Listeners and Readers

I normally write about music and musicians here. But neither music nor musicians float separately from a wider world, especially the wider world of listeners and readers who build audience and community around art. So today I want to focus on that world and on one reader/listener in particular.

I learned Friday mid-day that my friend Richard Cobeen had unexpectedly passed away Thursday night. We first encountered each other at Robert Christgau’s MSN Expert Witness blog, where a community of commentators sprouted up. Back then I was more aware of him than engaged with him, but when Christgau’s blog there ended the community traversed to Facebook before fracturing without Christgau to hold it together. In that process, Richard and I ended up in the same shard, and he went from person who posted intriguing things to someone whose friendship I treasured.

He’d lived an interesting life: college dropout, stay-at-home dad, back to college to become a grade school teacher where he taught kids how to love music and culture along with their academic skills. (If you are interested in his thoughts on teaching music, watch this video presentation. He kills it.) That path gave him insights into life that more traditional track people like myself sometimes missed. Although it was a love for music and Robert Christgau that first united us, I was soon swept up into his reveries on movies, food, cocktails (and I don’t drink!) and even sports. He loved life. He loved what it had to offer. He saw its pleasures not just as a means for self-satisfaction, but as a way to build community with likeminded people.

We bonded over Saint Etienne, Kid Creole and Prince. More relevant to this blog, we bonded over his burgeoning interest in Brazilian music, Marisa Monte and Jorge Ben in particular. I’d like to think I played the key role in convincing him that Ben was a world-class artist, but I just shared the music that made the case. He definitely helped me make better sense of the African musics I’ve always struggled to get my ears around.

As with the rest of my music group friends, Richard was a big supporter of Brazil Beat. I don’t have that kind of connection to most of my readers, of course, but Richard’s passing reminds me how grateful I am that anyone cares what I think. Each hit confirms that maybe this obsession of the past five-and-a-half years is worth the effort it takes to maintain.

Brazil Beat has lost a reader, but more importantly I’ve lost a friend, and the world has lost a truly great person. His life was a testimony to how those things society tends to dismiss as secondary (art, food, etc.) are actually at the heart of what makes living good, because the friendships built around those things can transcend all kinds of barriers, including physical ones. We never actually met in person. But over a dozen years we had formed a genuine friendship online (just ask the spouses/partners who know all the group members by name!), and in the last seven or so I communicated with him about these kinds of things and more nearly every day.

I’ll miss him deeply. However, I’ll mourn him not be retreating from the world, but by trying to live more fully in it, because that’s the lesson he taught me. Enjoy life. Enjoy music and art and food and sport. Most importantly, treasure those closest to you as he did his family and friends and students. And maybe, if you are interested, listen to this playlist assembled by another music friend who took a list of Richard’s favorite songs to make this. And what do you know: it has a Brazilian song I hadn’t heard until he introduced it to me.