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Musicological Sparring, Courtesy of David Byrne and Questlove
By ALLAN KOZINN

Because making music is, at heart, a formidable acting job — in which the performer projects a stage persona that may not be much like what he or she is like offstage — public interviews with musicians can be a gamble. One way around that is to find a couple of players who come from different musical worlds, yet have things in common that might not be immediately apparent, and let them quiz each other for 90 minutes. And you can rig the game by choosing musicians who are secret scholars of musical arcana, and who enjoy a bit of musicological sparring. That was the Public Theater’s strategy on Tuesday evening, when it presented the first installment of its Public Forum series at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.

In one corner, wearing a burgundy pullover and clocking in at 60 years old was David Byrne, the front man and songwriter for Talking Heads, who has gone on to a remarkably varied career since the band’s breakup in 1991, and whose latest project is a show based on his 2010 album “Here Lies Love,” to be staged at the Public in April. In the other, sporting a gray sweater with a large, colorful heart pin and a metal comb stuck in his anarchic Afro, was Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, the 42-year-old drummer for the eclectic Philadelphia hip-hop and soul group the Roots, which performs nightly as the house band on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

Both were there in other capacities, too. Mr. Byrne is the author of “How Music Works,” a thick volume of musical reflections that was available, in a huge stack of autographed copies, in the foyer outside the hall. Questlove – or, as the moderator, Jeremy McCarter, addressed him at one point, Professor Questlove – is now teaching a course on classic albums at N.Y.U. He was engaged for that job, he explained during the forum, after he responded, firmly but patiently, to a dismissive review of a Public Enemy album by a young National Public Radio intern. Questlove will also have a book out soon: his memoir, “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove,” is due out from Grand Central Publishing on June 18.

Mr. Byrne’s book and Questlove’s course yielded the first potential fault line. Hadn’t Mr. Byrne suggested in his book that the creation and adoration of revered musical canon was a bad thing? Well, not exactly, Mr. Byrne said. He was “going after classical music,” not the pop canon that Questlove is teaching. And even at that, he said, “there’s some classical music that I really love, and some that I don’t get and I don’t think I will ever get.” What he really objects to, in fact, is “the subliminal thing going on, that listening to that music instead of the pop music I listened to, would make you a better person. It became this class thing.”

It was left to Questlove to defend the classics, which he did in an unusual way, noting that he had studied classical music, with his father’s encouragement, and had been accepted to the Juilliard School but decided to work with his rap group instead.

“It’s funny you say that,” he told Mr. Byrne, referring to the class issue, “because I had a teacher who could speak both languages. And I remember when we first started studying Stravinsky – the class trip was going to see ‘Rite of Spring’ – and he finally found a way to explain it to us.” His technique? He described Stravinsky as the Public Enemy of classical music. “For those who are unfamiliar with Public Enemy’s music,” Questlove added, donning his professor’s cap, “they wanted to be music’s worst nightmare, the hip-hop version of the Sex Pistols. Just cramming in samples one on top of the other until it didn’t sound like music anymore, it just sounded like a mess. They wanted their music to give that experience where, ‘this is what it’s like in the inner city.’ Once he explained it to us, we couldn’t wait.”

From there, the discussion roamed freely through musical philosophy and history. Mr. Byrne worried about the professionalization of music – the idea that young people were being discouraged from making music for the love of it and being taught that there was a professional class of musician whose job it is to create music and a consumer class whose job it is to listen. He and Questlove wandered through the creation of the New Wave scene in the late 1970s (Talking Heads enjoyed being part of it for a while, but later chafed at being categorized) and Questlove’s creation of a Philadelphia hip-hop movement, based on live jamming, 20 years later (he believed that the only way to create momentum was to bring like-minded but competing musicians together).

They spoke of reviews: Talking Heads was eager to read them, but Mr. Byrne now waits a year; Questlove checks his computer regularly to see how his projects are being rated. They mused on the nature of success (Questlove, speaking of the Roots, said, “we were never platinum” – meaning, huge sellers – “so our saving grace was our critical acclaim”) and about the genesis of Talking Heads’ “big suit” (it was the result of a Japanese fashion designer’s comment about everything being bigger onstage). Questlove marveled at the way techniques used in Mr. Byrne’s 1981 collaboration with Brian Eno, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” anticipated techniques used in hip-hop. And he held forth amusingly on his own long campaign, so far unsuccessful, to get Bill Withers to collaborate with him.

Probably the most striking moments of the discussion, though, were Questlove’s theories about musical education. One should, he argued, start young: he recently loaded up a couple of iPods for a friend with a new baby and attached it to speakers around the child’s crib. He would not say what was on the playlist, apart from Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, but he asked his friend to play the music around the clock. As for advice for older students, sought by a teacher in the audience, he took a strikingly traditional stand.

“I’m never that ‘follow your dreams’ guy,” Questlove said. “Because some people’s dreams will get realized and some dreams won’t get realized, so I kind of feel it’s dismissive – ‘Oh! Follow your dreams, kid, see you later!’ My radical advice is simple: you have to practice and you have to be organized. Which I know also sounds rather like bland, dismissive advice, but I think it’s true. If you look at all of history’s great figures, it’s discipline, practice, organization.”

NY Times: http://artsbeat.blogs.nyt...questlove/
Skirball Center: http://nyuskirball.org/ca...ublicforum

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