Philip Griffin: Transcript
Philip Griffin:
I try and connect with things as deeply as I can. I mean, I love the fact in music that there are so many styles of music that you can explore, so many instruments. I'm a complete sucker for different instruments. But just finding your own meaning in whatever it is that you're involved with. I've had absolutely no kind of career path aspirations. Here I am. Here's a door. Go through it.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Philip Griffin is an amazingly versatile, creative, and generous musician based in Australia. He plays, improvises, and composes in many styles on many different instruments. During this episode, you'll hear him play the rabab, the ukulele, and guitar in his duo with violinist Jude Iddison. He reflects on his work teaching children and people with disabilities, and reflects on some of his important mentors, including Richard Gill, Linsey Pollak, and Ross Daly. I discovered Philip through Linsey, and if you missed my episode with Linsey, you'll want to check that out as well. I have included timestamps in the description, and like all my episodes, this is available as a podcast and video. And the transcript is also included on my website, leahroseman.com. Everything is linked in the description.
Hi, Philip. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Philip Griffin:
Hello, lovely to be here. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
It's particularly cool for me because you're in Brisbane, Australia tomorrow, and I'm tonight here in Ottawa and I have 30 centimeters of snow outside my window and I think it's probably quite warm there from the looks of your T-shirt.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah, it's pretty warm. When I was getting organized this morning, I had a long-sleeved shirt on and it's just too hot. I just can't do it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah, I mean, Brisbane isn't the hottest place in Australia, but it's pretty humid. And I don't know, I think we're expecting 30, 32 today or something centigrade.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I so far have featured one other Australian musician, your friend Linsey Pollak. So I hope those listeners who haven't heard that episode yet will check it out because he's such an amazing musician and he suggested that I speak with you.
Philip Griffin:
Right. Yes. Well, yeah, we've known each other for 40 years and we've been playing on and off for a lot of that time and it's been great, a great privilege to have shared many journeys together. I don't know whether you've seen his latest project, which is these Sunrise Sessions. He's done, I think 18 of them when he gets up at three o'clock in the morning and goes and sets up in different beautiful places near where he lives and mainly just plays along with a prerecorded drone and then improvises one of his wind instruments, which he invents and makes himself and plays as the sun rises. Sometimes he does it in collaboration with other people, but mostly just him.
And yeah, the way he produces the videos is also really amazing. Just him recording on an iPad and then shooting with another iPad and somehow he makes it look like a multi-camera kind of super high-quality production, but it's just him and two iPads and his instrument in a beautiful place in the Sunshine Coast. So yeah, he's remarkable.
Leah Roseman:
I have been following them. I haven't seen all of them yet. They're so beautiful.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I think you were featured in one of the earlier ones, weren't you, with your trio with Tunji?
Philip Griffin:
I haven't done one of those with him. No. We did a recording of the Beier Griffin Pollak Trio at the edge of a lake, but that was with actually somebody shooting it. But he recently did one with Tunji, the other member of the Beier Griffin Pollak Trio. But yeah, hoping one day to do one with him. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And in this trio, what instruments are you playing mostly?
Philip Griffin:
So I play plucked stringed instruments in that trio. So oud, rabab, which is an Afghan skin-topped instrument in the same, but nothing like a banjo. I play laouto, which is a Greek lute, electric bass, sometimes guitar, sometimes balalaika.
And Linsey plays all wind instruments, all of which are his own invention and manufacture, although there is the aspiration to include bass clarinet in that, which would be the first instrument that he hasn't invented. But in true Linsey style, he's made a modification to his bass clarinet. That means that he doesn't have to carry the final joint, the bell, and it means he loses one note, the lowest note, but it's significantly lighter and easier to get around. So yeah, he just can't help himself. He's constantly inventing and modifying. And then Tunji Beier plays percussion. So yeah, we've got strict demarcation, the wind, strings, and percussion.
Leah Roseman:
The laouto, you mentioned it's like a Greek lute.
Philip Griffin:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Similar to the oud?
Philip Griffin:
Yes. I mean, the oud is the ancestor of all plucked stringed instruments with a wooden top. It keeps kind of coming into Europe and inspiring a new set of instruments. So all the guitars and ukuleles and lutes and whatever else, they're all derived ultimately from the oud.
These days, the oud is a fretless, 11-stringed in six courses is probably the most common, and the strings are the same construction as a classical guitar strings. Whereas the laouto, there's two main sorts. I play a Greek islands one. It's four courses, each of double strings, and there's steel and it has movable nylon frets, like fishing line essentially wrapped around as frets, which you can then slide up and down should you need to. But they're bowl-backed stringed instruments. So it's a lot of similarities, but there are some key differences. Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Now, I was just thinking, by the time I release your episode, I will have already released my episodes with oud player, Ali El-Farouk. So he demonstrates his oud lot in case people missed that. And I was just editing today another episode that's coming out with Adam Hurt playing gourd banjo among other things. And Adam was saying, because the gourd banjo, they're normally round and he finds it kind of slippery to have this bowl shape, but the maker who made his grew the gourd between two boards so it would be flat. So I was just thinking with all these bowl-shape instruments, do you find they slip around? Are they kind of cumbersome or you're just used to it?
Philip Griffin:
You kind of get used to it. I mean, everyone's slightly different as to what you need to get used to holding it in place. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that, growing a gourd between two boards.
Look, with oud you can kind of wedge it with your knee and different parts of your arms. There are certainly other instruments that there's just nothing there to grab onto and they're just constantly floating and moving around and your hands are chasing this way and that way. But no, I'm certainly pretty used to it with oud and the laouto.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah, I mean, the guitar is pretty well-designed in that sense with that thing that fits over your leg and locks it into place. But yeah, I mean, that's just part of what you've got to learn how to manipulate when you're playing these great instruments.
Leah Roseman:
So I know later in this episode you'll be playing the rabab for us, which is kind of an Afghan lute, like more that area of the world.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. It's from Afghanistan and Pakistan. But because it's got a skin top, it's in a different branch of the chordophones, I guess, to the oud. So al-oud is the root of the English word wood and also lute, al'-ud. Yeah, you get lute from that and obviously wood. So yeah, all of the descendants of the oud are wooden topped. And then the banjo and the rabab and a whole series of North African instruments that have skin tops are in a different branch. So, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you studied, it was in Greece that you studied Turkish music.
Philip Griffin:
It's when the journey started for me. I was on tour in 1994 with Australian Swiss group Xenos playing Balkan gypsy music. And we had a series of engagements in Berlin and around that part of Germany. And for a number of years, I'd heard about Ross Daly and people said that he was somebody that I should try and meet and have lessons with or connect in some way. And when we got to Berlin, there were these posters up saying that he was going to be playing in Berlin. And until I was able to reconcile my diary with the date that was on the poster, I had a slight sinking feeling that it wouldn't work out, but miraculously it did.
And he performed a legendary concert, all of which you can see on YouTube, with one of the Shemirani sons playing percussion and Sokratis Sinopoulos playing bowed strings and Ross playing his array of instruments. And went to see that incredible concert and met him afterwards and had one lesson with him in Berlin. And he said, "Why don't you come to Athens?" So yeah, it worked out. I went to Athens, had some more lessons with him, and that's when I started becoming interested in Turkish classical music. And yeah, that's something that I studied quite seriously for a while there.
And I was later living in the Middle East and I went to Turkey on a number of occasions and different places that I've lived tried to connect with people who like playing that music, including yesterday I went and saw two fantastic players who live in Brisbane, Nara Zelfrey and Joseph Trad, a ney player and a spike fiddle player. And they're just both fantastic in that kind of sphere. So yeah, it's something that I'm still love playing when I get the opportunity.
Leah Roseman:
Was there a way that you worked with Ross that was different than other mentors and teachers you'd worked with?
Philip Griffin:
I guess so. I mean, Ross, because ultimately he's got a European background, he studied Western European, Anglo kind of background. I mean, his initial instruments that he played were classical guitar and cello and things like that. So I mean, he's come into this other world where he's an absolute master. But I guess, he recognizes what somebody coming from the Anglo world kind of needs to get into that space.
And I mean, Turkish classical music is a notated tradition. There's many, many scores of that vast repertoire. I mean, it is a different way of reading a score compared to say, Western classical music where there's a lot more prescriptive elements to reading Western classical music scores. But in some ways, it's a bit like a jazz chart where it gives you the bare bones of what are the chords, what are the notes, what's the structure. And then, I mean, you'd never go to a jazz gig and hear anybody play what's written in the real book, for example. It's the same piece, but everybody changes it to suit their own style and who they're playing with and on top of, obviously, all the improvisation that happens.
And it's the same with Turkish classical scores. They show you an unornamented version. There's no chords involved because it's a non-harmonic style of music, but it gives you an outline that you then elaborate. And interestingly, when you're playing it in an ensemble setting, people are elaborating and ornamenting in a different way simultaneously, which is kind of a bit different to say, a Baroque situation in Western classical music where there would be a lot of discussion about, "Oh, how are we going to ornament this? Unless it's going to be a mordent or this," or whatever it is. And, "Let's get out of the way so that we can hear this person do that."
It's a different mindset really, where you hear everybody doing their own version and it adds a level of complexity to the sound. But that's just how it all works. I guess, partly due to the fact that you're not getting harmony in the way to confuse things. So it's all about melody and microtones and maqam and all these kinds of aspects of the music.
Leah Roseman:
So this would be a natural place to have some rabab music. Do you want to take time to tune it now, or would you rather do that later?
Philip Griffin:
Yeah, happy to do it now.
Leah Roseman:
Sure.
Philip Griffin:
This isn't Turkish. This won't be anything to do with Turkish classical music.
Leah Roseman:
Some listeners are listening to the podcast version and they can't see what you're playing. So if you could describe this instrument and talk about the kind of music you're going to play on it for us.
Philip Griffin:
It's about as long as my leg. It's got two big indentations in it like a guitar does. But in that area of the instrument, there's a skin top. And on that skin top, there's a bridge with a plethora of strings. There are three playing strings where you can actually play melodies. That's one of them. And that one. Then you've got a pair of drone strings, which are tuned in fifths.
So depending on how you view these things, you could say that it's kind of in D, and these drones are D and A. But the lowest note you get is C sharp. So the lowest of the strings that you play melodies on is C sharp. And then you've got F sharp and B. So if you want to play the root note, you have to put your first finger down, which is pretty different to just about any instrument I've ever played.
So that's five strings that are the full length of the neck to the bridge. And then you've got a series of sympathetic strings, which starts off being a major scale with an added flat seven, and then kind of a bit of a pentatonic thing, finishing up with a high D up the top. And these you can either use, you can do those kinds of effects, or you can just allow the natural resonance of the instrument to engage those sympathetic strings.
So in terms of describing it, it's dark brown. It's apparently a single piece of wood from the far-right end of the instrument right up to where the headstock meets. And there's a fairly elaborate headstock that comes back with carvings and intricate handmade, I'll just show that up to the microphone for people who are watching it. And it's got this beautiful little curve here, which apparently is used for carrying the instrument around. When you're walking around, you can hold it, hold it there. I'm just going to be improvising something.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. Very cool.
Philip Griffin:
Thanks. So yeah, that's a rabab. Not sure how it kind of translates to the podcast arena, but when you can hear it in... Yeah, it's got this beautiful natural reverb that the combination of the skin top and the sympathetic strings provide, and certainly in an ensemble mode it's a really evocative instrument in the mix there.
Leah Roseman:
That was a really cool improvisation. Thank you, Philip.
Philip Griffin:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering what the first time was that you heard a rabab, do you remember?
Philip Griffin:
Pretty sure it was also Ross, Ross Daley. I was living in Jerusalem in the late 90s, and he came and did a kind of a camp, a music camp in Jerusalem, which I attended. And he was there playing, doing some concerts with some local Israeli musicians that he knew. And I was just about to move back to Australia. And I said to him, "I know a couple of really fantastic players in Australia. I think it would be great if you could come," and with his partner, Kelly Thoma. And I'd suggested that I and Linsey and Tunji accompanied them. And yeah, Ross liked the idea. At that stage, he'd never been to Australia.
In 2001, they came and we organized a tour. Yeah, we toured up down the East Coast from Kin Kin, which is where Linsey was living at that stage and finished up in Melbourne. And one of the instruments that Ross brought to play on that tour was a rabab. And when I first met him and started buying his recordings, on an album of his called Selected Works, there's this incredible piece and improvisation for sarangi and rabab where he plays both parts and I'm sure that was the first time I heard the instrument, but then heard it intimately on our tour, and then we organized another one. And by that stage, I decided that I'd really like to get one. So on the second tour, when he and Kelly came out, he played this instrument that I just played for the tour, and at the end of it I bought it from him and it stayed here. So yeah, it's got a very special connection with him.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So learning about you, you're such an interesting, and we really have to dig into all the things you do and are, but you're just so open and flexible as a person and a musician, it really strikes me and you've managed to create really amazing opportunities for yourself.
Philip Griffin:
Well, two things. I think I've been incredibly lucky in my life with the mentors that I've had, and certainly Linsey is a colleague and that we've done lots of projects together and we're colleagues, but he's also a mentor and he's the person that first exposed me to initially Macedonian folk music. I mean, we met in 1981, and I think soon after 1982 probably, I borrowed his tambura, which is a long neck lute Macedonian traditional instrument. And he started teaching me music of that tradition. And it was completely outside of my sphere of experience at that stage. I mean, I was reasonably proficient on the classical guitar. But yeah, that was my first exposure to irregular meters and kind of modal music.
And it opened a door to a world. It's one of the things you can't really say, oh, this would've never happened if this hadn't happened. But the way that it did happen for me was through the doors that were opened by being in contact with Linsey and learning Macedonian music and then Turkish music, and then Greek music, and through Turkish music, seeing the connection between Turkish classical music and Ottoman classical music more broadly, which a lot of Arab musicians play the same pieces as Turkish classical musicians, but with a slightly different slant on them. So you can say Ottoman to describe both of them. But yeah, I mean, Linsey allowed that path. And then Ross, in his way certainly opened all sorts of channels for me, which I've explored in different ways.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US or two euros, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode, if we could jump back to your singing days. I know that you had a mentor, Richard Gill, who's very important in Australia as a singer and conductor and sort of music activist in terms of education.
Philip Griffin:
Absolutely. Yeah, Richard, yeah, I mean, I was at the Conservatorium in Perth in Western Australia on the opposite side of the continent where I now am, but Perth is where I met Linsey and where he set up the North Perth Ethnic Music Center as it was then. And we had groups that played Macedonian music and other things. But I was studying classical guitar. I went there in 1984 and yeah, that's what I wanted to do. Played classical guitar. And Richard Gill arrived in 1985, and he completely changed my world. And he had choirs, an eight voice choir, which as you can imagine, had eight people in it. I had very little background in singing, but he just made it possible for people to do things that they'd never imagined.
And he invited me, well, he moved to Perth to be the Dean of the Conservatorium. And for some reason, when he had to go and fulfill other commitments back in Sydney or whatever, he got me as a student to take rehearsals of the choir in his absence, knowing pretty much nothing about, I didn't even know how to conduct different patterns of seven fours and things like this. And we were doing Carmina Burana which has got quite a lot of changing time signatures and stuff. And he said, "Okay, you take the rehearsal while I'm not here. Okay, off you go." And I'm sure it was excruciating for some of the other people in the choir, but it completely changed my view of what was possible in music.
And after a year of having these experiences, I finished the course that I was doing in classical guitar and swapped over to doing a bachelor in conducting, and which was pretty... I think, I was the only person doing conducting at an undergraduate level. I mean, I think it's become much more mainstream to be doing, conducting at an early part of your career. But my understanding at that point was that was pretty radical for him to encourage and allow this to happen, that conducting was something that people much further into their careers at a postgraduate level did. And also, as part of that... Well, it became apparent that a lot of the people that I was going to be conducting were singers rather than, there wasn't a huge orchestral program at the Conservatorium, but there was quite a lot of singing stuff. So if you're going to be conducting singers, you better find out a bit about singing.
So I started having singing lessons with a teacher and also coaching with him. And we'd go in and we'd do all this operatic repertoire, and I'd go out of the room thinking, I can do this. I can sing and just on this absolute high. And that's one of the things that, I mean, he's so beloved in Australian music circles, and everybody has a special connection with him. I mean, I'm reluctant to talk about how special it is to me because I know how special it is to everybody. He had this incredible ability to make everybody feel as though they were special and tangents all over the place.
But late later in life, or a few years later, he was the Chorus master at Australian Opera and I was part of the young artist development program as a composer conductor, and walking around the Sydney Opera House with him. And you'd start at the stage door and he'd have this conversation with the person there and all these names. He had names for everybody and stories, and there were these things, and then you'd walk through and then there'd be the mechanists and he'd know everybody's name and everybody loved him. And then he'd walk through this, the green room and everybody, then you'd walk through here and you'd know everybody's name and made everybody's feel special in an absolutely miraculous way.
And it's certainly that time of doing coaching with him made me think, this is something I can do and I love doing. And by the end of my studies at the Con, I sang the title role in Gianni Schicchi by Puccini and probably made an absolute pig's... I'm sure it was hideous, but it was fantastic thing to do and made me, again, changed my life. And also with composition, he taught that improvisation and composition was at the center of music education. So you analyze, you play and you write and you improvise, and that's what you do.
So by the end of my course, which was in conducting nominally, I sang the lead in an opera, and I was music directing musicals within the music theater/theater school. I was getting work in theater as a composer and music director. And that's all due to him empowering me as a musician, but not thinking of myself as a classical guitarist. But you can do all this stuff. He died a few years ago, but I think of him all the time. He's just been such a profound inspiration and there's Facebook groups of the Richard Gill Appreciation Society and people constantly telling their stories what he did for them. And for those years, I was in a uniquely privileged position where I had so much one-on-one contact with him, and I thank the universe for it.
Leah Roseman:
I was reading that towards the end of his life, he started the inaugural Sydney Flash Mob choir.
Philip Griffin:
He did so many things, so I wasn't there. So I'm not sure exactly what... When he died in the last couple of days, I think maybe the day before he died, this guy, Paul Goodchild, assembled this massed brass band outside Richard's house in the street in Stanmore, in suburban Sydney. And Richard, he was kind of lying there, unable to... He wasn't moving or responding very much, but this brass band appeared outside his house, and they played the theme from The Dam Busters and the story in all the papers was that it was his favorite piece of music. Like I say, you're walking around, for example, the Opera House, and he's got all these kind of funny relationships with people. And I'm sure that the fact that it was his favorite piece of music is some piece of shtick that he had in some kind of humorous... I cannot believe that his favorite piece of music was the theme from The Dam Busters, but it would've been some kind of humorous conversation that happened with somebody, and it gets taken out of context.
And he loved people. He loved making music accessible. Everybody had the right to a good music education and participated in music. He was the chorus master of Opera Australia. He was music director of Canberra Symphony Orchestra. He was the artistic director of both Oz Opera, which was a touring arm of Australian opera. And he was the artistic director of Opera of Victoria... No, Victorian opera. I can't remember which one. One replaced the other, he invented baby's proms. He would get up with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and do these kind of prom concerts for kids, toddlers and whatever.
And in Australia, I don't know, it may be a worldwide thing, but he was the master of getting up with an orchestra and an audience and playing stuff and explaining to the audience what was going on and breaking it down and saying, "Okay, brass, play that little bit." And then they'd play that. And then, "Okay, let's hear what the woodwinds are doing while..." Or give you background about the composer. And he was just so at ease with audiences of any age and any level of skill. It's just about impossible to meet a professional musician in Australia who wasn't taught by him, went to a music camp. Friend of mine who's a very successful academic in America. She taught playwriting at Harvard, and now she's at some Brown University, or she did a jazz course at the Con about the same time that I was there. And she said the most profound part of the jazz course, the two year jazz course was one hour she had with Richard Gill. He continues to be a powerful presence in many people's lives, not the least mine.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's wonderful to hear because for those of us listening who aren't Australian and have never been there, we're learning about this incredible master educator and human being that we haven't heard about before. So that's a really great tribute.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. He lived in the States for a couple of years and taught Chico in California. Yeah, I mean, he was big in the Orff movement, and he'd go and do kind of keynote addresses at conferences around the world.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of community music, he must have had an influence on you, and I know you've done quite a bit of work. I was curious about your work with Tutti Arts, the accessibility in the arts and the work you did there. I had seen some of the videos, very moving videos you'd created with young musicians who were visually impaired or completely blind. And I was curious about that project and how you got involved with it.
Philip Griffin:
Okay. So I moved to Adelaide in 2001. One of the first people that I looked up that I'd worked with or had connections to was Rosalba Clemente, who was by then the artistic director of State Theater of South Australia. And she was involved in a project that was a very interesting project, but it was coming up with some challenges and she needed some help. It was being presented as part of the Adelaide Festival in a year where Peter Sellers, the American Opera and Festival Director, was the director of the Adelaide Festival.
And it involved State Opera of South Australia and an organization called Tutti, meaning everyone. Tutti had started a few years previously. In Australia, in all the capital cities there are these residential homes for people with disabilities. And in Adelaide, the big one was Minda. As a kind of an activity for people in this Minda home, this wonderful woman, Pat Rix, was asked to do some music, and she went in and did some singing. And that developed over time into the Tutti Choir, which involved both people with disabilities and people from the community when they'd go and hear and see, just were so entranced with the energy that they just wanted to be a part of it.
So it's gone on to be a big organization in South Australia, and it's got drama and visual arts, but the heart of it has always been this choir. In the time when I first came in contact, it was still very much the choir was the thing, and they were on stage. There was also a band, and there were professional singers and actors and all that sort of stuff. And then the choir was Tutti. And so I was engaged to try and integrate them into the production. And yeah, it went well and I did what they'd asked.
And I got on really well with Pat, who was the person who'd started the choir. And she invited me to be more part of the organization. And I did other things. I continued to work with Rosalba at State Theater Company and wrote some music for The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, which were also fantastic things to be involved with. But yeah, continue to work with Tutti in various ways. And Pat Ricks has also been talking about Ross Daly and Linsey Pollak and Richard Gill.
Pat in a very different way has been a real inspiration. She sees the world very differently to me. She offers very different insights to the ones that I naturally find. But she was aware, I mean, another whole string in what I'm interested in is photography, and I think combination of photography and music leads you pretty naturally into video. So Pat was wanting to expand what was happening at Tutti. There was already acting and visual arts stuff happening, and she wanted to start a digital media program. So she invited me to start that.
I'd made some recordings with some of the singers in the Tutti choir. Some of the young people were in a particular program when we made some recordings. And I thought this would be a great way to utilize these recordings and kind of connect with both the drama and the visual arts components that were happening in Tutti Arts. So made a series of videos over a couple of years where I used the recording that we'd done, the audio recording, and then worked with the artists to devise visual scenarios, story boarding in some cases. And there's some pretty nice videos there that we made.
And they really, at the time felt like, yeah, a very great way of combining all the different things that were going on in Tutti Arts. The music, a lot of them feature people acting, and certainly there's lots of opportunity for the visual crew to contribute. And then I guess the skills that I developed in there, in that role, I've then gone on and made a couple of videos. Subsequently one in New Zealand, Price Tag that I did in a school that I was teaching at. And then a couple of years ago, I did one at the local primary school where I teach now in Brisbane. So yeah, it's really very labor intensive, but it's a pretty satisfying thing to do when you shoot and direct and edit and it's a good fun.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I saw them and I saw the more recent one you did with the kids, it was really charming. And so the artists you were working with who were visually impaired, was it meaningful for them that you were making a video? I understand one of the girls, she had lost her sight gradually so she could remember color.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, that one I think is pretty moving that colors video, that was a song that Annika and Pat Rix, who I mentioned before, co-wrote. And when I started thinking about making that video, I was talking to Annika's parents, and they still live about five hours north of Adelaide. And Annika was having appointments with various kind of eye surgeons, and I'm not sure what kind of mologists they were, ophthalmologists or different people. And because she was living so far away, it was not like, oh, pop in next week. So the doctors said, oh, can you film what's happening and so that we can see how her development is. So when I went got round to doing this video, Wendy, Annika's mother turned up at my place with this pile of photo albums and I think Annika's brother, Bronte had digitized all these movies that they'd recorded. So I just had this unbelievable resource of all these videos and photos from Annika's childhood. So when, in the song it says, "I see blue," I could just look through, and there was a photo of her with all this blue stuff. "I see green," and then, oh, there's a video of her doing this with all this green. And then we shot stuff at the age that Annika was when we made the video. But it was just such a gift having all those resources from different points in her life. That finishes up being pretty moving, but in some ways... So, yeah, as you say, Annika had some sight and she still has memory of seeing color.
But Jason, who was in Folsom Prison Blues, was born completely blind. But when I sat down with him and explained what I had in mind... I don't know how it's possible, he's got such a visual memory, a visual kind of imagination. So he said, "Okay, so the first scene can be like this and we can have... Talon could come and go doing this, and then Doll can come in from that direction, and they can be wearing this, and then we can go... Or we could do this, or we could do this." And so it's like six different ideas for the first scene and then a similar number... And said, "We're just making one video at the moment. We just need to make one decision." But his visual imagination was just completely over the top. I don't know how that works, but he was great to work on that with. We used his ideas and he had really strong ideas on who should play which roles in the movie. Yeah, that's what we did.
I have to say it does mean something. I know another friend, who's nothing to do with tutti, Frankie Armstrong, that... She's now in her early 80s. Very important. She's known as the godmother of the natural voice movement, and in the last few years I've done a few concerts with her, singing the music of Brecht, with music by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler and stuff like that. Anyway, just recently saw her. She's constantly, her vision is virtually zero, but she uses all these visual metaphors. It's great to see you, and she loves going to see things, and she loves going to see the theater. Yeah, it's kind of, on a rational level, sometimes a bit hard to reconcile how that would be the case, but that is the case.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm. Interesting. So in terms of working with children, you've been a teacher for many years, in many different settings, working from preschools all the way to high school band.
Philip Griffin:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
And I'm curious how your approach has changed over the years, being a parent as well, how that affected your ideas about musical education.
Philip Griffin:
Well, again, Richard Gill is a constant source of inspiration about how to make music education accessible, interesting, relevant, important, and all those things. And I guess it kind of connects a bit to the Tutti scenario. There's a part of me that thought, okay, I don't want to be working with these people with disabilities and making allowances for the fact that they've got disabilities. So I just thought about it for a while and eventually decided, okay, well, I won't. I'll just work with them, and if there's something they can't do, then that will become apparent. But that's not your starting point. Your starting point is, we're going to make music. And that's the same for me with working with kids. Obviously you choose repertoire that's going to be possible, but within that, you then, you just do it as well as you can.
I do my side as well as I can, I try and make as many helpful suggestions and lead the rehearsals in a way to make it sound as good as it possibly can, and forget about the fact that they're in year five or... We're just, we're here together, working on making this sound as good as it possibly can. I'm the director, I'm the one who needs to be saying stuff to make it better, in the same way that you would with any group of people. You're constantly listening to, how can this be more in tune, more in time, more... But all of those things are, how can we make this more meaningful and how can we make this speak to us in... Meaning, trying to find the meaning there.
I have quite a big co-curricular program at the primary school that I teach, a ukulele group, a year five guitar, a year six guitar, a senior choir, a boys choir. And this year we're doing a musical, although we don't know what it is yet. And that's being at school two days a week-
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Philip Griffin:
... and then teaching year four, five, and six classroom music as well. But to me, the core of what I'm there for is the co-curricular stuff, making ensembles happen and... Yeah, that's what it's all about.
Leah Roseman:
Philip, are you there in the morning before classes, and how do you fit in all those rehearsals with them?
Philip Griffin:
Mornings before school, and I don't take a morning tea break or a lunch break. There's rehearsals every break and before school. Which I can do, because I'm only there two days a week. I probably couldn't sustain that five days a week.
Leah Roseman:
What's your eating schedule like on those days? I'm curious.
Philip Griffin:
Eating. So the first session finishes at 11 o'clock, and the rehearsal starts at 10 past, so you've got 10 minutes that you can-
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Philip Griffin:
So, that's fine.
Leah Roseman:
So ukulele, I know when you lived in New Zealand, you had mentioned to me before when we spoke that ukulele is huge there. I know you have one of your ukuleles with you, and it's a great instrument for accessibility, right? It's not very expensive, people can play in groups?
Philip Griffin:
Yep. Yep. So, yeah. I mean, I've had a ukulele of one sort or another since the 1970s when, I don't know whether the people who were part of the kind of 1920s resurgence or... It was big around that period. People who had bought them there were kind of dying in the 1970s, so there were all these kind of historic instruments coming on the market. And in fact, I think the first instrument I bought was a Royal Hawaiian, which would now be a hundred-plus years old. I think in these deceased estates in the '70s, these instruments became available. It wasn't a very trendy instrument in the '70s, it was a bit of a joke, certainly in Australia, in my perception of it, and there's certainly been a renaissance since then. I've got no idea what was happening in New Zealand at that time, but it's absolutely standard in a classroom in New Zealand to walk in and there's a whole set of ukuleles on the wall.
Two friends of mine, who I got to know fairly early on when I moved to New Zealand, Mary Cornish and Maria Winder, had started a program in New Zealand, partly in response to the fact that they saw music teachers' resources being diminished, and trying to provide a way of music programs continuing to happen in schools, with teachers who weren't necessarily trained musicians. And I think the ukulele is a perfect instrument for that, in that it's pretty easy to figure out how to play a chord, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to read, for example, tablature.
As a leader of a ukulele program in a class, you don't have to be the best player in the room. You just need to be able to... It's more about the management side and perhaps tuning the instruments and using the resources, but you don't need to be out there demonstrating everything and inspiring the kids by showing them perfectly how to play something. And I've seen it time and time again where these programs flourish, just because there's a teacher there who's committed to it and has the right skills, but the right skills don't have to include being a fabulous player.
As against, for example, I don't know whether there are too many successful recorder programs in the world where the person leading it doesn't play the recorder at least to a reasonably high standard. I mean, that's an instrument where you need... You need to be able to model good sound on the recorder to hope that your class is going to sound good. And the recorder's the first instrument that I learnt, and I still, I teach the recorder. So if there was any sense in that, that I was saying that, ukulele good, recorder bad, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. And I have serious reservations about the ukulele replacing the recorder.
It certainly has a role in a place where there's no alternative because it gets kids involved in music in a way that might not be possible any other way, if they don't have trained music teachers. And certainly, both in New Zealand and in Australia, we don't have a music program anymore, we've got an arts program and music is one of the components, and you don't have to teach it all the time. You can just do it one semester out of four, and then the other time you do digital arts and drama. And rather than, obviously, as it should be, music being something that happens every week with every child. So just the reality is that there aren't specialist music teachers in every school, and classroom teachers are having to deliver it. So in that context, it's better that there's something that works than there isn't.
And so Maria and Mary came up with this model where they would come up with a repertoire, they would record it, they would put out a book, a school would buy into this program, they would get these resources, and at the end of the year, kids from all these schools that had learnt this repertoire would come together in this massed festival. And some years there were like three and a half thousand kids who'd learnt the same repertoire, and they're up in... We used to have it in a sports arena just outside of Auckland, and the kids would all be in the audience stands. There'd be a rhythm section down the bottom, on the edge of the athletics track, and there'd be all these kids and they've learned all this stuff, and then suddenly they're playing it together in this massed setting. Yeah, it's been a really successful model.
COVID kind of hit the getting together part of it, it's now going through a bit of a rethink about how to best deliver it, and it looks like it's moving more... Because that festival was in Auckland, that made it a particular focus on it being attractive to people who could get to Auckland, and now they're trying to make it more national and having more small events happening throughout the country. But yeah, just trying to develop the model and take what's good about it. Two things from my point of view, one is that I have been pretty heavily involved in the last few years in producing the material that goes out to schools, so I record the backing tracks, do the arrangements of the recorded material, and help with the production of the printed material.
And another thing. After this had happened for a few years, this kind of massed grouping, which they call the Kiwileles, it's pretty apparent that some kids are really into it and they want to... Not all of the pieces, but some of them, they include not just what chords can you play, but little riffs and licks and things that people can get into, and it's pretty apparent that some kids really get into that. And after this had happened for a while, realized, well actually, yeah, there's a place for those kids after they've kind of been involved in Kiwileles. And so that started, they call it the Ukulele Development Squad for awhile, and then I took that over, then that further developed into a senior squad for all the kids who'd been in from the beginning. Then we needed to have another, a junior squad. And yeah, I mean, I treated that like a chamber orchestra, really, and started doing arrangements for two-part concert, ukulele one and two, tenor ukulele, baritone ukulele-
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay.
Philip Griffin:
... and bass ukulele. So pretty much like a string orchestra. And you've got these kids who are shredding all these riffs in the Kiwileles, desperate to do new things. At one stage was doing really intricate... Mozart's Turkish Rondo, and. (singing).. Which you can-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Philip Griffin:
... when you've got that range of instruments and pitches, you can actually... You do it in D minor, not A minor, but it just works. You can play the whole thing. Done lots of arrangements for that line up. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So would you be willing to treat us to a little bit of ukulele music?
Philip Griffin:
Sure. In 2018, we took the senior squad to Hawaii and went to the Hawaiian Ukulele Festival and the senior squad played at that, which was pretty special. And because I was over in North America, I thought it'd be interesting to go and check out another ukulele festival. So I looked at the possibilities date-wise, and there was one in Oregon at Bend, Oregon. I met this incredible luthier, Pat Megowan. This instrument is the result of that meeting. Pat likes every... I don't know whether that comes over?
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm.
Philip Griffin:
Can you see the little blue wattle underneath the eye?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Philip Griffin:
Every instrument that Pat makes has a name and a story, and I think he said to me that if the person who's getting the instrument made doesn't want to buy into that, then he just does it himself. But it's hard to imagine anybody not wanting to buy into that. Because of my interest in birds, my connection with New Zealand and the ukulele, because even though I've had instruments since the '70s, it really, all that stuff that I was just describing in New Zealand just really took off there for me. And so, yeah, the ukulele and New Zealand is very connected for me.
So this is a kōkako, which is an endemic New Zealand bird. And the other connection is that... I mean, it's got this beautiful blue wattle underneath the eye, I think it might show there. Otherwise it's a kind of this gray bird. And so the horrible English name for it is blue wattled crow, and the Maori name is kōkako. It's kind of this pretty plain gray bird, and then when it calls, it's the most incredible thing you've ever heard. And I kind of like that with the ukulele, you kind of think, oh yeah, it's just a ukulele, but yeah... This one isn't.
The renaissance guitar is four strings, tuned the same as the ukulele. The ukulele arrived in... 1877, I think it arrived in Hawaii from Madeira. It was the machete, which is very much like a renaissance guitar, and then it got the name ukulele when it arrived in Hawaii and changed slightly. But it's essentially from the same family of instruments. So, renaissance guitar music fits pretty perfectly onto the ukulele. So I could play you a little bit of renaissance guitar music. This is Tourdion.(music)
Leah Roseman:
Lovely. Thank you.
Philip Griffin:
No worries.
Leah Roseman:
Speaking of early music, I know you play the theorbo and Baroque guitar, and you were involved with Affetto group in New Zealand? Early music?
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. Yep, that's right. Affetto was just another one of those unexpected... I didn't go to New Zealand thinking, I'm going to get into the ukulele and I'm going to join a Baroque group, and I'm going to do my masters in opera singing, but that is what happened. We moved to an area where... I mentioned Mary Cornish and Maria Winder, who were involved in the New Zealand Ukulele Trust and the New Zealand Ukulele Festival. We moved to a pretty affluent suburb in Auckland where Mary Cornish was the music teacher at the local primary school. My kids went there, I met Mary, and figured out this ukulele connection. That happened, and also the choral connection, and she was doing a concert. That's how I got involved in the choir thing, which led to me making the video of Price Tag.
Also, there was a woman teaching at the school doing kind of after school lessons, Carol Buckton, and she was kind of a recorder legend in New Zealand. My kids had lessons with her, and she knew... All these coincidences, which led me to meet Polly Sussex, who's a fantastic Viola da Gamba player in Auckland. She's in this group Affetto, and they had decided that they wanted a theorbo in their group. There was a luthier, formerly from New York, living in Wellington, and his specialty was theorbos. So they thought, okay, we'll commission Jason Petty to make us a theorbo. So they did, but they didn't have anybody to play it, so they asked me whether I would like to learn how to play it. And I said, "Well, I'd love to, but I'm probably going to be moving back to Australia in about a year or so," and they said, "Oh, whatever. Learn anyway and do some concerts with us," and so that's what happened, but by the time I left, we'd started to have a pretty good time. I was pretty keen to get a recording of what we were doing and so I pushed for us to make an album, but by that stage, I was leaving, so it took a little while, but we did finish up making a CD together, which I'm very happy about, that we actually got to do that. It's great having recordings of different things that you do, and I'm hesitant to use the word proud, but I'm pretty pleased that we did it and got to record me playing theorbo and Jayne Tankersley, singing and I played quite a bit with her, with me on vihuela and her singing and then big ensemble stuff, and that was a great experience.
Leah Roseman:
So your partner, Dominique Schwartz, you've been following her around a little bit. People might wonder why you kept leaving your professional situations and going to something different.
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. She was with the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for 28 years. She was with a program called Foreign Correspondent. She was the inaugural reporter on that, traveled all over the world for six years doing that. We met towards the end of that when she was looking at ways of moving on, and she got the job as Middle East correspondent for the ABC, which is why we moved to Jerusalem, that's the place. I think the two biggest populations of journalists in the world are Washington and Jerusalem.
And so we were part of that whole world for three years, and then when we moved back to Australia, she became the ABC's 7:00 PM TV news anchor in Adelaide, which is why I lived there, and then we moved to Auckland because she was the ABC's New Zealand and Pacific correspondent for four years, and then we moved to Brisbane and then the ABC suffered major cuts and she was made redundant. So she's left the ABC much against her will.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. After all that time. It's a lot like Canadian journalists, I'm sure other places as well.
Philip Griffin:
Right. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. Is she finding new directions for her career?
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. She was very driven as soon as she found out that she was going to be leaving ABC to get another job, and she's got another job pretty much straightaway and then has moved to another role with Pew Charitable Trusts, which is a big US based environmental. So she's working on great projects, one of them being increasing protection for Australia's sub-Antarctic islands and some really good stuff in that space.
Leah Roseman:
Excellent. Good for her. I wanted to talk about briefly, your album, Banksia. Is that it? Am I saying it right?
Philip Griffin:
Okay. Yep, Banksia. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
It's very, with a violinist, Jude Iddison. Is that how you say her name?
Philip Griffin:
That is indeed how you say it, yep.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's really lyrical and whimsical and indifferent. I hate defining what the music sounds like, but I was wondering would it be possible to share a track of that on this episode?
Philip Griffin:
Absolutely, yeah, you can share anything. Yeah, totally. (music) So the first day I went to the WA Conservatorium of Music, which was in 1984, I could play reasonably well classical guitar and I had very little other musical education, and on the first day that I was there, I met this young woman a couple of years younger than me and she had been, I think the top or the second top or something in the previous years, high school music grades, and so from a totally different world from me. I didn't do music at school, I had very little background, and she was also, I think the leader of the WA Youth Orchestra and had been playing violin forever.
And her mother was the librarian at the orchestra and all her sisters and brother played orchestral instruments, and so from a totally different world, but in some ways, we were kindred spirits and we connected pretty strongly right from the first moment, and we finished up sharing a house and she went off and did all sorts of other things, but we've always stayed connected and some, I don't know exactly when, we've always talked about, oh, wouldn't it be good to play some more together and blah, blah, blah, and a couple of years ago, we thought, okay, let's do it. So she came over to Brisbane, she still lives on the West Coast.
She came over, I don't know, we had four or five days where we just workshopped some ideas and some of her tunes, some of my tunes, and we worked on some pieces that she'd written melodies for and I worked some chords on. So we're very long-term friends and it was very personally rewarding to work through making an album together in that way. There were several visits back and forth where we would refine the arrangements and we did some recording and then realized that's just not what we want to do, and then finally came up with something that we were pretty happy with.
Leah Roseman:
To finish this off, I thought you've referred a few times to your work with photography and nature, and if you could just speak to that briefly. I think as a young child, you were fascinated with the frogs and birds, but it's a big part of your life. If you could just speak to that briefly.
Philip Griffin:
So yeah, again, going back to the mentor thing, I went to pretty radical non-conformist schools, inconceivable, and I think about the schools that I teach at and have taught at and think about the kind of schools that I went to and duty of care, and at the beginning of every year, the sort of things, there's a teacher you need to sign up for about mandatory reporting and first aid and CPR and data sharing and all these kind of things, and I think about total, absolute free for all lack of any of that at the school I was at. Anyway, there were a whole lot of rat bags there with rat bag families, but the art teacher, her family were the people who brought jet boats to the Abrolhos Islands off the western coast of Western Australia for cray fishing.
And we would go on school camps to this incredible place, the Abrolhos, and there's a bird, the Lesser Noddy, which is a turn which breeds only on the Abrolhos and the Seychelles. So it's a major birding mecca for Australian birders, which I already knew when I was going there. I think I was first caught by dinosaurs as many six year old kids are, but it just never left. So dinosaurs developed into lizards and birds, and at one stage, I had to look after my next door neighbor's aviary while they went on holiday, and it was a walkthrough aviary and I'd go in and sit there and he had these beautifully landscaped aviaries with ponds and grasses and stuff.
And these beautiful finches had come down and they'd come and eat the fresh grass and have a wash, and I was just completely [inaudible 01:30:26and nothing's changed. In fact, I'm still exactly the same as I was when I was six. I'm totally obsessed with music, lizards, birds, and nothing's really developed. I'm exactly the same person. So we were going on these school camps to the Abrolhos and one of the people that was a student there, her father was the head of the Division of Natural Sciences, Barry Wilson, and he was an expert in seashells, and he came over on one of the camps for a few days and he brought some scuba gear and took kids out doing scuba diving.
But he realized that I was pretty keen on lizards and birds and knew a reasonable amount, and he said, "Would you like a like to come and do a school holiday job in the museum? I'll see whether I can organize it," and didn't take me long to absolutely want to do that. So I think I was 11 when I started doing that, working every day of every holidays. We'd break up from school on Friday, I'd be in the museum on Monday and I'd be there until the last possible second before we went back to school, and I did that for three years, and finally, the museum said, "Okay, you seem to be pretty keen on this. Would you like a full-time job here?
We'll see whether we can get the education department to let you leave school early." So I left school when I was 14 and worked in the bird and reptile department of the museum, and my boss was Glen Storr who an absolute legend in the Australian both ornithologic, which is birds and herpetology, which is reptiles, describes so many species of reptiles and did these major revisions of all these. He's a huge figure in those spheres in Australia and he was my boss and very different to the relationship that I had with people like Richard Gill, but incredible influence on how I interacted with that world.
Leah Roseman:
So let me understand. Did you not go to high school, Philip, when you said you left school at 14?
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. I was at school before then, but I was doing bits of year 11 maths and bits of nothing, and it was just so unstructured. It's hard to even know how to answer that. I was at high school, but it was such a hippie free for all that... Anyway, that's the way, again, I met Linsey through a friend of mine there who was the sister of Linsey's then girlfriend. So if I hadn't gone to that school, I wouldn't have gone to the museum and I wouldn't know Linsey, and again, through another branch of that connection, I found the teacher that set me on a serious classical guitar path.
So much of my adult life is connected to that schooling, and one of the things early on at the museum, I got involved in photography and we'd go out and we'd look for reptiles, and in those days, it was very hard to take bird photos. People didn't have a big telephoto lens is relatively cheap these days. It certainly wasn't in those days, but you could take high quality photos with a macro lens and I've got a cheap camera and a cheap macro lens and a flash, and I had people that showed me how to do it.
And so some of my photos from the late seventies, early eighties are still being used in books now, and like everything else, I'm still really interested in it. I still go out looking for lizards and frogs and try and take photos of them, and in the last, I don't know, 20 years or so, I've had access to lenses that have enabled me to take some photos of birds as well, which is very different activity, but yeah, it's pretty nice stuff to do.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Great. And so to close out this episode, Philip, I was just wondering if you could just reflect, it strikes me that what's affected you a lot is not only your own openness, but the opportunities you've had to just follow your own interests in a really deep way, not in a superficial way. Particularly as a teenager and a young man, you're able to really just go with these opportunities. Do you have any ideas about that in terms of how you would mentor young people now or looking back on your life as a young person?
Philip Griffin:
Yeah. I don't think I'm the greatest player in the world or the greatest anything necessarily, but I try and connect with things as deeply as I can and I'm interested in, I love the fact in music that there are so many styles of music that you can explore, so many instruments. I'm a complete sucker for different instruments, but just finding your own meaning in whatever it is that you're involved with, being open to opportunities that present themselves. I've had absolutely no career path aspirations. Here I am, here's a door, go through it.
Most of the time, there's something good to be got through. Even if you don't stay there for a long time, there's something you can get out of it. Be kind. I would like to think that when I'm working with young people that I see, that I try and find things in them in the same way that people have helped me over the years. It's a very powerful model being taught well and kindly for you to go on and do it in a similar way, and I hope that I do justice to the people that have inspired and nurtured and supported me.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure getting to know you today.
Philip Griffin:
Thank you very much. It's a great privilege to speak to you, and thank you for inviting me.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I've lots more episodes coming in this season three with a fascinating diversity of musicians and their stories and music. Have a great week.
