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Young@Heart

Chorus celebrates 40 years of breaking rules

By Debbie Gardner
dgardner@thereminder.com

 

Rosie Caine, who joined Young@Heart during COVID-19, performs for the first time live onstage June 9.

 

Steve Martin, 94, performs at the June 9 Young@Heart concert.

Prime photos by Julian Parker-Burns

 

Editor’s Note: Young@Heart is rescheduling the date of its 40th Anniversary show from Oct. 29 to Nov. 20 at 3 p.m. at the Academy of Music, Northampton, MA. Tickets that have been purchased for the Oct. 29 show will be honored for the new date. Ticketholders who cannot attend the new concert date can exchange their tickets for a refund by calling 584-9032 x105 or emailing boxoffice@aomtheatre.com.

Bob Cilman, founder and director of Young@Heart, said of this new date, “I sincerely apologize for the date change. I’ve been recovering from a significant medical issue since the end of July. I was able to make my first rehearsal with the chorus at the end of September. It is clear that the 40th Anniversary special performance we want to put on will need the extra time and be a much better show if we move it to November. I hope you understand the need for this change and please know we plan on creating something very special for our 40th.”

     “I didn’t think it would last a week,” Young @Heart Chorus founder Bob Cilman told Prime about the early days of what’s now a world renown performing group. It not only lasted, it thrived. So well in fact, that this October Cilman and his Young@Heart performers are gearing up to celebrate their 40th anniversary of performing.

     Fans are invited to join in the milestone celebration with a live concert at the Academy of Music in Northampton on Nov. 20 at 3 p.m. Tickets to the concert are priced from $25 to $50 and are available online at amotheater.com.

     “It’s really going to be a look back at our 40 years,” Cilman told Prime.

     And what a 40 years it has been.

Not your average chorus

     Admittedly, Young@Heart has come a long way from the group of elders who gathered around a piano after lunch at the Walter Salvo Meal Site in Northampton in 1982. Originally conceived as “a way to break the tedium” at the senior dining  facility by Cilman and piano-playing coworker Judith Sharp, the group of elder singers – who have found a niche performing rock songs such as Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and “Come as You Are” by Nirvana that wow audiences of all ages – have morphed from their humble beginnings to become performers of national and international fame. Young@Heart was the focus of a 2006 BBC documentary, which played on PBS in the U.S in 2008. They’ve performed across the country as well as in concerts in Germany, Japan and Australia. The chorus has also played gigs on programs such as Good Morning America and the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

     The average age of a Young@Heart performer is mid-80s. The youngest members are in their mid-70s, the oldest, currently, are in their 90s.  In the early years, the chorus had one member, Anna Main, who did a comedy act and performed with the group until she was 100.

     “We were fearless,” Cilman said of the world tour in the early 2000s. “We went all over the world with people who were not in the best of shape and got away with it. I realize [now] what a miracle that was, and [the audiences] were so appreciative of the work that they did.”

     Steve Martin, at 94 one of the oldest performers and a longtime member, noted to Prime that Young@Heart’s 2006 documentary has found its way into several college curriculums as an example of positive aging and the power of music.

     Cilman said Young@Heart truly was, and still is, a troop of trailblazers.

     “People who go to the theater, people who go to performances are usually older, and they go to see young people perform,” Cilman said. “The truth is no one expected older people to perform the way Young@Heart does.”

Going viral

     In a way, Young@Heart seems unstoppable. Not even the scourge of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic could slow the chorus down.

     Much like the way many members have learned to handle the quirks and issues that often come with aging, the group just adapted.

     “It was a whole different scene,” Cilman said of moving the weekly in-person chorus rehearsals online once COVID-19 brought the world to a halt.  “Within a week we figured out how to get people on [Zoom], people who had computers or smart phones but really didn’t know how to use them.”

     Cilman had high praise for the chorus’s “tech guy” John Laprade. “He was brilliant in getting us up and running,” Cilman said. With a little help from technology, Young@Heart was able to keep rehearsing. They were also able to produce some new shows online according to Cilman.

     “We produced five shows that brought our work to more people than any of our live shows,” Cilman said. “It brought Young@Heart to audiences around the world.”

     Rosie Caine told Prime she joined the chorus during the coronavirus pandemic and spent “two full years in the world of Zoom” learning a total of 63 songs for the online performances.

     “It was really remarkable how tech came in and we could learn all the songs and we could slice [them] all together,” she said.

     The key to the chorus’s world-wide online reach was a quirk of fate, explained Cilman. Early in the coronavirus pandemic a Holland resident, Julia Van Ijken, was researching choruses and saw Young@Heart’s video performance of “Road to Nowhere” by the Talking Heads. Cilman said Van Ijken wrote to him about the chorus.

     “I asked her if she had any video skills and found out she had just graduated from the Royal College of Art” and had some experience in video production, Cilman said. “She became our video producer” and oversaw the creation of the five online shows.

     “She made little movies of everyone and then linked it all together to create a virtual show,” Caine said of Van Ijken’s work.

     The chance collaboration with Van Ijken “was another one of those lucky things that has happened to the chorus throughout the years,” Cilman said, adding Van Ijken recently emigrated to the U.S. and is now the chorus’s full-time content creator.

     Though he doesn’t own a computer, Martin said with the help of a friend and his equipment, he was able to sing in “a couple” of the virtual concerts and connect with fellow chorus members through some post-performance open mic sessions. “People thought it went over very well,” he said.

Coming alive again

     Young@Heat returned to the stage on June 9 with a concert that also paid tribute to Ukraine, Caine said. Martin, she said, sang a song in Ukrainian and then “talked about his childhood in that part of the world and we all sang a song in Ukrainian.

     “It was my first time singing live on the stage with others [after the coronavirus pandemic]” Caine shared.

     “I sang a song in my native language,” said Martin, who explained that his parents were Slovak, coming from the area of Europe that encompasses Ukraine, Poland, Russia and Lithuania. “It was about a son who left his house to fight for a cause that he believed in” and the mother at home who was sewing a special shirt for him to wear when he returned. He said he also learned enough Ukrainian so he could sing a song in their native language. 

     “The audience gave back so much to us, it was magic,” said Caine, who has spent a good part of her life performing Irish folk songs. “I’ve been on stage all my life and never had an experience anything like what we got from the audience that [night]”

Celebrating a milestone

     “It’s going to be very different [from our regular concerts],” Cilman said of the celebration Young@Heart was rehearsing for their 40th anniversary performance in Northampton on Nov. 20.

     Audiences, Cilman said, can expect to see “songs from past performances” but performed with a twist by new singers. “We hope to bring back songs so iconic, from our documentary,” he said, listing numbers such as “Fix You” by Coldplay as one of the songs that’s being reworked for the anniversary performance. “In the [documentary] it was supposed to be performed by two guys, but one passed away just before the performance,” Cilman said. “This time it’s being sung by a guy who is going through some major medical stuff.”

     Other songs the audience can expect to hear at the concert include “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed, “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane and “Purple Haze” by Jimmy Hendrix. “Some of the songs are going all the way back to our first performances in 1982,” Cilman shared.

     Martin said he has two songs to learn for the live concert, and despite some current mobility issues caused by an accident, he’s planning to make both the rehearsals and the concert.

     “The songs he’s selected for me was ‘Schizophrenia’ [by Sonic Youth,] the one ‘O’l 55’ [by Tom Waits] and the third one is a duet [‘I Remember it Well’] he wants me to sing with Shirley Sevensa. It’s a departure from his usual agenda and it’s from the stage play ‘Gigi,’” Martin said

     Though some of the material is new to Martin, he’s confident he’ll have them ready in time.

     Caine said “[Bob] has a tremendous balance of not pushing when people are having challenges, and yet pushing us if we need a bit more. He can push people past their own perception of their potential,” adding that after two years with Young@ Heart “I know I’m capable of more than I thought in terms of memorizing and absorbing and performing.”

     Caine will be performing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in the concert.

     Cilman, Martin said “has such a wonderful understanding of voice and he picks songs that will fit your voice. He’s just like a master technician who knows what button to push, he has that ability to take the individual – male or female – and just listening to him [or her] sing, know exactly what songs they could handle.”

     According to Cilman, the Nov. 20 anniversary concert is slated to run for “close to two hours, with a 15-minute intermission.”

     Young@Heart, he added, will be back on the road touring after the Nov. 20 celebration, with a concert slated for New Bedford In November.

CD and documentary

     When asked if Young@Heart had any plans to produce a new recording for their 40th anniversary, Cilman said that “we may put out a new CD” but there wasn’t a firm commitment yet.

     And there will be a second documentary in the works. “It may be delayed until the spring,” Cilman said. Like the concert, the plan is to show old works in new ways.

     “We have a lot of old footage [of performances] we have been going through,” Cilman said. “Part of the new documentary will be … juxtaposing old footage with new people singing the same works.”   

More than just a chorus

     “I think Bob understood that if he were to create an elderly chorus doing music that attracts young people, that’s the bonding, that’s the glue that holds the chorus and the audience together,” Martin said of the way Young@Heart seems to transcend the generations. “That’s what keeps me in the chorus, the bond that attracts younger people to music that gets sung by older people, that’s the magic of the Young@Heart chorus.”

     Performing doesn’t overcome all the infirmities of age, Martin said, and he still has his “problems” but for someone who admits to “coming out of the womb singing,” the chance to continue to make music – albeit not the music he grew up with – and the challenge to learn something new and exciting has been what’s kept him coming to rehearsals for 22 years.

                “You understand that magic that occurs, that only happens [live],” Martin said. “You don’t get it when you listen to our CDs and the [documentary] – which is extraordinary and is being used in colleges and universities when the teach geriatrics and how older people react to music – but you have to see us in person to really get the feeling of how that music transcends itself into all ages [with] a chorus whose average age is 83.”