LETTERS FROM HOME: MUSIC IS LIKE ICE CREAM AND OTHER REVELATIONS

Oct. 31, 1996

Music is like ice cream and other revelations

Dear Julie,

Have you thought about the similarities between music and ice cream?

Corky Siegel thinks in that sort of way.

He's a child of the '60s who was part of one of the best blues bands around. Most rock 'n' rollers were exposed to the Chicago blues through the Siegel-Schwall Band. When the band took a sabbatical in 1974, it was front-page news in the Milwaukee Journal.

Along came Seiji Ozawa, asking Siegel-Schwall to jam with his band. His band, of course, being the Chicago Symphony. Together they played "Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra" by William Russo. Audiences stood and applauded.

Siegel has expanded on that epiphany with the San Francisco Symphony and other musical organizations that don't usually play blue notes.

The current experiment is called Corky Siegel's Chamber Blues, a show DC and I saw last weekend at Southern Illinois University. Siegel hammered on the piano and screamed through the scales on his harmonica, all accompanied by a traditional chamber group and a tabla player keeping Third World time.

We clapped until our hands ached. Partly because the music was thrilling and well played. And partly because the musicians broke through our sound barriers, made us hear the familiar from fresh angles.

I spoke to Siegel a few days before the concert. He said the barriers are psychological and social. That we use our musical tastes to say to ourselves and to others who we think we are. If we listen to hip hop we're cool and contemporary. Rap, we're tuned in. If it's blues, we're soulful, even though we may clap on the wrong beat. If it's classical music, we must be sophisticated. Or is jazz more sophisticated?

He's amazed that people wonder why this combination of instruments and idioms works.

That's because he thinks music is like ice cream.

"The reason when the words ice cream are spoken that everyone's eyes light up is not because of the flavors of the ice cream but because ice cream is sweet, cool and creamy," he says. "That's where the power in the ice cream lies.

"The flavors are really fun and great, but the real power lies in the essence of what ice cream is."

Many different flavors of people were in the audience having a similar good time. Hip professors and tweedy ones, high school boys and girls, blue jeans and suits. He says, "the wise as well as the newborn of all ages.

"...As they're sitting there they may think they've come for the classical part but they've really come for the blues."

Two sides of the same essence. The separations are fabrications meant to protect our self-image. They prevent us from experiencing the world from points of view that threaten our egos. The separations keep us apart.

The same energy that plays hopscotch on my spine when I hear music plays hopscotch on yours and recreates the world from second to second, regular as a downbeat.

Listen to John Lennon's "Imagine" again and have a bowl of ice cream.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.