ALAN SEIDLER 101

As clichéd as the phrase may be, Alan Seidler has always marched to the beat of a     different drummer.

Long before “eclectic” and “crossover phenomenon” became music business buzzwords, Alan was following his own very personal star.  At a time when purists on both sides of the musical divide looked on such purposeful multifacetedness with derision or outright  contempt, Alan effortlessly glided between (and often sought to combine) his career as a classically-oriented composer with a quite different role, playing blues and ragtime piano and singing pre-Depression Tin Pan Alley chestnuts (many of which he originally picked up from his mother and grandmothers), as well as his own zany retro-pop parodies (tackling such thorny topics as medical ailments, insanity, illicit drug use, and his favorite

 cause celebre, touting the nobility of the warm, furry and much-maligned gorilla) on records, radio and TV talk shows, and just about anyplace else that would have him.  As he himself puts it, “To this day, I read reviews of my serious work claiming that I haven’t yet found my ‘own voice’ as a composer, but that’s not true at all---I just never understood why I had to have only one!

Alan Seidler was born on December 4^th.  Taking a page from his friend and former housemate, the late singer/songwriter Tim Rose, Alan says that age is a personal matter, but will admit to fitting broadly into the Baby-Boomer demographic and to having attended the original Woodstock Festival as a youth.

Though there was no tradition of professional musicianship in his family (beyond ancestral tales of descent from strolling fiddlers in a 19^th-Century Ukrainian village), his father played folk songs on the harmonica by ear and his mother had briefly considered a singing career while in her early teens, so when Alan insistently begged them for a piano since little more than a toddler, they gave in, purchasing a rickety 1900s-vintage upright shortly before he turned seven. Having learned the rudiments of musical notation from a local piano teacher, within weeks he was not only spending every spare moment at the instrument, but writing songs and miniature piano pieces of his own.

His first ambition was to become a concert pianist, and indeed from the age of eight onward, he concretized in his hometown of New Rochelle, New York and neighboring communities, playing his own earliest piano pieces in addition to the standard repertoire.

But even while pursuing the classics, Alan became proficient at playing blues, jazz and pop standards, and by the time he reached his teens he was serving as musical director or rehearsal pianist for various local revues and theatrical productions.  He was soon composing increasingly complex (though not always complete) serious works, while at the same time writing or co-writing pop, rock and soul numbers, one of which (“Standing By”) was saleable enough to catch the ear of Johnnie Taylor, who recorded it before passing it along to Al Green.

When Alan was fifteen, director Gene Feist (who had been his junior high drama coach) founded the now-famed Roundabout Theatre in New York City and, despite Alan’s youth, tapped him to be musical director for the company’s first production.  Thus began a long-running love affair with the Big Apple, where Alan began spending as much time as he could, and where he ultimately moved right out of high school.

In the meantime, Alan continued his piano studies and kept on composing.  The earliest serious works he still acknowledges date from this period.  By the time he turned seventeen, he had made his debut as piano soloist at Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall with Gene Forrell and the Master Virtuosi of New York and won a scholarship which helped him to continue his professional training at the prestigious Juilliard School, where he studied composition with the eminent composer and theoretician Vincent Persichetti.

Student housing wasn’t Alan’s cup of tea, though, and having already become somewhat of a fixture on the Downtown club scene (where he was sometimes permitted to regale patrons with his own increasingly offbeat numbers between scheduled sets), he lived for a time at New York’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. Alan recalls, “My room cost $9 per night with one night a week free. It was cramped and narrow and the bathroom was in the hallway, but it was The Chelsea with all its seedy rock-star glamour and everything that went along with it, so how could I possibly complain?”

Though still attending classes at Juilliard, Alan began moonlighting with a friend as an unpaid staffer on radio station WBAI-FM’s The Steve Post Show, and to his surprise, was soon able to trade fetching coffee for Steve and his guests for a recurring spot on the show, playing piano, singing, and frequently exchanging musical banter with British record producer and oldies maven Ian Whitcomb, another Post regular. This opportunity gave both Alan’s personality and the lighter side of his music their first real media exposure and the lure of the burgeoning independent record industry of the 1970s wasn’t far away.

Next came Blue Goose Records where label chief Nick Perls signed the twenty-year-old to a six-year contract.  The roster of artists Alan recorded and/or performed with over the next few years reads like a Who’s Who of the ‘70s blues, folk and ragtime revivals, including John Fahey, Rory Block, Jo Ann Kelly and nonagenarian pianist/songwriting legend Eubie Blake, to name but a few.

Early in 1974, Blue Goose granted Alan a temporary leave from his contract to record an album for John Fahey’s legendary Takoma label, then headquartered in L.A.  That album,

Morning Impromptus/Evening Bacchanals, consisted almost entirely of Alan’s piano improvisations and was an artistic if not a commercial success, having only a limited release on eight-track tape before Takoma was forced to sell its assets and properties to Chrysalis Records, which shelved the project.  An effort by Fahey, who had been signed in his own right by Warner Brothers Records, to take Alan along with him was initially green-lighted by Warner but failed to bear fruit, and Alan eventually returned to New York.  The following January, though, Alan Seidler was suddenly catapulted into cult-hero status (and more than a little notoriety) when Blue Goose released his piano/vocal album The Duke of Ook on an unsuspecting world. (Webmaster’s Note to all “Duke” fanatics---Alan’s new label, HooveApe Records, will issue the first legally authorized edition of “Duke of Ook” in 2007.  A poor-quality Japanese bootleg was issued in 2002 without the consent or knowledge of the copyright holder [Simian Press] and has been sold via mail-order at grossly inflated prices.)

Most of the lyrics and all the music for The Duke of Ook (save for a parody of the 1920s Irving Berlin classic “All By Myself”, which with Alan’s revised lyrics transformed the tune into the plea of a lovelorn ape) were written by Alan.  The album also featured a cover drawing by underground comics icon R. Crumb, of “Fritz the Cat” and “Mr. Natural” fame which has become a classic in its own right and has long been downloadable on a multitude of websites and also available as poster and silkscreen, among several other variations.

As much of a boost as Crumb’s participation gave the album, it was the songs themselves that got Alan noticed not only by deejays and critics, but by what soon became an international cult following.  The more socially conscious numbers on the album briefly won Alan the moniker “The Tom Lehrer of the Seventies” in critical circles, but it was his wackier songs, such as “The Song”, “D-O-A-P (Dope)”, “Oozing Cyst Blues,” and its Country/Western counterpart, “Oozin’, Just Oozin’ For You” which helped brand him as one of the prime cazies of the music biz, an image that as he himself admits, “I did little or nothing to dispel,” adding that “in today’s social climate of political correctness, the album would never have been released at all.”  Though using the idioms and language of traditional blues and Tin Pan Alley standards (combined with a liberal dose of his own highly personal and fanciful vocabulary), Alan continues, “I guess there was something in there to offend almost anyone, if they were looking to be offended.”  At least one song (“D-O-A-P”) was ultimately pulled from the airwaves amid protests and death threats due to its perceived anti-social, pro-drug message.

Championed by supporters like legendary radio host Dr. Demento and music magazines of the day, such as Crawdaddy,  Alan toured college campuses and music venues throughout the U.S. and Canada and was seen (admittedly not always in the most dignified of circumstances) on such TV programs as The Merv Griffin Show, The Joe Franklin Show, Wonderama with Sonny Fox, and the CBC’s Ninety Minutes Live.  At the same time he formed his first production company/talent agency, Ook Ook Productions, which booked East Coast rock bands and cabaret acts and produced Vaudeville at Town Hall, an ultra-retro extravaganza headlining octogenarian “Crooning Troubadour” Nick Lucas, who had introduced “Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me” in a long-forgotten 1929 movie musical.  Alan did double duty, accompanying Nick and other cast members at the piano while serving as the show’s executive producer as well.

Alan appeared on several more Blue Goose LPs over the next few years, and producer Perls also recorded another fifty-odd as yet unissued piano/vocal tracks of his work, either alone or backed by a variety of pickup bands and other artists, but somehow Alan never again had the opportunity to duplicate the popular success of The Duke of Ook before his contract ran out and Perls soon after shut down Blue Goose entirely at the end of the 1970s due to his own worsening health which he never recovered, finally succumbing to AIDS in 1987.

By the time the Blue Goose years were drawing to a close, Alan was beginning to long for a simpler, quieter life anyway, having long since fallen prey to the timeworn showbiz curse of too little work and too much play.  In addition, his career as a serious composer had all but evaporated during the Seventies and would take a good deal of time and sustained effort to reconstruct.

For a time, Alan thought marriage might bring him some needed stability and help rein in his increasingly over-the-top image, “so I went ahead and married a fellow musician for all the wrong reasons,” he says, quickly adding, “of course it didn’t work out.  She and I didn’t speak for years after the split, but now we’ve been friends again for a long while, so we must have done something right somewhere along the way.”

The road back to life as a working composer was a long one, though.   Throughout much of the 1980s, Alan nurtured a low-key practice as a vocal coach and arranger to avoid more pressure-filled demands upon his time.  He began to get his compositional feet wet again by supplying background scores for plays produced at such venues as New York’s Playwrights Horizons and Westbeth Theatres as well as the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, where he collaborated with playwright Julia Cameron, who went on to fame in the ‘90s as the creator and author of The Artist’s Way.

Still seeking encouragement and support, later in the Eighties Alan turned to composer-conductor Giampaolo Bracali, a long-time faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music.  Bracali soon became both mentor and friend, helping Alan to hone some of the rustier skills of his craft and inspiring him to once again devote himself to serious composition full-time, as was his original intention.  “Basically, I’ve had two teachers,” says Alan, “Vincent Persichetti and Giampaolo Bracali.  They both taught me that even the most intricate of musical creations begins with making the commitment to putting just one note on a piece of score paper, and above all, the discipline of writing every day.  In all honesty, that’s not to say that I actually always do that, but I’m a lot better about it than I used to be.  I still see Giampaolo quite a bit, and if he suspects that I haven’t been working as hard as I should, he’ll call me a lazy composer, or worse yet, “you lazy boy”, and since he’s often right, I usually get the message pretty quickly.”  (Webmaster’s Note:  This interview section was taped in the summer of 2001. Giampaolo Bracali passed away of cancer in December, 2006.)

Encouragement and perseverance paid off, and by the early Nineties, Alan was putting together a sizeable portfolio of work, including a large number of art songs and several choral works, with or without instrumental accompaniment, as well as a good deal of chamber music, one example of which, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, was issued on violinist Patmore Lewis’s Azatlan Records CD From The Soul, along with sonatas by European masters Richard Strauss and Karol Szymanowski.

One of Alan’s prouder moments of recent years came on November 20, 1995, when a full-length program of his concert music was presented at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall, featuring violinist Lewis, pianist John Nauman, soprano Laura Last and tenor Steven Goldstein, backed by an instrumental ensemble drawn from members of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Orchestras under the baton of the Met’s Associate Conductor Richard Woitach.

Since then, Alan has remained busy.  In 1999, he composed the score for Douglas Zimmerman’s indie film, “He Oughtta Be Committed,” which won the Audience Appreciation Award at the Louisville Film Festival in 2000 and was seen at the Sao Paolo Festival in Brazil in the fall of 2001. Though he is quite interested in the challenges presented by composing for the film medium, despite spending much of his time in and around Hollywood during the years 2001-04, no concrete offers except for some minor editing work have been put on the table since.

Beginning in February 1999 and for an incredible seven years thereafter, Alan chipped away at a gargantuan setting (which he eventually dubbed a choral symphony) of Walt Whitman’s ecstatic, visionary poem The Mystic Trumpeter, set for soprano and tenor soloists, solo trumpet playing from offstage, large mixed chorus and an orchestral complement of brass ensemble, four percussionists playing a total of seventeen different instruments, piano, celesta, organ, eight celli and four double basses. The work finally received its premiere in October 2006 (see below) and as of 2007, the concert division of Alan’s production company (New Classics Entertainment) is in negotiations for its release on a major label.

In the winter of 2001, Alan took time out from the Whitman work to compose a short piece, Simplify Me When I’m Dead, to a text by British poet Keith Douglas, honoring his friend, recording colleague and former producer John Fahey, whose untimely death some weeks before affected the composer (and much of the musical world) profoundly.

The work was written for baritone voice, viola, guitar, marimba, piano and percussion and will receive its belated premiere during The Orchestra of Our Time’s 2007-2008 season.  At the urging of friends and fans, Alan has also been puttering around with a memoir which he calls “To No Good End” (sardonically titled for his fifth-grade teacher’s prediction for his life after a particularly flagrant example of juvenile mischief), but comments, “nobody has yet been able to convince me of any sensible reason that people would want to read about my life, so I’m not really working too hard at it until someone does.”

So how does Alan view his life, the world of music, and his place in it from the vantage point of the new Millenium? “It’s too big a question,” he replies, “so I’ll try to break it down, though I’m not always too efficient at that once I get started.”

“When we recorded a CD of my chamber music in ’97, I wrote this really pretentious essay about myself which was supposed to be the booklet for the CD.  Fortunately it never got into print,and I want to keep away from anything resembling that now.

“The world of music is part of the world at large, and even as it grows by leaps and bounds, in many ways it’s shrinking more and more each day, which is paradoxical and mostly due to the technological advances of the last couple of decades.  When I first started out in music, it had become as specialized a field as the practice of modern medicine.  There were very few people crisscrossing the lines between ‘classical’ music and any other genres.  In the classical sphere, it had become increasingly rare to see a composer who was also a performer or vice-versa, and performers themselves were being pigeonholed into their own subspecialties and sub-subspecialties.  In the last several years, this trend has reversed itself just about everywhere outside of the most rigid bastions of tradition (which won’t survive too many years longer anyway, for both artistic and economic reasons), and everybody is doing everything.  For the most part, I think the change is great, even if its main impetus is the financial and practical near-impossibility of presenting new work in the halls of the Uptown establishment.

“Just as the Berlin Wall came down, the barriers separating different cultures and even between different genres existing within the same society are crumbling all around us.  If you want to see and hear what’s happening in new music here in New York today, don’t waste your money on tickets to the Philharmonic.  Go Downtown to The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, The Great Hall at Cooper Union and innumerable other small venues and clubs that are springing up every day.  That’s where it’s all happening, and this seems to be true all over this country.  Mainstream ‘serious’ music has been made inaccessible to the general public in the Great Temples of Art, so new artists (and I don’t confine that term to music alone) are bringing it to places that are within their practical reach and where there’s a real desire to hear, see and be a part of what’s new.  This was an inevitable development---it had to happen, and you can’t underestimate the relative ease of world travel and the influence of the Internet on any of this either.  Twenty years ago, “World Music” was just a platitude----now it’s a reality as barriers between East and West continue to melt worldwide.  The same can be said of all musical and other artistic forms and genres.  I know a lot of people don’t understand my position on this, but I’ve always hated having to define myself as “classical” vs. “popular,” “serious” vs. “silly”, etc., and that’s only the beginning .  In this country alone, we’ve got the classical tradition alongside of and gradually melding with jazz, blues, folk, rock, hip-hop and any other form of expression you can think of.  A million different things are going on at once, and seeking to define and label them, in my opinion, only serves to limit them, and that holds true whether you’re talking about a work of art or a relationship between two human beings.

“As far as my own life and music---well, I can’t say I don’t spend plenty of time (probably too much) thinking about it, but what I think isn’t nearly as important as the fact that there’s work and growth going on in both areas.  Even in my so-called ‘serious’ music (and there I go labeling again), I’ve never, ever adhered to any one stylistic dogma, and this has gotten me a lot of criticism which I feel is both unfair and misdirected, because my eclecticism is no accident, but part and parcel of my personal aesthetic.  When I’m writing for myself, I write what I feel, and what I feel changes at very least from day to day, and most definitely from work to work.  If I’m doing a project with other people in mind, then of course I’m going to tailor the ‘style’ and technical requirements to the expressive needs of that project anyway.  There are critics who insist I haven’t found my own voice, but what if I happen to have many voices?  To me, it means that I’m versatile and can do many different things, either one by one or in combination.  This has always been the case in my work, and I think that’s an asset, not a liability.  If music is a ‘performing’ art, which of course it is, why should those who write what’s being performed be any more bound to adhere to one style or genre than the performers themselves?

“As to my ‘un-serious’ work---what I did in my recording days and the reputation that came with it:  I still love the music, crazy or not, and I still love gorillas.  Great Apes are great!   As far as some of my behavior, yes it was pretty outrageous at times and yes, some of it was chemically induced or at least chemically enhanced, and I’ve paid a heavy price for a lot of it personally and professionally, but maybe it was part of growing up for me.  Maybe I was a case of arrested development.  I mean, everybody was at a party in the Seventies---I was just one of the people who forgot to go home.  People who know me well know that that part of my personality hasn’t disappeared---I’ve always craved attention, challenged (or ignored) authority, and had a keener than average sense of the absurd, but I think I’m learning to channel that in a way where it doesn’t just end up as a series of random acts of flamboyant self-destruction, and might even come in handy now and then, if judiciously applied.  I have much more respect than I once did for what I can do for myself, and now it’s tempered by experience and a healthy fear of what I can do to myself if I just throw caution to the winds and act out on whatever comes into my head.”

Webmaster’s Note: These remarks from Alan were taped in 2001 and since that time, many of his opinions have changed due to his own experience and what he has observed in the world of the performing arts around him.  He now says, not without some pessimism, “With the burgeoning and ever-faster growth of technology worldwide, I find myself worried, very worried about the continued existence of the performing arts as we know them as the 21^st Century moves on and this, unfortunately, is far from limited to the art of music alone.  If I have a legacy that I want to leave behind me other than my own work as composer and performer, it is to help ensure that live performance of new music, dance and theatre pieces presented by real-life human beings will survive the Digital Age and whatever may follow it.  To this end, I have set up a production company, two of whose divisions, New Classics Entertainment and Hoove Ape Records, are totally devoted to this goal which, tragically, I too often now see as more of a vision than a reality in the New World which is already upon us.

“Don’t get me wrong---I’m not some reactionary enemy of technology and the bright promises it can bring to this world---far from it.  I know that none of us have the power to selectively slow down a universal process that we must in many ways regard as progress and the natural course of history, nor should we.  Still, as a lifelong creative artist, I can’t help mourning in advance the passing of millennia during which the making of art has been a thoroughly human experience and see it totally transformed into artificially generated media, something we are almost capable of doing fairly seamlessly even now. The saddest part of all may be that as this process (which has, of course, already begun) moves further and further along, it will be done so skillfully and subtly that the vast majority of people won’t even notice.  I can only hope against hope that at least some of my predictions are wrong, or the loss to civilization will be immeasurable, leaving the only live practitioners of living art, song and dance in what we “privileged” societies consider the most remote and “primitive” corners of the earth.

“That being said, I’ve lived through some exciting times and there’s no denying that we’re living in a very exciting one right now, so I’m just glad I’m still here.  Please don’t bother to ask me where I see myself five or ten years down the road because I’m at the point in my life where I’m content to answer that one with a resounding ‘I DON’T KNOW!” and be at peace with that.  You can bet on this though:  wherever I may be, I’ll still be composing, most likely performing in some fashion or another, and so long as I have anything to say about it, you’ll be hearing from me!”

Alan Seidler was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music for “The Mystic Trumpeter: A Choral Symphony” following its premiere in the fall of 2006.  The results of that prestigious competition will be announced sometime in the spring of 2007.  We of Alan Seidler Online can only congratulate him on the nomination, wish him luck and send him our best wishes for a happy and healthy life as we always have.