Philip Glass is one of the greatest and most prolific living composers. His works have ended up in concert houses, opera houses, on theater stages, and movie screens, where his scores have been nominated for three Academy Awards. He is famous for collaborating with a wide spectrum of musicians over the years and gets the opportunity to curate the annual benefit concert for the Tibet House, the cultural center he co-founded in 1987. Tickets are still available for this year's show, taking place tonight at Carnegie Hall. Glass will be joined by Patti Smith, Steve Earle, Vampire Weekend and The National among others.
How long have you been in New York now? I've been living in the East Village since 1969. Forty years.
How has it been watching the gentrification over the last ten or twenty years? Well, things always change. Some of the ethnicity of the neighborhood has been lost. Second avenue is like a campus now. Lots of young people go to school out here, which means the weekends are noisy and the lunch hours are crowded.
Second Avenue on the weekends is Little Times Square. It goes on until two or three in the morning.
It's a Bridge and Tunnel crowd. It's become a destination for sure. Lots of people from out of town. I have noise canceling windows so I hardly notice it. But lots of my favorite places to hang out are too crowded now. The good thing is that the drug culture has almost disappeared.
It certainly doesn't have the heroin reputation it used to. Oh my god, you couldn't walk along 2nd or 3rd or 4th street or B, C, and D. It was a nightmare.
Is walking through Tompkins like a night and day experience from twenty years ago? It's quite different. In the summertime there's still a certain amount of youth culture, hitchhikers coming in from out of town, visiting the scene of another generation's misbegotten needs, but they do it anyway. You do see that, but in many ways the area's been cleaned up a lot. I think that's the pressure of NYU to clean up the neighborhood, that's been helpful in a lot of ways. So there are good sides to it.
There's a sort of yearning among young people to experience a time they've never seen, like the time we were just discussing. You've got to go to other parts of town. You have to go to Greenpoint, for example, places like that. That's actually much more reminiscent of this area twenty-five years ago. You're not missing anything, it's just not all on the same subway line.
But it seems like there's nothing really intimidating about Greenpoint. Well, this was a dangerous neighborhood at one point, but what's attractive about that? It was a drug culture. It's basically a negative culture. It's negative for the emotional and physical health of the people that participate in it. It creates crime. It's a big downer. My generation got over that in the eighties, but every generation has to discover that for themselves. It's very hard to romanticize a needle culture at this point, don't you think?
Do you get to see a lot of live music in your neck of the woods? I do. Last night, I went out, not down here, I went across town to hear a guy named Joel Harrison. He's a jazz crossover into contemporary music guy, very good. I go out to hear music, but it may not be down here. When I first moved into this neighborhood there were some really good jazz clubs in the East Village. You could go hear Pharoah Sanders, people were playing down here. I don't see that very much anymore, in my immediate neighborhood. The theater culture is still very strong. There's a New York theater workshop called 4th street and La Mama is still there, there are a lot of theaters in the city. Richard Foreman is up by St. Mark's Church, the theater culture is still very strong down here.
Is there any contemporary pop music that you get out to see? Well, you know this Tibet House concert now has got all kinds of things on it. It's got Vampire Weekend...have you seen that listing at all?
Yeah, I did. I'm excited to see The National playing. I know it's their first time on the bill. Yeah, The National's here. And Antibalas is here. Patti Smith is going to be here, she's a regular. There's a lot of energy. Commercial music may not be that interesting, but pop music can be. There are things that are meant to sell records, but there's always a part of the youth culture which is interested in real expression and quality. I think that's always been true.
How involved are you in the selection process for the Tibet House? Very involved. We start in June and July. I have a committee that works with me, three or four people. It takes half a year to put that concert together. It's become younger and younger, as we get older and older, which is really great. There are always a few older groups, and then younger people, people who are playing concerts for the first time. People your age, you know. It's great, we don't need to ghettoize ourselves by age. Ray Davies has done this show three or four times, he's from the Kinks. It's good for older people to go to things with younger people, that's what I like. They get to know each other, and there's a social dynamic, like when we had a rehearsal before the show. A lot of interesting things happen.
So a lot of planning on what is going to be played happens the day before it? The lineup we'll work out on Monday, and the setlist we'll also work out on Monday. They decide their own songs, I don't tell them what to play. Sometimes they'll ask me, and I try to help if I can, try to find some people who want to play together. The overall planning happens in June.
What drew you to the bands that you picked this year? We got some New York bands this time which is unusual, but I'm always interested in things I don't know and things I'm hearing for the first time, like the National. This is a benefit concert, it's a great concert because it's at Carnegie Hall, and there's a terrific atmosphere to this concert, but there's also money in this concert. You have to catch people when they're not on tour, when they're not in the studio. We've been trying to catch a few people for the show, but they've been in the studio, or it's been a long day...but this show has been going on for more than twenty years now, so eventually...we always have an interesting lineup, because we start in June, we really have to work at it. It takes six months to put this thing together. Benefit concerts, especially ones that have been around for as long as this one.Angelique Kidjo is going to be singing with us too. She's a wonderful singer from Africa. Fantastic singer. She brings a tremendous energy to the performance.
What's your involvement with Tibet House? I'm one of the founders of Tibet House, so I've been there from the beginning. After the first couple years, we decided we needed to have an annual concert to raise money, and it's become almost a self-perpetuating event now. It's still Tibet House and there's still a welcoming speech, and there's still a big picture of the Potala Palace over the show, and there is still a strong connection to Tibet, and we still have Tibetan monks at the beginning. So we've kept the Tibetan theme, and all the money raised is divided among Tibetan refugees and community based Tibetan organizations, and some other things. We don't confine it just to Tibet anymore, we put down some for Farm Aid, andAngelique Kidjo has an organization that works in Africa. The main theme is still Tibet, but we try to spread it out now, to bring a bigger range to those interests. And also, as a culture the Tibetans have survived, I'm not worried about the Tibetan culture surviving, they are surviving, and doing beautifully. Of course that's not the same thing as having a country, and that's a very very sad part of it, but the ones that are outside, they need our attention and our help, but in a way there are also a wide range of issues that we need to pay attention to.
It must be very satisfying to be able to spread the wealth like that. It is. I think everybody tries in music to do that. Paul Simon has a children's hospital, a medical unit for children that travels around the city. People do different things, people have different kind of charities. It connects us to the world, and we affirm that connection, we nurture and develop it.
Can you share your strangest "only in New York" story? There are so many of those stories. I'm drawing a blank right now, but I must know at least fifty of them. For many years, I had an annual visit to Coney Island with my friends, a group of filmmakers and musicians. Every year we went out to Coney Island and visited together. There was a time when it had a kind of continuity to it, though not so much anymore, but that's not important. I'm sorry, I can't help you with that.
Is there a New Yorker you most admire? Some of them are gone. Norman Mailer, he helped start the Village Voice years and years ago. He was a fixture in New York. He ran for mayor once. He was a funny guy, a tremendously energetic guy, and I liked him. He's not around anymore, but I liked him anyway. You know John Updike just died, a few days ago, you probably know that. He was of Norman Mailer's generation. Norman Mailer really came out of Hemingway in a way. Then Allen Ginsberg was my favorite New Yorker of all time. He was a close friend. He was in the East Village a lot, he lived around here, and he passed away ten years ago. But there will be other people to replace those souls.
Given the opportunity, how would you change New York? The biggest problem on the weekends the subway systems. They're trying to fix the tracks, okay, I understand that. You just don't' know when the trains are running anymore. You can get on the D train and end up in the wrong place. That's my pet peeve. Every New Yorker has a pet peeve, but we all use the subways. You can't use street transportation during the daytime, there's too much traffic on the street. So everybody's on the subways, and we depend on it. I mean it's a great subway system, really a truly. It's relatively safe and clean, but on the weekends you have no idea where the trains are going.
Have you ever considered leaving New York? No. My work base is here. I spend time out of New York to go to Nova Scotia and kick around up there for fourteen, fifteen weeks a year, which is a fair amount. It's not as much as some people do, but it is for me. So I get to be out of the city a lot. The cultural life of the city is such a formidable, energetic, part of our city, and you can't find it anywhere else. You know people come in from Sao Paulo, it's in all big cities, but they don't have the energy of New York. Even though we're half the size of some of those cities, culturally speaking we have everything here. It's an addiction, isn't it?
Forty years in the East Village is pretty impressive these days. Yeah, I watched it. I'm part of it, I like it.
Are there any stories from when the East Village was a dingier place that you could share? The good part of it was that there was always a big music scene down here. I remember there's a place called the Five Spot that was on the Bowery and St. Mark's place. It's an all-night deli now, but it was a jazz club. While I was living in the city in the late fifties and the early sixties, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman shared that place. They didn't play together, but they had alternating sets. You could walk into that place most nights of the week, and they were playing there. These people are legendary now, of course they are, but you would go into that place and it wouldn't be very full, very few people would be there, but if you wanted to hear real music you could hear it at the five spot.
Is Carnegie Hall your Favorite spot for music in the city? It's a nice spot, a great spot, in terms of favorites, you can't beat it. Every time we do this concert, for the people playing one of the big pulls is playing at Carnegie hall. David Bowie and Paul Simon, the first time they played there, they hadn't played there before. They had played big stadiums but they'd never played Carnegie hall. And for the young people, just to be walking on the stage, they say "my god, this is it!" and I say "yeah, this is it." Yeah, it's the place.
