On My Father

I write you today on – or depending on where you are, slightly after – the first anniversary of the death of my father, the artist, Gabriel Laderman, who currently has two paintings (far right in this shot) up in a group show at the Schroeder, Romero & Shredder Gallery on 531 W. 21 St. in New York, NY.

My parents were both great music lovers and both were crucial to my musical development. When I was a child, classical music was almost always on in my parents’ Upper West Side apartment and in the car, when my father still had one. The only time that wasn’t true was when my brother was listening to rock on the stereo or we were watching TV. Or sometimes when we were having dinner. Or when we had classical music on the record player. Moreover, my father always had classical music on the radio in his studio. WNCN and WQXR were his favorite stations. When we took trips in the car, my father would play a game with me, whereby we would guess who wrote a piece we turned on in the middle. This was a good educational exercise for me, but my father stopped playing when I got better at it than he was. It did take me a while to get that good, though.

My father had several years of musical education when he was a child. His mother, who I called “Baba,” Ukrainian for “Grandma,” had wanted him to be a musician. He practiced the cello for years, and then the oboe, but never got good. He even was thrown out of the chorus my mother conducted at Ithaca College while he was going for his Master of Fine Arts in painting at Cornell, because he couldn’t sing on pitch. But though the paintbrush was the right tool for a man of his talents, he certainly could hear and understand music to a very high degree.

By the time I was four, I already had a favorite recording, of the complete Four Seasons, featuring Salvatore Accardo as the violin soloist, I believe with I Solisti Veneti. I can’t find that recording online, and I no longer have a working turntable to play the LP and have given the record away to a violinist friend, but this 1987 recording of the slow movement of “Winter” with I Solisti Delle Settimane Musicali di Napoli stands up very well.

My parents were also early fans of modernist music. They went to numerous premières at the American Composers Alliance in the 1950s and were big fans of Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse, and Stefan Wolpe, with whom my mother studied counterpoint. As a young child, I disliked even fairly mildly dissonant music, but my father encouraged me to give it a chance. Piano was my first instrument, and I enjoyed playing through Bartók’s “For Children,” but it took longer for me to enjoy a work like this (for best effect, turn up your speakers), which my father loved so much.

My father also liked 1920s jazz very much, especially Louis Armstrong, and took a break from listening to classical music around the 4th of July, when WKCR devotes several days exclusively to recordings by the great trumpeter, whom my father considered one of the greatest of all musicians. He particularly loved the Hot Five and Hot Seven. Listen to Potato Head Blues and understand why.

My father was open to non-Western classical musics, too. My parents bought just about every world music record they could get their hands on through the 1970s or so. And my father’s encounter with non-Western music went far beyond just listening to records. I will never forget the day he took me with him to see kabuki in Tokyo. I was 10 and had not yet sat through a European opera, but I found kabuki fascinating and beautiful. My father also loved wayang orang in Solo, Indonesia, where actors play scenes from the Mahabharata in gesture and dance, with the accompaniment of a gamelan, and Beijing opera, which we experienced together in various places including Beijing.

Another way that my father was important was that he believed in me as a musician and a person. He was delighted at the musical directions I took (except for my performance of bop and post-bop jazz), the way I interpret, and the technical level I have achieved, and considered me the greatest “unknown” flutist in the world. He pushed me to perform more, record more, and promote myself more, not just because I was his son, but because he knew I had important statements to make about music. I hope to honor him and his memory by continuing to do things I consider artistically right, good, and true, just as he did in his art.