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The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music Paperback – May 4, 2010
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Journalist Steve Lopez discovered of Nathaniel Ayers, a former classical bass student at Julliard, playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Deeply affected by the beauty of Ayers’s music, Lopez took it upon himself to change the prodigy's life—only to find that their relationship would have a profound change on his own.
“An intimate portrait of mental illness, of atrocious social neglect, and the struggle to resurrect a fallen prodigy.”—Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBerkley
- Publication dateMay 4, 2010
- Dimensions5.23 x 0.79 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-100425238369
- ISBN-13978-0425238363
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Lopez is a terrific reporter. The Soloist is poignant, wise, and funny.”—Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
“A heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful, read.”—Essence
“An utterly compelling tale.”—Pete Earley, author of Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
“With self-effacing humor, fast-paced yet elegant prose, and unsparing honesty, Lopez tells an inspiring story of heartbreak and hope.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Compelling and gruffly tender...Lopez deserves congratulations for being the one person who did not avert his eyes and walk past the grubby man with the violin.”—Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist writing for the Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I'm on foot in downtown Los Angeles, hustling back to the office with another deadline looming. That's when I see him. He's dressed in rags on a busy downtown street corner, playing Beethoven on a battered violin that looks like it's been pulled from a dumpster.
"That sounded pretty good," I say when he finishes.
He jumps back three steps, eyeing me with suspicion. I see the name Stevie Wonder carved into the face of the violin, along with felt–pen doodles.
"Oh, thank you very much," he says, obviously flattered. "Are you serious?"
"I'm not a musician," I answer. "But yes. It sounded good to me."
He is black, just beyond fifty, with butterscotch eyes that warm to the compliment. He is standing next to a shopping cart heaped over with all his belongings, and yet despite grubby, soiled clothing, there's a rumpled elegance about him. He speaks with a slight regional accent I can't place. Maybe he's from the Midwest or up near the Great Lakes, and he seems to have been told to always stand up straight, enunciate, carry himself with pride and respect others.
"I'm trying to get back in shape," he says. "But I'm going to get back in there, playing better. I just need to keep practicing."
"So you like Stevie Wonder?" I ask.
"Oh, yes, certainly. 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life.' 'My Cherie Amour.' I guess I shouldn't have written his name on my violin, though."
I write a column for the Los Angeles Times. The job is a little like fishing. You go out and drop a line, cast a net. I'm figuring this vagrant violinist is a column. Has to be.
"I'm in a hurry at the moment," I tell him, "but I'd like to come back and hear you play again."
"Oh, all right," he says, smiling appreciatively but with trepidation. He looks like a man who has learned to trust no one.
"Do you always play in this spot?" I ask.
"Yes," he says, pointing across the street with his bow to Per–shing Square, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. "I like to be near the Beethoven statue for inspiration."
This guy could turn out to be a rare find in a city of undiscovered gems, fiddling away in the company of Beethoven. I would drop everything if I could, and spend a few hours pulling the story out of him, but that will have to wait for another day. I've got another column lined up and not much time to shape it. The deadlines come at you without mercy, even in your dreams.
"I'll be back," I say.
He nods indifferently.
Back at the office I sweat out another column, scan the mail and clear the answering machine. I make a note on the yellow legal pad where I keep a list of possibilities.
Violin Man.
It's got potential. Who knows where it will go?
Part One
1
I can't get the image out of my head, this odd picture of grubby refinement. But when I go back to look for the violinist in Per–shing Square, I come up empty. His disappearance only makes the mystery more provocative.
Who was he? Where did he go? What is his story?
Three weeks later, he's back, reappearing in the same spot, and I watch from across the street for a while before approaching. His playing is a little scratchy and tentative, but just like before, it's clear this is no beginner. There'd been some serious training in there, somewhere along the way. He doesn't appear to be playing for money, which seems strange for a homeless guy. He plays as if he's a student, oblivious to everyone around him, and this is a practice session.
Strange place to practice. The ground shakes when buses roar by, and his strings are barely audible in the orchestra of horns, trucks and sirens. I gaze at the tops of buildings adorned with gargoyles and grand cornices. Men and women move about, duty–bound, –ignoring him for the most part as they disappear around corners and into entryways. The man plays on, a lone fiddler. He throws his head back, closes his eyes, drifts. A portrait of tortured bliss.
When he pauses, I move in.
"Hello," I say.
He jumps back, startled just as before.
"Do you remember me?" I ask.
"I remember your voice."
He's still suspicious of me, suspicious of everything around him, it seems. He says he was trying to remember a Tchaikovsky piece he once knew quite well, but now it is as elusive as the meaning of a dream. It's obvious that he's troubled in some way, like so many others who wander the streets as if they inhabit a different planet than the rest of us, wrapped in many–layered outfits to keep from coming unraveled. He's wearing a ratty blue sweater with a light brown T–shirt over it and the collar of a shirt spilling out over the top of it all. Wrapped around his neck, like a scarf, is a yellow terry–cloth towel. His pants hang low on his waist, fitted for a man three sizes bigger, and his grimy white sneakers have no laces.
He tells me his name is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. From Cleveland. He's going to keep practicing until he's proud of what he hears, he says, and I tell him I might like to write about him for the L.A. Times.
"Seriously?" he asks. "You'd really want to write about me?"
"Why not?" I ask.
He's a handsome guy, lean and fit–looking, with a strong jaw and clean white teeth. He reminds me a little of Miles Davis. I ask where he lives and he says at the Midnight Mission, one of the biggest rescue operations on nearby Skid Row. Not inside, he specifies. But on the street, though he showers and takes some meals inside.
"Why not sleep inside?"
"Oh, no," he says. "I wouldn't want to do that."
I wonder how safe it can be for a man trying to reconnect with Tchaikovsky as drug dealers, prostitutes and hustlers work streets teeming with the lame and the afflicted. Skid Row is a dumping ground for inmates released from the nearby county jail, and it's a place where the sirens never stop screaming.
"Maybe I'll come by and visit you at the mission," I tell him.
He nods, but I can see he doesn't trust me. He tucks the violin back under his chin, eager to get back to his music, and I know that if this one ever pans out, it's going to take some time. I'll have to check back with him now and again until he's comfortable enough to open up. Maybe I could go on his rounds with him over the course of a day or so, see if anyone can help fill in the blanks in his story or explain his condition. As he begins to play, I wave good–bye, and he responds with a suspicious glance in my general direction.
Two weeks later, I go looking for him once more and he's disappeared again. I stroll over to the mission at Fourth and Los Angeles streets, where I see street people by the dozens, some of them drug–ravaged, some of them raving mad, some of them lying so still on the pavement it's hard to tell whether they're napping or waiting for a ride to the morgue.
I check with Orlando Ward, the public information man at the Midnight. He tells me he's seen the violinist around, but doesn't know the backstory. And he hasn't seen him lately.
Now I'm worried that I've lost the column.
Weeks go by and I get distracted by other things, shoveling whatever I can find into that empty space on the page. And then one day while driving to work from my home in Silver Lake, a neighborhood five miles northwest of downtown, I cut through the Second Street tunnel and there he is, putting on a one–man concert in a location even noisier than the last one.
He remembers me this time.
"Where have you been?" I ask.
He says he's been around, here and there. Nowhere special.
A car whooshes by and his mind reels.
"Blue car, green car, white car," he says. "There goes a police car, and God is on the other side of that wall."
I nod, not knowing what to say. Maybe he's a little more unreachable than I realized. Do I take notes for a column, or do I make a few calls to see if someone can come and help him?
"There goes Jacqueline du Pré," Nathaniel says, pointing at a woman a block away. "She's really amazing."
I tell him I doubt that it's the late cellist, who died in 1987.
Nathaniel says he isn't so sure.
"I don't know how God works," he tells me sincerely, with an expression that says anything is possible.
I scribble that down in my notebook, and I also copy what he's written on his shopping cart with a Magic Marker:
"Little Walt Disney Concert Hall—Beethoven."
I ask Nathaniel if he has moved to this location to be near the concert hall and he says no, he isn't even sure where Disney Hall is, exactly.
"Is it around here?" he asks.
"Right up the hill. The great big silvery building that looks like a schooner."
"Oh, that's it?"
He says he moved to this spot because he could see the Los Angeles Times Building two blocks away.
"Don't you work there?" he asks.
Having lived in Cleveland, New York and Los Angeles, –Nathaniel tells me, it's reassuring to be able to look up at the L.A. Times Building and know where he is.
He plays for a while; we talk for a while, an experience that's like dropping in on a dream. Nathaniel takes nonsensical flights, doing figure eights through unrelated topics. God, the Cleveland Browns, the mysteries of air travel and the glory of Beethoven. He keeps coming back to music. His life's purpose, it seems, is to arrange the notes that lie scattered in his head.
I notice for the first time that his violin, caked with grime and a white chalky substance that looks like a fungus, is missing an important component or two.
"Your violin has only two strings," I say. "You're missing the other two."
Yes, he says. He's well aware.
"All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I'm having is right here. This one's gone," he says of the missing top string, "that one's gone, and this little guy's almost out of commission."
His goal in life, Nathaniel tells me, is to figure out how to replace the strings. But he got used to playing imperfect instruments while taking music classes in Cleveland's public schools, and there's a lot you can do, he assures me, with just two strings.
I notice while talking to him that someone has scrawled names on the pavement where we're standing. Nathaniel says he did it with a rock. The list includes Babe Ruth, Susan, Nancy, Kevin and Craig.
"Whose names are those?" I ask.
Oh, those people, he says.
"Those were my classmates at Juilliard."
Product details
- Publisher : Berkley; Reprint edition (May 4, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0425238369
- ISBN-13 : 978-0425238363
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.23 x 0.79 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #657,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,734 in Popular Psychology Pathologies
- #2,132 in Black & African American Biographies
- #5,683 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Sunday Macaroni Club and Third and Indiana. He has been an editor-at-large for Time magazine and has also written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Through the very compassionate and capable voice of Steve Lopez, the reader is led into a world of stunning surprises and shocking insights into the very real domain of mental illness and homelessness where doors are opened and scenes displayed with unrefined veracity.
This novel seems to beg to be read as a clever work of fiction...however it is far from fictional!
This is a true story of amazing strength and of the careful 'baby steps' required to navigate the delicate emotions that continually thunder inside the heads of the mentally ill... and to walk beside a man of enormous talent who is also afflicted with schizophrenia; living on the streets of Skid Row while creating beautiful music for all around him to hear.
Nathaniel Ayers once had a brilliant career ahead of him in the music world and was a stand-out student at Julliard.
Everything changed as his slow descent into mental illness evolved and one day he found himself on the outside desperately seeking the comfort of the euphonious chords that sweetly sooth the scattered thoughts of his present-day schizophrenia.
Nathaniel worships Beethoven as he pushes his shopping cart full of instruments and his survival cache through the streets and tunnels in the slums of downtown Los Angeles.
The chance meeting of Nataniel Ayers and Steve Lopez is what makes this startling story and the friendship that is formed fills the novel with charity, empathy and grace.
This novel will change how you look at the mentally ill and homeless around you forever....Mr. Lopez has helped to shine a bright and fresh light on the 'stigma' of what we call madness.
With true compassion, we see how delicate the path to well-being can be and learn the deeper meaning of "There but for the grace of God go I"
Thank you Mr. Lopez...you really DID make a difference!
The Soloist is about Lopez's experiences in befriending a mentally ill homeless man whom he had noticed to be a startlingly gifted musician. As it turned out, the man, Nathaniel Ayers, had been trained in classical music at Juilliard. As an indication of Ayers' talent, note that he attended Juilliard on a full scholarship from 1970 - 1972, when black students were extremely rare - almost nonexistent - especially ones from lower-middle-class, single-parent families. He did extremely well in that ultra-competitive and stressful environment (straight A's in music performance classes; and also in other classes until his schizophrenia kicked in and his grades began to fall) until the illness finally forced him out. Ayers had been living on the streets for 33 years and was in his mid-50's when Lopez met him.
The book is as much about Lopez's efforts to help Ayers as it is about Ayers himself, which is why I'd consider it primarily a memoir. Finding financial help was the easy part. Lopez's popular columns in the largest newspaper of Los Angeles inspired a barrage of donations and offers of help.
The problem was, Ayers didn't want help. He was content with his life as it was. But Lopez was frantic with worry about Ayers' safety on the worst Skid Row in America, where violent (and commonly random) beatings, stabbings, and deaths were a daily occurrence.
Lopez does a great job describing his agony and frustration with Ayers' refusal to accept the donated free apartment and free treatment; while at the same time recognizing Ayers' dignity and his right as an adult to make his own decisions. They are feelings I know well. I experienced the same thing once in taking care of an old friend who had become mentally unstable, homeless, and also terminally ill due to alcoholism. It was an awful time in my life, and Lopez's vivid account brought it all back to me.
Nathaniel Ayers, however, did not smoke, drink alcohol, or do drugs. In fact, he had a violent disgust towards anyone who did. It makes his situation all the more tragic - there is no way the reader can brush him off with the excuse, "He brought it on himself."
One quote from the book really brought it home to me. We now know that most - and probably all - mental illness is caused by physiological dysfunctions that cannot be controlled by willpower or self-discipline. As Stella March, an activist who has a son with schizophrenia, said, "[Why is] it socially acceptable for them to sleep on filthy and dangerous streets? Would anyone tolerate an outdoor dumping ground for victims of cancer, ALS, and Parkinson's?"
The Soloist is a moving, interesting, and very informative book which has accomplished a great deal in bringing these issues to the attention of the public as well as community leaders. But our economy has worsened considerable in the two years since its publication. I am afraid that the momentum it generated has been lost, and that budget cuts have made services for the homeless and mentally ill even scarcer. All the more reason why we should read this book now.
The writing, although competent, isn't perfect. It is a little boring in places when it goes into politics. And Lopez's hopes and fears combined with Ayers' lapses become sadly repetitive after a while (although that is an artifact of the situation rather than the writing, it does influence the reader's experience of the book.) Also, I was surprised by the author's occasional mistakes in language and grammar. Admittedly, they are infrequent and subtle, such as using a word that was okay but not quite right, when a better option was available. Such things surprised me in view of Lopez's more than three decades as a professional journalist for highly respected newspapers and magazines.
And it would have been nice if some photos had been included. You can see some online - including videos - if you google "Nathaniel Ayers," although it is difficult to differentiate the ones of the real Ayers from the movie stills and promotional photos. Check out this video from CBS's "60 Minutes": [..]
I'd especially liked to have seen photos of Ayers' reunion with Yo-Yo Ma, who was a classmate at Juilliard - this was one of my favorite parts of the book.
But these are small quibbles compared to the honesty of the writing, the highly interesting person that is Nathaniel Ayers, and the importance of the subject.
I'm wondering what has become of Ayers since the book was published in 2008. The reader really comes to care about him. I hope that he is safe and well, that the two men's friendship has continued, and that Lopez will write a sequel.
(273 pages)
Quote from The Soloist:
"The pendulum has swung too far to the side of leaving people like Nathaniel to fend for themselves."
I also love the fact that this book is realistic. There isn't a "perfect solution" presented nor a rosy outcome. Real life rarely has that. The author did a great job with describing how he struggled with the fact that there wasn't a "perfect solution" or rosy outcome and how he came to terms with meeting someone where they were and allowing that connection and friendship create a bridge to possibility. The author repeatedly struggled with wanting to find the "right" help and discovering that love and friendship was the "right" help. And while "the soloist" wouldn't be where he is today without professional mental health treatment and community resources, he would have never been able to access them if he didn't first have the love and friendship that the author offered.
This is a wonderfully inspiring story and one, that I hope, encourages people to become active in their own communities offering love and friendship to their neighbors.
Top reviews from other countries
Ce livre est pour vous si vous croyez encore (ou voudrez croire) dans la bonté humaine; si vous croyez (ou voudrez apprendre) dans les pouvoirs immenses et incroyables de la musique.
La première chose que j'ai regardé en terminant ma lecture était si l'auteur a partagé les bénéfices...c'est le cas. Donc merci Steve Lopez pour vos actions, pour votre partage et pour cette belle leçon de vie.
I have yet to actually sit down and read it cover from cover, but after reading three disjoint chapters the book is an instant hit with me. His very personal, yet thorough writing style makes you want to continue on to learn more about Mr. Ayers and Mr. Lopez. I found myself kinda cheering for Mr. Lopez's quest to help Mr. Ayers at one point. Definitely a worth read if you're into human interest stories. It's well written.