Last Sunday, I was watching 60 Minutes and was completely taken aback with one story, that of Derek Paravicini. Now, before I go ahead, my admiration for Michael Jackson is well known; Jackson was a prodigy from a talented family, who used his natural musical gifts to establish a legendary stature in the history of pop music. I’ve done a few columns on Jackson and the way his music not only touched the world, but touched me personally as an individual human being.

As I watched the opening of the story on Paravicini, listening to him play that piano in front of a small audience of people completely wrapped up in his music, I was taken with his virtuosity as a musician. I almost applauded when he finished his introductory piece – and like most of the audience I am sure, I was completely shocked when, during the interview after, he couldn’t tell his left hand from his right, nor his index finger from his little finger.
Derek was not only physically disabled but also intellectually so – he was born a premature baby who, due to too much reaching him in the womb, was both blind and partially brain-damaged. As the story informed us, despite his being unable to undertake simple tasks such as putting on his own clothes, Derek is a musical genius. According to his music teacher of now 26 years, Adam Ockelford:
“People call Derek ‘The Human iPod’, but I say, “Well, no he’s not-he is so much more than an iPod.” If he could just recreate what he heard, he’d be quite boring actually because we’ve got recording equipment for that. What makes Derek really special is that ‘creativity chip’, I call it. He can take different tunes, and mix them up. He can take different styles. He can take different keys and they all blend together and every, like every performance is unique and every performance is different.”
Born into a well-off British family, Derek’s ability was first noticed by his family when he as an infant would hear a song and reproduce it on a toy keyboard – it was then they sought out and called in Ockelford.
To understand how remarkable Derek’s ability is, you need to consider that even professional musicians incorporate a visual element, like sheet music, into not only learning music, but even performing it. In contrast, Derek only has to listen to a piece of music and it becomes hardwired into his brain and he can reproduce it perfectly, often only having to hear it just one. According to Ockelford, when he first heard the boy Derek pounding away at a keyboard, what he originally thought was a jumble of noise was an untrained Derek’s individual take on ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’. Today, Derek has a personal memory of ten thousands that he can easily perform, often on request, and in a completely different key from the original.

Of course, Derek Paravicini’s story could have been completely different, were he not born into a society that treasures his artistic gifts even that it accounts for his physical and intellectual limitations, or into a family that could have afforded training.
In Guyana, I see we have a renewed focus on music in the education system and, while we are still a far way to go towards an ideal environment for music development, that step in itself should be encouraged and amplified. Equally important, and an area that also needs a great deal of work despite the initial steps taken, is the focus we see being placed on integrating persons with disabilities into the mainstream. Guyana took the welcome step of passing Persons with Disabilities Act in June of 2010, with the President Bharat Jagdeo signing it into law later that very year. But laws in themselves are not enough – what is necessary is a conscious effort to change our attitude of automatically dismissing people with physical and mental disabilities. What Derek’s story taught me is that once we are willing to recognize and actively develop the latent abilities that lie in all our citizens, even the ones we as a society tend to write off without a chance, then anything is possible, even the appearance of true genius.
Who knows what tremendous talent lies in the minds of the most overlooked, most under-estimated section of our society? Like I stated before, I remain a great fan of Michael Jackson, and few things would please me more than if a true successor to his remarkable ability to touch lives with his music and sheer force of personality were to be discovered among Guyana’s youth – one of those things would be if another Derek Paravicini were to be found among the people we too easily stigmatise as completely disabled.
(I will return to the issue of addiction next week)
By Keith Burrowes