Review: Around the Corners, Out to the Edges: A Memoir by Jonathan Besser

The second most shocking thing about Jonathan Besser’s Around the Corners, Out to the Edges is the fate of Little Ted.

Besser, who died just months before this memoir was published, was best known as a composer and performing musician but he spent a short while as the director of children’s TV favourite Play School. Following the programme’s cancellation, the show’s other toys – Manu, Big Ted, Jemima and Humpty – were honoured with retirements at Te Papa. The studio crew blew up Little Ted with explosives.

More shocking, though, is just how much Aotearoa has changed in the 50 years since Besser arrived here from his native New York. He was fresh from music school, a flirtation with hippy culture, and an appointment with the Vietnam draft board. Besser says he was rejected from military service on the basis of his mental health, the fact he was a musician and his marijuana use. In the Auckland of 1972, he couldn’t even find proper coffee. New Zealand was a place as alien to him then as it would be to us now, a place much smaller and far less decadent, Besser says, than the one he left. He absolutely loved it.

“I felt that I’d time-travelled to a gentler, less harried, more civilised, safer way of life.”

Contemporary composers might offer a green-eyed sigh at the support available to musicians in the 1970s. Besser survived on grants, arts access schemes and the dole, as well as a sprinkling of short-term jobs and composer residencies, giving him the financial wherewithal to follow his muse.

He followed it all over the shop, composing, performing and collaborating on music in a broad range of composed and improvisatory styles. Besser worked with some of the leading figures in the arts scene: Billy Apple, Whirimako Black, Warwick Broadhead, Jon Cells, Marti Friedlander, Don McGlashan, Gaylene Preston and Ian Wedde among them. A strength of the book is how it captures the thrill of being at or near the centre of New Zealand’s artistic whirl, where concerts and happenings could and did take place almost by strength of will alone, even if some of the work is made to sound ruinously self-indulgent.

Arguably, Besser’s eclecticism contributed to him falling from public view in later years. Unwary listeners who came to his music through the rollicking sea shanties of his most popular work, Mr Darwin’s Dances, could suddenly find themselves in the middle of the experimental soundscapes produced with fellow composer/performer Ross Harris under the name Free Radicals.

Whatever the cause, Besser’s star faded, and towards the end of the book – and, we now know, the end of his life – he writes poignantly of composing music no one has heard: “After years of creating composed pieces that are never performed, it can affect your spirits.”

Perhaps because of this change of circumstance, Around the Corners, Out to the Edges is more interesting in its first half. Besser’s early years are given room to breathe while later passages touch on more but in less detail. There are a few minor errors, too: clarinettist Andrew Uren is called Andrew Ure, Michael Houstoun’s surname is spelt Houston, the year of a concert linked to an election is listed as 1981 when it was 1984.

Besser also likes to pile adjective upon adjective; Leonard Bernstein’s music, for example, has “a sophisticated, American, jazzy, big-band, orchestral sound, as well as beautiful melodies mixed with extended, new, driving dance numbers,” which frankly sounds exhausting.

In the main, though, this is a well-written and evocative book; a fitting tribute to the author, and a fascinating record of music-making at a particularly fertile time for the arts in Aotearoa.

Reviewed by Richard Betts