Howzit Howard

Will UH wage cuts hamper recruiting?

I want to gently point out a logical fallacy in the assertion by some members of the UH Professional Assembly that wage cuts will put UH way low on national rankings and hurt recruiting. It would be apples and oranges to compare new, lower compensation with current compensation at other schools, because most states have got their own funding crises and some are in deeper holes than we are. Universities on the mainland that have not yet cut wages may have to later. Any wage cut is a difficulty for any wage earner, and I do not rule out the possibility that, for one reason or another, UH could find itself in a diminished competitive position when the dust settles. But at this point it could easily work the other way, if rival schools cut more than we do. And anyone who blames UH management, current or former, has gone dotty from grading papers. No one saw the severity of falling tax revenues coming, even people whose full-time job it is to foresee this sort of thing. This recession has been unique, vaporizing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth and forcing the government to try all kinds of new ideas to stimulate the economy, only some of which have worked. Not UH, nor the Republican governor, nor the Democratic legislature, nor the current Democratic president, nor the Republican last one, could have foreseen what happened in its entirety. It is unfair to blame any of them when the vast majority of economists also failed to predict this mess. This happened, if you insist upon blaming someone, as perhaps you should, as a direct result of the criminal hard-sell of exploding mortgages to people who couldn't afford them, and the intense, arguably fraudulent, marketing of investments based on those mortgages by idiots in Armanis too focused on their next six-figure bonuses to say, or even to see, that the unregulated market in derivatives magnified risk rather than spreading it around. Countrywide Financial, which absolutely led the way on subprimes and will go down in history books next to the Credit Mobilier scandal and the panic caused by Erie Rail Road stock, is no more, having been absorbed by a megabank, but most of the bonuses-for-brains Wall Street financial houses do still exist, and are even at this moment lobbying members of Congress not to pass any regulation of derivatives or any requirement to keep a greater cushion of cash on hand like real banks do. Will they ever learn? The question answers itself.

Who has an auditorium I can use?

You know how I give the business news. What if I were to appear on a stage with half a dozen musicians and report the history of classical music? I've written a first draft already. And a couple of really good musicians are willing to take part, including a well-known member of the Symphony and a colleague on KGMB9 who is active in Gridiron. The idea is to raise money for the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival. Because it's a first-time event, and because the objective is to raise money for a nonprofit, and because the evening will be educational as well as entertaining, I'm hoping a college or school will have a hall it can donate for the evening if the timing is right. Maybe sometime over the winter. But I'm flexible. Got any ideas? Postscript: The festival likes the idea of doing this around Feb. 12-13-14. In response to other questions, I'd like a venue that could accommodate a couple hundred people. I've never done this before - the organizing part - but I'm hoping to hold the costs low, raising issues of hall fees and stage personnel costs. It would be nice to keep the ticket price low!

No plan is an island

When I was a little boy, in the 1950s, my family lived in a two bedroom house on a road parallel to the Gov. Ritchie Hwy., which ran from Baltimore, Md., to the state capital in Annapolis. It was a divided highway, a new thing in those days. I remember the smell and the hum of the tires of the buses and trucks that used the highway at night. I would stand at the window sill, which I could barely see over, and watch them , wondering who was aboard and where they were going. From there to Annapolis, a half hour drive, there wasn't a single stoplight, only the flashing kind they have today in Kaunakakai. You had to be careful crossing Ritchie Hwy. in a car, and more so on foot. A boy I knew got killed trying to cross it. Let's call that 1959, when I would have been six, going into the first grade. A dozen years later, 1971, when I graduated from high school and worked at a radio station in Annapolis that Pat Sajak owns now, there were more than 20 stoplights. By 1975, when I went to work in Washington, D.C., Ritchie Hwy. was so congested they were building an Interstate spur to replace it. While I worked in Washington for the next 25 years, I drove back to my home stomping grounds less and less frequently, mainly to see my family, which meant a specific hour-long drive, without wandering around the county that hosted my childhood. When I did, after some years, I barely recognized it. Incremental change that my family was used to, hit me with a cumulative effect. The nearest thing to a town center when I was growing up was an unincorporated place called Glen Burnie. The most similar place to it in Hawaii is Wahiawa. Blighted, but in a quaint way. Everyone thought it needed urban renewal, but then it got it, and today Glen Burnie has a bleak brick look that is newer but somehow not better. As for Annapolis, the sleepy little harbor town became a city, a colonial yet urban outrigger to Washington, D.C., connected by huge yet congested Interstates. How did this happen? The population of America, which doubled from 75 million to 150 million in the first half of the 20th century, has doubled again in my lifetime, from 150 million in the early 1950s to 300 million now. That's how it happened. For every 15 people living in America in my childhood there are 30 now, and more all the time. They have to live someplace, work someplace, shop someplace. They have to be schooled, treated when sick, buried when they die. My home county, which seemed a wonderful place and which I loved dearly and was never going to leave until I discovered the world beyond it, thought itself adept at the black art of planning its land use. It was one of the first counties in the nation to have a planning department and an official 20-year highway plan. As a teenager reporting news over the radio, I found the 20-year highway plan and was enthralled by it. Imagine a map of an area you know like the back of your hand, with roads on it that didn't exist. Some of the roads looked like brilliant ideas, creating wormholes between parts of the county that were quite hard to get to even if, like me, you knew all the back roads. Others were appalling. They would divide neighborhoods and spoil wooded areas where I had hiked or biked. But the most amazing thing about the 20-year plan was that I hadn't known it existed, and most residents of the county never knew about it, and most of the few people who did know about it had never read it. In all the years I covered public debates on the mainland about development plans - new communities, new roads, new malls - I never heard anyone raise the idea of land being finite. Land doesn't seem finite on the mainland.They would argue about whether to allow development here or there, but closing it off altogether, risking economic stagnation, was considered so ill-advised that there was no pointing even wasting time to explain why this option was dismissed. Well, there was one guy who discussed it - a fellow named Werner Fornos who kept running for county executive. His day job was head of Zero Population Growth, Inc., so he thought about this all the time. But flattening out population growth was another option people dismissed. So development proceeded apace, planned, maybe, but not really controlled much. Open spaces would remain somewhere else. No one seemed to realize that no plan is an island and development affects other places, open or otherwise. Here we are in Hawaii, which has so many wonderful characteristics they are too many to enumerate, but one of them, I suggest to you, is that everyone can plainly see that our land is finite. Even the ocean, which looks infinite, is experienced mainly through the finite part nearest land, which reminds us of its fragility by becoming stinky from time to time. It's a good thing that we all understand deeply that we can't just build anything. But beyond that, I don't know that we're any more sophisticated than those people back in Maryland who accepted development as inevitable and let it run its course with only occasional management of this tract or that. Something has been nagging at me about the debates of recent years over Hawaii's development projects of recent years. It is the knee-jerk tendency of people on all sides, even if they do not always choose the same side. In both supporting or opposing development projects, we tend to use slogans in place of informed consideration, demonizing the other side and imputing to them the worst possible motives. It is, I think, not merely stupid but dangerous to allow public discourse on land/resource use to become a clash of politics, personality or philosophy. Our population, which has been fairly flat in recent years, will continue to grow even if slowly. If the average person doesn't take an interest, only deep-pocketed developers and activists with their own constituencies will duke it out. It will help if reporters are given time to read the plans, and not be content with he-said/she-said stories that can confer victory on the basis of which side has the speaker best able to give a catchy quote. Any plan for development is connected to the people who will have to live with it, and they owe it to themselves to stay connected with the facts, preferably through their own study of the facts.

Costs and benefits of monuments to our civic pride

Once upon a time, time was no big deal. We did not always strive to divide the day into equal hours, and the hours into equal minutes, and the minutes into equal seconds. You could not be "on time" because there was no uniform measurable time to be on. Even the vague punctuality of "Hawaiian Standard Time" was inconceivable, or at least unconceived. It was not until the 1300s that people decided it was high time to have modern time, and put clocks into high places like bell towers. Then, as Daniel Boorstin writes in "The Discoverers," community pride became a pride of bells. "Churches, monasteries and whole towns were judged by the reach and resonance of the peals from their towers." One old bell had an inscription: "Funera plango, fulmina frongo, Sabbath pango, Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos," which Boorstin assures us means, "I mourn death, I disperse the lightning, I announce the Sabbath, I rouse the lazy, I scatter the winds, I appease the bloodthirsty." There was always a mercantile reason for these clocks, ordering town life, bringing people to markets earlier, promoting commerce, but civic pride dictated ever more complex and sonorous clocks, bells and chimes. This did not fade until the spread of small clocks that allowed anyone to have measured time in the home, after which clocks were no longer the big time and civic pride needed other outlets. By the 1800s civic pride was about roads, canals and railways. All the great railways of the United States except the first transcontinental line were each the project of a single city. New Yorkers built the Erie Canal, the Erie Railway and the New York Central Railway. Philadelphians built the first great toll road and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Baltimoreans built the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The transcontinental route that I mentioned as an exception was pushed by President Lincoln to keep California in the Union during the Civil War. Civic pride in the late 1800s and early 1900s also focused on symphony orchestras. It is no accident that orchestras we consider America's best even today - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, yes, but also Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis and Milwaukee - arose in industrial cities where corporate barons could support them. The newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer left a pile of money for the New York Philharmonic with, apparently as a condition of taking it, a list of composers he wanted to hear less of. In the 1900s civic leaders became obsessed with sports stadiums. Every city wanted the biggest and best arena. In the 1990s Baltimoreans tore down their beloved Memorial Stadium to build Camden Yards, a high-tech home for the Orioles with digital readouts of the speed of pitches and all the other data one had gotten used to seeing when watching a game on television. I saw a game from an air conditioned executive box as a reward for covering a story well and it made me feel like leaving a lot of money to the Baltimore Symphony with stern instructions to play less Wagner. The conventional thinking of cities that one must - MUST! - have the best possible clock towers, railroads, symphony orchestras and sports arenas extended long ago to convention centers. As always, there is sensible mercantile reasoning behind it - convention centers promote spending and tax revenue by visitors, aiding local businesses and residences - but left unsaid or at least unstressed is the "mine is bigger than yours" impulse to have a newer and better convention center than the other guy. Not entirely unrelated to other forms of boastful exaggeration are the turgid revenue forecasts attendant to such expensive projects. So it is that the Honolulu Convention Center, while bringing in significant visitor spending and tax revenue, has not met the expectations of the forecasts issued when it was first dreamed up. The Convention Center is having a good year this year and it is a major reason why Oahu hotels are three quarters full while neighbor island hotels are often less than two thirds fall. Conventions bring business visitors who bring spouses and families and stay a few days beyond the convention and see the sights and often make side trips to other islands. Business tourism has proven more resilient than individual visitors in this recession, cushioning our downturn. The Honolulu Advertiser accurately reported Sunday that total Convention Center revenues have come nowhere close to the huge forecast numbers presented while the project was first considered. So what happened back then? Did someone merely concoct gigantic profits to quell opponents? Probably. I think a contributing factor may have been that they accurately reckoned how good a convention center it would be but failed to anticipate how many other cities would have the same idea and build edifaces of civic pride themselves. We are about to see this again. Aloha Stadium is so rusty we don't dare move the movable parts any more, lest it get stuck in the less-used configuration. Replacing it will cost a pile. To justify it, officials will produce forecasts of sports tourism revenue that will be commensurately huge. We may even make those revenue targets in good years. But there will be other years, and it might help if we simply decide that this, at least, is tax dollars spent on something we enjoy and we want a great big wonderful stadium for ourselves and hang the cost. As for the Convention Center, I commend it to anyone who thinks legalized gambling would mitigate our downturn. Legalized gambling would have worsened the downturn. It is highly susceptible to poor economic times. Conventions require so much planning that most are not canceled in poor economic times, so the center, whether it met inflated expectations or not, has made Oahu's recession more bearable than it otherwise would be.

Music post: Weirdly cool concerto at Blaisdell this weekend

You can come Saturday at 7 p.m. or Sunday at 3 p.m., but come to Blaisdell Concert Hall this weekend to hear Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain perform a triple concerto for banjo, bass and tabla with Andreas Delfs and the Honolulu Symphony. The concerts actually begins at 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday but I'm hosting the pre-concert talk from the stage and I'd love to see you there. First things first. "Tabla" refers to tuned drums played widely in India. The word is related to the Arabic "tabl" which simply means drum. You've heard tabla playing on recordings by Ravi Shankar, John McLaughlin or George Harrison. Zakir Hussain is considered the best there is on the tabla. He was one of the members of Shakti, an ensemble that also included "Mahavishnu" John McLaughlin and Lakshmi Shankar (now he calls himself Shenkar), who in turn has played with Frank Zappa, Phil Collins, Yoko Ono, Peter Gabriel and Lou Reed. I think that list is a good reminder that Western musicians for decades have been working to put Indian music before Western ears because they find it fascinating. Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer will be known to many people who like to sample unusual or crossover music. Fleck, who took up the banjo at the age of 15, was playing bebop on it while still in school, and there seems to be no genre he won't sample and master. His album "Perpetual Motion" [Sony SK 89610] features Scarlatti, Bach, Debussy, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Paganini and Beethoven, sometimes assisted by others, including violinist Joshua Bell and guitarist John Williams among others. Fleck can play Flatt & Scruggs one minute and a fugue the next - it's all music to him. Edgar Meyer, who also plays on that album, may be the best classical bassist in the world today, and he is equally at home improvising or playing what Bobby McFerrin would call "paper music." I recently played an improvised masterpiece called "Woolly Mammoth" on "Howard's Day Off." It comes from "Music for Two," an excellent album by Fleck and Meyer [Sony SK 92106]. Meyer plays with wit, but also with care - many otherwise excellent bassists have unsteady intonation, especially in the upper registers, but not this gentleman. The concert program also includes Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony. Ebullient from start to finish, its finale is a tarantella that manages to be happy despite being in a minor key. Today I had the rip-roaring pleasure of reading a critical pan of this work by no less a light than George Bernard Shaw. I can afford to be amused by Shaw denigrating a piece I like because I know why he did it. Shaw was an ardent Wagnerian and felt that concert audiences of his day overrated composers of absolute music - he called it "decorative music"! - by the likes of Mendelssohn and Brahms. So he did what he could to take those worthies down a notch, the better to interest people in the operas of Wagner - British audiences already liked early Wagner and they could stand his music in symphony concerts, but Shaw wanted more interest in the later stuff like the "Ring" cycle. Wagner enjoyed denigrating Brahms symphonies as a collection of half-finished drinking songs, though he made an exception, even in his years of highest dudgeon, for the two string sextets, as do I. Brahms, by the way, I interject with the tabla in mind, was one of the first to put a triangle into a symphony, and it bugged the hell out of some critics, who as late as the 1800s were sometimes called percussion "Turkish effects." In time there actually was a little bit of a reaction against Mendelssohn, but today's listener, without knowing the musical politics involved, would be hard pressed to understand why anyone could but love music so pretty, so interesting and so well put together. I am not normally a fan of pretty music but I make an exception for Mendelssohn. If you are new to Mendelssohn and want to explore him more, his single greatest work in my view is the Octet for Strings.

Music Post: Cartoons and classical music

"Kill da wabbitt, kill da wabbitt, kill da wabbit!" Elmer Fudd, right? And, thanks to "Apocalypse Now," you also know it as the "Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's "Ring" operas. It is but one example of a classical work that reached a generation of Americans through cartoon soundtracks. You have seen a cartoon in which a large character is chasing a small character. They repeatedly appear and disappear in a hallway through various slamming doors. The music is a descending melody played by piccolos and trumpets when the small character appears and trombones and tubas when the large fellow follows. It is the first cancan from "Gaite Parisienne, a collection of greatest hits from the operettas of Jacques Offenbach. Rossini was mined extensively in cartoons. People who have never seen an opera recognize the melody of the overture to "The Barber of Seville," and the overture to "William Tell" yielded no fewer than three famous melodies, the sunrise theme, the storm theme, and "The Lone Ranger" theme. Dudley Dooright sometimes rode to the theme of the overture to "The Light Cavalry" by von Suppe. I'll play all of this music this weekend on my public radio show, as well as extensive clips from the Warner Brothers cartoon music of Carl Stalling, whose brilliance becomes apparent when you hear the music without the distraction of watching Road Runner or Sylvester the Cat. Stalling's music is what we think of as "cartoon music" when anyone writes it nowadays - comical music that whines and whistles, stomps and tip-toes. John Adams of "Nixon in China" fame wrote a composition called "Roadrunner" that will wind up the show this week. Andrew Lloyd Webber of "Phantom of the Opera" fame wrote a cello concerto for his brother, variations on the famous theme of Paganini, and I'll play one variation that is manifestly "cartoon music." "Howard's Day Off" is heard live every Saturday, 5-7 a.m. HST, on Hawaii Public Radio, including via streaming audio on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Facebook subscribers can check out the Howard's Day Off Appreciation Society founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Two years before the " Sunrise " mast

"Sunrise on KGMB9" premiered two years ago this week, and what a strange voyage it has been, a voyage that began in last place in the ratings and took us to the opposite location. It is unusual, and possibly unprecedented, for a morning news show to go from worst to first in so short a time, but then the show itself is unusual in several respects. Morning news were always more conversational and personal than evening newscasts, which have an older history and date from a more formal time. Dick Doty, a former NBC announcer whom I knew years later at Mutual News, told me that NBC required its radio announcers to work in formalwear. Successive generations of evening news anchors have been loath to loosen up too much compared to their seniors. Morning news programs, by contrast, began with the original "Today" show, which had a live monkey in the cast. For years all the morning shows confined their hard news to brief reports, filling the rest of the time with light interviews. Segregating the hard news allowed morning shows to have a split personality, with chit-chat here and formal presentation there. I do not propose to give away the trade secrets of "Sunrise," but it does no harm to tell you that the high energy of the program is deliberate - we feel one of our duties is to help you wake up. Speaking for myself, I came late to television and as a viewer, I desired certain reforms. For example, I hate fake chit chat. REAL chit chat is fine, but only if it flows organically from broadcasters who actually like each other. When Jeff Booth moved back to Ohio it was important to the rest of us to find a meteorologist we liked as much as Jeff. You can imagine how lucky we felt when the station hired both Dan Cooke and Ben Gutierrez. There is a saying in the theater that there are no small roles, only small actors. In my trade I have my own saying: there are no boring stories, only boring reporters. Hotel occupancy is important, therefore I report it, and if I have to use Legos to make it easy to take in, then that's what I do. From time to time a casual viewer will tune in, catch all the kidding around, and miss the fact that no show presents more hard news. The regular audience knows. I have really enjoyed two years of working with Steve and Grace and Taizo and Malika and the rest of our on-air collegues as well as a lot of people you don't see on the air but play a big role in the way the show looks and sounds, including Scott and Anna and Linda in the newsroom and Michael and Peter and Craig in the control room and Ward and Byron and Jen on the studio floor and John and Paul and Joel behind the cameras. We consider it an honor to work for you.

Watch the Turtle Bay case

What the Hawaii state supreme court does in the case of Turtle Bay expansion plans has the potential to affect future development in scenic locales across the state, and should be watched closely by everyone from environmentalists to developers. Decades ago, the then-owners of Turtle Bay Resort won approval for a very large expansion of the resort, with not one but several new hotels and a bunch of residential housing units. For economic reasons, it never happened. A few years ago, Turtle Bay's later owners, looking to sell, dusted off the old plan, figuring approvals for expansion were a nice value-add. But a lot had happened in the ensuing years. North Shore residents were no longer so desperate for the jobs such expansion would create, and were more concerned about traffic on the North Shore's only main road, which had worsened beyond worst nightmares back in the day. One of the legal avenues pursued was to suggest that the environmental impact statements prepared for the original expansion plan was too old to still be valid. But an appellate court ruled that an EIS needs updating if a plan changes, not if the environment does. It is this ruling that a coalition of environmental groups is challenging in a request that the state supreme court hear the case, announced Thursday. The elephant in the room, whether the law is written to account for it or not, is that the North Shore road manifestly cannot any longer handle the traffic that the plan would generate. This is not taking a pro-green or anti-resort stand but merely stating the obvious. The traffic is there whether its existence is bad for one side or the other. No contrary stand makes the traffic go away. It may be that the state supremes cannot find anything in the law to allow a requirement that the EIS be redone, and I do not know if state or county legislators can enact a law to limit debate. In the meantime, Governor Lingle forestalled development with a proposal that the state facilitate a purchase of the resort. The idea was to sell part of it for profit, and keep the rest off-limits to development. Credit froze before this could be pulled off but she did manage to stop the clock on development. The stunt was tricky but no more so than dusting off development approvals dating back to when cars could still burn leaded gas. The impact of this might be greater for long-term planning statewide than for Turtle Bay itself. Its management, the same firm that just got the Makena Resort contract, has made an effort to have amicable relations with North Shore residents, and of course many North Shore residents work at the hotel. It's still possible that the community can work out something reasonable.

The other shoe drops in Hawaii ' s rising unemployment

This is a man-bites-dog story, because some state lawmakers tried to be fiscally prudent while it was businesses that were short-sighted and unwilling to save. The unemployment compensation fund in this state, and other states, is filled, not with general tax revenue dollars, but specifically with an assessment from employers. In 1984, laid off from a radio network, I went to the unemployment office in another state, and there were signs on the walls: "Unemployment compensation checks do not come from your tax dollars. They come from a fund supported by employers." I never forgot it because it struck me that the only reason to put up a sign like that would be if "customers," meaning the unemployed, threw in some remark about it being their tax dollars when they complained about anything. It seemed like piling on, somehow, to make someone who was out of work read a cantankerous message like that. So the way it works, each employer is supposed to pay a set amount per employee, and the employment compensation fund pays it out as needed. Obviously the fund will get larger or smaller according to how many people are drawing it down. Hawaii's fund had a surplus for years, which grew to $552 million in 2007. Businesses, then paying $280 per employee, lobbied lawmakers to reduce that. We were already getting reports back then that the economy was peaking and unemployment would rise in a coming downturn, so state lawmakers suggested that perhaps it would be wise to bank the money for awhile and see what would actually be needed. The business community said this was ridiculous because even if unemployment rose by several points the fund would last for years. Lawmakers gave in. They said, "Okay, we'll cut the payment, but we'll authorize the state to raise the rate if the fund becomes depleted without any further legislation." The assessment was cut to $90. Well, you know what happened. Unemployment didn't go up several points - it doubled. And benefits to the unemployed were increased, too. Labor Secretary Darwin Ching announced Thursday that the fund that was supposed to have enough money for years of higher joblessless will become insolvent at the end of next year unless assessments from employers are increased more than fourfold. The assessment next year will be least $450 per employee, in some cases much more. For a good-sized restaurant with 50 employees this will be mean paying thousands instead of hundreds of dollars. We're talking about a significant new expense in the middle of an economic slump.

Music Post: The Honolulu Symphony is back

The Honolulu Symphony has emerged from months of financial uncertainty, and rehearsals began Thursday for a pair of remarkable concerts you can still get tickets for this weekend. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from people who answered a call for help from the stage at concerts last spring, plus contract givebacks by the musicians themselves, plus financial help from a foundation that works for the orchestra's long-term future, have restored normality. Maestro Andreas Delfs, who stayed the course through all of that, is looking forward to rehearsing the orchestra for a concert that will include one of the happiest works in the classical repertory and a new triple concerto for an astonishing combination of instruments. The golden classic is Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, bright, tight and ebullient. It was originally scheduled later in the season but was moved up to the season opener when the earlier financial travails forced to scheduling changes. The new work is called "The Melody of Rhythm" and is a concerto for banjo, double bass and tabla featuring soloists Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain. Bela Fleck, a crossover star with his band the Flecktones, has wowed classical music lovers with his recordings of Bach on the banjo - it's like Bach on the lute, but twangier! - and has performed frequently with his friend Edgar Meyer, a bassist who composed the concerto. It seems odd to say this about any symphonic work that includes banjo, but the wild card in the concerto is Hussain's tabla, a kind of drum heard in the ragas of India and other cultures. In an appearance Thursday on "Sunrise," Maestro Delfs mentioned that most of us, even if we think we don't know the tabla, have heard it, perhaps in the recordings of Ravi Shankar (Norah Jones's daddy) or in the Beatles tunes that use Indian instruments. I have an album of duets with Fleck and Meyer and it contains some remarkable music. Both of them love classical music, folk music, and jazz, so the concerto could go in any of many directions and probably more than one. Looking ahead to the October concerts (Oct. 3-4) the Symphony will perform Debussy's "Clair de lune," Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," and Francis Poulenc's "The Story of Babar," narrated by cast members from "Lost." You haven't heard classical music until you've heard it live. And you don't have to dress up. It's the tropics, baby! Come comfortable.