Transcript
Speaker: Made on Zencastr. Hello and welcome to Rest and Recreation, the work-life balance podcast from Abysida. I'm your host,
Speaker: Michael Millward. Today, Rick Della Ratta is going to be telling me about Jazz for Peace. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, Rest and Recreation is made on Zencastr.
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Speaker: As with every episode of Rest and Recreation, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Today's Rest and Recreation guest, who I met on Matchmaker.fm, is Rick Dellaratta, the founder of Jazz for Peace.
Speaker: Rick is a jazz musician who is based in New York. I visited the city and when I go again, I will make my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
Speaker: You can also access trade prices on travel by joining the Ultimate Travel Club. There is a link and a discount code in the description. Now that I've paid some bills, it is time to make a podcast.
Speaker: Hello, Rick. Hey, Michael. How are you? I am very well. Thank you very much for asking. And I hope you can say the same. I can. I indeed can. Great to be with you. Thank you very much. Really pleased that you're able to.
Speaker: I wanted to start, please, if you could just give us a little bit of a summary of of your career until that day when you decided to found Jazz for Peace. Well, up until then, i was a musician. i had really become a full-time musician at around 13 or 14 when I gave up my paper route because I had so many musical activities going on.
Speaker: I was playing in the church on the organ. i was playing in the young kids, like with my homeroom teacher's sons had a band that played the dances. I was playing grown-up band. And then I was playing in the, ah that played private parties and stuff, sneaking me in and out of those. I was kind of underage.
Speaker: And then I was also playing in the school band, you know, the stage band and all that. And it just kept going on and on from there into, you know, college. I went to a music conservatory. And then I just started performing all around the world, touring with well-known acts such as the Platters and the Artie Shaw Orchestra, opening act for Dizzy Gillespie, and all kinds of amazing bands that no one's ever heard of too. And they're They're amazing and memorable.
Speaker: But I was noticing one thing, Michael, and that was that music and the arts and culture really brought a something different to the table when it came to human relations.
Speaker: And I noticed that music and the art form of jazz that I was becoming more and more versed at could cut through everything from language barriers to creed, to culture, to religion, you know to race. I would just cut through all of those barriers And it would affect people in a positive way.
Speaker: And the more I noticed it, the more but behind me in the back of my mind, i was it was occurring to me that if we include the arts and culture more, we could do so much better in so many areas where we need to get along with each other, maybe even unite as a species and face world problems that might be coming ahead in in you know the coming decades and centuries.
Speaker: I could hear the New York police sirens in the background there. And for me, that's one of the sounds of New York. It is. I'm right in Times Square now. Now I live in Times Square, which is really nutso. I mean, you know, ah probably everyone knows Times Square. It's a bit kind of like the center of of everything. So it does get a little crazy. You never know when one of those crazy sirens is going to go off. Something going on down there. We don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Somebody who lives in Times Square, that rolls off your tongue. But for someone who lives in rural North Yorkshire, it's like, yeah, that's, ah that's, that's quite a concept.
Speaker: It's quite, yeah, it is quite a thing. Well, right next to Times Square is kind of a community, a neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen. and But I live right on the corner. I mean literally, I can look down from my balcony onto 42nd Street. So you've had this great idea around using music and jazz music to bring people together.
Speaker: And we all have great ideas. We just say they're great ideas. They sit on the back burner that we don't really do very much with them. But there was a catalyst that made you want to really do something about it.
Speaker: What was that catalyst? What happened was when I saw the events of 9-11, I was tipped off by a photographer. In fact, if you ever look up an album by me called Jazz for Peace,
Speaker: You'll see a picture of me that was taken only hours before the Twin Towers were hit. And it was literally on September 10th, 2001. And a photographer happened to want to take pictures of me for her catalog. And she was going to give me free photos. And this same photographer had a job on Wall Street.
Speaker: And she called me that next morning. And she said, I'm so sorry. I don't know who to call. i all She was all frazzled. And I said, what is it? And she said, something's going on. my you know My boss's son called. He's in the second tower. And something happened on one of the towers. And he's in the other tower.
Speaker: I said, listen, you know I'm on the fifth floor walk up up. The roof is right above me. I just go up on my roof. Let me just go up and take a look. And I was hoping to calm her down and just say someone flew a kite into there or smashed a window. But what happened was I you know went up.
Speaker: And she had tipped me off. So now otherwise would slept through it. And now I went up there and saw, you know, just like walking into a movie. And so I was not, unfortunately, not able to calm her down at all.
Speaker: And now I was really looking at something that was unprecedented. And words started to slowly swirl around inside me. I wrote the words down as I went through the day. And really, I had to write the words down because if I didn't, they would just keep swirling and other thoughts couldn't come into my head because the same words would be just going around and around like a hamster wheel.
Speaker: So I would write those five words down and free myself up, kind of purge them. At the end of the day, all I had was a piece paper with words on it. I called that poem after reading the words, I called it jazz for peace.
Speaker: And I've been trying to live up to the words of a poem ever since. The poem? I hear jazz for peace coming through the trees, and in my heart it fills me like a celebration.
Speaker: I see the light, and I want to follow, inspired by the past contributions of those that came before and laid the groundwork for us to build on.
Speaker: In this universal language that is a gift for all mankind and when we speak it people are enlightened by the creativity and artistry that stands for peace and love and to humanity and intelligence that leads to reaching potential.
Speaker: that we have in our soul so we can raise our total conscience and see that the gift of giving is our greatest privilege. I hear, jazz for peace.
Speaker: It makes you think, doesn't it? Yes. Thought-provoking words, I hope, because I've been trying to live up to them ever since. Yes. Yeah. So it's a traumatic experience to witness something like nine eleven At the time, I watched the pictures on the televisions in a tower block in Hong Kong and um lots of friends in the similar sorts of situations.
Speaker: So traumatic at the time. There are now people working who've finished their college and have started work. They're 24. years old and for this is history this is not a lived experience in the same way as it is for people like you and me but you were there less than a quarter of a mile away and i suppose it's like seeing it in your backyard Well, you know, it's like walking into a movie and it was the first time I ever felt like I just walked into the screen and of movie. I mean, there was a Rodney Dangerfield used to tell a joke when I was a kid and I used to listen to some of his records.
Speaker: And he would say, you know, good. You know, when someone would talk, would talk while he was doing a show, he'd say, hey, you go to the movie, you talk to the screen. I felt like I was walking into the screen. And since then, Jazz for Peace has taken me to places where I normally wouldn't go as a musician because as a musician, maybe I would go. And I did go to Paris and Tokyo and London and, you know, major cosmopolitan areas.
Speaker: But with Jazz for Peace, I found myself going to Rwanda. Kenya, Ghana, you know Tamil Nadu, India, Kathmandu, Nepal, Lahore, Pakistan, all kinds of places you would never go. And even places in the United States where you know they just hardly ever have jazz in their city, but yet they wanted the mission of Jazz for Peace and its work to help outstanding causes and to show that peace is a lot more than what we thought it was and all those great people who laid the foundation like I spoke about in the in the poem.
Speaker: ah But peace now can be helping the world's outstanding causes and uniting collectively to do so. I mean, when I would perform, let's say I was talking to somebody in Las Vegas just a couple days ago,
Speaker: And I said, go look at our event in Las Vegas and what you'll see, what will you see? You'll see a bunch of people who don't get along in Congress. You'll see Republicans and Democrats and people that you see arguing and and saying not so nice things about each other on television. Yet there they were uniting because they love the mission of Jazz for Peace to help outstanding causes within their community of which they both.
Speaker: you know ah is common ground for them that they both support. So that's my point. It's an opportunity to unite people in a positive way, which the arts and culture has a long history of doing throughout um are the centuries of the past. People have a disagreement like politicians in the Houses of Parliament or in Congress in the United States, and you put them in an environment where they have something that can be a common interest and they can enjoy that common interest.
Speaker: How do you transfer the situation with Jazz for Peace into other areas of life? You know, you can take these little lessons. They're almost like fractals.
Speaker: And you can put them into any area of your life. You know, finding common ground, finding a point of, you know, a point of of goodness, a point where where everyone gets along.
Speaker: Even in your own life, I've found that doing activities that raise my frequency, they call it. You know, there's a lot of people now who are onto this. Raising your frequency. your human consciousness, raising your level of consciousness.
Speaker: You know, we have the ability to be very positive and feel things on a high level, but we don't always tap into it. We notice it sometimes when we're jubilant and excited about something, but those are the exception and not the rule.
Speaker: Yet I'll find that because music would take me up. And i we just had a person who's a human consciousness expert do a live thing where she witnessed my performance and then she gave it a human consciousness rating And the lowest form of human consciousness is 20.
Speaker: twenty And then it goes there are other like levels of emotion that are 40 and 50 and 75 and something like that hurt the level of human conscious. She raised, she rated my performance was 540 and 600 level human consciousness is peace.
Speaker: So why not raise our level of human consciousness up to these levels? where it's not it's the norm instead of the exception. And imagine how much good just doing that can bring to the world and to our own individual lives. Yes, quite a thought.
Speaker: You have the idea, you're inspired to create a poem and you can improvise music around that. How do you get from that point to the situation where you have the president of America at the time, Barack Obama, noticing what you're doing and saying very, very positive things about you?
Speaker: Well, here's something I would love for everyone to consider, and that is, it's ah it's really a fractal, and you can look at it through, if you look at that through music, take a Beethoven sonata, put it in front of you if you know anything about ah an instrument, and then to look at it as a musical instrument, it will look overwhelming.
Speaker: The sonata will look over from maybe eight pages long, all of these difficult things and credentials and this and that, but what happens if you just look at the first measure, the first two beats,
Speaker: or you know let's say you can look at two measures but let's just say you look at just the first two measures or even less and that's what a music teacher will teach you to do you'll be like oh my god i could never play some music and the teacher will say no no no you're not looking at we're not going to play the whole sonata we're going to play the first measure look at this and so when you when you bring it down to that minutia now you realize that okay that each little step isn't a big deal. So from going from a poem that I wrote on a rooftop to a phenomenal letter by President Obama and so many others that I've received would seem mind-blowing. It wouldn't make any sense. no There would be no rhyme or reason as to how you could ever get there.
Speaker: But what if you just go one little step at a time? And that's what I had to do. I was forced to do because I was in uncharted waters. I had seen something that had we had never witnessed in our lifetimes before. It was unprecedented and i had a poem which to show for it, and what am I going to do with that poem?
Speaker: Well, you know what? It certainly wasn't going to get it recognized by the President of the United States. That's not what you're going to do next. What could I do? Well, ah couple monthly a couple weeks later, we had talked offline about how everything was closed, and you even mentioned it in your country, but here it was completely shut down.
Speaker: when When it opened up, I had the chance to headline at a jazz festival that I had previously been booked at. And I was the headliner, so over 8,500 people were going to be there.
Speaker: And they told me, you've got to get down here because you're the headliner and there's 8,500 people going to be here. And what, what there, in other words, life told me what I was going to do next. Well, I was like, well, I got this poem. I don't know what to do with it.
Speaker: I guess I'm going to read it. I'm going to read the poem to 8,500 people. So that was the next step. It wasn't to go from all the way there to all the way into things that no one could imagine ever happening. But just that next step, you know, was a step on the journey. And like I said,
Speaker: One little step after another, you know, led to a situation where i was like, well, what am I going to do next? Well, maybe I should play a few concerts to help outstanding causes. There's got to be 30 or 40 of them in a giant city like New York, having no idea that there were over 80,000 registered and that there were there are outstanding causes for every single problem that we have in the world.
Speaker: And really, it's only a matter of identifying the ones that are the most dedicated, the least captured you know by not so good forces, the ones that are the purest and most dedicated.
Speaker: to to achieving these goals and helping them. And that's what I started doing, leading to over 850. And like I said, it was before ah Barack Obama that I was doing them around New York City. And after like doing ah over 200 of them in the New York region the mayor of New York got wind of it and he wrote a letter that was mind boggling. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And it was at one of my concerts that I went to that they were reading the letter that he had written to me. I hadn't seen it. He had written to them for them to give to me.
Speaker: And they were reading the letter. I said, What was that? And they said, that is from the mayor of New York City, and he wants you to have this. And they gave it to me. And, you know, like I said, it was always, what am I going to do next? What am I going to do next? What am I going to do next? And it's been that way ever since. no matter how long the journey, just take it one step at a time.
Speaker: Yeah, from that letter, I realized, okay, I have a global mission. i can't just conveniently play in the five boroughs of New York City. I've got at least go across the state. I've got to do something. I've got to get out, you know, maybe the neighboring states do something in Vermont.
Speaker: Well, I started going across the country. And when I reached Chicago, there was that letter because that had been his jurisdiction as senator. Wow. From small ideas, big things do come.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, when I reached Kenya, Africa, there was a letter from the prime minister. So, you know, it started happening all world. Brilliant. Brilliant. Now, one of the things that you used, I the believe, to help you do this was something called the seven branches of empowerment tree.
Speaker: You can't go through all seven, but could you give us a flavor of what what the seven branches of empowerment and how it helped? Yeah, so basically I had been, as a musician, I had been privy to off events. You know, musicians play at events.
Speaker: They are a part of events. And sometimes they even put on their own events. Amongst ah jazz musicians will put on an event to get something out related to their project or something. Being a part of so many events, playing at so events, and everything, whether it's a wedding to a private party to a jazz festival to, a you know, so many different kinds of possible events.
Speaker: I learned that there are little things that help people. And when we were doing these concerts to help outstanding causes, we would get letters from them. And from the letters they sent us, they would be revealing to us why they thought what we were doing was important, why we should keep doing it and why, because of of this or that it was helping them.
Speaker: And one of one day we would get a letter from an organization that would say, Hey, you know, we really need to tell you we have expanded our donor base because of you and this little vip thing that you put on for us before the event and we were able to invite prestigious people to come and and then our our main board members were able to invite their friends and now their friends have come over so now we're like okay let's pass that forward let's make that a branch of the empowerment tree we actually made that the roots of the tree that would help us confirm the event with each outstanding cause this
Speaker: VIP outreach, which starts with a comment from the organization And then we extend it to ah comment from their board members as their roots. And then we extend it to comments from the other periphery that are going to be part, they're all going to be VIP guests of honor.
Speaker: And those make up the roots of what we call an empowerment tree. Well, we would get in a letter from another one. Hey, those local sponsors, that did so much good for us because they didn't even know about us. And we were right down the street and now they love us and they want to be a part of it and they want to help us in there. You know, they they want to help us on on next, you know, every year.
Speaker: And so that was branch number two, sponsors. Others would say, wow, your publicity, we could never publicize our event that that the way that you did. You know you got us publicity all over the state, all over the country, and often international publicity. And some of them actually turns out they need All of the publicity that we're able to get, we are able to get publicity everywhere because of We Are Jazz for Peace.
Speaker: And they're not able, sometimes they're lucky if they can even get in their local paper. So again, publicity and awareness became an empowerment branch. These are things that empower you. You can't put a financial price on them.
Speaker: And that slowly these organizations are realizing, you know what? It's not money that we need all by itself. It's all of these branches. And that's why we realized we need to grow an empowerment tree.
Speaker: New and prestigious supporters became another branch. Of course, fundraising became another branch. And fundraising was important for them, too, because they would say, wow, how did you learn that fundraising technique that you learned?
Speaker: showed us. I said, well, we got it from the Red Cross. Wow, you have fundraising committees from the Red Cross, from the Habitat Free? Yes, because we've worked with all of them. And you know they they're not they don't even know each other's fundraising tricks, but we know them because we've worked with all these different nonprofits.
Speaker: So in other words, it's an empowerment tree. What we're trying to bring to the world is empowerment and enlightenment. And so it funds alone are really um a small piece of the We'll put a link in the description to the seven branches of the empowerment tree so ah the voluntary sector organizations can use it as well.
Speaker: But what is the future for Jazz for Peace? What's the future looking like? Well, the future is looking like, see what happens if when you do that. It leads to things where you literally have people.
Speaker: solutions for the world. And one solution that we stumbled upon, we just happened to notice that we have a world that funds 100%, not even 99, but 100%.
Speaker: And same world funding peace at 0%, not even 1%, 0%. And all we really need to do, you want to straighten our world and watch all of our problems disappear, zero percent not even one percent zero percent and all we really need to do if you want to straighten out our world and straighten out and watch all of our problems disappear is fund peace at 100% and war at 0%.
Speaker: But again, are you going to do that? Well, we're right where we were now when I was on that roof at 9-11. We have to take small steps to try to get from 0% funding for world peace to 1% funding for world peace.
Speaker: And if you want to see how phenomenal that would look like, go to the Empowerment Tree link that Michael's going to leave for you. I'll give you the link right now. It's jazzforpeace.org.
Speaker: peace.org is our official website, but this is jazz for peace.wordpress.com forward slash about, and that's an archive page. i don't say a word on it, but when ah from that one little page, you can see what jazz for peace has done at zero and imagine an exponential function of that, which is what would be if we only funded peace at one pur and So we have stumbled on the mother load, and that is the simple fact that we need to get off of zero funding for world peace and onto 1% and beyond.
Speaker: and Sounds great. I think the most important thing about your story as well and your experiences and what you've achieved is that it demonstrates that anyone, when they feel inspired, they are powerful. And as Peter Michael Deeds said on his podcast, you have turned the pain that you experienced on 9-11 into real power.
Speaker: into real power And it all boils down to that fractal, Michael, of, um you know, wow, I'm looking at the Beethoven Sonata and just looks so overwhelming. Well, guess what? you're If you're looking, World Peace looks like looks so overwhelming.
Speaker: but it's not so overwhelming If you just contact like, let's say, Jazz for Peace and you send an email to info at jazzforpeace.org and you just say, hey, I want to be a part of world peace. I don't know how. And we'll find an entry point for you that fits you, that fits where you are.
Speaker: Everybody can play a role. There's a role waiting for you. at your entry level, at your comfort level. That's great. Thank you very much, Rick, for helping me make such an interesting episode of Rest and Recreation.
Speaker: Thank you. My pleasure. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. And in this episode of Rest and Recreation, I have been having a conversation with Rick Dallaratta, the founder of Jazz for Peace.
Speaker: You can find out more information about both of us at abbasida.co.uk. There is a link in the description. I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to Rick Della Ratta.
Speaker: If you're a podcaster looking for interesting guests, or if like Rick, you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker.fm is where great guests and great hosts are matched and great podcasts are hatched.
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Speaker: Until the next episode of Rest and Recreation, thank you for listening and goodbye.
