One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. It had all the makings of yet another "Get Out of School Free" pass, and my mother had outfitted me for the day in my pressed white shirt. Come to think of it, white shirts and ties were mandatory for assembly day too, so we were periodically pressed. (The Principal's office even kept extra ties in a drawer for wayward souls who showed up at school on assembly day in less than proper attire.) As I recall the field trips seemed to always end up in Manhattan, either at the Museum of Natural History or the Hayden Planetarium, two different institutions that are in fact part of one museum, located at Central Park West and 79th Street. The range of field trip options seemed strangely limited, as I spent year after grade school year alternately in these two institutions on outings. Not that they were uninteresting, it just seemed that there must be some place else we could go. On this day, instead of pulling up to the all too familiar group entrance at the lower level of the museum, the school bus turned onto 57th Street, disgorging us kids from Queens, NY in front of Carnegie Hall, one school group among numerous others. Filing into the magnificent huge and ornate hall, which I had never been in before, our class managed to get seats down front not too far from the stage. We didn't have long to wait before the musicians filed out, followed by a very pleasant man with no instrument who took his place at the head of the orchestra and turned his attention to us. I don't exactly remember him introducing himself, but it was Leonard Bernstein, the Philharmonic's young conductor.

Bernstein had joined the Philharmonic in 1957. One year later, believing (against prevailing opinion) that classical music could be enjoyed and understood by children, he implemented the "Young People's Concerts," in which he and the full orchestra performed while he explained the music, its form, structure, and history to young people in the audience. The program continued for fifteen years, running through 1973, building an even larger audience when it aired on CBS television for some fifty-three episodes, making Bernstein famous as both performer, composer, and lecturer to America's children. It remains the longest running series devoted to classical music to have aired on commercial television, bringing classical music into the homes and lives of millions of children and families on a weekly basis. Sort of hard to imagine in the current climate of increasingly dumbed down "reality" shows!

That day I had managed to get an aisle seat, which was fortunate, since it afforded me an unobstructed view of the stage and the man. In addition to explaining the music and then performing it, Bernstein would ask serious but good natured questions, finding a way to wed the ordinary experiences of childhood knowledge to the complexity of classical music, making it fun and enjoyable in the process. Taking the music apart, and rebuilding it instrument by instrument, we were given a sense of how the music was both composed and assembled: what melody and time signature meant, how tempo and dynamics gave expressive shape to the music being performed, and the role of the conductor in making the music come to life. All the while he had an ebullient smile on his face, taking obvious delight and deep pleasure from the work he was doing. And clearly it was his choice to be engaged in this work; the work of teaching and thus developing future audiences for the music he so loved. While I never became a connoisseur of classical music, I do nonetheless listen to it on occasion, and in so doing pay silent tribute to Leonard Bernstein and that formative experience years ago.

When I was young, growing up in Queens, NY my older cousin Teddy, Jr. used to come by my parent's house after work or on his lunch breaks to relax, unwind, and listen to my dad's recently acquired hi fidelity stereo. My Cuban uncle Roland, a confirmed deep audiophile, had gotten my dad hooked on the new audio sensation of really listening to music, with a finely tuned turntable, amplifier, receiver, and some powerful speakers. My brother and I would accompany my father on these visits to Uncle Roland's, where inevitably he would unveil yet another new and more advanced piece of equipment, and proceed to demonstrate its superior audio qualities by putting on a recently acquired album, usually jazz (organists Jimmy Smith and Richard "Groove" Holmes were favorites). Sitting in the living room with the lights dimmed (the right mood seemed important to the listening experience, too), he would enthuse over the undistorted bass, the clear mid range, and sparkling high ends in the sound. My dad, being an engineer, certainly appreciated the science of it all, and had acquired a turntable (a Thorens) and speakers, but built his own amplifier and receiver from Dynaco Audio's Dynakit. With the equipment in place, and few choice albums added to his now growing collection, the set up (and a comfortable arm chair) attracted my grown cousin, who took to spending his free time after work periodically hanging out in our living room listening to music.

One of the albums I began to hear during this time was Miles Davis in Europe. Recorded in 1963, it was probably but a few years old at the time my dad acquired it. My cousin used to fall into what appeared to be a deep trance listening to this album, sitting still with his eyes closed, concentrating deeply, smiling occasionally, and then opening his eyes at the end as if he'd seen the Rapture itself. I was too young and unschooled at the time to understand my cousin's reactions. But upon getting my first set of drums at the age of fourteen, I began to give the album a more serious listen. What struck me first and foremost was the robust and invigorating drumming that accompanied the improvisations of Miles Davis and the other band members. In the company of young veterans like Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and George Coleman, Williams made his presence aggressively felt. Throughout the album Williams plays with an authority and unbridled audacity that through sheer virtuosity simply redefined and expanded the role of the drummer in the small jazz ensemble, musically responding, pushing, and brashly commenting on the music at hand, often pushing it in unexpected directions through his inventive sense of time. What I didn't know at the time was that Tony Williams was all of eighteen years old when he was playing on that album! Indeed, by the tender age of eleven he had already been playing in clubs, and at fifteen had shared the bandstand with Max Roach and Art Blakey, not to mention playing in the bands of reed men Sam Rivers and Jackie McLean among others. Davis called Williams, "the fire, the creative spark in the band. Man, just hearing that little motherf*cker made me excited all over again. Like I said earlier, trumpet players love to play with great drummers, and I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherf*ckers who had ever played a set of drums."

In 1997, when my survey exhibition from the Walker Art Center was traveling to various museums, I told the curator of the exhibition Kellie Jones that when the exhibition opened at the Newark Museum, I wanted to talk about Tony Williams during our public dialogue that evening, since Williams was one of my earliest and strongest creative inspirations. Williams had just passed away quite recently, and he was very much on my mind. That night I didn't want to only talk about "art," I wanted to talk about how a creative spark was lit for me upon hearing Williams for the first time, and how such a creative spark can then go on to inform and inspire a range of creative work. Later that same month I was at the opening for another exhibition of mine at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Standing in the gallery where my work hung, an older black woman walked straight up to me without so much as glancing at the work on the walls, and asked me, "Did you know Tony Williams?" My face went flush for a minute, and I then told her that while I didn't know him personally he had made a big impression on me as a young musician. I further told her that I just spoke about Williams a few nights before. I asked her if she has been to the Addison before, and she responded that she hadn't; someone she knew thought she might want to see the shows. When I finally asked her who she was, she said, "I'm Tony's aunt, and I'm just coming back from his funeral in Japan. I wanted to talk to someone about him, and thought that someone here might have known him." You can imagine the look on my face at that point, since the likelihood that someone on the campus of Phillips Andover knew Williams would not have been my first impulse. As it turned out she lived on the Cape, not too far from my mother, and I dropped her a letter some time later, telling her about my early encounter years all those years ago with Tony and his music.

I recently visited the Milwaukee Art Museum to meet with the photography curator Lisa Hostetler and other curatorial and education staff in preparation for the opening of my exhibition Class Pictures there at the museum in April. Entering the museum's dramatic lobby, I spotted the special exhibitions gallery, where various exhibition graphics and signage announced the presence of an exhibition of work by Jan Lievens, a 17th century Dutch painter whose works were unknown to me. Being a long time admirer of Rembrandt van Rijn's paintings (another early and lasting influence of mine), and recognizing some affinity in Lievens' work, both stylistic and thematic, I made a mental note to take a sustained look at the show after my meeting.

As it turns out, Lievens was indeed not only a contemporary of Rembrandt, but a close friend, and the two artists shared a close and long symbiotic relationship and conversation about their respective work. Lievens appears as the subject in several of Rembrandt's work and vice versa. While theirs was a relationship of mutual engagement and respect, ultimately Rembrandt achieved a more sustained success and notoriety that soon eclipsed Lievens, though Lievens had actually begun his career some years before Rembrandt. The title of the current exhibition Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered is intended to finally bring him out of Rembrandt's very large shadow. Lievens considerable talent is apparent from the first piece one encounters on entering the gallery. Believed to be the artist's grandmother, this painting, with its wildly expressive brush work, dramatic lighting, and heightened psychological presentation was made when the artist was all of fourteen years old. He was highly sought for his commissioned portraits while still a teenager, and by the age of twenty-five was in even greater demand as a portraitist.

Lievens and Rembrandt were born in Lieden just over a year apart, studied with the same master teacher, and lived near one another. So close was their association, that some of Lievens best work ended up being falsely attributed to Rembrandt. The exhibition contains room after room of stunning paintings as well as various drawings and etchings that Lievens made over his long career. Like Tony Williams, Lievens' work suggests that across a broad historical span of centuries, young people have always been capable of far more rigorous creative utterances than they are often given credit for if one provides them with the necessary tools of expression.