BREATHE
The Breathe Benefit concert held this Saturday at the Wiltern
Theatre will bring together many different well-known performers
for breast cancer awareness. The benefit was organized by Third Eye
Blind’s Stephan Jenkins and Step Up Women’s
Network and will benefit the UCLA Breast Center and the Breast
Examination Center of Harlem. Artists will include Nikka Costa,
Deftones, Jurassic Five, Liz Phair, Seal and Sugar Ray.
By Chris Moriates
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Breathe is all about bringing things together: people,
performers, musical genres, charity, education and
entertainment.
The Breathe benefit concert this Saturday night at the Wiltern
Theatre on Wilshire Blvd. will bring headlining artists such as
Nikka Costa, Deftones, Jurassic Five, Liz Phair, Seal, Sugar Ray,
Third Eye Blind and many others. Together, they will perform on the
same stage in the name of breast cancer awareness.
The proceeds of the show will go to the UCLA Breast Center and
the Breast Examination Center of Harlem.
The underlying message that Stephan Jenkins, lead singer of the
rock band Third Eye Blind and co-promoter of the concert, would
like to convey to the world through Breathe is that just because
some may not have had personal experiences with the deadly disease
doesn’t mean that the disease shouldn’t affect
them.
Not all of the performers have been affected by breast cancer.
However, they seem to understand Jenkins’ message.
“At anytime, anyone can be a victim,” said Mark
7even of the hip-hop group Jurassic Five. “I have a wife, and
there are women in my family, and it’s something that is out
there. Breast cancer is a serious thing, and just because I
don’t know anybody that has had breast cancer doesn’t
mean that it can’t happen. To be aware of it and to be in a
cause and fighting it is a good thing.”
Jenkins’ own experience with his mother’s breast
cancer prompted him to attempt to change the way the public is
educated about the disease.
“During my mother’s ordeal with breast cancer, I
began to think about ways that I could appease my own frustration
and the terror that it caused us,” Jenkins said.
“And I began to think about the disease and how the public
is educated about it. I felt that the way that breast cancer is
presented to the public at large did not correspond with my
experience with the disease.”
The goal of the concert is to assist breast cancer research,
while spreading the word about the disease.
“We targeted the UCLA Breast Center “¦ partly because
UCLA deals with research as well as treatment for underprivileged
women,” Jenkins said. “The reason why that was
important for me is that my mother was able to get access to good
healthcare and there are a lot of women in this country who cannot.
And that’s a scary thought. It’s really contemplating
that reality that prompted us to give to those
associations.”
Jenkins and Step Up Women’s Network, a non-profit
organization that unites female professionals, joined forces to
program the benefit concert. But Breathe is not just any benefit
concert.
The show will bring many well-known artists together for the
show. What sets this show apart, however, is that most of the
artists are going to perform in pairs, coupling up acts like
Crazytown with Sugar Ray and Third Eye Blind with Nikka Costa.
The idea of pairing up artists that have not performed together
before is a novel idea that is sure to present some interesting
moments. Like any blind date, there is a chance for great chemistry
or utter clashing ““ either way, the audience is in for
something different.
“I wanted to make it exciting for the bands that are
playing and also to make it something different for the
audience,” Jenkins said. “The audience gets to see
pairings of people that normally wouldn’t happen. It’s
not the standard charity show where bands play their watered-down
30-minute set. There are moments that are eligible for kind of
spontaneity and transcendence.”
The show brings together many different genres of music and
presents an opportunity for some groups to perform in a different
atmosphere than they are used to.
“I see it as a challenge,” Mark 7even said.
“We might gain a few fans or we might give someone some
respect for hip-hop that didn’t have it. To take ourselves
out of the norm and out of the hip-hop crowd is a challenge,
because these people aren’t going to give you no love,
because they don’t know you.”
The real miracle is that this show is actually going to happen,
despite all the setbacks. The first jolt came with the death of
Aaliyah, who was scheduled to perform at Breathe with Seal, earlier
this year. Then came the terrorist activities of Sept. 11, further
thwarting the efforts.
“This show has been hijacked by the World Trade Center, so
fundraising dollars are really only available to the Red Cross for
the reconstruction of the WTC and relief for the families,”
Jenkins said. “[The show] is intended to be a joyous,
bacchanalian thing. We are sort of doing this against all odds,
because we were beset by Aaliyah’s death, who very early on
was excited about doing the show. It was going to be her next live
show. She was so fresh and immortal. And the WTC made it so that
most of these shows get cancelled.”
The show will go on, although it will be held at the Wiltern
Theatre instead of the much larger Greek Theatre, where it was
originally scheduled.
Seal will perform a tribute to Aaliyah and a gift will be
presented to her brother.
“[Aaliyah] made quite an impression on me,”
Seal said while talking from his Los Angeles home. “I saw
that she was an amazing human being – very professional … for
such a young person and she had an incredible work ethic which I
found very appealing. She was just an all-around beautiful person.
It was a tragic loss.”
As for whether the benefit is irrelevant in light of the recent
national attacks, Seal felt that was an absurd idea.
“This benefit in particular is to help raise money for
breast cancer awareness, so that people won’t get breast
cancer, and if you were to calculate the amount of people who die
of breast cancer not only in this country but all over the
world each day, one would likely see that they far outweigh the
number of people that died in the Sept. 11 incident,” Seal
said. “Now, that’s not to belittle what happened. Any
benefit to help a noble cause ““ a cause in need of financial
benefit or awareness ““ is worthy and valid and is indeed
relevant.”
Breast cancer still threatens millions of women and families
around the world and Jenkins, Step Up and the many performers
coming together for the show will attempt to help out these women
in any way they can.
“Breast cancer is going to get solved by money, because
money is the engine for treatment and research,” Jenkins
said. “If in some small way I can widen the scope of who
embraces this as something that is important to them, then we can
widen the scope of who is willing to give money.”
“You get bands like the Deftones and Third Eye Blind,
whose appeal is mainly to males who wear skateboard shoes and drink
coca-cola, and those companies that want to appeal to those boys
say “˜OK, this is important to us,'” Jenkins
added. “And that’s the way that they do fundraising.
When I started to produce the show, that’s the angle that I
came up with.”
The Breathe Benefit concert will be a lesson in togetherness and
an education about a world pandemic.
“It’s going to be a real community kind of feel that
night,” Mark 7even said. “It’s going to be real
loose. There’s going to be a cool vibe there that night, and
it’s definitely worth going to.”
The Breathe Benefit show will be held on Saturday at the Wiltern
Theatre on Wilshire Blvd. Tickets are available through
Ticketmaster.