Thrill of making and listening to music

At the Women’s Audio Mission on Natoma Street the other night, the band Antique Naked Soul recorded an a cappella beatbox song. It was a professional session, and also a demonstration for members of the music community (among them an enthusiastic group from Pandora), prospective supporters and volunteers.

WAM, which trains more than 1,200 young women each year in its working studio, challenges the reality that fewer than 5 percent of sound industry workers are females. The setup is so stateof-the-art that professional musicians and storytellers — including singers Angelique Kidjo and Tanya Tagaq, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Kronos Quartet and Salman Rushdie — have recorded there. You walk in and feel the energy.

That night, the music of Antique Naked Soul — multilayered, complicated, intricately woven shreds of sound — seemed especially suited for the demonstration. Visitors and trainees crowded ’round, watching and listening.

And right up front, sitting before the mixing console in the studio, was a man more formally dressed in a sport coat, listening and bopping his head in time with the rhythm. He was Clarence Jones, a civil rights hero who had been lawyer and speechwriter to Martin Luther King Jr., and who is currently at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center at Stanford.

I later learned that Jones studied clarinet at Juilliard as a young man. He first visited WAM a few weeks before to record his stories of the civil rights movement in the ’60s. These tales were told with music by Zachary Watkins, played by the Kronos Quartet.

Listening to him speak so moved Terri Winston, founder of WAM, that she cried. “Hearing that history directly from someone who had been there was incredibly moving,” she said.

And Jones was so taken with the studio and its aims that he asked to return to watch the young trainees in action at a recording session. He’s a historic figure, but he sat there quietly, with no need to be the center of attention. He watched and listened, surrounded by engineers-in-training, performers, volunteers, donors, and he appeared to be having a good time.

So it seems today’s theme is music. At a gala Sunday, March 19, for the dance company Smuin, London Breed took the stage to give her version of the opening rap song of the musical “Hamilton.” This was the prelude to her auctioning off three pairs of tickets to the show and dinner at John’s Grill (each package fetched $5,000). The lyrics might describe many a politician’s life: “Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of; the brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter.”

As to sounds that turn on professional musicians: Symphony Silicon Valley timpanist Robb Erlebach likes the Nimrod Variation from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” a piece that he describes as “very slow, very moving”; but pianist Barry Koron of St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church gets particularly emotional playing Ravel, Schubert and Scott Joplin — “anything that makes me sing inside as I play it.” And Livermore Valley Opera clarinetist Gary Sears says the Finale to Act 4 of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” brings “a tear to almost all” string players and woodwinds because of “its indescribable beauty.”

Symphony Parnassus bassoonist Sarah Smith finds it “hard to have spine-tingling moments while playing an important bassoon moment, as anxiety and concentration tend to erase the tingles.” Nonetheless, she says, tingles can come while “playing a big tutti moment . ... In the last movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony — about a minute from the end — the alto trombone bursts forth with a high A, a dopamine-inducing moment of musical domination.” Parnassus violinist Cindy Pacini says that at a concert on Sunday, March 19, despite its name, “In Memoriam,” a piece by the composer Arnold Bax was “so luscious and rich for the strings that I felt I was playing for a passionate love scene.”

Choral singer Allison Gong says she’s most turned on by “Renaissance polyphony, especially those sublime a cappella cadences when all of the voices resolve into a gorgeous final chord.”

And in similar vein, Arnold Seibel notes that “anything not discordant sung or played in a large ensemble moves your whole body molecule by molecule. It plays you while you’re playing it. You are the music.”

“I want a doggie. I want a guinea pig. And I want a little brother.”

4-year-old girl to her mother, overheard in Half Moon Bay by Lynette Brohm