Creativity and leadership: Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra

I went to see this wonderful band last week.  It was an absolutely brilliant concert: surprising, stimulating, awe-inspiring, tender, funny, and above all musical: it made me think again about tunes I thought I knew, and introduced me to wonderful songs new to me (in particular Blue Pepper by Duke Ellington, and I'll wait for you by Sun Ra).  The band consists of...wait for it....27 musicians (or thereabouts - there were also a number of mannequins positioned in and around the band, some of them apparently playing instruments, which made counting people difficult!): 9 brass and woodwind, 5 strings, 3 guitars, 2 keyboards, 4 drums, percussion and vibes, and 4 singers.  The music was eclectic (an overused word I know but absolutely precise in this case), encompassing Captain Beefheart, 'Library Music' (not sure what this is), Ellington, Coltrane, a reworked and even more doom-laden Ghost Town by the original Specials, cheerful ska classics, Edgar Broughton, Johnny Clarke, Dvorak, In the Bleak Midwinter, and especially the music of Sun Ra, pioneer and promoter of black consciousness and interplanetary travel, spiritual mentor and forerunner of George Clinton and Funkadelic.  Spatial AKA, like the Sun Ra orchestra, were kitted out in glittery and vaguely Egyptian robes, hairpieces, sunglasses and/or masks, arrived on stage piecemeal from amongst the audience, while making a collective sound like a gathering storm of didgeridoos (one instrument unaccountably absent from the proceedings).  They played continuously for three hours, and then for another half an hour out in the lobby as everyone was leaving!

Visually, the movements of the band members and their costumes were augmented by a strange set involving already mentioned mannequins, three of which were painted silver and suspended above the band as if flying, along with what I gradually realised was a small lunar module about to crash to earth.  Behind the band was a continuously changing and layered projection of slides, videos, and psychedelic lightshow, the like of which I haven't seen for years: it took me happily back to New Riders of the Purple Sage at Surrey University in about 1972!  But this backdrop wasn't just for decoration, it imparted a powerful cultural and political flavour to the music, so that even though there were almost no overt political statements or references during the set, the whole experiene was flavoured with a clear enough set of political messages and affiliations.

There were so many terrific musical and visual moments: Alcyona Mick playing whirlwind piano solos while apparently motionless, a kettle drum solo involving continuous de-tuning and retuning of the drums during the solo, wonderful ensemble arrangements and solos amongst the brass, woodwind and strings sections, complex textures added by percussion and vibes, and poetry and scat singing as well as a joyous impersonation of the late great Captain Beefheart by Edgar Broughton, himself something of a legend in his own lunchtime for those of us of a certain age, singing Frownland from Trout Mask Replica.  Johnny Clarke, the great Jamaican reggae singer, came on like a cheerful psychedelic Santa Claus, all in yellow and with locks reaching down to his calves!  For me the single best moment was Francine Luce singing Sun Ra's I'll wait for you, in memory of her father.  The band's website has a few short clips of music, and there are more on Youtube, but don't let anything stop you from seeing them live if you can.

Why am I writing about the Spatial AKA Orchestra here, in a blog focussed mainly on education?  Well, the sheer size of the band got me thinking about the kind of organisation needed to put a concert like this together, and this led on to a perennial topic of thought and conversation with me: the qualities needed by the people who run such enterprises.  I'd love to talk to Jerry Dammers about this: his must be an incredibly complex and difficult job.  He is thought of as a song-writer and arranger, but he's obviously much more than that.  The economics of big bands can't be easy: many, if not all, of the individual members of the Spatial AKA are absolutely at the top of the tree in their various specialisms, and they all need to make a living.  I read somewhere that Miles Davis's legendary Birth of the Cool septet only existed long enough to make a  single record, and didn't play any gigs, because even with only seven they couldn't earn enough in New York in the late 40s.  Ellington and Basie managed it somehow, but for them it may have been easier because popular musical taste demanded large dance bands, at least during some periods; that is hardly the situation in 2011.  Captain Beefheart's uncompromising vision led him, allegedly, to shut his band up for a year to practice, hardly feeding them anything, let alone paying them, until they were note-perfect on Trout Mask Replica.   The band-leader's job, apart from choosing and arranging songs (for 27 parts!), includes all the organisational issues of publicity and marketing, negotiating and agreeing contracts with concert halls and promoters, travel and accommodation (for 27!), and then, most interestingly of all, the people-management issues within the band itself.  There must be so many potential headaches among such a large group of creative people!  Is Jerry an Arsene Wenger, an Alex Ferguson, or an ashen-faced Ron Knee?  His musical arrangements depend for their success on the skills of all the individuals playing them: suppose some of them aren't so enthusiastic about them?  This is analogous to footballers having to play within the tactical system designed by their manager: we know all too well how easily confidence of the manager in the player's capability, or of the player in the manager's system, can be broken down - similar issues must arise in big bands too.

All of this points to the fact that an enterprise like the Spatial AKA Orchestra is no trivial project, and this makes me marvel all the more at last week's gig: it was a triumph not just of musical creation and re-creation, but of leadership and organisation too.  Each depends on the other.  Thanks to everyone involved!

'Minimally Invasive Education'

Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall Project

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Innovation - always a good thing?

Businesses, colleges, quangos, and government departments always aspire to innovate. Innovation is one of those words that seems to have no negative connotations - redolent of creativity, modernity, flexibility, responsiveness, and other buzzwords that offer similarly positive but essentially vague promises.

Of course innovation is a good thing, but, and this is my point, not in principle. A new product, system, policy, or piece of software may well be innovatory, in the sense that it breaks new ground technically, or generally does something or offers something that has never been done or offered before. But none of those qualities guarantee that the innovation is useful or productive.

Let's look at some examples. Utility companies, providing gas, electricity or phone services, continually bombard us with junkmail, text messages, or even personal callers, offering us 'new' payment packages, through which we may be able to save money. These packages are described as new and innovatory 'products', through which their services are being brought to a competititve market place. My point is that they may well be new and innovatory in some sense to do with the range of types of payment package on offer, but in fact they clutter up the market place so that it is actually harder for consumers to find the way to pay that suits them best. Far from being useful, they make life more difficult for consumers.

Most people agree that the world recession was caused by some of the banks behaving like gambling consortia. One of the ways they brought about the crash was by innovating. I've heard these innovations also described as 'products': they offered new types of
investment opportunity, based not on funding useful economic activity, but on the buying and selling of investment risk. These products may have been innovatory, but they also helped inflate the bubble that when it burst brought about the present financial crisis across the world.

In the world of policymaking, we have the intractable conundrum that while the most important social, political and economic problems are not inherently solvable in the short term, policy is expected to be developed and implemented within the lifetime of a government, ie 5 years maximum. New ministers want to make an impact quickly, so they are tempted towards 'innovatory' policies, not because they are useful or they are workable in practice, but because they sound good and give the impression that the minister is active and hands-on. This syndrome, of course is found not just within national and local government, but in all types of organisation, among senior and middle managers, who routinely change jobs more and more frequently. In the early days of New Labour, in the late 90s, I read this, written by a government adviser: 'Anyone who stays for more than two years in an organisation becomes a drag on that organisation.'

This kind of inanity represents tunnel vision about the future: anything new is good, anything old is bad. This is the language and thinking of thoughtless and irresponsible advertising agencies and snake-oil sellers. Innovation can get a bad name very easily, and that would be disastrous, because we need new ideas and inventions to help us solve the huge problems we face in relation to climate change, world poverty and inequality.

All new ideas should be welcomed, but not implemented until they have been evaluated for their utility: do they work, will they improve things, are they practicable and affordable, will they have any unintended side-effects? Don't hold your breath.