The Langley Schools Music Project
Innocence & Despair (Bar/None) As a child of the Seventies, it’s hard listening to this album and not wanting to recast yourself as a student in Hans Fenger’s elementary school music class. Recorded with two microphones at a rural British Columbia school gym in 1976-77, Innocence & Despair pits enthusiastic 9- to 12-year-old novices against contemporary pop hits in a manner that resonates with a joy unfettered by convention. Instead of traditional notions of music education, like being in tune and hitting the right note, Fenger focused on dynamics, encouraging the kids to feel what they were doing. Their take on the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” may have a few jarring cymbal crashes, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more potent distillation of the song’s victorious essence. Moreover, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” assumes an entirely new dimension with whatever’s-in-the-pantry instrumentation from Orff xylophones and a steel guitar wired through a tremolo, played with a glass bottleneck. It would be easy to catalog Innocence & Despair as the Shaggs channeling Spector if it weren’t for transcendent revelations like 9-year-old soloist Joy Jackson’s rendition of “The Long and Winding Road.” Unencumbered by the sentimental arrangement of the Beatles’ version, Jackson reflects the sadness of the lyric in a remarkably stark manner that forces you to swallow back tears. Much like a long-lost photo of a forgotten day, Innocence & Despair unearths a uniquely beautiful frame of life fully intact and undistorted by waves of forced nostalgia.
This article appears in December 14 • 2001.
