Interview: Children’s Music Star Alex Mitnick

Posted on June 11, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Alex Mitnick stars in Alex & The Kaleidoscope, a fun and friendly series on YouTube and NYC-TV. Mitnick uses music and colorful, inviting adventures to engage children’s curiosity. I really enjoyed talking to him about what makes music such a powerful learning tool and how he teaches teachers, even those who think they have no musical talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SptyzV8820A

What songs did you like when you were a kid?

Probably my mom singing at the piano which is pretty typical. I imagine for a lot of musicians, it was in the house. My dad plays a little guitar and I always remember my mom singing show tunes and my dad singing folk songs like, “Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton…” There was always music in my house. I have pretty clear memories of dancing around to this reggae record that my parents brought back from Jamaica. And then of course I listened to those early like pre-Raffi kids’ music guys. And most of it was just to the music that my parents listened to.

And what was the first instrument that you played?

I did! I had piano lessons from my very early age from a blind piano teacher who I vaguely remember but we are talking like first, second grade. And then in fourth grade I got the chance to try the saxophone in my public school in Boston where I was living with my family at a time. In fifth grade I switched over to trumpet and I played the trumpet all through fifth grade up to 12^th grade in high school. I was in the school band and I was in the marching band and the jazz band and the concert band and I sang in the choruses at school and I usually did the annual musical. I was never the star but I was always involved with the music program one way or another.

Towards the end of high school, I really found music to be a powerful tool for me to actually socialize with when I was hanging out. I wasn’t necessarily the most talkative kid but by 11^th to 12^th grade there was a core group of guys that whenever we got together, we ended up sort of jamming on guitars or like big African drums or just playing the kitchen table; making some kind of music one way or another as just part of what we did to hang out. And that basically blossomed into kind of jamming on guitar more. And then by my third year in college I switched from Penn State University where I was just pursuing environmental science. Then I finally honed in on guitar and jazz guitar and composition and ended up graduating with a degree in jazz guitar, which in many ways was kind of the beginning of my life as a career musician for sure.

Why is it so important for kids to learn music? As you know music programs are often the first ones cut. Why is it important? What do kids get from studying music?

Well for me I think it became a form of expression that was so much easier for me than necessarily my words or even writing in high school. Having music as a means and an outlet to really show the world who I was was really important for me. And I think for young kids, especially having something like that beside your basic social skills, your basic conversational skills or even writing or math or having this sort of almost instantaneous means to connect to other people or to connect to something you’re passionate about. Maybe you have learned a song on the piano that you hear on the radio and suddenly you’re actually creating something in your life. You are in charge, you see the immediate feedback. I think that is an incredibly empowering tool for anybody but especially kids.

And I would say more basically, it just makes kids happy! Kids playing music are happy, they really are; especially young kids. Young kids dancing and singing are 99 out of 100 times happy and enjoying it. So it’s just this incredible resource for joy and good thing in a child’s life.

I like the way that you encourage kids to create analog instruments out of stuff that’s in the home. So what are some of the instruments that you like to teach them how to make?

The most primal and basic instrument is actually like the human body itself. So when my son is 15 months old he will bang sticks on things but the most fun we had is when he just started moving his body, clapping his hands together, slapping his knees, echoing my musical or rhythmic phrases and expressing himself with just the basic thing he was born with which was his body. And when I teach music class to kids, most of what we do is singing, stomping, clapping, feeling the beat and it is a very physical thing. I can speak from experience with a baby myself, as soon as we are in the kitchen, my son is pulling out all the Tupperware and I am giving him spoons and eggbeaters and anything that he can get his hands on to just start playing along and making some noise. And then in addition to that, the work I’ve done with kids, there are so many simple tasks like making a paper cup, filling it with beans or rice or beads or something like that, taping over the top and then suddenly you’ve got a couple of shakers and maracas right there. And then you can do that same thing with all sorts of recycling material like plastic pens or coffee cans and especially you can turn anything into some kind of unique percussion instrument. A little bit of time and effort and you’ve got yourself a little percussion orchestra.

What kind of music do kids like best? I know they all love the songs from “Frozen!”

The “Frozen” thing is for one, just an absolutely brilliant multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign; which has essentially got it into every single family’s car or YouTube or whatever. It is just brilliant across-the-board! But also, I think people like to also be able to sing familiar songs with other kids, so everybody knows the song. If it’s not that, it’s “Happy” from Pharrell Williams. It goes to show you how much you appreciate happy sounding and joyful music.

Good music is good music whether you call it kids’ music or not and that is certainly the case with me and my son. I just basically play music that I like, anything with an upbeat rhythm and a happy melody, he is really responsive. Parents in my generation really grew up listening to some pretty great music. We were listening to rock and pop as kids and so we’re trying to re-create that experience for ourselves with our own kids, playing stuff like the Beastie Boys or Beach Boys whatever it is.

That’s really my philosophy when I write music for kids. Like I want to listen to it. I really don’t put on much for my son that I seriously wouldn’t want to be blasting in my car myself.

You wrote an album for him, didn’t you?

Yes — Love Songs for My Baby. It’s just like this outpouring of emotion and affection from the parents towards the child.

What are some of the fun topics that you address in your songs for children?

I am inspired by the beauty and wonder of childhood itself. And like with my TV show: Alex and the Kaleidoscope, the whole point is that when you are looking through the kaleidoscope, you’re actually looking through the eyes of the child. So essentially, if you can turn them on to something, it would really be anything, any subject whatsoever. And that is what is so cool about music; you give it like a fun upbeat rhythm and a catchy little melody, you can essentially teach a child about anything with a song. And I have got songs about everything. On our TV shows we go to the zoo, we go to the aquariums, we have a shark song, we have a Kangaroo song, we have train songs, we have human body songs and we have songs about gardening, we have songs about space or about the sky, it’s limitless!

Kids truly have a sense of wonder almost of anything and it’s our job as teachers and adult and I think and in particular entertainers of kids, to basically turn them onto that wonder.

How do you help teachers learn how to incorporate music?

Well it’s actually pretty funny because I essentially do exactly what I do with a bunch of like 3 to 6-year-olds, except they are all adults so they have all these other inhibitions. But it’s all based on the theory that each and every one of us has music in us somewhere. Very few people I’ve ever met don’t have some kind of natural response to music and so in my typical way of making it kind of fun and playful and just taking the pressure off of participants in these workshops, we just go through rhythms, games and exercises or take funny songs that they might know and just turn them into more broad games. And then suddenly, some of the people who would never call themselves musicians without any instruments or anything are all jamming together making music.

Interview: Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five

Posted on June 10, 2014 at 3:59 pm

It was a tremendous thrill to speak to Dave Clark, from the Dave Clark Five, one of the greatest pop groups of all time. Their string of classic hits include “Glad All Over,” “Bits and Pieces,” “Because,” and “Catch Us If You Can.” He talked to me about his days with the group and the hit play he created after the group disbanded.

And I am very excited to have a copy of the new DVD Dave Clark Five & Beyond: Glad All Over to give away. To enter, send an email to moviemom@moviemom.com with Dave Clark in the subject line and tell me your favorite song from the 60’s. Don’t forget your address! (U.S. addresses only) I will pick a winner at random on June 20, 2014. Good luck!

The movie you and the group made, Having A Wild Weekend, was on television last night as part of a British Invasion tribute. I was surprised how somber, even melancholy, it was, while the others were all light-hearted, even silly.

It different. We didn’t want to make a musical. It was really about the industry really, about how people are used and exploited sometimes and I thought that was quite exciting to do that.

You were very different from the other groups at the time in the way you approached the business side of pop music. Where did that come from?

I left school at 15 years of age, I wasn’t academic at all. You can say really in a way it was by accident because we started from nothing and then gradually you build up your following and became better. Then we ended doing what they call the Mecca Circuit which was in the documentary, we started from nothing then all of a sudden we were packing in six thousand people a night, three or four nights a week and never repeating a song and doing a lot of our own material and of course we got several offers for recording contract. One of them was with Decca Records and they were the company that turned down The Beatles actually. We went down and we had to do an audition which we passed it and we were ready to sign an agreement and then they said to me, “We have this new hit producer. Why don’t you come down and see what’s it like to work with him because this is who we will get to produce your records?” So we went down and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re not recording any of your own material, this is what you’re going to do”. And they were making us into what was the “flavor of the month” which was in those days Cliff Richards and the Shadows in the UK. And I thought “forget it” and I said to the guys, “When we can get some money we’ll make our own records.” We didn’t have any money, though.

And we were packing in 6000 a night with our own style. Surely any record company could say, “Let’s try something new. It’s different.” EMI Records was also one of the handful of people that were chasing us. And I said to them, “Look, if I can produce the records myself I will pay for them,” and that’s what threw them. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. Fortunately I was a Black Belt and I was doing karate and combat and all that since I was about 8 years of age and I got a job to crash a car for three nights as a stunt man and that’s how it came up. It wasn’t monetary, I mean you go and get the best deal you can. I went in asking for four times the going rate. I found out what the going rate was for independent producers and I thought, “Well, if I ask for four times the rate, and get what everybody else is getting and they won’t think I was a pushover.” And to my amazement, they agreed to pay me that because they didn’t look on the long-term, there was no longevity. You might get one or two hit records and then on to the next person.

And I am sure they felt that about the Beatles and everybody else. In those days, everything was disposable, for the short term. And I think that is how it all happened. But I think it is very important to control your own destiny. In those days record companies had it deals with publishers so they would publish whatever they got cut off. We did not want that.

So that’s why it happened. It was in the days when we were selling 180,000 a day and we were still at number two because of the Beatles were at number one. We would have to sell 1.5 million to knock them off the number one spot because it was their biggest ever selling single, “She Loves You.” And we ended up doing 2.5 million with “Glad All Over.” You could get a number one today on thousands.

I have always said to people and I am not trying to be modest, if “Glad All Over” had been three months earlier or three months later, it might still have gotten number one. But that’s a thing called luck and it’s being in the right place at the right time. It wasn’t planned. Ed Sullivan phoned me in February of 64. I didn’t know who he was. Who knew? The Beatles didn’t know, we didn’t know. To me, America was the land of dreams. It’s where all our musical icons came from. We were really playing America music. I always believed in putting your own slant on it and making it your own but without American music there would not have been a British invasion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO7I-mQBpYc

What is the difference between the Mersey Sound from Liverpudlian groups like The Beatles and the Tottenham Sound from the London groups like the Dave Clark Five?

In those days all the groups, the Beatles and The Rolling Stones even and all the Mersey groups, it was really three guitars — bass guitar, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums. I was always influenced by Fats Domino. So we had keyboards which in those days was an organ with Mike and Dennis on sax as well as guitar, bass and drums, which gave you a much bigger sound and also gave you more flexibility to do a lot of other things like lots of instrumentals. The sax gave it a sort of like an undercarriage in a way that made it very weighty with the drums.

You appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show more than any other group.

Yeah, 18 times.

Who did you meet backstage, anyone interesting?

Richard Rodgers, one of the greatest composers. In fact, he wasn’t on the show. He came to watch us at rehearsals and he stayed on for the show. That blew me away. You had all the great American greats: Jack Benny, John Wayne, it was total that mix and match, Richard Burton doing “Camelot” or whatever.

You can see in the documentary that the group really seem to enjoy live performance.

Oh, we were a live band.

It was actually going out there on stage. It was wonderful! I always had to laugh or smile when you get other big names or contemporaries saying, “What was it like going out on stage?” “Oh, it’s okay”, whatever. To me, it’s like being heavyweight champion of the world for that hour or so that you’re onstage because you have to work the audience. It’s a bit like I suppose a pied piper; you bring them up and know when to bring them down and to bring them up again. It’s exciting and that comes through experience of playing the dives in the early days and getting beer cans thrown at you when you weren’t very good and then you win an audience over. We ended up on the biggest ballroom circuit in the UK and that covered Wales, Scotland, Ireland and they used to cater for 1 million people a week, which is a lot, over 1 million people and employed over 200 bands a week and we got to the Gold cup in 1963 for being the best live band in the UK which was a great for us! It was really good!

I loved the part in the documentary about your innovative, immersive, four-dimensional production called “Time.” How did that come about?

Originally in the 60s when the Beatles said it all with it the way we all felt; the answer really and a lot of people think it’s corny but it’s love and peace. I didn’t get into that because The Beatles did it admirably with “All you need is love” and John Lennon with “Imagine” and all those wonderful songs. We called it a day while we were still selling millions of records. It’s best if you can stop at the top. And there were other things I wanted to do.

So I took off and went around the world. And I had this idea of the feeling of peace and love and that there would be another planet billions of light-years away where everything was timeless, ageless, no violence nothing and that’s how it came about. So the most important thing is to write the songs and that started and then to make sure that I wasn’t too close to it, I played it for Stevie Wonder, which it says in the documentary. And he liked it. I wanted to make it different. I felt that in those days theater was very straight in a way. I felt the action should be like a movie where it’s exciting and you actually make people a part of the movie so we transformed to the theater so when it like a rock concert. And when the audience got transported up into the universe. The whole theater changed and became like a planetarium and a flying saucer came out of the air that was 50 feet wide and it exploded. I wanted to do all the things so the audience felt that they were in the movie or in the music. The most important thing for me was I wanted a godlike figure that wasn’t necessarily God; it is what everybody believed is a loving God, your favorite uncle, giving words of wisdom. That was another high in my life, working with the great Sir Laurence Olivier. When he spoke, there was 250 little speakers all around the theater. It was like God, all amazing! It was all around. And it was very, very spiritual. And to mix the two; if it had just been spiritual, you might have lost your audience but if you could mix the two and make people stop and think and they take the message in, then you’ve done your job. It’s combining the two and it was very enlightening and very rewarding I felt.

I particularly enjoyed in the documentary the scenes with you and Freddie Mercury. It looks like you had a wonderful friendship.

Oh we did. Sadly I was the only one with him when he passed away; which is very, very sad. He was great! He had an amazing personality. If you watch DVD 2 and you see the interview, we just hit it off and I didn’t think we would. I wanted Freddie on the album but everybody said he was a nightmare to work with. As I said, I’m a perfectionist and Freddie was, too, but it worked. When you get people like that, you give and take to get to the end result to be good; it’s not egotistical in any way. And I found him an absolute dream to work with and he was the only performer I’ve ever known that I’ve actually worked with you could go for 12 hours and he just gives you 100 percent every take.

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Adam Levine Sings “Lost Stars” in “Begin Again”

Posted on May 30, 2014 at 11:57 am

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Interview: John Ottman, Editor and Composer of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

Posted on May 27, 2014 at 8:00 am

I last talked to editor/composer John Ottman about “Jack the Giant Slayer” and loved hearing about his unique combination of roles, often working with his former classmate, director Bryan Singer. They collaborated again on X-Men: Days of Future Past and it was a pleasure to catch up with him to discuss the challenges as both editor and composer of working with so many characters and two different time periods.

You have so many characters in this film and some of them change their appearance a lot, either due to use of their superpowers or being played by different actors in different time periods. How do you as an editor help the audience keep everybody straight?

The hardest thing when you have many characters in a room in one scene is to basically keep their presence alive in the scene. If you spend too much time with one character talking, your mind inevitably wants to know what the other characters are thinking or how they are reacting. And if you spend too much time away from showing their reaction to the other character talking, the more I think you feel uncomfortable in the scene. So the challenge is sort of the keep everybody alive even if they’re not speaking.

What are some of the ways that you do that?

I just put myself in the mind of the audience. I’m watching someone speak and I as soon as I start to wonder what the other character or character being spoken of might be a reacting, I want to see them. I use my own reaction to cut to another character.

And there are different time periods in this film also.

Yeah, there’s a dreary future and then there is 1973. Logan’s consciousness was fed back into his younger self so that he can change an event that happens in the past so that the future might be fixed or not be so dreary.

How do you keep the audience constantly aware of where they are in time?

It’s pretty obvious where you are. Nevertheless, we did have internal debates sometimes where people were like, “Are you sure people know that we are in 1973?” “I think so.” But that wasn’t a huge problem. It was just basically the timing and keeping the storyline as clear as possible. It’s extremely convoluted and a very complex story.

You’ve got the young and old version of some of the characters, right?

Correct, yes. And the other biggest challenge of the film was the time travel aspect. It’s like the “whack a mole” game where you whack one mole and then you create another problem. It’s sort of like you have to keep whacking a mole until you can live with the smallest problem. But there will always be imperfections in time travel stories so that was a big challenge; sort of building consensus with everyone to try to accept what we were going to accept.

Did you once again do the editing first and then composing second?

Of course, yes. It’s overwhelming to actually deal with all of the management of the film to get it together. The editing is not just putting pieces together. At least for me it’s also storyboarding scenes, it’s designing the pre-visualization of the scenes with the pre-vis artists, it’s generating the shot list with the second editing director, visual effects issues, looping the actors and all that endless stuff. I have no hope of even starting to write the score until I have some sort of editor’s cut.

So do you work with a temporary music track as you are editing?

Yes, but people would be surprised to know that I don’t really use music to cut my scenes together. I wait until I get my full editor’s cut together before I put any temporary music in. And working without music, I know where the film is strong and it’s not reliant on the score. Once I get to that point, I spend about two weeks putting temporary music in so we can have screenings and show the studio.

I’d like to go back to that same challenge of two time periods and so many characters. How do you use the music to help the audience keep it all straight? You don’t have different themes for the characters, right?

In fact this has fewer characters themes than X-Men 2. It’s not so typically superhero-like when a character walks and you hear a motif for them.

This film is different so it does not really lend itself to have numerous character themes. There is the overall theme of the film; the X-Men world, which is my theme from X-II but then there are really three other themes in the film. The main one is Charles Xavier’s theme because it’s really his story about how his character has lost all the hope when we see him in the 70’s.

And it’s Logan really trying to get him to rekindle that hope. That’s the centerpiece of the score; at least subliminally, his music. And also he’s trying to fight for Raven’s soul so she has a little bit of a motif in the movie and then Magneto himself has a very simple very accessible motif. There’s not much time in modern movies to establish a beginning, middle and end theme for each character so you barely have time to do signature sound that you can recognize, so his is very simple but very sort of malevolent.

For lack of a better description, there’s a metallic sort of sound. And Mystique has her transformation swishy kind of sound. So I obviously left room for those things. I am very involved in the sound design so I think I surprise people when I am directing the dub as the editor, how I often bury the music or intertwine it with the sounds I use.

What about the time period differences? Are there different instruments or different time indicators?

The 70s gave me an excuse to use some analog synthesizers; we use some old keyboard synthesizers and electric piano and guitar, sometimes very subtly but it was fun to do that. And especially for the sentinels of the past, I was able to do some sort of electronics that were of the period. The score for me is unlike Jack in that Jack was a very pure orchestral swashbuckling score where you had basically everything emulated from the orchestra. This score was very synthesizer heavy with orchestral supplementation. So that was just our decision because every movie is different and that’s what felt right for this film.

If you could take one of the X-Men, which powers would you pick?

I guess I would have Mystique’s power so I can sort of… I can be really out of shape and morph into someone has a great body.

Yeah, I think we’d all like that one!

Tonight on PBS: The Memorial Day Concert 2014

Posted on May 25, 2014 at 2:24 pm

Tonight on PBS, Joe Mantegna and Gary Sinise again host the annual Memorial Day concert on the U.S. Capitol lawn. It will be broadcast on PBS at 8:00-9:30 Eastern time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3epnou3nd0

Each year, the National Memorial Day Concert presents a unique program honoring the valor and patriotism of Americans who have served our country. The show pays tribute to their sacrifices, as well as those of their families and loved ones.

As the war in Afghanistan winds down, the 2014 National Memorial Day Concert will recognize our servicemen and servicewomen with a special “welcome home” to thank veterans who served in Afghanistan.

In these segments of the show, we’ll feature a story about a critically wounded veteran suffering from severe physical injuries and the grave invisible wounds of war. We’ll also focus on the story of a mother coping with grief after the death of her son, the first to die in Afghanistan. His service inspired her to become actively involved with Gold Star Mothers. Now she is helping other mothers with their loss, grief and healing as they move forward with their lives.

The 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion also will be commemorated in 2014. World War II veterans who participated in the invasion, a seminal moment that turned the tides of war in favor of the Allies, will be honored and featured in this tribute to the sacrifices of our nation’s Greatest Generation.

This year the National Memorial Day Concert will also mark its 25th anniversary, featuring a reflection of the many stories of service and sacrifice presented throughout the years. These heartfelt moments have brought us together as one family of Americans, paying tribute to those who defend our freedom.

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