ArtsLIVE in Ventura County

Op-Ed / Essay Submitted by Ivor Davis

Art … ambushes

I blame the British Army for my love of music.

I was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps at 18, when military service was mandatory in my native land. I started as a private and rose to the exalted rank of – private – when I finally, and happily, was demobilized back into the real world of England in the late Fifties.

London-born, I had applied for an overseas posting, hoping I might be sent to Hong Kong or another exotic colony at the expense of Her Majesty’s government. But in typical military fashion, the Army stationed me in London, six miles from my home.

That was good and bad news. My shorthand and typing landed me a job as secretary to a young Army lieutenant and doctor named Roger Bannister, who was famous for being the first runner in the world to break the four-minute mile.

Stationed at a military hospital in central London, I was able to go to the British equivalent of the USO where they handed out free tickets for the best shows in London. I saw Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and a host of superb British actors on stage.

We also were given some of the best seats in the house for musicals and performances of the London Symphony Orchestra. We heard giants from violinist Yehudi Menuhin to jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and American refugee harmonica player Larry Adler.

Music had been the background to my childhood. My father, a baker, loved opera and constantly played Gigli and Caruso as well as the great traditional Jewish cantors on our windup gramophone. My mother sang. However, our frugal post-war finances did not allow us the luxury of purchasing tickets to hear the great and the near great, which is where the Army came in.

In my 20s I came to America as a foreign correspondent for an English newspaper, and one of my first jobs was spending five weeks on the road with a pop group from Liverpool, who went onto great fame. My ears were not then attuned to Beethoven’s Ninth — rather to hummable tunes like “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).”

Fast forward to my move to Ventura in 1980 and my subsequent discovery almost two decades ago that the Ventura Music Festival provides world-class music in my own neighborhood. No longer did we need to fight the traffic to downtown LA; we could hear talented artists at our own doorstep.

After joining the festival’s board, I was persuaded to become president from 2007 to 2009. It was a great opportunity to work with others to turn the festival into a more ambitious and wide-ranging nonprofit.

Now I am happy to say that under the leadership of our Artistic Director Nuvi Mehta, Ventura has become a known venue in the music world.

As the festival has grown, so has my passion for music. Through it, I have been exposed to an array of classical and jazz artists. And, this year virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman and jazz pianist Herbie Hancock are headlining the May festival.

Someone once said the arts take a chaotic world and make sense of it for us. I couldn’t agree more. And of all the arts, music is the most universal and the one which can take us to places we have never contemplated and could not have reached on our own.

And, now, 50 years after I left the Army, it is as essential to my life as food and clothing.

– A journalist, Ivor Davis is the former West Coast correspondent for one of Britain’s largest circulation newspapers, a contributor to the New York Times Syndicate and a former ghost writer for Beatle George Harrison’s syndicated column. Active in local arts groups, he is the former president of the Ventura Music Festival’s board of directors.

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