Musician
Ahipene-Mercer's father was a guitar player and his mother a singer. He began his music career playing in school bands in the early 1960s. In 1964 the Beatles came to Wellington and the young Ahipene-Mercer attended their concert, resolving then to immerse himself in music. He joined the music programming section of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in 1967, resigning in 1969 to become a full-time musician at the age of 21. As Ray Mercer he played lead guitar with The Dedikation, which successfully recorded three singles and an album. They were number two on the New Zealand Hit Parade in 1969 with their first single, "Wait for me Maryanne", a cover of a 1968 song by Marmalade, and reached number 12 on the national charts with their 1970 cover of the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday." Dedikation appeared on the famous "C'mon" TV series, and were finalists in the Loxene Golden Disc awards.Between 1972 and 1980 Ahipene-Mercer worked in London, UK, playing in pub bands, and returned to New Zealand to tour with the Rocky Horror Show in 1978. By that time, he had begun training in making guitars, with the aim of becoming a full-time Luthier. He returned to Wellington in 1980 as a Luthier, but has continued to play guitar both for pleasure and semi-professionally. He organised and performed in "Rock against Racism" concerts in Wellington in the early 1980s and worked with other bands such as the Wayne Mason band and Blue Highways. He has composed and recorded music for children's stories and some films, and took part in concerts for causes such as medical aid for Iraqi children, child cancer and the Mary Potter Hospice. He claims to have played in every hall in Wellington. Ahipene-Mercer is an external assessor of live music performance at Whitirea Polytech, as a member of the music advisory board. He is a member of the Board of Studies at Te Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School.
He has the unusual status as the only City Councillor ever to perform in the Wellington International Festival of the Arts as part of the "Maori All Stars" in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Ray Ahipene-Mercer
Famous quotes containing the word musician:
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about China ... That’s what makes him an expert. He knows nothing about music, being tone deaf. That’s what makes him a musician ... And he’s batty in the head. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“The mastery of one’s phonemes may be compared to the violinist’s mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor’s renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”
—W.V. Quine (b. 1908)
“Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)