for that matter could he successfully misrepresent it). Wisely, Hillman does not attempt either. Instead he places the artist in his context. Chiefly that context is the complex of family (especially his bevy of aunties), community, land and Dreaming: in short, culture.

“Culture”, a term used promiscuously in conversations between the races, embodies meanings that are layered and expressed in dance, in music, in painting, in song, in storytelling and in land husbandry. The meanings are traditionally expressed obliquely, which is to say they are in part obscured. What Gurrumul does with these enfolded meanings appears to be a risky enterprise of his own, with calibrated departures from liturgical norms, a sort of jazz move in which he improvises within a theme and extends it beyond the limits of permitted custom.

Such a variation on a theme must be perceptible only to a tiny number of the millions who respond to Gurrumul’s music making. In this sense it is a secret, yet another, in  practice that skates ever along the outer edge of theunshareable.

When Gurrumul sings, whitefellas listen, enthralled. Literally, we are in a thrall, under a spell cast upon us by the spellbinding singer. We scarcely hear the words, we cannot parse them; and when we read their translations in Hillman’s book, the words in English are so simple as to appear banal: a profoundly false impression. And yet, and yet, we are transported. If beauty be truth, then truth is shown to us precisely as it is withheld. The subtlety of all this magic is clearly rendered in Hillman’s book.

To those who have read “My Life as a Traitor” and “The Rugmaker of Mazr a Sharif”, Hillman’s skill in rendering an alien culture will be familiar. It is in his later work, “The Honey Thief”, that Hillman manages to capture the artist in the act of working his art, in this case the sublime art of the Afghan (Azari) storyteller.

In the present volume Hillman attempts the extremely ambitious exegesis of the utterly untranslatable term, “Dreaming.” He succeeds, in this reader’s view, brilliantly. In twenty five years and over sixty working visits to remote Aboriginal communities, I have never felt I came so close to apprehending (I doubt any whitefella will ever comprehend) the Dreaming, as in Hillman’s “Gurrumul, his life and music.”

Hillman has succeeded remarkably in penetrating the life of art and ceremony (the two amount to much the same thing) on Elcho Island. Seven years ago while I worked on Elcho ceremony was active but off limits for whitefellas. Clearly Robert Hillman won the trust of capable cultural brokers on the island, who ‘let him in’ wherever this was permissible. In return, Hillman repays trust with respect that neither fawns nor condescends. In this his text avoids the vapid tone of comments on the book’s photographs.

Which leads me to the one regret I have about the book, a quibble perhaps, but an important one. In an important sense Hillman’s publisher subverts the author’s enterprise, which is to render in words an art that is ineffable. It is the format of the handsome volume that works against the writing. You look at the book, you find the cover images arresting – and to one familiar with the singing – quite new. The book itself cannot be held in the hand and read: it is biography in a coffee table format. You open the book, you start to read and you find yourself distracted repeatedly from the text by beguiling photographs which tell their own story quite compellingly, but quite out of sync with Hillman’s theme at any point.

Better justice might have been done to both text and photos by physically separating them.

In the end the book succeeds to a remarkable degree. Importantly, it demonstrates how, as whitefellas embrace Aboriginal culture, Australia is becoming more Australian.

Hillman’s book is bound to succeed beyond these shores as Gurrumul’s audiences around the world drink deeply in their thirst for some understanding of his life and his music.