Hayden’s home for multiple sclerosis concert fundraiser
"Having seen his decline, it's just such an awful disease."
Lynda Matthews
World-renowned jazz musician Hayden Chisholm is back in his hometown and stepping up to help people living with multiple sclerosis (MS).
On Sunday, a fundraising lunch, Jazz in the Garden, is being held at Nice Hotel and Table, MS Taranaki patron Lynda Matthews said. Chisholm, a saxophonist, composer and multiinstrumentalist who lives in Germany, will be playing with friends from Wellington.
It will be his only performance in New Plymouth during this visit.
He has studied in Cologne, Japan and India, developed a radical microtonal system he termed ‘‘split scales’’ for saxophones, has toured and recorded extensively, taught at universities around the world and directed jazz festivals.
‘‘He’s just an extraordinary musician and he’s doing this for an extraordinary cause,’’ Matthews said.
The fundraiser is dear to her heart because son Roland has been living with the debilitating neurological disease for many years.
‘‘Having seen his decline, it’s just such an awful disease.’’
MS can be hard to diagnose, because the symptoms get blamed on other things. Roland was a young fit sportsman when he started to become unwell.
‘‘The symptoms were put down to skiing injuries.’’
But a wise physiotherapist knew there was more to it.
When asked to be patron for MS Taranaki a few years ago, Matthews felt privileged to be asked, especially because the mother of her husband John, Lady Mary Matthews, was also a patron of the society for many years.
‘‘In Taranaki, we have got 100 clients. The youngest is 14 and the oldest is over 80,’’ she says. ‘‘More people are being diagnosed and there’s no cure.’’
There is treatment to help with symptoms, which range from mild to extremely severe. The latter can include having difficulty moving limbs, spasms, speech problems, blindness, extreme fatigue and cognitive impairment.
‘‘It’s like your brain is in a fog.’’ The MS Taranaki website says the disease is most often diagnosed in people between the ages of 20 and 40, and women are about three times as likely to develop MS as men. It’s a disease of the central nervous system and happens when the myelin sheath breaks down causing lesions on the spine and/ or the brain.
Funds from Sunday’s lunch will stay in Taranaki. They will be used to help fund a field worker for 20 hours a week, pay for a meeting room, exercise equipment, a small library, an 0800 number for people to call for support and a website.
‘‘The field worker supports people with MS, makes visits, gives advice, helps with managing symptoms and accessing further information,’’ Matthews said.
She encourages people to help this often ‘‘unsexy’’ charity.
‘‘It’s going to be a marvellous afternoon of companionship. It’s an opportunity to hear Hayden Chisholm, who you don’t often see in New Zealand and he’s doing this as a donation,’’ Matthews said.
‘‘You are helping us help people living with MS because any money makes such a difference to us being able to get out into the community.’’
Anybody struggling with MS can contact the field worker, Moira, by emailing fieldworker@mstaranaki.co.nz.
Tickets for Jazz in the Garden are available from The Nice Hotel.