JUSTIN HINES
Outside of a few famous blind performers, you don’t often see artists with disabilities on stage. The late Teddy Pendergrass comes to mind, of course, as does Vic Chesnutt, likewise paralyzed and also deceased.
Enter Justin Hines, the acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter and international fundraiser for people with disabilities.
The wheelchair-bound Hines, who has battled the rare genetic joint condition Larsen’s syndrome since birth, brought his new and totally non-profit Vehicle of Change tour to New York’s Cutting Room last week. The tour is supporting dozens of local charities including Pediatric Angel Foundation, Arthritis Foundation, Children’s Heart and Center of Hope; the Cutting Room gig benefited the Red Cross of Greater New York.
Hines may be a “chair guy,” as he casually referred to himself on the phone a few days before the Cutting Room, but that didn’t stop him from barreling on stage. Indeed, the guy has rappelled down a 33-story building in San Diego in a stunt to raise charity money.
But there’s nothing at all reckless about him or his music.
“We’re spreading a message of love and connecting with and helping as many people as we can,” he said, and while it does sound all goody and gooey on paper, in performance Hines is amazingly as engaging for his performing as he is endearing for his unending sense of altruism.
With his right hand on the joystick of his power wheelchair, he kept moving it back-and-forth, from and to his freestanding microphone in a simulated dance step—if “dance step” is the right way to put it. But it was so natural that you quickly got past the fact that he’s “disabled,” which is the right way to put it. Same with the way he beat out the rhythm on a tambourine he managed to position horizontally in the crook of his crossed leg—no matter that he broke off a jingle, the second busted one of the tour.
His long-sleeve shirt-covered arms fixed in permanent akimbo, he could contort himself such that he could play harmonica, and work a looping machine with which he constructed a backing track by piling on mouth percussion and harmony vocals. But by then you were no longer really conscious of his disability, even though it was all right there in front of you all the time.
“There aren’t a lot of musicians in my situation,” Hines had noted earlier. “Most people assume there are challenges to being a performer in a wheelchair, and indeed there are some. But my whole journey is about inspiring a different way of thinking: Hopefully people who see me will open up a little bit.”
By the end of Hines’ New York Vehicle of Change tour stop, at least one person in the audience had.
Jim Bessman
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