Verna Gillis: Transcript
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Verna Gillis:
Music changes the chemistry of the body. I've always felt that they talk about music therapy. If one can really learn to listen and stop the mind, that's real music therapy. My dad gave me that gift. My dad taught me how to listen.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations With Musicians with Leah Roseman. It's hard to sum up how important Verna Gillis has been for music lovers. First of all, she's an ethnomusicologist who recorded traditional music around the world including in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Suriname, Ghana, and the United States. This episode will bring you along on some of these journeys. 25 of these recordings are available through Smithsonian Folkways and Lyrichord, and I'm very grateful to Smithsonian Folkways for allowing us to use some of these tracks for this specific episode.
The albums that this music comes from are linked in the description and show notes for the episode. In 1979, Verna opened Soundscape, the first multicultural performance space in New York City, which put on hundreds of performances over five years. You'll also hear Verna reminisce about her work on career development with phenomenal international musicians, including Youssou N'Dour from Senegal, Salif Keita from Mali, and Carlinhos Brown from Brazil. As a producer, Verna was twice nominated for a Grammy Award for two of the albums she produced with Roswell Rudd.
She's also a writer and spoken word performer. We've included in this episode one of her recent spoken word videos with British musician Jennifer Maidman. There's so much more in this episode and I hope a wide audience will be inspired by Verna Gillis' reflections on her remarkable life in music. Like all my episodes, you can listen to this on your favorite podcast player, watch the YouTube on my channel, and read the transcript. Everything is linked on my website, leahroseman.com. I've also included detailed timestamps. So Verna, before you continue, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me here today.
Verna Gillis:
Thank you for asking me.
Leah Roseman:
I just asked how you were and you were telling me about this amazing concert and I said, "I better push record." So please, start again.
Verna Gillis:
Okay. I'm vibrating. Last night, I went with friends to the Falcon in Marlboro, a great music venue to hear the master ngoni player from Mali, Bassekou Kouyaté, modern and traditional at the same time playing ngoni with a wah-wah pedal and his magnificent wife and her magnificent voice and his younger son on bass ngoni and his younger brother on gourd and his nephew on talking drum, and we got there in time to get a table right in front so there was nothing between us and the band. To be in the presence of such a master where just nothing else mattered at that moment.
That was such a, and I know Bassekou. I met him in Mali when I was there with Roswell, when Roswell did his collaboration with Toumani Diabaté and Bassekou was in the band. So we have history with Bassekou, and then I brought Bassekou over and I don't remember the year, and he features prominently with Roswell in one of his CDs. So he's been to Kerhonkson. Not many people can say that, but Bassekou and his band have been to Kerhonkson. So however, I haven't heard him in years, and in fact, I had never really heard him live with his band. I'd heard him in other contexts or contexts that we provided. It was glorious.
Leah Roseman:
Verna, I was really mulling over how to start this conversation because your life has been so full of so much music, and I was actually feeling overwhelmed and then I asked you how you were doing and you started with this great concert. So I think that's a wonderful starting place because it's the story of your life in a way, right?
Verna Gillis:
Yes, indeed. It was to be in the middle of the music, there was nothing ever came close to that, and to take in yet once again, watching this young man play the gourd, how anything at all can be done excellently, you know what I mean? I hate the expression sideman when they talk about the band because if it's a band, it's everybody because you wouldn't have the sound without - everyone is an essential sound, and anyhow.
Leah Roseman:
So you mentioned that Bassekou had recorded with Roswell Rudd.
Verna Gillis:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And I know who he was, but not all my listeners do. If you could speak to him and his work, and he was also an ethnomusicologist. I didn't realize that part till I was reading more.
Verna Gillis:
Roswell and I had so many things in common in terms of our interests, and our acquaintanceship with each other went back to the seventies when I was working on a degree and I asked him if he would work with me. It was one of those things where you could ask someone to work with you, and he had been an assistant to Alan Lomax and involved with him developing his whole cantometric system, which is the measurement of song, all the things that you can hear in a song, all the many things you can learn to listen for, and it was mind opening and mind-boggling for me.
And so we had a connection, and then I had a venue in New York called Soundscape on 52nd Street and Roswell performed there and we knew each other, and then later on, Brad and I had a place where I still am in Kerhonkson, and I would come up when I could and I would take the bus to New Paltz, and often, the timing was and Roswell would be coming up because he lived up here in Akward with his wife and family. So we disconnected, we connected, and I always liked him. The first photograph of me and Roswell was taken by Brad once when Roswell came to visit us here. We were all friends.
Brad died in April of 1998. We'd been together for 34 years. A month later, Roswell's wife of 30 years had a stroke and had to be moved into a nursing home. So in many ways, he and I had more in common at that point in our lives than anyone else I knew, and I felt that we started hanging out like grieving buddies and we were both what I call highly domesticated animals because the model of living with someone, it worked for me. I always said I was a lifer.
It always gave me stability, it grounded me, and Roswell was like that as well, and the music. You see, starting with my father, all my relationships with men, for sure, and with women and family and friends is around music. I went with two friends last night. We shared that experience. Music changes the chemistry of the body. I've always felt that they talk about music therapy. If one can really learn to listen and stop the mind, that's real music therapy.
Leah Roseman:
And your dad helped you with that when you were still a child.
Verna Gillis:
My dad gave me that gift.
Leah Roseman:
An important part of Verna's life and career was her travels and recording of musicians mostly during the 1970s and her work teaching ethnomusicology at Brooklyn College. If you refer to the detailed timestamps, you'll see that we discussed a lot of this part of her life later in this episode, but I thought it would be a wonderful addition at this point to have this beautiful musical moment with the kora music of Foday Musa Suso recorded in The Gambia. (Music). Later in this episode are four more musical tracks from Smithsonian Folkways recordings that Verna recorded. Verna and I are grateful to Smithsonian Folkways for allowing us to use these recordings as part of this specific podcast, and all the albums are linked in the show notes for this episode.
Verna Gillis:
My dad taught me how to listen. I have a lot of his 78s and vinyl, and when he played music, he didn't talk. It wasn't background, and we would sit on the couch and listen, all the great singers, all the great operas, all the great pianists, all the great violinists, all of them up till Debussy. That's where my father's cutoff was. Great, great, great, and I also was very fortunate because my father's sister was married to a well-known conductor named Julius Rudel, who ran the New York City Opera. So as children, we got to go and hear. We were exposed young, first orally and then visually, and the truth of the matter is music is visual. It's not only oral.
The complete experience of it can only be had three-dimensionally with music. So that became the quest, and also, you know this, we grew up in a home with culture heroes, with the concept that greatness existed and that certain people embodied that greatness, and honestly, most of them were musicians, singers. Paul Robeson was a culture hero. Winston Churchill was a culture hero. Marian Anderson was a culture hero. Heifetz, Horowitz, Rubinstein, they were all culture heroes. We heard the best. My father curated the early years of our musical life, and of course, then there was radio and I was totally into radio. That's where you got it, and the music started to happen in the fifties. I remember Elvis.
Leah Roseman:
So if we could fast-forward maybe to your 30th birthday, I believe you're on a houseboat in Kashmir with Brad Graves.
Verna Gillis:
I'm glad you retrieved that memory for me. I wasn't sure I could. I was trying to remember. We were on Lake Dal in Kashmir. It was part of a trip that took unexpected turns. I was actually headed to Iran to do research for a dissertation, a percussion based, Sufi inspired training. I can tell you more about that, but that's where we were going, and we had booked our tickets on Aeroflot and that was the least expensive way to get to Tehran. When we got to the airport, our bags checked in, but we did not because unbeknownst to us, Aeroflot had a policy that if any Russian citizens showed up, even if they hadn't booked their flight, they took other people off the flight and put them on.
So we got bumped. I wasn't about to rebook through them, and then the least expensive way to get back to Tehran was a round trip ticket to India. 36 hour flight, made six stops, one of them was in Tehran, but because it would've been so much more so we booked all the way through to India. All right. We arrived in Delhi in June, not a season for me. It was 115 degrees. There was no way to feel I could stay hydrated. It was too intense. I remember we went to the Taj Mahal and I never saw it. I saw it as a shimmering, wavering building because the heat rising off the ground was so intense that it affected, and I remember when we got inside, the coolness of the marble and I laid down on the floor.
Anyhow, we needed to get out of Delhi. It was the wrong time of year to be there. So we took a flight to Kashmir. It had never been a plan. It emerged as a solution and it was spectacular. In many ways, I wasn't prepared for Delhi, the density, the number of people living on the street. It was too much, and from that, we went high in the mountains to Kashmir and lived on a houseboat. It was close to idyllic. Boats would come in the morning with fruit, various things that you could buy, and I was carrying my recording equipment, my great old Stellavox, my reel to reel, and the people who owned the houseboat, I asked them if they knew musicians and they arranged for musicians to come to the houseboat. They cooked a meal and we recorded right there.
Leah Roseman:
And that's when you started recording musicians around the world, or had you started earlier?
Verna Gillis:
That was '72. That was kind of the beginning of it.
Leah Roseman:
And meanwhile, your bags were waiting for you in Iran?
Verna Gillis:
No, no. We got the bags back, but we had sublet our apartment, our loft. We had to stay in Brad's studio. It was an interesting experience of New York because we weren't home, but we were. So we became tourists in New York until our flight left. Anyhow, the whole thing from start to finish was spectacular.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need my listener's help. Please consider buying me a coffee. The link to my Ko-fi page is in the description. Every dollar helps me cover the costs of this huge project. Thanks so much. If we could just skip to Soundscape 1979 and talk about how you got this multicultural performance space going.
Verna Gillis:
I had a radio program on WBAI for years. Actually, when I came back from that, so I guess from '72 on. Yeah, it was called Soundscape Music from Everywhere with Verna Gillis and the word soundscape, I just want to tell you about that. There's a great book by the Canadian writer Murray Schafer called Tuning of the World, which was instrumental in my life, and in that book, he coins the word soundscape and he talks about how soundscapes change over time.
Anyhow, I get goosebumps just even remembering, and that became the name of everything I did was soundscape. So Brad, my husband, had a studio at 549 West 52nd Street, corner of 11th Avenue, and one day, he said, "I saw a sign on the door of the building at 500. It's a loft for rent." He said, "Why don't you go look at it?" Brad always had ideas. I went to look at it and took it right away. It was the next right thing to do. It just kept happening, and those were astounding years.
Leah Roseman:
I read you said in another interview that you brought Ornette Coleman to see the space and he advised you to video everything, and you didn't listen to him.
Verna Gillis:
Well, I videoed a lot of things, but not everything. The thing is I was thinking back, I have what I call the, I'm an archivist. I have that gene, and I'm also a producer. I have that gene, and I was thinking back to a lot of the recordings that I did before I opened Soundscape. That's a production of sorts. You have to pull all these elements together to make the recordings happen. They don't just appear. So I had that ability to make things happen, and the radio program that I did, what a thrill for me. I got to talk to everybody, to everybody. I have those tapes, and then so Brad found the space. Ornette came to see it. Those were the craziest and most creative years.
Leah Roseman:
And it was intense. You had a lot of shows, right?
Verna Gillis:
Well, one year I did 167. I'm now 80. I have a new song. I have to send it to you. Maybe I sent it to you. It's called Who Was That Person?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you sent it to me. It's great.
Verna Gillis:
Okay. Yeah, so definitely brought a level of whatever it was but it worked. It worked. Everybody played there. It was the space to do what you weren't going to do elsewhere. It was the place to bring in anyone I wanted. So we did a voodoo ceremony. Tito Puente played there. Paquito D'Rivera, he left Cuba via Spain. Daniel Ponce left Cuba as a marielito, and they met at Soundscape and the rest is history. And that's what happened. People made connections.
Leah Roseman:
And you brought people together too?
Verna Gillis:
Oh yes, definitely. Definitely. The great pianist, Marilyn Crespo, did a duo with Olatunji. Different for both of them. Never would've happened elsewhere. I remember asking the great saxophonist, Jimmy Lyons, to do a solo, and he looked at me baffled. He said, "I've never done a solo," and yet I'd heard him play solos of 30 or 40 minutes but within the context of the Cecil Taylor band. But he was coming off other things. You know what I mean? But he did do a solo, and there was plenty of craziness too. It was a drug riddled era. It was fabulous. It was fabulous really.
Leah Roseman:
I'm hoping to get permission to have some of the recordings you made used in this. We'll have to contact Smithsonian and so on. But I noticed on your YouTube, Verna, that some of your recordings you made in Suriname, you said they hadn't been released, of the Ndjuka people.
Verna Gillis:
Oh no, they are. They're on a record, I think, Music of the Ndjuka. I think it's on Lyrichord. And I'm still in touch with Andre Pacosi who was my guide into the interior in Suriname. He lives in Holland. I have photographs of him and his mother. It's like I knew his mother.
Leah Roseman:
And when you went to the Dominican Republic to record, I think it was a student or two of yours who actually acted as guides there?
Verna Gillis:
Yes. One of the really life changing also experiences of my life was teaching at Brooklyn College. Half my class was not born in the United States, so the diversity was amazing to me. Many of them were Caribbean, Latin American, and I knew really nothing about Caribbean music at that point. And that's when I started going to Haiti and then to the Dominican Republic. Two of my students, brothers but in separate classes, David and Ramon Perez from the Dominican Republic. Anyhow, I ended up going there to do field work, and Ramon was my field assistant there. We traveled the island and that was my most extensive. We just went all over the island. Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.
Leah Roseman:
What you're about to hear is a short track from the Dominican Republic recorded by Verna Gillis. The link to the Smithsonian Folkways album is in the description.(music)
Verna Gillis:
But I'm not an expert on anything. I'm a generalist par excellence.
Leah Roseman:
What were the courses that you were teaching at Brooklyn College?
Verna Gillis:
I was very fortunate to teach in an experimental program called The New School of Liberal Arts. You met with your students once a week for four hours. Four hours is great when you're working with music because that really gives you the time to sit and listen. And for me, it was the real opportunity to learn how to communicate in a non-specialized language. And a lot of the students had interesting things to bring in and ideas that I'd gotten from Murray Schafer, I asked them to speak to the oldest person they knew and to ask that person for sounds that had gone out of existence in their lifetime. That was one of the things that Murray Schafer says, "Where's the museum for disappearing sounds?" So they did that.
I gave them the assignment to go and sit outside in the soundscape, different soundscapes, and to close their eyes and just take in all the sounds. And it's going to be different. If you're in a park, it's going to be different than if you're in a city. It's just helping people to listen better.
And then in teaching, again, listening to a piece of music, you can listen to it so many times and each time ask them to follow something different. You listen to the blend and that's what brings you in. And once you can start to hear all the parts, it's just a deeper appreciation. I was never teaching information. I never had much information about anything.
Leah Roseman:
When I was a student at McGill University, R. Murray Schafer came as a visiting professor. So I took a soundscape course with him. And I do remember a few things quite vividly. One of them was looking at an old painting where there was a lot happening and talking about the sounds. And he talked about sellers in the street with the calls and how that was so much a part of what people would hear for hundreds of years and that's really disappeared. And I'm curious now that you are 80, are there sounds you remember from growing up in New York that have disappeared in the streets?
Verna Gillis:
When we were very young, we would go to a bungalow colony for the summer and there was outdoors an ice box, a literal ice box. People would clamp blocks of ice and literally put them in this ice box which is just how you kept. The sound of that.
I remember living in a building that was heated by coal and it had a coal chute and I was always fascinated when the coal truck would come and they'd open up this area and this chute and the sound of the coal going into the chute. The sound of cash registers, the sound of my mother yelling at me, cobblestones, milk bottles, the clanking of things. Change even.
Even now, I play this game called Mahjong. I play it just for the company. I have a Mahjong whisperer who sits next to me but what I love best about the game is the beginning when everyone moves the tiles. That to me is the highlight, the audio highlight of the whole experience. Is Murray Schafer still alive?
Leah Roseman:
No. He died a couple of years ago.
Verna Gillis:
Oh.
Leah Roseman:
Another one of my guests, Ellen Waterman, spoke about him quite extensively. She had worked with him. If people are interested, they can listen to that.
Verna Gillis:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, he was very important in Canadian music.
Verna Gillis:
Oh, he was a life changer for me. Did he write anything else? I should look it up and see. All I have is The Tuning of the World.
Leah Roseman:
Book wise, I do not know that. I mean most people know him as a composer.
Verna Gillis:
I see.
Leah Roseman:
So speaking of writing, you're a writer and I did buy a couple of your books of aphorisms, which are the same as you do in your performances, the same writing. Are you still actively writing or is it more just journaling?
Verna Gillis:
I am writing. I'll tell you my new piece is called Not as Funny As It Used To Be. I'm known for funny but, quite honestly, finding my way to the Funny is not as easy as it used to be. So it's kind of about giving myself permission just to be where I am.
I don't know if I told you my new ... If anyone asks me now how I am, my answer is good enough. Because I realize if I continue to compare things to the way they were, it's more about despair but they are good enough now. I'm grateful for modern medicine. Yeah, they are good enough. And that was what I call a "Paradiggum Shift" and it brought me into the present in a more grateful way.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking about your archives that were lost in the fire. Was that 2014?
Verna Gillis:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Did that include audio tape or was it other things?
Verna Gillis:
No, it did not include audio tape. It was just the paper trail of a lifetime. Some of Brad's work exploded. Limestone is porous. I was in New York in a show, at a theater festival at the time. I found out about it on a Sunday. I had two more performances. My sanity was not coming up because I knew there was nothing I could do here and that I would never go back. You know what I mean? That was disassociation par excellence.
And when we came up here, Roswell and I were just so grateful that it hadn't gotten to the house. And also another building had charred but had been spared. They sent up this really interesting man who was a fire inspector and, to listen to him, he was able to determine the direction that the winds were blowing at the time of the fire and they were blowing that way and not this way. This way is where the house was. I lost handwriting and what I mean by that is handwriting has vanished. It used to be a marker, the same way you hear someone's voice and you know who you're talking to, you get a thing with handwriting and you know who it's from and that's gone.
And I had saved all these letters from my father, my ... The truth of the matter is would I have ever gone back and read them? Well, of course I'll never know but now the answer is no. And honestly, living in the present takes all my attention, is quite riveting and needs all that I've got to give to it. So the past, I'm not hanging out there really.
Leah Roseman:
You might be interested. Some of my regular listeners know I don't operate from a list of questions, but I make kind of a mind map. So for you it's a little bit involved. I try to be a minimalist, but there was just so much I had to-
Verna Gillis:
Oh, love it. Love it.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm not sure we'll get to all of this, but maybe we could talk about in terms of a producer like the first US concert for King Sunny Adeé, how did that come about?
Verna Gillis:
A young couple, and I don't remember their names, that used to come regularly to Soundscape said to me, "We want to play something for you. We want you to hear someone." They came to my house and played King Sunny Adeé for me, and that was it. Contacted him and did his first concert at the Savoy, then did a tour with him, and by the time he came back, he had become a rock star. And we did his final concert. I did his final concert at Roseland. And not only was it sold out but the Nigerian community started arriving when it was over.
Roseland was a union room so I started the concert. I was not presenting to a Nigerian audience but the Nigerian audience, they were on Nigerian time. I could have done another show but I didn't. And it was packed. The place was over packed. It was such an enormous success. I remember I had a limo to take him back to his hotel afterwards. I went out and grabbed the limo to take all this cash back to my loft. I didn't know what to do with it. I put it in the freezer. I wasn't prepared for such a financial success.
Robert Palmer in The New York Times called it the "Pop Event of the Decade". It was. I became known as kind of the world music person in New York at that time. By the way, I hate the term, world music. We talked about that, haven't we?
Leah Roseman:
We did talk about that before.
Verna Gillis:
And the person who I thank for that was Ryuichi Sakamoto. We were neighbors and friends for a while. He and his wife, Norika, were living in the West Village so we knew each other. And then I did his New York concert, and I did a fabulous concert with him at the Beacon Theater. And one day we were talking, and he said to me, "For me, Western classical music is just another form of ethnic music." And that was the epiphany moment for understanding.
So where were we? Where was I? Was I answering anything you asked?
Leah Roseman:
You were. We were talking about presenting King Sunny Ade, and then I was looking, many of the quite famous musicians you ended up representing I'd heard of, but I didn't know about Carlinhos Brown. And then reading about him and all this amazing community music he's done over the years, how did you meet him in Brazil?
Verna Gillis:
I was very fortunate to organize a world music festival for the New York International Festival of the Arts. They gave me a budget to bring over groups and I wanted to go to Brazil specifically looking for groups. I was friends with Arto and Duncan Lindsay. Arto was a great musician. He had a band called DNA, a very well known band in New York for a while, and they'd grown up with missionary parents in Brazil. So Duncan came with me. I brought him with me as my translator and he brought me then to the home of Carlinhos Brown. My first experience of Carlinhos was him in tight bicycle shorts and a tank top leading a percussion ensemble of maybe 60 young people in front of a house that he had built for his parents. Love at first sight and he was dynamite and fabulous and we just connected. It's just about that. It's just about that.
I think I've always had a particular affinity for percussion. I've organized percussion ensembles, I mean festivals. And one of my early fantasies of myself, and I've had several, but one of them was to be a conga player. When I got my first apartment when I was 17, I bought two conga drums and I used to play along to Latin music. I took conga lessons for a while from Montego Joe and I took timbale lessons for a while from Nicky Marrero. But that wasn't my natural talent, but I had this thing for percussion. And yeah, then Daniel Ponce. Daniel Ponce was my fantasy of myself. He was magnificent and graceful when he played. He could play five congas at a time and they sang.
He came off the streets. He had been in jail in Cuba. He was one of the people who was told to leave. He didn't ask to leave. And then his life changed because he had all this natural talent not only as a player but participating in Carnival in Havana and directing Carnival. And if you can do that ... He like Carlinhos from the street but had these great skills because of the music they were part of. And Daniel was able to apply that here and put bands together and ensembles together and translate that talent to situations here.
Leah Roseman:
And in the '80s in New York, there was this Latin scene sort of starting musically that you contributed towards?
Verna Gillis:
Eddie Figueroa had a Latin club downtown in New York and he lost his lease. I had just moved into Soundscape. He said, "Can we bring it here?" That was the gift. That was the gift. It became a Tuesday night series and everybody played there. And then I worked with some of those musicians in other contexts, and Daniel Ponce was one of them. It was with Daniel Ponce that I first really understood that I had a talent to work with talent, to recognize talent and potential. My goal was not to have him do what he already knew how to do but to create situations to apply that to something new.
Leah Roseman:
Can you give an example of that?
Verna Gillis:
Well, for example, he and Paquito never would've met in Cuba. Paquito played with Irakere which was a well-known Cuban band that traveled internationally. They were from different classes. Daniel was "netamente de la calle", you know what I mean, really from the street. They never would've met, never. They met at Soundscape and then a new fusion was born.
And I was able to bring Daniel together with Celia Cruz and Celia Cruz, the great singer, had left Cuba in the 1950s but she was also roots and hadn't done that in a while. And she and Daniel, they rehearsed at Soundscape, and then we brought it to SOBs. It was a fertile time. It was a fertile time. Timing is everything. The great pianist, Jorge Dalto, Hilton Ruiz, Michel Camilo, it was just the time.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of some of the African musicians that you represented, were you traveling in Mali? Were you traveling in Nigeria? How did that come about?
Verna Gillis:
No, I had traveled a little bit in West Africa. I did field work in Ghana in 1976 and did side trips to Benin and Togo, recording music everywhere I was. But in I forget the year, a friend of mine, Ken Day, whom I know to this day who lives in Sweden, came to my house with a cassette and he had just come back from Senegal. He said, "You've got to hear this." And it was Youssou N'Dour. And once again... You know what I mean?
Leah Roseman:
He started singing quite young, performing as a teenager?
Verna Gillis:
Yes. He's from a griot family and music was always what he did. So 1984 I guess, Brad and I went to Senegal, and I'd actually written Youssou a letter that got through. What a concept. Anyhow, he came to New York to meet me. It was.... Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you helped his career for about 12 years?
Verna Gillis:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
I mean, he's so huge. How did you develop that? What kind of things?
Verna Gillis:
Well, again, everything was timing - Peter Gabriel was a fan of Youssou N'Dour. I approached Peter Gabriel and Youssou became part of a Human Rights tour that Peter Gabriel put together, which included Youssou, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, oh, a great singer, I can't remember her name, and Youssou. It was a launching of sorts. It was timing again. World music was the thing. Brad and I were very good friends with Don Cherry, and we had done a project with Don Cherry. In fact, we'd gone to Mammoth Cave Kentucky with Don Cherry recorded within a cave there, so I knew Don and Moki and I knew their children Neneh and Eagle-Eye. Neneh became a great singer, and she and Cameron were living in New York at the time. And I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be interesting to put her together with Youssou?" Neneh also has African roots herself. Cameron is a producer, Youssou and I arrived there and Cameron had put down this descending line. That's all he had put down.
(Singing)
And they both took off over that. And it was the song Seven Seconds. And we sold almost 2 million copies. And then there was interest. I was able to find booking agents in Europe and a separate booking agent here. And we did the circuits, we did the circuit. And I'll tell you a funny story, because on the Human Rights tour with Sting and Springsteen and all these people, we had our own plane. I mean, it was quite an experience. And generally always Youssou opened because he was the least known of the artists. The people hadn't come for Youssou yet. So he would open and very warmly received, always.
So part of the tour was in Cape Coast. Oh, Ivory Coast, I'm sorry. In Ivory Coast, Youssou closed the concert...
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Verna Gillis:
... Because no one knew from Bruce Springsteen, or Peter Gabriel or Sting, you know what I mean? Anyhow, it was a wonderful experience. And I was able to get Youssou record deals, publishing advances. No one gets publishing anymore. Those were the days when musicians could make money from selling records. Napster ruined all that. For some reason, many people have never paid for music. Spotify should burn in hell. You know I'm a ranter. That's my genre.
Leah Roseman:
I bring this up with a lot of people, the whole problem with streaming services, and it's something that really bothers me. And I really applaud Bandcamp, especially for independent artists that can put their work there and I try to listen to music there as much as possible and buy albums through them.
Verna Gillis:
Yes, me too.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I guess the press was different. There was more music press.
Verna Gillis:
Well, we got reviewed everywhere. We got reviewed internationally. It's amazing to me to remember it. And Brad was an integral part of it. I mean, of the loft scene for sure and of everything.
Leah Roseman:
He wasn't a musician, he was a sculptor, but he absolutely loved music.
Verna Gillis:
He had his own group for a while called Vortex.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Verna Gillis:
Brad was a great sculptor. Great sculptor. In fact, I hope you'll visit here actually.
Leah Roseman:
I'd love to.
Verna Gillis:
I bet we'll talk about that. I live in a sculpture park. I live among his work, and it gives me enormous comfort. And Brad was so influential in my life. I said "My father ended at Debussy." That's where Brad began. And then it was everything else. Everything else. I'm a New Yorker, I grew up in the city. I always said that I was his New Yorker, and he was my American because he was from Texas. So he had a concept of America as a place. America was a backdrop to New York for me. It had no reality really. New York was a place you left from to go other places. But Brad brought me into America. He related to it geographically, geologically and culturally too. He was proud of being a Texan. Never got that, but he opened things up and brought so many things into my life. I mean, I remember walking into the bedroom in our loft, and he'd be sitting on a stool with headphones listening to music, and all the hairs on his arm would be standing up.
Leah Roseman:
You said he was in a group called Vortex. A musical group or an artistic group?
Verna Gillis:
It was a musical group. A duo.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Verna Gillis:
The best thing about the group, from my point of view, was the covers he designed.
Leah Roseman:
And when you traveled to Greece with him, was one of your early trips, it opened up your ears to different kind of sounds?
Verna Gillis:
I took a freighter to meet Brad in Greece. Brad had been in Israel. He went there to work on an archeological dig with General Yigael Yadin at Masada. From there, he went to live on a kibbutz in Eilat in the south. And he used to write me letters because we had already connected in New York, "Come live with me on the kibbutz. We only work six days a week, 12 hours a day." I said, "No, thank you. Let's meet in Greece." And so I took a freighter and the first place I stepped foot after New York was in Morocco, in Casablanca. That's where the freighter docked.
And it was visceral. You know you were somewhere else. The air smells different. There are calls from the minaret. It was a cultural infusion, and it kept going from there. And then in Greece to hear the music, we heard so much great music there, and that's where Brad and I got to know each other. That was the first place that Brad and I lived together. And Brad was into his Kazantzakis phase at that time. He had his mustache, he had a watch fob, we made a pilgrimage to Kazantzakis' home and grave on Crete. Oh, it was wonderful. It was wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, when you're on that boat, being the child of immigrants who had taken boats to the U.S., did it have a resonance for you that way?
Verna Gillis:
No.
Leah Roseman:
No.
Verna Gillis:
No. My grandmother, it was my grandmother and my mother who came here by boat. My father's mother. 15 years old, illiterate, steerage, from Odessa. And it was only during this recent Ukrainian war that I understood why she was able to get out. Because Odessa's a seaport town. I had never bothered to really understand that part. So she's one of the long line of boat people. Still going on.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Verna Gillis:
I have what I call a one older woman show. And it's interesting, I used to refer to her as Rosie the Terrible, because she was not a soft and cuddly grandma. And she could give the look. And the only person who ever softened her up was my father, who was her favorite child. That was just a fact. So when she came, you never knew. But then in telling her story, I took off the Terrible, you know? You start to hear what you're saying.
Leah Roseman:
And when you were a music student at City College, there were a lot of Jewish refugees teaching there.
Verna Gillis:
Timing. How Fortunate. Fritz Jahoda had been a conductor at the Vienna Opera. Jewish. Had to get the hell out of there. Came to City College. I was able to take a course that he led in chorus and it led to one of the most extraordinary musical experiences that I've ever had, which was to sing in a double chorus of Bartok's Cantata Profana. That surround sound. That was a benefit. And there were just great musicians who were on faculty. The City College was able to benefit from that. Everyone in my family graduated from City College, starting with my father, who in those days was able to go there because it was free. And then started teaching there when he was 19.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Verna Gillis:
Yeah. I was supposed to go to Boston University. I could not bear the idea of living in a dormitory. It wouldn't have been good for me or anyone. I had to share a room with my sister. No, no, no, thank you. So anyhow, I didn't do that and I started living in the West Village, and my brother went for a couple of years to a school in Wisconsin. Didn't like being in Wisconsin. Went to City College and my sister started and ended there. So we all graduated from there.
Leah Roseman:
What was the West Village like in those years? Early '60s?
Verna Gillis:
I don't remember. Oh, god, it was coffee shops. It was LeRoi Jones and Hettie before he became Amiri Baraka. They had a music loft. I don't know how I found my way there. I don't know how that happened. It was picking up people on subways, talking to people in coffee shops, it was going into small, where you've walked downstairs and there'd be live music. And then I got a job working part-time for a lawyer, started going to City College. Took me 10 years to get my BA. When I finally got my BA, my mother gave me a lovely gift, and she wrote me a note. She said, "Anybody can do it in four years. 10 years," she said, "That's special."
Leah Roseman:
The dissertation you were working on when you were going to record in Iran, was that...
Verna Gillis:
Oh, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
... For a doctorate, or was that-
Verna Gillis:
Yeah, for a doctorate. So yeah, I love doing it. It went up in the fire. And I was reminiscing about with friends last night, one of the things that I've saved, I have a packet of, I don't even know if you'll know what it is, carbon paper.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, yeah.
Verna Gillis:
Okay, you know carbon paper. So I was reminiscing about writing a fucking dissertation with carbon paper...
Leah Roseman:
Really?
Verna Gillis:
... And those goddam footnotes. And if they don't fit in, you got to start over again. And then if you make a typo, you got to white it out on the carbon copies.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Verna Gillis:
Oh my. And the little Olivetti with the little turning ball. Oh my god. Anyhow, so I have carbon paper should you need any.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I wonder if people were better writers back then because it was harder to edit?
Verna Gillis:
Well, I've lost handwriting. It's shocking to me. Those muscles aren't really being used anymore. And what passes for a signature today is anything at all.
Leah Roseman:
I was reading about another little thing you did. It wasn't music, but Poetry in Public Places, 1974. I believe you started this?
Verna Gillis:
I did.
Leah Roseman:
Poetry on buses.
Verna Gillis:
Yeah. One thing that has always figured in my life has been a large room. Brad and I were very fortunate. There was the Davidson Foundation that had artist housing, and I found out about it, I applied for it through Brad, and we were given a 1900 square foot loft. I mean, we paid for it. Rent, of course, but it was $125 a month in those days. 1900 square feet, windows on three sides, three flights up as part of artist housing. He later went on and did Westbeth. That was his second project. The building that we were in was his first project. It was an old manufacturing building, he had bought it from the city for back taxes and did a minor conversion. But it was a blessing in our life. And we had this large room. If you have a large room, you have to do something in it. It's an opportunity. And large rooms have continued to factor in.
So we had interesting friends, and we did a series of poetry readings. And also Don Cherry, I remember... Oh, yes, through another connection, I had met Alejandro Jodorowsky, who did some really interesting films. A Mexican film director. And Don Cherry did some music for him. Anyhow, they rehearsed in our loft. I had a Steinway Baby Grand, which is another story. It was a space. You could do stuff in a space. So the poetry thing, and then who knows? Why not put them on the buses? I don't know how it happened. And then the New York Times Magazine section did a story on it. We won awards. Yeah. How things happen.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And for you, your writing has been quite therapeutic over the years, just...
Verna Gillis:
Absolutely. It's where I found my voice. Writing first was a tool. When you write something, you find out what you're feeling often. And then my father was one of the funniest people we ever knew. My father was the original king of one-liners. I mean, I'll tell you some of my father's lines. "The first hundred years are the hardest." That's a line from my father. The other line from my father that I really love is, well, he said, "I married your mother, but you're going to have to marry a perfect stranger." Then he said, "The average person is way below average." Anyhow, I always called it pun-ishment in our house. And in fact, all three of us; my brother, my sister, and I were all into it. We could knock them out. And so what I do is just an extension of that.
Leah Roseman:
What you're about to hear is one of Verna Gillis' recent spoken word videos. This one is called Numbers Game. It's dedicated to all of us dealing with illness. At the end, I list the credits for all the many people involved.
Verna Gillis:
(Singing)
Leah Roseman:
For those of you listening to the podcast, I wanted to read the credits. Special thanks to David Johansson, Michael Hamilton, Lauren Mancia, Adam Gidwitz, David Gillis, Amy Summers, Ava Tonudo, Julie Novak, Karen Martino, David Gonzalez, Michael Heller, and Jane Augustine, Mary Hennessy, Solana Bennett, Brielle Bennett, Carolina and John Simon, Masha Taylor. Lyrics and vocals; Verna Gillis, produced by Reggie Bennett. Guitar and bass; Jennifer Maidman. Drums; Jerry Moratta and video production; Lindsay Morano. This is dedicated to all of us dealing with illness.
And in terms of your life as a pianist, I'm curious, you were gifted this beautiful piano by your aunt, as I understand?
Verna Gillis:
Yes. My mother's mother, my grandmother, was killed in the Holocaust. I'm a Holocaust Jew. That's my identity. And my mother's Aunt Riva was like my grandmother. When I was four, she gave me my first piano, an upright, and said that if I continued with it, one day she'd get me a good piano. So I was never a pianist, but I enjoyed playing the piano. I took piano lessons, I wrote little ditties. I didn't have to be forced to practice. I enjoyed it, but there was no great talent. It was just something I enjoyed. When I was 17, my parents moved. They didn't take the piano, and they said, "Wait, just wait." One day the doorbell rang, and there came this Steinway from my aunt.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. And you have it still in your room behind you?
Verna Gillis:
I'm going to turn so you can see it. Hold on. You see it?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, beyond the desk.
Verna Gillis:
Wait. Oh, there it is. Yeah, you see the trombone? Behind that is the piano. That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Do you still play?
Verna Gillis:
Oh, yes. Started really playing when I was living with Roswell, because Roswell and I started writing songs together, and Roswell worked out a lot of his material on the piano. It's not that I played it, but that it was always integral to my life and what was going on around me. Great people have played this piano. Sun Ra played this piano.
Leah Roseman:
In your YouTube videos, Verna, there's beautiful slideshows of some of these trips you've taken with the music you recorded there. But the one in Haiti that was actually filmed by somebody, so there's this incredible video footage people can see. That must have been such a memorable trip.
Verna Gillis:
Haiti, I'll tell you the story, I think you know. You teach things that you haven't experienced, that's in academic situations. It's impossible to have experienced everything. But I had taught Vodou as part of a segment that I did on religion. Brad had actually suggested that we go to Haiti, because he had read about rara, carnival music, and he thought, "Wow, let's go. Nothing's been recorded. Let's go check it out."
Anyhow, he also had a contact of a oungan in Port-au-Prince, and we went to a ceremony there. So there I am with my Stellavox, with earphones. The music is extraordinary. The ability of music to transport people is extraordinary. And suddenly the guy twists off the head of the chicken, pours the blood down the front of his body, drinks the blood, and throws the carcass on the floor. And I'm watching the carcass, and I'm remembering the phrase "running around like a chicken without its head." And I really got it. And all the hair on my arms are standing up and I'm thinking, "Far fucking out!". I mean, I was seeing something that was beyond anything I had seen before or could really comprehend. The guy then ate a glass. He then walked on embers.
Well you know, most things in life that one does, you don't understand. When I drive over a bridge, I don't understand the engineering or the physics or any of it that enable that bridge to be there. It's beyond my comprehension. But this was different maybe because it was different. Brad and I went back to the hotel we were staying. We went to sleep, and I wet the bed. It had touched something.
Leah Roseman:
This is a short excerpt from the Vodun-Rada Rite for Erzulie, the Vodou spirit of love and women, recorded by Verna Gillis.
Verna Gillis:
As I said, most things are beyond our comprehension, but we don't question them. We just assume. And then I was in Winti in Suriname saw the same experiences. Anyhow, yes indeed. Music is transporting. It's definitely transporting.
Leah Roseman:
And Verna, not all your travels were abroad. In terms of recording music, you recorded with a great Comanche flute player.
Verna Gillis:
Doc Tate Nevaquaya. Yes, yes. That was wonderful. And my oldest nephew, Ivan, was with us for that. Yes, it was wonderful. Music is everywhere. It's everywhere.
Leah Roseman:
Doc Tate Nevaquaya was a Comanche artist and traditional Native American flute player. He played an important role in reviving the playing of this instrument in the 1970s when Verna recorded him.(music)
How did you hear about him, or -
Verna Gillis:
Well, we went on one of Brad's trips to the southwest, and then... Oh, Brad had been working on a sculpture, and we drove through Oklahoma. We drove through Oklahoma. Flat. Interesting. And you ask around, and we saw a sign about a powwow, and we asked if we could go and sure. We recorded the powwow. Met Doc Tate there and I asked if we could go, and he said, "Sure." People have been surprisingly generous and open to being recorded. And some people had never been recorded before and heard themselves for the first time on my headphones. The recordings are shared experiences. It's not a one-way thing.
Leah Roseman:
Do you remember one of those experiences when someone was hearing themselves for the first time, who it was and what their reaction was like?
Verna Gillis:
I could send you a photograph. It was in the Dominican Republic, and his sense of wonder. Certain music is hard to record because a lot of people who sing also play rhythm. Sticks or bells. And if you're only recording with two mics, you really get the bell or the stick. Anyhow, they're imperfect. It's a document. For me, it was a focus. Brought me right in.
Leah Roseman:
This track of Dagomba drumming is from Ghana. The link is in the description. We could talk about Salif Keita , if I'm saying his name right?
Verna Gillis:
Yes. Oh, God, Salif. Oh, I had met Salif while I was working with Youssou. But I'll tell you, all the artists that I've worked with, there's a moment where you fall in love with them. Their musician self. I remember when it was with Youssou. I remember those moments, and I remember it with Salif. I hung out with him in Paris. I remember he had a little studio in the basement with no windows. He reminded me a lot of Carlinhos. They're a font, a never ending font of ideas. And Salif is interesting as a person, as well as a musician.
As albino, they used to sacrifice albinos in Mali. He was born albino, but the priest said that he would be pardoned because there was something special about him. Well, there definitely is something special about him. He has a vulnerability about him that comes out in his music and comes out... Salif has the ability, which I found rare, is to be friends with women, and women loved Salif. Anyhow, it was so multifaceted working with him. We did a CD together called Papa, and Vernon Reed was the producer. But honestly, Salif did most of the producing and didn't need a producer. Salif knew exactly what he wanted. Exactly.
Anyhow, watching him work was incredible. And I don't know if you've heard that CD. I love that CD. There are a lot of wonderful things on that CD. We brought in Greg Jones for something. I mean, we had a ball. John Medeski is on it.
Leah Roseman:
Did you do some touring with him?
Verna Gillis:
Yes. We went on tour. I'll tell you a funny story about Salif. The first time that I worked with him and met him was I did a double bill at the Beacon Theater. If you can imagine this, Salif Keita and Youssou N'Dour. That was my bill at the Beacon Theater. Oh my God. Okay. And Salif came up to me before he went on. He said, "I want to be paid now."
And I said, "I'll pay you later when I pay every-" "I want to be paid. Now." I laughed. I don't remember if I paid him, but that's where he was coming from. That must have been his experience. But Salif did tend to veer a little bit towards the not trusting side of life. And the thing with Salif was, and I don't know if it was a result of his albinism, I'm not sure. If you were in front of him, he got you. But as soon as you stepped away, he forgot you and went into his own... You couldn't rely on him to follow through.
Leah Roseman:
So did you bring him to the States for the first time?
Verna Gillis:
Yeah. I heard him do a solo. That was one of the great musical nights of my life. His lyrics are extraordinary. He's a total artist. Youssou, for example, has a right and a left brain. Carlinhos now has become quite the entrepreneur and quite the business person. I don't know if you've seen any of his recent... Do you follow him on TikTok or Instagram? I don't know where it is.
Leah Roseman:
Maybe I should. Okay.
Verna Gillis:
I mean, it's interesting to see what he's doing now. It's on a commercial level that's of no interest to me personally. But just to see he's this public personality that goes everywhere with cameras. I mean, Carlinhos started out playing buckets on the street.
Leah Roseman:
Do you have any perspectives on the evolution of social media and how young artists feel they have to project their personas? How that's changed over time with the way people used to do publicity?
Verna Gillis:
One of the things that's changed is it's impossible to release a song now without a video.
That's a big change. I remember when MTV started, that was a disaster for music. I mean, it was a creative outlet. But now, a lot of music becomes background to the video. You've got to entertain with the video. It's hard to find a music video that's just about the performance of the music. It's led to a lot of interesting creativity for sure, and collaboration. But for the most part, I'd still rather listen than watch the song, but if it's Adele singing her song, I'll take it.
Leah Roseman:
You did so many travels, and I don't want to take your whole afternoon. We didn't talk about Peru really, or Ghana or some of the other places you traveled and recorded. Are there any of those memories you wanted to bring to life today at all?
Verna Gillis:
I remember one of the memories of Peru was going to a national museum and seeing people who looked exactly like the figures coming out of the cases. That cultural connection and hearing all those great Indian languages. And the chewing of the cocoa leaves. Getting locked in Machu Picchu. Because in those days, a lot of people were coming to Peru because of the drugs, and there were signs up all over. But they also didn't want people to stay in the ruins after dark. So they put a gate up and ask people to leave. And of course, we didn't leave, and I'm not even sure we were aware that we were supposed to leave. And remember the extraordinary experience of sitting there and all these extraordinary mountains, as you lost the light, you lost the sense of dimension. And so they all moved towards you. I remember that so well. But then of course, we couldn't get out. So I was with David and he had to climb over the gate. Definitely not something I was capable of doing. And he found someone to come back with a key.
Another thing about Ghana was you can see it. My hair, it took me a long time to appreciate that my hairstyle is dry and frizzy. That's what it has going for it. And in Ghana, in those days, the women wore very, very short hair. My hair was like this. I now call it a jewfro. But in any case, my hair became a point of contact for me with people because they'd come over to it and touch it and say, "Nice." So that's memorable. I remember one night in Accra... No, it was in Kumasi. We went out for dinner and I wore my house coat. It was a long blue house coat, and it fit in perfectly with the kind of dresses the women wore. That was a memorable night. I know that in Kumasi, in Accra, you could set your watches by the time it rained. We were there in the monsoon season. And anyhow, there are other memories, but those are non-musical ones. I remember Tamale in Northern Ghana. It was a storm, and I put on my bathing suit, got my shampoo, went outside, and anyhow.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. So many memories. Well, Verna, I want to thank you so much for your time and your stories and your perspectives.
Verna Gillis:
You too, Leah. You too. You too. Let me know when you want to do it again and figure out when you can come visit, really. That would be lovely.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, for sure.
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following this series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three, with a fascinating diversity of musicians and their stories and music. Have a great week.
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