Mt. Lebanon hosts eminent percussionist for master classes
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro sits at a conga set while speaking with Mt. Lebanon High School percussion students.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro at Mt. Lebanon High School
He may be a world-class percussionist, but Michael Spiro doesn’t appreciate references to “world music.”
“I’m very much opposed to that term,” he said about the marketing category for non-Western traditional music, “because it would imply that Beethoven and Mozart were not from the world.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro makes notations for the edification of Mt. Lebanon percussion students.
That being established, Spiro proceeded to treat Mt. Lebanon High School percussion students to a highly informative master-class session that combined history and theory with frequent flourishes of humor and some doses of solemnity.
As a practitioner and instructor of music specifically from the Caribbean and Brazil – “I won’t even say that I play music from Latin America,” he explained – Spiro provided some thought-provoking background on how the applicable styles developed.
“Do you all know that there was slavery everywhere in the Americas, not just in the United States? I was not really taught that when I was your age,” he told the students. “So the first thing you need to know is that the music that I play does not exist without the pain, suffering and violence of the African slave trade. Jazz does not exist. Rhythm and blues doesn’t exist. Hip-hop doesn’t exist.”
For example, he referenced the influences on what became the music of Cuba, where slavery wasn’t outlawed until 1886, more than two decades after the end of the U.S. Civil War.
By Harry Funk
Staff writer
hfunk@thealmanac.net
Michael Spiro performs during an educational session at Mt. Lebanon High School.
“The Spaniards brought slaves to Cuba almost up to the day they ended slavery,” Spiro said. “So that means what I was singing to you was a New World version of an African language that people still sing in and, to some degree, still speak to each other in, and do it today. This is not ‘museum’ music. This is going on right now, as we speak.”
An associate professor of music in the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University for 10 years, Spiro has recorded with an impressive array of artists, from jazz legends Bobby Hutcherson and McCoy Tyner to the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts and Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick.
His interest in Caribbean/Brazilian music dates back to the early 1960s, when as a youngster he heard the decidedly Latin-flavored “El Watusi” by Ray Barretto (1929-2006) on the radio.
“I have no idea what that is. Never heard of it. Clueless,” he recalled. “But that’s awesome.”
Later, as an aspiring rhythm-and-blues drummer, he was diverted toward another path after being turned on to some similarly intriguing music.
“It just called me. And that ruined my life,” he joked.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michael Spiro conducts a master-class session.
As far as that assessment, music enthusiasts would beg to differ. “Bata Ketu,” his 1996 album with fellow percussionist Mark Lamson, was voted one of the top 50 drum records of all time by DRUM! magazine, and in 2004, Spiro received a Grammy nomination for his work as artist and producer on Mark Levine & the Latin Tinge’s “Isla.”
Some of Spiro’s more recent work has been as a member of the trio Talking Drums, with fellow San Francisco-area residents David Garibaldi, best known as a member of the Bay Area funk-soul band Tower of Power, and Cuban-born percussionist Jesús Diaz.
September marked the release of “Bakini: En el Nuevo Mundo,” a blend of Cuban, Brazilian and Trinidadian music that Spiro recorded with Joe Galvin, a doctoral student of his at Indiana.
Friends of Mt. Lebanon Percussion presented Spiro as the program’s 2018 guest artist, welcoming him to present a pair of sessions on Feb. 16. Subha Das, the percussion program’s principal assistant director – he’s a highly regarded drummer, as well – arranges for the visits.
For Spiro, the trip to Mt. Lebanon represented somewhat of a departure from his usual educational sessions.
“I never am asked to do high schools, because what I do is pretty much outside of almost every high school curriculum,” he explained. “They’re getting basic stuff in the instruments that, here in North America, we tend to play. So what I do is found generally at the collegiate level.”
He and the younger students, though, seemed to relate well to each other as Spiro incorporated audience participation into his instruction and interspersed his lessons with demonstrations of his percussive talents.
“Part of the great thing about being a musician is that one gets to kind of experience new things,” he said. “So I’m experiencing a new thing today.”