What Is John Clare Doing in Las Vegas?

"Music gets its eternal beauty from an ideal balance of emotion and intellect."

I had a feeling there'd be air-violining. But then again, the rest of the mental image I'd conjured before seeing my first real live classical music disc jockey in action was admittedly kind of lame. Him always answering me in sprightly yet hushed intellectual announcer tones ... his anally organized office, whose silence is occasionally broken with shouts of OK, who the #*%& put Samuel Barber with the European composers? ... the busts of his favorite composers lording over the soundboard.

No, stereotyping isn't nice, but this was more like purposeful mind-streaming that I was doing during the drive over to the Nevada Public Radio station, where I was to meet KCNV 89.7-FM's classical program manager, John Clare. And gathering and purging this set of obvious false expectations was my way of cleaning house, preparing to identify, absorb and translate some unobvious truths about a genre, a city and a man rumored to have a timely passion for both.

Except for the air-violining. That would remain a true expectation.

The first bit of clarity actually hit me on the way there—that the new 24/7 classical format of our National Public Radio affiliate can save lives.

It was morning rush hour, and the endless trudge from Green Valley to the vicinity of Torrey Pines and Charleston would normally be sucking hard on my will to live. But today my frustrations were not being aurally exacerbated by hopeless words from the campaign trail, the Middle East or Mark & Mercedes; I was listening to "The Lark Ascending" and thinking about peaceful mornings in the country, about what a DJ does in the studio while playing 15-, 30-, 45-minute pieces, about how dreadfully boring classical music seemed to me most of my life, and if I'm starting to understand it, maybe I'm getting old ...

Anyway, the point is, a higher insurance premium wasn't the only thing keeping me from ramming that brake-riding blue-hair into her fiery afterlife.

Then again, if John Clare had been playing Wagner's Gotterdammerung just a few minutes later ...

I never had the chance to conjure a look for John Clare because I'd actually seen him before, at the opening of Hofbrauhaus. He was down at the end of a long table, and when we were introduced, he flashed a great big, squinty-eyed grin and jovially hoisted his stein. It was an action that stuck me as a more natural fit for him than a violin gently snuggled between chin and shoulder. Maybe it was because he has the figure of a guy who might drink from steins a lot, or maybe it was because he wasn't dressed like Arthur Fiedler, or maybe it was both, that he seemed overly down-to-earth for a classical music program director.

His named popped up again a week later. I was mining Hal Weller for story ideas about his Las Vegas Philharmonic, when Hal abruptly took a detour from free publicity. He offered that John Clare had an "encyclopedic knowledge" of classical music. I was hooked: Anybody with an encyclopedic knowledge of anything fascinates writers because such people usually come with eccentricities, such as air-violining in front of complete strangers.

But I wasn't reeled in, as no scene-setting stunts are ever guaranteed. So I called Hal back a few weeks later and asked him to remind me why he nominated John Clare—outside of the man's encyclopedic cranial capacity. "Because he doesn't come across like an encyclopedia, like many geniuses do," Hal said. "He knows the repertory so well, and yet he's so modest about it. That's what's endearing about John—he's an unassuming genius."

A very nice stereotype-buster, and it jibed with my Hofbrauhaus recollection, but a full-blown Weekly profile? I proceeded to learn more about John Clare: that he's a cigar-smoking, bar-hopping, James Bond-reading, violin-playing kind of guy who keeps a website called www.classicallyhip.com and is nurturing a unique on-air segment called 20/20 Hearing (Sundays at 8 p.m.) when he's not musically dealing with kids on parole (Clark County Team Academy), guest-conducting a high-school orchestra (such as Silverado a few weeks ago) or launching the Las Vegas Chamber Music Society (www.lvcms.org). All of which is incredibly nice, too, but it was only when I learned he was a card-carrying Eskimo from Kansas that I knew he'd be worth the drive.

I'm let into the KCNV control room, which happens to be fastidiously organized (but I cut him stereotype slack because the station's relatively new), with a short, neat bookshelf of reference materials behind the disc-maestro's chair and a bust of a long-dead composer whose name I can't make out but he's definitely lording over the soundboard. It's a spacious little room, with two seats and mikes for guests. I take one of the seats and push my mike aside. (Call it low-tech paranoia, but I wouldn't want my wind section to mar Brahms' Symphony No. 3.)

While I'm taking it all in, people are hunting down John Clare. Since Symphony No. 3 is a full 42 minutes, you get one guess as to where they found him. OK, the second and more accurate guess would be that he was out in the station's courtyard, burning a stogie in the cool morning air.

He finally bustles into the room, with time to spare, and he's wearing a sport coat over his Oxford shirt and wool tie—a look that's much more Kansas Sociology Professor than Boston Pops Conductor. I'm happy to learn that he talks more like somebody you'd meet at the House of Blues than in a public library's classical music bin. Just in the first few minutes of conversation, he refers to the "The Lark Ascending" as a "killer piece," name-drops groups like Portishead and Nirvana, and makes statements like, "God knows I love The Who, but there comes a point where I just wanna relax."

Already I feel comfortable enough to pry open an unobvious truth. Here he is, in fabulous Las Vegas, a 34-year-old unassuming genius with a variety of tastes, a solid background in broadcasting, acres of bon vivant potential and a sturdy hip bone, yet he lives across the street from the station, where he shows up every morning near dawn to play songs with titles that look like Latin algebraic expressions to an audience twice his age. I want to know, Why settle on classical music as a career?

The question comes out raw like that. (Did I use the word "settle"?) John grins, asks for a time-out and turns to his mike and slides a fader up the soundboard. He closes out the Brahms, saying something in German about the composer being a bachelor at the time of composition, then sets up a little Bach adagio for violin and oboe from the Las Vegas Musical Festival Orchestra. He slides the fader down again and turns back to me.

"I love this. I wouldn't do alternative or jazz or the Beatles, even though I could, the tools are the same. But I love this too much. I'm a total classical geek ..." He pauses to turn up the volume on Bach. "This version is so passionate, so brilliant. I have to be around this music."

And so he has, ever since he was 7 and heard Itzhak Perlman live in Wichita. He took up the violin right after. In junior high, he remembers being class anomaly and ordering the Beethoven symphonies with his Bangles record and Michael Jackson's Thriller through the Columbia Records club. By the time he got to Wichita State, he wanted to be a composer, and freshman year alone, with ears tuned to the sound while eyes followed the scores, he learned 360 pieces of music.

Life's lessons and dreams can add up to odd sum totals, and fast-forwarding through his many career steps--founding orchestras and running festivals in his early 20s, giving 52 violin lessons per week in Dallas, serving as the classical announcer/producer in Wichita, and interim NPR cultural programming producer over a three-month period in Washington, D.C.--still doesn't give much clue as to what's an unassuming genius like John doing in a very assuming place like Vegas.

Several years ago, Clare and Nevada Public Radio program director Flo Rogers crossed paths in Kansas. He was a budding announcer, she was a director looking to hire. But "it wasn't the right time," Rogers says. Clare eventually did his stint at NPR and added a few more years to his résumé—seasonings that would impress Rogers by the time she was ramping up for a 24/7 classical station in Las Vegas. "This time, all the planets were aligned," she says. "He was the right person at the right time."

Clare's a rare solution to the constant dilemma facing classical music radio everywhere. "To be able to do it with any authenticity," Rogers says, "you need people who are immersed in classical music and have technical musicological knowledge. But the downside of that is the overwhelming number people who listen to classical music on radio are not like that. They find classical music a great companion, a great escape from the clanging chaos of our world. The challenge is to find people who bring that authenticity but present it in a way that's enjoyable. And I think John does that outstandingly well."

That combination of emotion and intellect is a boon to the city's oft-ridiculed cultural side, Weller says. "He is the embodiment of good broadcast music in Southern Nevada." Weller's especially keen on 20/20 Hearing, which centers on Clare's interviews with some of the world's top composers and playing their complete pieces. Such a format is apparently rare in radio, but you'd think, given that most of classical music is lyricless, that picking a composer's brain would have some appeal. "I think it's going to take off and become a valuable, desirable product," Weller says, "and you will have heard it first in Las Vegas! It's a great way to bring serious music to the forefront here."

What Clare adds, besides the mere creation of the show, is intellect ("I know what questions to ask to explain the music," he says) and a knack for bringing too-infrequently excavated musical creativity to the surface without sounding too esoteric—or even too serious.

For example, "Who knew you could do a two-hour program of Vegas-centric classical music?" Clare says. He did. So one of his 20/20 shows went themed one Sunday, and possibly for the first time, listeners heard a lineup of songs that included "Letombeau Liberace," "Dead Elvis," "Mavis in Vegas" and a string quartet version of "Viva Las Vegas."

I think I've been set up. John Clare has slipped in some Panufnik in today's lineup.

"Katyn Epitaph" begins to play, softly, simply, a solo violin. Clare joins in, chin pressed to his invisible violin, hand sawing his invisible bow. "Here it comes," he says, and he uses his make-believe conductor's baton to bring in the woodwinds, then the rest of the orchestra.

I sense that this song means a lot to him. I soon interrupt the performance with the most facile of questions: Why do you like it?

"It's interesting. It's meaty. It's gorgeous. It's a really sad piece, based on a tragedy that happened in World War II. The Russians drove 15,000 Poles into a forest and executed them. I hate thinking about that, but you think about the composer that had been oppressed and knows of this injustice, and he's going to express it, even though he knows it's illegal. So, just to know that these very notes could have such huge consequences, and he's going to write it anyway."

Here it comes again, he warns. The orchestration builds, adding a bassoon, tuba and timpani. The percussion may not literally be representing gunshots, but certainly the tragedy, the drama, the inevitable that cannot be stopped. An emotion that only music could preserve eternally, given the right balance of intellect. "Katyn Epitaph" has it, he says. "It's technically perfect."

OK, the emotional part I get, but how do you measure the level of a song's perfection? There's no answer for a layman, I'm guessing, but Clare has a very adaptable way of trying to at least get across its significance: "The odds of hitting the perfect piece are very small. It's like putting only 20 bucks in a machine and hitting the jackpot."

I'm sure that's how they'd explain it in New York.

John Clare is an Eskimo who, on a 95-degree May day, sits in a Las Vegas lounge called the Icehouse, and it is he, not the writer across from him, who is quickest to point out the irony in this. In fact, the next thing I know, I'm looking at his certified Native American card, which officially declares him three-eighths Inuit. His actual connection to that world was limited (he was adopted at birth and lived in Alaska till he was 10, when the Air Force reassigned his dad to Kansas), without much influence ("I like to fish, but that's just for relaxation"), and his card remains in his wallet mainly to amuse attractive grocery store clerks, to whom he'll flash the card and ask if they give discounts for a certain product he's placed before them: Eskimo Pies.

When you're only human, an ideal balance of emotion and intellect is a tough thing to achieve. Try being encyclopedia-smart about classical music and see if that impresses a pretty blond waitress, for example. "I may find a convert someday," he says. But overall he has a talent in relating to Vegas (where he's been now for nearly 900 morning shows) and pretty much any scene in it. Which is good for us, in our slow quest to improve both our city's outer and inner reputations. That takes somebody who can hang with the Icehouse crowd and talk shop with virtuosos such as Valentina Lisitsa, the Russian pianist who guest-starred in the last Philharmonic concert. In fact, he did both at once.

It's an ideal balance of loving classical music and embracing Las Vegas, which, when asked if he indeed does fit in Vegas—if he's the right man at the right time in the right place—he tidily summed up by saying: "I want to encourage serious musicians like Valentina to come here and perform, but I also want a scantily clad waitress to bring me a scotch."