Artist`s Save the World Tour

When artist Wayne Ashley hears about tragic events he responds by creating his tile mosaic artwork and gifting that work to people who are suffering.  Recently Ashley heard about the murder of five-year-old Taliyah Marsman and her mother Sara Baillie in Calgary.  He responded by creating a tile mosaic of a mother bear and cub for Taliyah’s grandmother and Sara’s mother Janet Fredette when she is ready to receive it.  The faces of Taliyah and Sarah are laser-inscribed into the granite.

He made a companion piece which he drove from his home in Edmonton to the Calgary police department whose members were traumatized in searching for the missing little girl.  

Wayne Ashley presents artwork to Calgary police

One of the Calgary constables emailed his thanks saying that Ashley deserved “a thousand thanks and, much like us, you will not see how many lives you have touched until we meet again.” (Gareth Hampshire, CBC News July 25, 2016) 

The artist has been creating these pieces for years.  After 911, Ashley created a five panel piece which he loaded in his truck and drove from Alberta to New York.  The piece is now installed in a Staten Island Park as a memorial to the first responders who lost their lives in the aftermath.

The First Law of World Peace installed in Staten Island

This 49 year old artist was born and raised in Edmonton.  He is a self taught artist who is also a member of Driftpile First Nation.  One of his pieces, “Unity” is on the First Nation and is a response to racism.

He has also made pieces to commemorate the murdered and missing Indigenous women.  Recently his work was installed in the Edmonton city hall to remember the first responders in that city who have lost their lives in the course of taking care of the community.

“I have to do this because I feel in my heart there’s a lot of people who do a lot of good and they carry a lot of dark things with them,” said Ashley (Gareth Hampshire, CBC news July 20, 2016).

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Ashley made a piece to honour the 20 children who died and drove it to the US.  On the way home he ran out of money and had to sleep in his truck.  The US police officer who woke him up to see what he was doing was moved when he showed her photos of his work and told him his story.  She got him a hotel room for the night, paid for his breakfast the next morning and filled his truck with gas.

His piece  "Ascending"  is a memorial to honour those buried in unmarked graves at Holy Cross Cemetery in St. Albert.  He has also created memorials for slain police officers David Wynn and Daniel Woodall.

Wayne Ashley with one of his pieces

Ashley works concrete jobs in the summertime and gives the pieces without financial compensation.  He wants to give something from the heart without financial consideration.  Father Jim Holland of Sacred Heart of the First People`s Church says his friend, "helps people to see life in a different way."  There are people who support Ashley so he can continue with his work.

Mike Fluker was working as a security consultant on a construction site when he met Ashley who was trying to recover tile from the demolition.  They became friends and Fluker is one of the people who helps to support Ashley financially.  He feels it makes him a part of this labour of love.

Some of the pieces which are installed outside need repair.  Ashley will be visiting them and doing repairs.  He calls it his "Save the World" tour because he believes each piece brings goodwill that he hopes will help others deal with sadness.  You can hear Ashley speak about his work on CBC.  He says he wants to make the world a better place for the people who he loves and for those they love and so on. His open heart will surely inspire you.

The Music of Strangers

“To change the world, you have to make a little noise,” reads the trailer for the recently released documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.  Directed by Morgan Neville, this movie documents the musical collaboration of world renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. 

Starting in 1998, Yo-Yo Ma began searching for musicians from the region of the ancient Silk Road; Persia, India, China and Mongolia. Ma was a child prodigy and can’t remember not playing the cello so he feels it isn't something he chose.  Even in his sixth decade he is still looking for how he fits into the world, looking for meaning.  He says in the film, “The clearest reason for music and culture is it gives us meaning.”  

Yo-Yo Ma has taken part in a large number of cross cultural collaborations throughout his illustrious career.  And so creating the Silk Road Ensemble was a natural part of his search for how music can contribute to global understanding.  One of his collaborations with a street dancer “L’il Buck” Riley dancing to Saint-Saens’ The Swan that is shown in the film, can be viewed on you tube.

Yo-Yo Ma

The Music of Strangers beautifully tells the story of some of the primary members of the Silk Road Ensemble and how they create together, layering and expanding their themes like a piece of music itself.  The footage of the group performing is intriguing.  Traditional music is combined in a non-traditional way that is rich in complexity, beauty and diversity.  It is of course like nothing you’ve ever heard.  You can get a quick taste of it during the movie trailer. 

Wu Man, Kinan Azmeh, Kayhan Kalhor and Cristina Pato are the  artists featured in the film along with Yo-Yo Ma.  Wu Man is originally from China.  She plays the pipa, a lute-like Chinese instrument with a 2000 year-old history.  She is a  virtuoso soloist, educator and composer who like Yo-Yo Ma was a child prodigy.  She has taken part in collaborations that span artistic disciplines and are evident in her multiple recordings.

Wu Man on the right

Kinan Azmeh is a clarinet player originally from Syria.  He has appeared
worldwide as a soloist, composer and improviser.  The movie shows him
visiting a Syrian refugee camp to teach music to children.




Kayhan Kalhor from Iran is an internationaly acclaimed virtuoso on the
kamancheh, a bowed four string instrument.  He has made Persian music popular in the West through his many collaborations.

Kayhan Kalhor front left

Cristina Pato is a Galician bagpiper, pianist and educator from Spain.  She performs jazz, Galician popular music and classical music worldwide. Together with many other musicians, they model “new forms of cultural exchange” in their performances, workshops and residencies.

Yo-Yo Ma says that these musicians started as strangers.  He speaks of the fear of working with strangers that eventually turned into joy.  A musician from China says, “None of us speaks perfect Persian, perfect Chinese, perfect English but we all speak perfect musical language.”

The Silk Road Ensemble

 “We started as a group of musicians getting together and seeing what might happen when strangers meet,” says Ma. “Now, when I’m with them, I feel a huge amount of creativity and trust. I am supported, inspired and energized by the work they do. It’s a pleasure to have seen them grow into mature artists and contributing cultural citizens. They are all people who care about their communities. Some are professors and some run festivals. They have all created fulfilling and meaningful lives for themselves in sometimes trying circumstances and I feel like I’m a fuller human being for the experience of knowing and working with them.”

Kindness is Contagious

All the shootings in the US in the past month have left me feeling disheartened about how humans can treat one another.  As an antidote, I decided to watch the movie Kindness is Contagious for a second time.  This film by David Gaz is narrated by Catharine Ryan Hyde, author of the book Pay it Forward.

Gaz feels that emotions are “collective phenomena.  We don’t just feel emotions, we show them.”  He was interested to see if kindness can spread in social networks.  This interested him because networks have exponential power.  Researchers have found that we are each connected to all other humans by just six steps or what has been called “six degrees of separation”.  Therefore, although we may have a relatively small number of people in our social network, those people have people that they are connected to and so on.  So through these networks, we have more influence than we think.

Studies have demonstrated that when you are interacting with someone who is kinder, you tend to be kinder as well.  Likewise, if you get the flu and you are in contact with someone else, they may get the flu. Gaz, says that an emotional contagion is as “process where one person feels an emotion and it ends up spreading to the people that person is connected to and the people that they are connected to and so on.”

Scientists are finding that kindness and cooperation are vital to the survival of a species.  Even Charles Darwin came to this conclusion in his last book.  The idea of survival of the fittest based on a model of competition was one of his earlier ideas that was made popular because it fit the worldview of industrialized nations of the time.  But by the end of his life he felt species that cooperated were more likely to survive.  This idea didn't gain attention because it was counter to the thinking of the time.  Watching the events in the US lately makes it obvious to me that fear and hatred can also spread like a contagion and that they don’t create healthy communities.

Gaz argues that altruism allows us to do more together than we could do on our own.  He gives the example of the simple network of a bucket brigade.  Altruism allows us to form social networks because we tend to break connections that aren’t reciprocal.  These networks allow us to see ourselves as a sort of superorganism.  Groups that have altruistic people in them do better than groups with only selfish people in them.  On average, these groups are a force of good where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here are some interesting facts based on research about the benefits of kindness:

• ·        The primary quality that one looks for in a prospective mate is kindness more than money and good looks
• ·        People who volunteer later in life are more likely to live longer
• ·        Kind people are trusted in a competitive game and are given more resources
• ·        Sports teams have a higher level of wins if the members like each other
• ·        People who give in their teenage years have better mental and physical health in later years
• ·        Kind people are more likely to get pay raises and promotions

In the movie, Gaz asks a wide variety of people one simple question, “What is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?”  The answers included, paying someone’s rent, buying someone a car, donating a kidney, being a Big Brother and the list goes on.

Try asking yourself this question: What is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

I wonder if you can even figure out what the nicest thing you have done for someone else is.  I suspect we will never know all the good will we have sent out like ripples.  Most of us focus on our gaffs and mistakes instead.

When I hear about the turmoil south of us and within our own society as well, I often feel powerless.  But if you think about kindness being contagious, then we all have more power than we know.  Our kind acts will magnify exponentially.  If we can imagine what it is like to be another person, we may have an idea of what kindness would be to that person.  If we have the courage to create an act of kindness, we are being part of the solution and building a stronger community where we all benefit.

If you want a shortcut to feeling this, you can watch the trailer or if cuteness will do the trick, check out this grade school class reciting the poem Kindness is Contagious.

The Songs of My Ancestors

British educator Sir Ken Robinson speaking on creativity and diversity said, “ People often associate creativity with the individual. But is there a social dimension to creativity that's particularly relevant in the 21st century? Absolutely. Most original thinking comes through collaboration and through the stimulation of other people's ideas….. In practical terms, most creative processes benefit enormously from collaboration… This is one of the great skills we have to promote and teach—collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity."

Here are some stories of creative collaboration that have come my way.

Mermans Mosengo and Jason Tamba

Musicians, Mermans Mosengo and Jason Tamba both left the Democratic Republic of the Congo fifteen years ago. Mosengo came to South Africa where he worked as a drummer and bassist. Tamba, a self-taught guitarist also travelled to South Africa where the two musicians met and formed the band Afro Fiesta.  Their vision is to use music to educate and inspire audiences to find peaceful solutions for Congo and for all people. 

They take inspiration from different kinds of music to find their own sound.  Their most recent CD, Music is My Ammunition blends roots reggae, makossa and Congolese rumba.  You can hear the title track which was recorded with artists from various countries on youtube. The opening lines of the song are 

“The songs of my ancestors ricochet through the wind, and the smoke is rising from the words I and I sing. Music is my ammunition.  Fire down Babylon.”  The artists feel that coming from a war torn country, they are using their music instead of bullets to create change.

Music is My Ammunition was produced by Playing for Change  which is a “movement created to inspire, connect and bring peace to the world through music."  Mosengo and Tamba used a crowd funding appeal to raise the money to promote this CD and reached their goals.  This allowed people from all around the world to participate in bringing the music of peace to more people from all around the world.

Jayme Stone is a Canadian “banjoist, composer and instigator.”  He is always coming up with innovative and collaborative new music projects.  Last year he created the Lomax Project.  Stone focused on songs collected by folklorist and field recording pioneer Alan Lomax which he researched in the US Library of Congress.  

Jayme Stone researching at the Library of Congress

Instead of trying to get a recording company to back the project, he used Kickstarter to successfully crowdfund the necessary money.  Then he brought together roots musicians to “revive, recycle and reimagine” the traditional songs.  The finished CD includes Bahamian sea chanties, African-American a cappella singing from the Georgia Sea Islands, ancient Appalachian ballads, fiddle tunes and work songs.  The Lomax Project CD was nominated for a 2016 Juno award.

Jayme Stone with banjo and friends

I was one of the many people who participated in the crowd funding because I think Jayme Stone is an extremely creative musician and I was happy to help him in this collaborative endeavour.  I got the CD in the mail when it was finished and feel proud to have been a part of it. I also took part in the crowdfunding for the AfroFiesta CD and will soon receive that as well.  I like supporting creative people who are adding so much to the world and being a part of the collaboration.

I am also a Tragically Hip fan and was saddened as were so many to hear that lead singer Gord Downey has terminal brain cancer.  In typical Downey fashion, he will do one more tour with The Hip's new CD Man Poem Machine.  Fans were discouraged to find that scalpers had scooped up most of the tickets for the tour.  The Hip responded with more concert dates.  

I saw some on-line petitions asking that the final concert be broadcast on the CBC.  It turns out that the CBC had already been trying to figure out how to do just that.  The Kingston show on Aug. 20, 2016 will begin at 8:30 pm ET and will be broadcast and streamed commercial free on CBC TV, Radio One and Radio Two, cbcmusic.ca and CBC’s YouTube channel.

Heather  Conway of the CBC said, “The Tragically Hip’s enigmatic sound, their poignant and witty lyrics and the unique, special relationship they have with their fans have helped define and influence our identity as Canadians.”

Gord Downey(centre) and the Tragically Hip

Musician Sarah Harmer, in a Toronto Star interview, said, “Gord’s been writing our stories for years, sparking up our imagination about ourselves and our country.  I aspire to that level of generosity and vibrance.”

Thanks to these collaborative efforts, all Canadians who want to hear The Tragically Hip's last concert will be able to witness a courageous and generous man who will be giving his all. And we will all be the richer for it.