BooksApril 19, 2022

The human scale of it: Peter Simpson remembers the composer Jonathan Besser

Guest writer

Peter Simpson reads Around the Corners, Out to the Edges, a memoir released two months after the untimely death of his friend, Jonathan Besser.

The title of Jonathan’s memoir comes from the opening lines of a long poem by the American poet Robert Creeley, written during his second visit to Auckland, in 1995.

Curious coming again here
where I hadn’t known where I was ever,

following lead of provident strangers,
around the corners, out to the edges…

– The Dogs of Auckland

There is a multiple appropriateness to this choice of title and epigraph. Jonathan, like Creeley, was an American who came to New Zealand as a stranger and approached the country with openness and curiosity. But Creeley visited only twice for a few months in total, whereas Jonathan came in 1972 and (with a couple of breaks) stayed for 50 years, becoming a New Zealand citizen and establishing his rich career as a composer and musician largely in this country.

There is a further connection between Creeley and Jonathan. The Dogs of Auckland was published in 1998 by The Holloway Press, a letter-press operation at the University of Auckland. I was co-director with Alan Loney; we printed the poem along with seven highly expressive ink brush drawings of dogs by the New York-based New Zealand artist Max Gimblett. In 2009 Jonathan turned the poem and Gimblett’s dog drawings into a multimedia Auckland Festival event with live music composed and performed by Jonathan (and others). There was a reading of the eight-part poem, accompanied by projected visuals featuring Gimblett’s drawings – not just those published in the book but more than 40 others. (You can watch a performance of the poem with Jonathan’s music and Gimblett’s visuals here.)

Besser, photographed by Marti Friedlander. (Photo: Marti Friedlander)

It was during preparations for this event that I first met Jonathan; he needed copyright permission to use the poem and drawings. Over the next decade and more we became firm friends, often meeting to share a bottle of red wine at the late-lamented Golden Dawn or at our respective homes in Ponsonby and Mount Eden. Our friendship led to a further collaboration in 2011 between Jonathan, Gimblett and Holloway Press: The Green Bicycle, involving facsimiles and recorded performances of Jonathan’s gamelan-inflected music, and several unique coloured-ink drawings (different in each copy) by Max plus a wonderful Indonesian-inspired poem by Chris Price which gave the book its title.

As these events suggest, Jonathan had a penchant for collaboration, often sweeping up other musicians and artists working in different media (poetry, theatre, ballet, orchestra, visual arts, film) into his projects or, alternatively, they involving him in theirs. The pages of his memoir are strewn with the names of many of the best and brightest of his generation in the arts: Ross Harris, Don McGlashan, Eve de Castro Robinson, Billy Apple, John Reynolds, Alan Brunton, Bill Direen, Ian Wedde, Mere Boynton, Warwick Broadbent, Miranda Adams, Mahinārangi Tocker, Mary Jane O’Reilly, Chris Prosser, Gary Brain, Shirley Horrocks, Roger McDonald, Wayne Laird, Steve Garden… the list goes on and on.

The band Bravura at Cooks Beach recording the album Turn for Rattle Records. (Front to back) Nigel Gavin, Miranda Adams, Peter Scott, me, producer Steve Garden, Tatiana Lanchkchova. (Photo: Supplied)

These people are mentioned in Jonathan’s memoir not in any “name-dropping” spirit (he was modesty personified) but because creative engagement with others was central to his modus operandi. Even the music he composed in isolation (to within weeks of his death) was often written with specific performers in mind – duos for violin and viola, string quartets, song cycles, full orchestral scores or music for the many bands he created, from the electronica of Free Radicals to the klezmer-influenced music of The Zestnicks. This diverse history points to some of Jonathan’s enduring characteristics – his zest, his can-do inventiveness, his versatility, his amiability, his gregariousness, his responsiveness, his drive.

For almost as long as I knew him, Jonathan was talking about this book, and I’m so pleased he got to hold a finished copy before his untimely death. Many of his friends were writers – poets, novelists, playwrights, historians, art writers, critics – and he was determined to become a writer himself, even though as a borderline dyslexic (as discussed in the book) writing presented difficulties for him. I did a search through old emails from Jonathan, and the earliest mention of the book that I came up with was: “Now I’m back on my memoir – reread.” This was in February 2015, more than seven years ago, and he had obviously been working on it well before then. Jonathan does not say much about this lengthy process in his note at the back of the book but does acknowledge four editors who worked with him on the manuscript at various stages, the latest being Nicola McCloy, named with Jonathan on the title page, who finally brought the book to bed.

A portrait of Besser from the 1980s. (Photo: Supplied)

Despite half a century in New Zealand, Jonathan sounded when he talked like Woody Allen and looked increasingly (as he said himself) like Albert Einstein; he remained to the end a New York Jew. In fact living in New Zealand if anything enhanced his sense of Jewishness. He writes: “I have no idea if I would have eventually written similar Jewish music or identified as Jewish as much as I have if I’d stayed in New York.” In New York, the most populous Jewish city on earth, being Jewish was commonplace, part of the air that he breathed; in New Zealand being Jewish gave him an edge of difference and he came increasingly to explore it, as in, to give just one example, the song cycle Aroha/Ahava he wrote for Māori singer Mere Boynton: “The concept was to find and exploit the unique cultural connection between Māori and Jewish people using the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament.”

An increasingly strong influence on his work was klezmer music, defined by Wikipedia as “an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions”. Several of the groups Jonathan formed, such as Bravura, The Besser Ensemble and The Zestnicks played this style of music, oscillating between infectious vivacity and plangent melancholy and with an unusual combination of instruments. The Zestnicks, for example, used trumpet, vibraphone, violin, viola, bass, guitar, voice and of course always with the impresario Besser dynamic at the keyboard.

The Besser Ensemble: (clockwise from bottom left) Rachel McLaren, George Packard, Roger Sellers, Ross Harris, Noel Clayton and Besser in the centre. (Photo: Supplied)

But while remaining something of an exotic in our native garden, Jonathan identified himself deeply with his adopted country. He lived at various times all over the place – in Dunedin, where he held the Mozart Fellowship, as well as for long periods in Wellington and Auckland; though essentially urban in instinct he even spent time living remotely in the Hokianga. He left New York in the early 1970s because he found it abrasive, dangerous and harshly competitive. He writes: “I love my found country New Zealand – the human scale of it … Here in this small land, I work with dancers, make film music, write for symphony orchestras and top chamber groups, perform on piano … make conceptual artworks, ad-lib with laureate poets, and work in poor schools. I feel you have to be versatile in New Zealand to eke out a living and happily get by.”

Jonathan Besser did more than “happily get by”. New Zealand did much for him but he in his turn gave so much back. As this absorbing and lively memoir – crammed with anecdotes, characters and unique fragments of cultural history – shows, he made an indelible contribution to our cultural fabric and his passing leaves a gaping hole.

Around the Corners, Out to the Edges: A Memoir by Composer Jonathan Besser, by Jonathan Besser with Nicola McCloy (Bateman, $50) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!

Patricia Grace, then and now (Photos supplied; photo illustration by Archi Banal)

BooksApril 17, 2022

Patricia Grace, the great navigator

Ben Brown

Guest writer

Patricia Grace, then and now (Photos supplied; photo illustration by Archi Banal)

Poet and writer Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) reviews the author’s new memoir, From the Centre.

“Sometimes when I am asked why I became a writer, I say that it was because of the availability of raw materials when we were children. I think there’s some truth in it.”

Paper is in plentiful supply when dad works at a stationery manufacturer. He’s handy with a knife as well and sharpens pencils carefully.

“At the other end of the pencil, he would slice away a shaving and write my name there.’”

An intimate memory. Cherished in the detail. The father who read to her from a single book of fairytales, covered her exercise books with the measured, cut and glued ends of wallpaper rolls, waiting to go to war with the Māori Battalion. The “raw materials” extending far beyond the basic tools of the trade to the keen observations of an astute young Māori mind sensitive to a growing awareness of “being different”.

“I found that being different meant that I could be blamed…”

Being different. Being brown. Being Māori.

My sense of Patricia Grace is one of quietly implacable resolve. She is that particular type of Māori woman who will – who will – follow through to the end whatever mahi she has set for herself, on her terms. It’s more than a mindset, this resolute spirit. It is her very being. It is the muka in the harakeke.

As a child in Wellington: the cover of her new memoir (Photo: Supplied)

In her new memoir From the Centre, Grace weighs her words carefully, wasting nothing, expressing the gravity, joy or disappointment of a moment in time with a clarity of language and a deep understanding that life is full of complexity and contradiction.

“The affection I held for this grandfather when I was young lessened as I grew and came to realise his deep prejudices. This came to a head for me when I overheard him talking to his brother, making derogatory remarks about my father, who had always treated him with kindness and respect. I managed to do likewise, treat him with some respect…”

So it is that a young Māori girl growing up in post-war, post-colonial Aotearoa begins to understand.

Patricia Grace is kaiwhakahaere. She is one of our great navigators. When I say “our”, I mean all of us who choose to try and make our way beneath the long white cloud. The life she charts in her journey “from the centre” is Aotearoa New Zealand revealing itself before her and around her. Grace renders her kōrero from the purviews of deep observation and personal connection, producing an anchor stone of resolve to keep us pointed properly home, allowing discomfort sometimes in our travels – discomfort that tells us something about ourselves.

Just married: With her husband, Kerehi Waiariki ‘Dick’ Grace (Photo: Supplied)

Memoir serves the historical record by offering a uniquely personal perspective, an individual account of the times. In this instance, a Māori woman of Ngāti Toa Rangatira descent, a teacher, a writer – so a tōhunga as well – reflects upon a remarkable career that saw her begin as a singular entity, a voice in her own wilderness determined to present her own record on the simple yet profoundly powerful idea in mid-20th century New Zealand: that a Māori woman has real and relevant stories to tell.

Grace was born in Newtown, Wellington, in 1937, the same year as my own Māori mother. She notes of her school years: “I was continuously having to prove myself. In some ways this was good for me. It made me strive, always needing to have high marks, excellent reports, neat books and handwriting.”

She would come to understand the source of her frustration was not an overbearing yet ultimately altruistic education system striving for universal excellence, but rather the consistently low expectations directed at Māori students generally. Fortunately for both herself and the New Zealand literature canon, as Grace understates, “These were matters I just learned to deal with.”

As the writer then, she begins in her living room by a window in the sun. She begins with Sargeson and the realisation that here is valid. She begins with Weet Bix and the Cremota Man and Knights Castile for a King in a Castle. She begins with mana kupu, matatuhituhi defining the pūriri, the tui, the kereru and the whenua, her beloved Hongoeka.

Ah yes, when a Māori writes about te whenua, look out! That way there be monsters, or taniwha perhaps. Or is it more just a carefully enunciated revelation of deep down, what we all know to be so? Patricia Grace is unafraid to place herself at te pūtahi, the centre, the convergence of this conversation.

At home in Plimmerton (Photo: Grant Maiden/supplied)

Around her and within her stirs a post-colonial narrative before the term or the terrain was even envisaged or defined. A Māori woman coming of age in the New Zild of the ’50s and ’60s, of keen observation and literate predisposition, must have felt compelled to evoke and elaborate upon this nation evolving around her.

Can you even begin to imagine the implication of a young MāorI woman driven to inform us of our foibles and quirks and our darker selves little more than a century after her people first were exposed to and then embraced the written word? We are fortunate that, in her writing, deft and measured commentary met an adamant and mature resolve to show us to ourselves. Sometimes we need teachers with a less abrasive tone to tell us what we should already know.

Grace writes, matter of factly: “I grew up amid two worlds, having close and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother’s Pākehā family and my father’s Māori whānau.”

Regarding her novel Potiki, a story about a Māori community on the coast being threatened by developers, Grace explains: “When I started writing, what I was thinking about was writing about the ordinary everyday lives of people that I knew, and it (Potiki) has been described as a very political novel, but I didn’t think of it that way, because issues to do with land and language are things that Māori people live with every day so to me I was just writing about everyday things…”

Think Raglan Golf Course, Bastion Point and of course, her own cherished papa kainga, Hongoeka Bay. Think of hundreds of unknown places that should, as a matter of course, be known – to all of us, Pākehā and Māori alike.

But really, te whenua is not the heart of it at all. The land was there before us, it will be there when we are gone. He tāngata, he tāngata; it’s always about the people. In the rendering of character we observe the mana of humility, where the bigot and the bully are almost forgiven, but not quite. Ignorance, in the end, must simply be dealt with, with a sure and implacable spirit. While the loved are laid bare with their secrets intact, yet somehow, we know. Or so we are led to believe.

“Perhaps the time was right for a stocktake, time to get in touch with beginnings, a reminder of a time when I’d had an unshakeable self-confidence,” writes Grace after an encounter with an unwanted cup of tea and a wonderfully eccentric oracle of the tea leaves. If this book is the reminder, Grace remains unshakeable.

From the Centre: a writer’s life, by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $38) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.