Facebook entry: Haha. Why is a funeral home a sponsor for this event!?
Answer: Because the music is great, the lineup is fantastic, so yehaaa ... go funeral homes!
AN EVENING dreamed up by a specialist in care for people who are seriously ill or suffering seems an unlikely basis for a concert that attracting top musicians?
But they’re out to rock you with their upcoming Motown and more concert at the Opera House. It promises to be a heck of a show, with famous names from all round New Zealand wanting to contribute.
Actually, although a funeral home is one of the sponsors, it’s not funeral homes; it’s a clever profile and fundraiser for hospices – Te Omanga, and Mary Potter.
But a blues and Motown concert for people who are mostly seriously ill, and hospices?
How come? Ian Gwynne-Robson is a Canadian GP who moved to New Zealand with his family and is now one of around eight palliative care specialists in the Wellington area.
He really believes in the power of music and thinks that when people are in great pain, or very ill, or dying there are things they’d like to say to each other but don’t feel they can.
“Music can often say so much more than people.”
Everyone knows it works for love songs, but Gwynne-Robson once a cellist, says music also does it for grief and bereavement.
Over many years he put together a compilation of Motown, gospel, blues, and soul songs, cheerful, sad, thoughtful, and uplifting, which he thinks say what we might like to say to each other in difficult times, but often don’t know how.
Gwynne-Robson deals with people in difficult circumstances all the time, but he doesn’t play them these songs,  he uses the music to teach other professionals how to listen for the patients’ own thoughts about making meaning of their lives.
Everyone has their own songs, he says, and those songs give insights as to how those people might cope.
A couple of years ago he was chatting along these lines to Bryan Crump on Radio New Zealand National and Crump suggested there ought to be a live concert of that music to raise the profile of Wellington’s two hospices. He had no idea how to go about it, so at Crump’s suggestion he contacted Melody Thomas, an energetic journalist now working at Capital Times, who knows her way around the music industry.
Thomas has put together a remarkable group of singers and players who just love the doctor’s music and jumped at the chance to be in the concert.
Look what she found. The house band is made up of musicians from some of the country’s very best bands: drummer Darren Mathiassen (Hollie Smith, Trinity Roots, Rhombus), bassist Alistair Isdale (Bella Kalolo and Air Force Bands), guitarist Paddy Bleakley (Harbour City Electric and The Aviators), keys player James Illingworth (Iva Lamkum, Recloose, Hollie Smith), prodigious saxophonist Lucien Johnson, and senior tutor at the New Zealand School of Music and trumpet player Nick van Dijk. Vocalists include Lisa Tomlins, Ria Hall, Thomas Oliver, Ryan Prebble, Darren Watson, Toni Huata, Mara TK, the Musical Island Boys, and both The Town Cryers, and The Mission choirs.
“The lineup is, quite frankly, ridiculously good,” gloats the delighted Thomas.
“I was slightly nervous about taking on such a large-scale event,” she says, “and I figured the best way to take care of that was to ensure the best musicians I know were involved.”
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, The Opera House, November 28.

What is palliative care?
Palliative care concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than striving to halt, delay, or reverse progression of the disease itself or provide a cure. The goal is to prevent and relieve suffering and to improve quality of life for people whose disease cannot be cured – and for their families. Hospice care is free,  provided in Lower Hutt by Te Omanga and in Wellington by Mary Potter), through nurses, doctors, spiritual carers, occupational and physiotherapists, and art and music therapists.
Gwynne-Robson describes palliative care as a philosophy of care which buys time for ill people and their families to come to peace with whatever their destiny might be.
In Wellington care is provided wherever patients are;  mostly at home.