Danny Rosenberg is an inventor, technological genius, dear friend, ultimate frisbee afficionado, and genuine PDX treasure. He’s also the guy who makes our weekly performances on Friday evenings happen, the man behind the curtain who pulls the strings, and the developer of our awesome new web site. Without his generosity and expertise, our Friday night series wouldn’t happen. He recently took a moment to answer some pressing questions I had for him.

How do you really feel about yacht rock?


Well, like most things in life, there's a wide spectrum from great to abysmal. At the very top end I’d put mid-career Steely Dan, say from Pretzel Logic through Aja. I’m sometimes tempted to include Gaucho in that list, but Gaucho’s like the Grace Kelly of yacht rock – superficially stunning, but in a way that borders on unapproachable. Anyway, Steely Dan’s use of atypical chord structures, like 11ths and suspensions, was matched in the mid-’70s only by Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder. What I like best about them is that, even if you have a good ear, you have to listen closely to each song a few times before you can sit down and play it. They're always full of interesting surprises.



In the mid-range I’d put something like CSN’s eponymous 1977 album. I find myself listening to Dark Star with some regularity, although I wonder whether I should admit that in public. They do get bonus points for the album cover of the band taken on an actual yacht, though.



At the should-be-banned-by-the-Geneva-Convention end, I’d put people like Rupert Holmes, Christopher Cross, and Stephen Bishop. There's a reason it’s Stephen Bishop whose guitar John Belushi smashes in Animal House – Belushi speaks for all of us. Still, SCTV’s parody of Michael McDonald singing backup vocals in Ride Like The Wind is a classic.

When the pandemic hit us, you were the first person to reach out to me with this crazy idea for how we could create safe musical collaborations. Can you believe we’ve produced 31 shows since then?


That does seem kind of amazing. What I proposed to you was an experiment, the outcome of which I really couldn’t know until I figured out how to do it and we tried it. It never occurred to me at the time that it would turn out this way, but in retrospect it should have been obvious that, once we figured out how to do it once, you’d want to do it every week. Once the pandemic was in full swing and the orchestra was furloughed, there really were very few other viable options to make music.



I think what’s made this possible is the lack of time and space constraints: ‘time’ in the sense that, in a normal year, you and the group would have full-time jobs and limited time for side projects, and ‘space’ in the sense that you're limited by the availability of concert spaces and the lead time and cost required to book them. With lots of free time, no physical space requirements, and the ubiquity of streaming media, there’s really nothing limiting your ability to present interesting music. I especially like that this has afforded the musicians an opportunity to try all sorts of interesting ideas: Eight horns. Six cellos. Five clarinets. Three Zachs. Two marimbas. It's like the 12 days of musical christmas.



What I’m most curious to see is what happens when the pandemic ends and everyone resumes their full-time symphony jobs. It’s hard to imagine that people would still have time for weekly shows, but I’d like to think that there's some sort of middle ground between a show every week and the six-nights-a-year seasons of years past.

What does the future look like to you?


At some unspecified point roughly 5 billion years from now, the sun will have exhausted all of its hydrogen and will turn into a red giant, enveloping the Earth and the inner planets in the process. I can only assume that Trump will still be claiming that he won the election by a landslide right up to that point.



In the nearer term, I’d like to say that the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades, but there’s no way I could back that up. I do think the next few months will be critical in determining whether or not our country devolves into autocracy. I’d like to think that the last few weeks have shocked people into some sort of constructive action to preserve our republic, but I can’t say I’m optimistic. At this point I feel like voting isn’t nearly enough, but killing everyone who disagrees with you might be a bit too extreme, although I lean towards the latter.



As for the future of 45^th Parallel Universe, I do hope that, even when everyone’s inoculated and able to return to the concert hall, 45P will continue on with some hybrid mix of live and live streamed shows. Now that the audience has become accustomed to weekly concerts, it’d be quite a blow to revert to the in-person-only model of the past. It also may take quite a while for people again to feel comfortable sitting next to a total stranger in a concert space.

Any parting thoughts?

Many years ago Pharoah Sanders stated that “The Creator Has a Master Plan: Peace and Happiness for Every Man.” Given the events of the past few weeks, I’m wondering if he’s interested in rethinking that belief.

Ron Blessinger
Executive Director, 45^th Parallel Universe