Pianist Lynne Arriale returns to Milwaukee with an inspired new album, Being Human

 

 

Lynne Arriale Trio – CD Release – Friday Musicale

Lynne Arriale Trio will perform at Bar Centro, 808 E. Center St., Thursday, March 14 at 8 p.m., $25

Lynne Arriale continues to grapple with the world, and uplifts it, with her immense gifts and passion. The pianist-composer has proven herself among the most socially and politically engaged jazz musicians working today. On her new album Being Human, she stays true to her piano’s voice whereas previously employing a vocalists to sing an iconic Bob Dylan song to powerful effect. Now she returns to Milwaukee, where she studied, and grew as an artist before striking out for larger pastures.

On Being Human she continues her practice of dedicating certain tunes to people of notable political import. Thus, we’re urged to contemplate such people as environmental activist Gret Thunberg, Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, Khrystyna Lopatenko, chief nurse at Kharkiv Oblast Hospital, the Ukrainian people and, more broadly, humankind and “those of faith.”

Her liner notes specify how she sees such people as meaningful and worthy of our consideration. And yet her work allows us the freedom to respond in any way we want as per the stimulus of her trio’s work, which fills the auditory senses as much as a piano trio can. The piano trio is a specific art form honed to heights of mastery by The Bill Evans Trio and Arriale carries on from such lofty standards. She mines in an affirmative jazz without lyrics but so full of spirit and both refined and rough-hewn musical gemstones gritted with shards of life to appreciate and feel. For example, Courage (for the Ukraine people) delves into the weight needed to muster that emotion and strength with a big Tyner-ish piano bass beneath muscular yet lyrical trappings. The theme’s minor-ish mood delivers the emotion instilled in “courage.”

No social cause is more pressing today than that of Ukraine, “remaining unbowed while resisting a vastly more powerful enemy, they stand in solidarity with their military forces, even while enduring the horrors and hardships of war,” writes Arriale. “Persistence” is powered by Arriale’s meaty McCoy Tyner influence, thundering along, raining fourth intervals, clearly inspired by Yousafzai, the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize, having survived The Taliban’s attempt to assassinate her.

One of the most intriguing tunes, “Curiosity,” defers from affirmation, bristles with tension and release, thick, piquant chords, and tight harmonies between her and bassist Alon Near, even atonal lines.

Though she is most typically a finely-crafting player with an innate sense of lyricism, a tune like “Soul” digs down into the muddy blues groove of a trio driving a layered and danceable pulse.

You can help but sense how far Arriale travels musically to discover the width and depth of human determination and courage in a world ever ready in defiance.

 

Two quintessential American salesmen and mirror opposites, Tim Arndt and Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman

And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing, he’s getting ready for the showHe’s going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.” — Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

Tim Arndt (1959-2024). All photos of Tim courtesy of Tim and Amy Arndt.

As I’m going in a sleepless gonzo-mode lately, I might not do justice to Cousin Tim Arndt or to spouse Amy Arndt’s power-packed obit of the extraordinary man who died of prostate cancer recently, at 64. It’s a revelation, the depth and myriad benevolence of Tim’s life. So, I hope this doesn’t seem too irreverent, as this is not an obit per se, and the ensuing analogy is meant to serve by contrast.

But as a culture vulture, I was struck by something in the sadness of Tim’s passing. In my house, we’re currently on a Better Call Saul-watching binge. Here’s the mirror reflection that caught my eye. It strikes me Tim’s life is the moral mirror-opposite of the title character. Tim started his professional career selling flip-style cellphones — close to the depicted the era when Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill starts re-inventing himself — selling “private” covert flip-style cell phones. And the TV series’ New Mexico setting ain’t far from Texas, so the cultural milieu isn’t too alien.

Jimmy McGill hustling private flip-style cell phones. The Georgia Straight

The big difference is how disgraced and disbarred lawyer Jimmy/Saul takes to selling cell-phones, for nefarious purposes. He has a born-salesman’s gift-for-gab, like Tim, but oh my, what Saul does with his gifts. Throughout the series he’s a salesman first and best, even when working as a lawyer.

What unfolds is a contemporary variation on the tragic American story of moral dissembling, through desperation, gravitating to the lure of free-market greed. He begins (with a lovely and upstanding blonde woman partner, like Tim), and he could’ve done so much good, and he knows it. We see this all grow like a cancer in him because Bob Odenkirk is a superb actor who reveals many shades of his character’s two-facedness. As Saul, he ends up exploiting his customers (initially retirees), and the system, as much as he can, eventually falling into the deadly cesspool of a Mexican drug cartel. He can’t help himself, his brilliant lawyer brother Chuck explains, dating from childhood, and consciously if compulsively continues to avoid the better angels of his nature.

Promotional image. Amazon.com

Activist Tim Arndt, by contrast, used the medium of Ma Bell for the sake of Mother Earth, as a springboard to profoundly protect and replenish the planet as a “climate change warrior,” and to help anyone who needed help. It seems that, like Saul, Tim couldn’t help himself, but to “do the right thing.” I shouldn’t make him out to be a saint but he seemed to be one of an empowering sort who “saw the potential in everyone and everything,” as his brother Steve commented. Saul sees the potential weakness in everyone.

Quoting Amy: “At Austin Energy, Tim was instrumental in the creation of the Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure (ECAD) Ordinance. He took his passion for combatting climate change to 360 Energy Savers, where he leveraged rebates to help lower utility bills for residents of Austin.
Tim purchased 1st Choice Energy in 2021. There, he continued to fight climate change and helped make Austin’s low to moderate-income families more comfortable by providing energy efficiency upgrades as part of Austin Energy’s Weatherization Assistance program.”

Widow Amy also notes that Tim would stop to help anyone with car trouble. Jimmy McGill’s beat-up 1998 Suzuki Esteem – rusted-out yellow with one red car door, would’ve needed Tim’s help. In fact, Jimmy is in an accident in the series pilot when two skateboarders try to scam him by purposely running into Jimmy’s car. Jimmy’s nearly broke at the time (working at a Cinnabon shop) and the punks-on-little-wheels demand $500 compensation for the “accident.” Jimmy points to his car as “a steaming pile of crap” to show how hard-up he is and says, “The only way this car is worth $500 is if there’s a $300 hooker in it!”

If Tim Arndt had been cast in the show at that point, Jimmy might’ve seen the erring of his ways, though probably continuing down his slippery slope. That ethical task is up to Jimmy’s girlfriend, the sharp-lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), who loves her pro bono work, in an almost morally preening way. She loves Jimmy, too, as his sounding board yet is strangely vulnerable to his “aw shucks” charms and deceptive bloviations. It’s a variation on a Macbethian love story, with the man as the infecting partner.

As Amy’s obit recounts in admiring detail, Tim Arndt was “The Ultimate Good Samaritan.” Jimmy’s version of “Goodman” Samaritan is to teach the young skateboarders how to scam better.

Girlfriend Kim Wexler (Reah Seehorn) listens to another explanation/vow from Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). Although high-minded, she has a weakness for his powers of persuasion and evasion. global.ca/news

Over time it became known that Tim had helped everyone in the neighborhood. If Tim could have been satirized at all, it might’ve been as a too-good-to-be-true do-gooder and tree-hugger, who might rankle some, but only as if we don’t need more of those in America. His tendency to be a found-objects “hoarder” might seem comical too, but all his gatherings were stashed in his garage (nicknamed “Vietnam” because of its devastated-looking chaos) which, with his special brand of genius, became a myriadic fix-it and repurpose shop for anyone who needed the once-again right stuff.

Among the more remarkable things Tim did was “returning BB King’s famous guitar Lucille to its rightful owner when it ended up in his possession,” as Amy recounts. (Please read Amy’s obit on Tim following this article — originally posted on her Facebook page — on more of what made him an extraordinary man.)

Tim Arndt, proud family man with (L-R) daughter Emily, spouse Amy, Tim, daughter-in-law Taylor, son Matthew.

Tim Arndt and Jimmy McGill embodied two versions of a quintessential American. Tim might have come as close as anyone with limited resources to being the ideal American, living to pursue justice, equality, and a measure of happiness for his own (the proud father of three) and anyone, and to help save the only planet we have to survive on. Though I didn’t know him well (he was a life-long Texan, I a Wisconsinite), Tim now feels like the brother I never had. In our shared Lynch genes, we even resemble each other. But he was probably a better man than me, than most.

Jimmy the Saul-man, with his own peculiar resourcefulness, was the every-man-for-himself American, the transactional con-man first brilliantly characterized in Melville’s The Confidence Man: His Masquerade from 1857), and agonizingly relevant today. Jimmy/Saul was a winning glad-hander, even capable of a flawed love, ever despoiled by the neediness of his greediness.

As for the way Tim loved, as Amy sweetly notes: “Tim was born in Dallas, Texas on Valentine’s Day in 1959. His mother Eileen almost named him Val, but thankfully, she chose Timothy James instead. Still, being born on Valentine’s Day meant Tim Arndt was born to exemplify love.”

May the Tim Arndts of the world inspire us, and may we be ever vigilant of the Saul Goodmans.

Tim and Amy.

_________

*Saul (Bob Odenkirk) may still be better known as the sleazy lawyer on Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul was a sort of prequel, telling the story of how Jimmy McGill came to be Saul Goodman. Odenkirk (only three years younger than dear Tim) has received six nominations for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series, marking his comic-tragic brilliance at embodying the conflicted yet chillingly mutating character.

_______________________

Tim Arndt’s obituary – the hardest thing I’ve ever written. What a guy!
By AMY ARNDT
_____
Timothy James Arndt, 64, died on January 22, 2024, after a 6-year battle with prostate cancer. Tim was the ultimate Good Samaritan, a climate change warrior, friend to many, and owner of the best laugh on the planet.
Tim was born in Dallas, Texas on Valentine’s Day in 1959. His mother Eileen almost named him Val, but thankfully, she chose Timothy James instead. Still,   being born on Valentine’s Day meant Tim Arndt was born to exemplify love.
Tim is survived by his wife Amy, the love of his life and pain in his ass, his son Matthew Arndt, daughter-in-law Taylor, daughter Stephanie Martinez-Arndt, and daughter Emily Rose Arndt. He is also survived by his brother Steve Arndt and wife Joy, brother TJ Arndt, and brother Mike Arndt. Other relatives include mother-in-law Judy Wilkins, father-in-law Glenn Underwood and wife Pam, sister-in-law Emily Montez and husband Rocky. Tim was predeceased by his mother, Dr. Eileen Lynch, and father Terry Arndt (unless you consult 23andMe, but that’s another story).
Tim attended W.T. White High School in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Walden  Preparatory School in 1976. When Tim’s grades didn’t quite cut the mustard, he used his charm and gift of gab to gain admission to the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas.
Tim’s career was always focused on helping people. His sales career began at Cellular One in San Antonio, TX, where he sold the original “brick” cell phones and the original flip phone which sold for over $2,500. He later worked at the Travis County Medical Society’s Medical Exchange, where he sold pagers and communications services to physicians. He was responsible for developing the training of thousands of Central Texans at the Customized Training division of Austin Community College. At Austin Energy, Tim was instrumental in the creation of the Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure (ECAD) Ordinance. He took his passion for combatting climate change to 360 Energy Savers, where he leveraged rebates to help lower utility bills for residents of Austin.
Tim purchased 1st Choice Energy in 2021. There, he continued to fight climate change and helped make Austin’s low to moderate-income families more comfortable by providing energy efficiency upgrades as part of Austin Energy’s Weatherization Assistance program.
Tim’s brother Steve wisely noted that Tim “saw potential in everyone and everything.” An altruistic hoarder, Tim’s garage was well known as “Vietnam,” because his collection of random objects looked more like a war zone than a garage full of dreams. We joked that if you needed something, Tim would ask, “What color?” because he likely had more than one of whatever it was you needed. He stopped to help anyone having car trouble. He refused to pass a lemonade stand without stopping to support a small business. One time Amy realized Tim had helped someone from every single home on their street. He considered people experiencing homelessness to be his neighbors, and he never judged a person for their circumstances. He simply helped them.
Tim’s laugh is almost as well-known as his good deeds. When the kids were little, if they got separated from Tim in a store, they never worried because they could find Tim by the sound of his bellowing laugh. Amy described Tim’s laugh as “a cross between a machine gun and Bert from Sesame Street.”
Tim could do so many things that we kept a list of “Things Tim Arndt Can Do.” The list included: taking almost anything apart and putting it back together, buying and fixing cars, building a treehouse out of recycled materials, and returning BB King’s guitar Lucille to its rightful owner when it ended up in his possession. He could dance the Jitterbug, cross-country ski, juggle, walk on stilts, safely hold bees in his mouth, and catch snakes and tarantulas. He could cook like nobody’s business, sew his firstborn son’s baby bedding (including bumpers), and create custom Halloween costumes, often at the very last minute. He could swim the length of a pool in one breath. He could even catch a fly with chopsticks.
Though Tim spent his life serving others, his family and friends were his greatest joy. He was often overheard telling someone on the phone, “I’m just lucky that I’m still madly in love with my wife.” He loved his Saturday morning ritual of talking to his brother Steve (and by way of speakerphone, Steve’s wife Joy). He was a caring role model for his little brother Mike. His Sunday morning breakfasts with his best friend Jon were his favorite start to the week. Nothing made him prouder than being a parent to Matthew, Stephanie, and Emily Rose. His legacy of love and good deeds lives on in his children, who all possess his best qualities.
Tim was a Yellow Dog Democrat to his core, working on numerous campaigns, block walking, phone banking, and helping register voters. One of his favorite things to tell people was, “The only part of my permanent record that I’m proud of is that I’ve never missed an election.” And it’s true; Tim voted religiously.
Speaking of religion, Tim was a cradle Catholic and lived the examples of a Christian life his entire life. However, when Tim’s cancer spread to his bones, he developed a skepticism about God and the afterlife. During this time Tim developed a friendship with Father Matt Boulter, the priest at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Austin. Tim concluded one of their last conversations by saying, “If you’re right, I’ll see you on the other side!” Then he laughed his giant laugh.
Tim’s family and friends believe that Tim’s work on earth gave him a VIP pass to the other side. While the world is a quieter place without Tim and his famous laugh, his memory will live on through his children, his countless good deeds, and the good deeds we can all do to honor him.
The family sends their unending appreciation and love to Tim’s medical team and caretakers. To the team at Texas Oncology: Dr Carlos Ruben de Celis, Colleen Adkins, PA-C, Dr. Louis Lux, Francesa Ciponi, LCSW, C-DBT, Vanessa Hohn, Senior Patient Services, and the many nurses and techs that Tim made laugh, thank you for your excellent care. Thank you to the team at Hospice Austin, especially Stephanie Beam, RN, and Cat Ross, CNA, whom Tim truly loved. Thank you to the incredible team at Christopher House, who cared for Tim so lovingly in his final days.
A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, March 23 at 2:30 at the Hancock Recreation Center in Austin. To honor Tim’s memory, please consider a donation to Hospice Austin, Christopher House, the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS), or a climate change organization of your choice. If donations are cost-prohibitive, please consider doing a kind deed in Tim’s honor.
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At 80, Jerry Grillo sings a song his way, taking musical risks, and usually winning

 

Singer Jerry Grillo performs at his “Decades Tour” celebrating his 80th Birthday at Bar Centro on Feb. 10, with drummer Randy Maio, at right. Photos courtesy Jerry Grillo.

A notable recent performance by Milwaukee jazz singer Jerry Grillo got me thinking about his art form, partly due to technical difficulties with my blog delaying me from writing an intended review. Then today, while exercising, I listened to one of the most acclaimed male jazz singers today, Gregory Porter.

So, I hope I’m doing Grillo a service by partly comparing him to the highest standards of his craft. Grillo may be nearing the end of his performing career as he chose to do a sort of career and life retrospective on his  “Decades Tour,” celebrating his 80th birthday at Bar Centro in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. The joint was filled beyond capacity, suggesting a cultivated popularity, which leads to an implicit question. Doesn’t the art of male jazz singing remain too rare, both nationally and locally? General audiences seem more attracted to female singers, who might be more easily marketed as well, whether singing jazz, or classical, or even pop, now that male singers fronting male rock bands have now given way to superstar female pop singers, the biggest which need not be named.

Thus, it seems all more valuable to appreciate men willing to open themselves up to the emotional and artistic vulnerabilities of singing, more typically the province of women. To this point, this man’s songs at Bar Centro included several made famous by women, including Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Dinah Washington, and Morgana King.

So, I celebrate Grillo’s accomplishment by possibly holding him to high standards. His voice may not possess the pure resonant quality of a Gregory Porter, or of a Kurt Elling, or the textural richness or quite the capacious dynamic range of his “favorite singer,” Tony Bennett.

Yet Grillo has plenty to offer as a narrative and dramatic master of his material, a musical raconteur, and as an improvisational risk-taker in the tradition of real jazz, by contrast to a safer singer guided by jazz musicians. He demonstrated this by performing songs that he conceded weren’t typical jazz material; he mastered jazz singing only in his career’s latter portion, since the 1990s. But these songs were sung his way. His roots actually lie in musical theater as he demonstrated here. His choice of material is consistently witty and engaging. He also took liberty to introduce each song with its context in his own life, thus personalizing it as a storyteller.

The first, “Teach Me Tonight” served as a way to learn about him and, with its sly pivot toward boudoir instruction, as a rich metaphor for the man himself as a true artistic Romantic, and as a teacher, which he was for many years. This began his biographical commentary: we learned he was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, not coincidentally the birthplace of Bob Dylan. He’s hardly the poetic songwriter that Dylan is (who is, really?), but Grillo, akin to Dylan, accomplishes so much both with a less-than-perfect voice and the creative chutzpah to virtually reinvent his songs almost every time he sings them.

So no, Grillo’s singing may not be as purely pleasing as, say, Porter’s. But that celebrated Blue Note recording artist tends to lean heavily on the warm, glowing tones of his resonant baritone, in many medium-to-slow songs.

By contrast, Grillo not infrequently finds himself in precarious pivots of intonation – because he’s taking musical risks, trying to modulate his singing to the twists and turns of the story-song, without being calculated. Thus, he seems more authentic, honest, vulnerable, and quite appealing as a musical human. He can also render a tender ballad, like the hush of “A Quiet Thing,” made famous by Morgana King. This managed to fairly tame the rather boisterous chatterers at the bar, a sort of spell-casting.

Now, with his audience’s full attention, he rewarded with them shortly with his most acclaimed song, “My Hometown, Milwaukee,” which he wrote. As he explained, it celebrates his adopted hometown by avoiding clichés like cheese and beer, instead exulting in our extraordinary “museum with wings,” our somewhat unique public transit bus The Hop, and our pro sports teams: “The Bucks are the tops! And the Brewers will win the World Series…next year.” His pause, and pitch drop, were perfect comedian’s timing, deflating his own claim, and drawing laughter from a crowd that surely would relish the always-game Brewers finally winning it all.

“My Hometown” is a declamatory romp, which leads to a big-chested, strutting climax, akin to Sinatra singing “Chicago.” The song earned him a proclamation from Mayor Cavalier Johnson of “My Hometown, Milwaukee” Day, last May. It also won the 2023 WAMI award for “Most Unique Song.”

Jerry Grillo and Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson hold the Mayoral Proclamation of “My Hometown, Milwaukee” Day last May, honoring Grillo’s song, which also won a 2023 WAMI Award.

In the second set, Grillo wisely noted that jazz is essentially a “black art form,” by performing Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” It’s hardly black protest or identity-assertion, but illustrates of how American black music grew by merging foot-tapping entertainment with insouciant, smart creativity.

He somewhat book-ended his program by honoring, early in the first set, his favorite singer Tony Bennett, with “I Wanna be Around” and, as the penultimate song, Bennett’s trademark “San Francisco.” Preceding that was one of the most poignant moments. Another pianist friend, Rose Fosco, had composed a tune she called “Lonely” which, he explained, was written for her late father, a delicately-crafted expression of her sense of loss. Grillo set it to lyrics, and it served also for him as an acknowledgment of mortality as did, in more affirmative terms, the program closer, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

Sensitive accompaniment shadowed the singer throughout: pianist John Hefter, drummer Randy Maio and especially saxophonist Jeanne Marie Farinelli, who added a limpid flute solo to that final tune.

Saxophonist-flutist Jeanne Marie Farinelli performs with Grillo at Bar Centro.

This evening breathed in long waves of anecdote and songful ardor, it chuckled, digressed and grew increasingly palpable of a creative man’s love affair with a city. That added up to what felt like a precious gift from the vocalist to his audience. Grillo will continue his “Decades Tour” for an indefinite time. Then, perhaps he’ll saunter off into the sunset.

However his final performance chapter plays out, let us give thanks and always cherish Milwaukee’s preeminent hometown male jazz singer.

_____________

Multi-talented Ben Sidran returns to Milwaukee for the first time in years

Ben Sidran. All photos via BenSidran/bensidran.com, unless otherwise credited.

Ben Sidran is a hydra? After many years of observing the multitalented pianist-singer-producer-author-interviewer-broadcaster, I strive to characterize him. “Renaissance man” is a cliché nearly as old as its historical genesis. More remote yet apt, hydra, the nine-headed snake from Greek mythology, seems only a slight rhetorical exaggeration. Grappling to encompass his myriad accomplishments, I hope you get a sense of the jazz man’s vast resonance.

And yet, despite his intellectual bona fides, literary as well as musical, as a performer he’s always projected a relaxed, unassuming aura which was no less evident in a recent interview.

The occasion is Sidran’s performing with his trio in Milwaukee for the first time in many years, at Bar Centro at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 7, even as the Madison-based Chicago native has lived virtually his whole life in the state of Wisconsin.

First, I’ll try to highlight the range of his accomplishments. He first arrived as a member of a rock band, led by Milwaukee native Steve Miller in 1968, and wrote one of Miller’s most iconic songs, “Space Cowboy.” Sidran really emerged in 1971, the year of his first album under his own name and of the important book of “jazz/sociology”: Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition. That loaded subtitle says plenty about the book, which includes a forward by iconic jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. Another scholarly Sidran work, There Was A Fire, traces the Jewish contribution to American music and The American Dream. He has also published a book of remarkably simpatico interviews with jazz musicians, and a superb autobiography, A Life in the Music.

Sidran’s album “The Concert for Garcia Lorca” was nominated for a Grammy Award. ebay.com

Among his notable recording projects over the years have included any number of albums highlighting his self-accompanied singing, an offhanded yet often pointed style. Those have ranged to a brilliantly unpredictable album recording poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, another adapting writings of existentialist Albert Camus to song, an all-star recording adapting Hebrew wisdoms, and an album of Bob Dylan songs.

Also, he hosted a Peabody Award-winning interview program Jazz Alive on National Public Radio, and presented a Tedx Talk, “Embrace your Inner Hipster.” The hipster is a person searching for “authenticity in an age of technology,” he explained.

For all that, one thing he’d never done is record an album of piano trio music until now, with Swing State, with bassist Billy Peterson and his son Leo Sidran on drums. 1 and 2

What prompted this after all these years of jazz-related singing?

“Just what you said, never having done it, trying to keep it fresh,” Sidran replies in a phone interview. “Piano trio playing is very much part of the tradition I like, and it was a good time to make it.”

The piano trio’s seemingly stripped-down format helps prompt the question of why and how he has worked so incessantly over the years in such a vast range of expressive, conversational, and analytical modalities.

“It may sound strange but in doing all of that to me they’re not different things. Playing piano, writing, working on a book, or the radio, they were similar: they take a certain amount of focus, experience, and technique. It all basically revolves around music, it’s music-centric. So, it’s focusing on the music of people. More than the actual notes — the things that music critics get into — that means less to me than the people in the culture.”

Why did he reach so far back into the 1930s for most of the material on Swing State?

“That’s when I first started playing piano, back in the ‘50s. That’s also what I listened to. Music in the ‘30s is a lot like today playing music from the ‘90s. It seems like a long time ago now but at the time it was contemporary.”

But why play it now? “It’s just comfortable to play and I don’t have any problems playing songs that are part of the tradition. That makes sense to me, that’s what we do really.”

So, in a sense Sidran has taken a deep breath after years of artistic striving to let his fingers, instead of his voice, do the talking. He sounds both relaxed and invigorated by vintage romantic standards.

One of the most distinctive renditions is “Laura,” typically a limpid, wistful love song to a dead woman. But Sidran cuts the pathos way back, and turns it into a taut, mid-tempo exploration of almost mysterioso effect. I told him “Laura” sounded like how the late jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal might approach it. Sidran gracefully accepted the compliment, then explained that in fact Jamal had been “the guide for that arrangement.”

By contrast, the title tune is finger-popping hard bop, and that funky jazz style seems to be the dominant aspect of Sidran’s own piano style. How does hard-bop of the 1950s fit into his musical world?

“Well, it’s the style of piano playing of Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly, a lot of piano players from the ‘50s and ‘60s that I grew up listening to. That’s my favorite kind of harmonic and rhythmic approach. Certainly Horace Silver categorizes as hard bop but it’s the language of the idiom of bebop.”

He’s too modest to think he’s a hydra, or plays as well as any of his favorite hard-bop pianists. But Sidran’s hydra head that actually thinks like a critic analyzed a piece by one of his favorites pianists, Sonny Clark, in these 1984 liner notes to Clark’s album My Conception. After a deft comment on the 32-bar structure of “Minor Meeting,” Sidran unfurls this lyrical description: “Sonny’s relaxed, casual attitude during his solo belies the precision of his lines and the almost literary construction of his musical ideas. It’s as if his playing is a non-verbal narrative that describes, in equal detail, both the ultimate destination of the journey and the little flowers along the way.”

But he’s a communicator in many senses so, despite Swing State, it would be a disservice to ignore his contributions as a jazz singer and producer, greatly influenced by another hipster singer-pianist, Mose Allison. He’s produced albums by Allison, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones and Diana Ross. Sidran’s own most notable recent vocal recording is probably Dylan Different. How good is it? The album offers “covers that uncover a near symbiotic connection to his source’s material,” raves All-Music Guide’s knowledgeable critic Thom Jurek.

“I did the Dylan songs I grew up with in the ‘60s, the songs that I liked to listen to. I wasn’t so much making a statement about Dylan as I was reinterpreting his songs because I grew up with them and they were fun to play. Dylan has had such a long career that he’s had four or five different periods. It’s hard to summarize. So, this was a tribute to the way he approaches lyrics and putting a Ben Sidran spin on the arrangements.”

But like Dylan, Sidran can’t help making some sort of statement, and one is embedded in the title of the latest instrumental album. He’s lived most of his life in one of the most critical swing states in politics and, in that sense, beyond the uncanny rhythmic state that jazz swing evokes, political implications were intended.

“Of course, here in Wisconsin the majority of voters are Democratic but the Republicans have got the state (electoral map) so gerrymandered that they take over the (legislative) offices,” Sidran explains. “I want people to be aware that this is a swing state electorally, and it’s important to get this right, and not let one party co-opt the other.”

Sidran’s album communicates this in a subtle way, almost like subliminal messaging, as if the romance in this wordless music beckons us to not forget Martin Luther King’s dream, of human equality and opportunity for all.

This prompted me to ask him about the political implications in his first book Black Talk. He didn’t want to paraphrase a book written so long ago, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t retain relevance.

And yet he feels that something in the book’s subject, black culture, has been lost, or perhaps needs reclaiming.

“I can tell you that the music and culture that I wrote about, the black music and culture of the ‘60s has almost no references in today’s black culture. So, I can’t really speak to the music that’s current because it doesn’t reflect what was going on 50 or 60 years ago. I don’t listen, and I haven’t listened, to very much rap music, and of course that’s been the leading form of black music since the ‘90s. So, I haven’t paid attention to a lot of this stuff. I go back to rhythm and blues and bebop; it’s very hard for me to contextualize this other music which I don’t listen to.

“Maybe it needs a different labeling for me to understand discussion of what people call contemporary. I don’t recognize it in the greater subject of my book.

“The music of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s was a great flowering, a cultural explosion of tradition. I mean there hasn’t been a greater musician than John Coltrane in 60 years. Today, there’s a lot of good young players out there. But it’s not as interesting to me as listening to Jackie McLean or, I love Eddie Harris.”

“The music I’m talking about, bebop, is still the most elegant improvisational music that has come out of America and really all around the world. It is not a particularly commercial format compared to a lot of others that have come along. It is difficult to play and difficult to listen to, in some cases.

“So, it’s not for everybody. The music that interested me made me understand American society from the inside out, to understand various aspects of what America is.”

Still swinging, Sidran stands strong by the bastions of American music history, by what we can still draw inspiration and insight, by honoring.

___________

This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express, in slightly different form, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/music-feature/ben-sidran-in-milwaukee-for-first-time-in-years/

  1.  Leo Sidran also reaps a bounty of diverse musical talents: drummer-multi-instrumentalist-singer-songwriter. He also hosts an acclaimed interview podcast, The Third Story with Leo Sidran.
  2. A reliable source reports that Racine-based trumpeter Jamie Breiwick will be at least sitting in with Ben Sidran’s trio at Bar Centro. The following night, at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8, Breiwick’s jazz-hip-hop group KASE will be recording a live album at Bar Centro with the jazz-folk group Father Sky, a.k.a. pianist-singer Anthony Deutsch.

 

The Atlantic’s own editor-in-chief explains why it is my favorite magazine

The cover of the print edition of the November 2022 The Atlantic. Courtesy The Atlantic

Not long ago, I said to a friend who, like most people today, does most of his reading online, that The Atlantic is the last magazine I would still subscribe to, if all others fell to the wayside by choice or circumstance.

I don’t normally tout publications per se in this blog, but The Atlantic has been my favorite for quite a long time, and now it’s editor has written a piece in the November issue that helps to explain why it is worthy of being a person’s favorite.

Much of this has to do with the publication’s storied history, having been born as an abolitionist magazine shortly before the Civil War. But current editor Jeffrey Goldberg opens his piece called “The American Idea” with an 1861 letter from Julia Ward Howe, expressing her melancholy and insecurities to the editor at the time. The editor, James T. Fields, was wise enough not to touch the copy of the poem she submitted with her letter. He gave it a title and published “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the first page of the February 1862 edition. “(Howe received, in return, a $5 freelance fee and immortality.)”, Goldberg adds drolly.

He goes on to point out that The Atlantic, in its 166th year of continuous publication, also published for the first time, “Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the first chapters of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, and Rachel Carson’s meditations on the oceans, and Einstein’s denunciation of atomic weapons, and so on, ad infinitum.”

Further, The Atlantic‘s founding mission statement (reproduced in Goldberg’s article) was signed by various luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who appeared in the first issue; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came up with The Atlantic‘s name; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become the magazine’s Civil War correspondent; Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), America’s most popular author at the time.

Goldberg’s only expressed regret about that time is that, given that Moby-Dick is his favorite American novel, that  Melville never found a way to contribute. That would be my sentiment exactly regarding Melville, who ended up publishing short pieces for Harpers, another long-time American magazine.

I have many reasons why the current magazine is my favorite, partly for it’s intelligence, it’s allegiance to no group, party or clique, and its cultural and political range. “We always try very hard to be interesting. That is a prerequisite,” Goldberg explains.

They succeed, too, which is why, even though some stories are long “thumbsuckers,” they almost invariably hold my interest and, if I don’t finish them, it’s my failing.

Here is Goldberg’s introductory article in the latest issue in full: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/165th-anniversary-atlantic-magazine-founding/671523/

p.s. As for your blogger, I submitted an article once — about Wisconsin guitar innovator Les Paul, Bob Dylan and Michael Bloomfield — to The Atlantic and, though chagrined, I was honored to receive a personalized, hand-written “no thank you” note from an editor from the magazine. The article was eventually published in NoDepression.com. Here’s the note. which I valued enough to frame.

________________

 

Growing Hope for America: An anniversary revisit to the 25th Farm Aid in Milwaukee

It’s one day removed from the date but I am honoring the anniversary of a great concert in Milwaukee history by posting my review of Farm Aim 25,  at Miller Park on October 2, 2010.

October 2, 2010 

Farm Aid 25 Does Heavy Hauling for America’s Family Farmers

MILWAUKEE — It took a quarter of a century for the players in this farm system to make it to the majors.

But Farm Aid 25 proved it ain’t no game though, heck, it was at least as fun as any Brewers outing, to judge from the 35,000 who rocked Miller Park Saturday, along with the many dedicated musicians who filled the ten-hour event.

Farm Aid 25 at Miller Park. Courtesy Onmilwaukee.com

The first Farm Aid drew 78,000 in Champaign, Illinois in 1985. Today it’s the longest-running concert benefit in the U.S, having raised $37 million over those years. And co-founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp – who all performed Saturday with style and passion – have been stars for decades. So the event’s 25th anniversary in its first major league stadium only served to remind people of a team effort as heroic as a two-outs, walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth.

The hero’s stance is somewhat different now. Farm Aid now does heavy work on the promotional tractor hauling the local sustainable food movement to public awareness. They’re helping push for organized family farming and healthy food choices as refurbished tools for economic revitalization of America through “family farm food systems” based on alliances, economic stewardship and well being of community and public health (see farmaid.org for more information on this)

They still proselytize for the ongoing plight of America’s family farmers in the face of corporate farming’s razing of the small farm business model. In the pre-concert press conference, Neil Young, Farm Aids’ resident corporate gadfly, asserted that big-business farms “create and spread disease and are inhumane to animals” and ravage the ecosystem.

Yet, as perennial good guy Nelson says, “We started out trying to save the family farmer and now it looks like the family farmer is going to save us.”

Farm Aid to mark 25th anniversary at Miller Park

Farm Aid co-founder Willie Nelson at Farm Aid 25 in Milwaukee OnMilwaukee.com

With a majority of this huge throng appearing to be under 30, the message seemed to connect with the generation that must take up the mantle of leadership.

Many of them sang along from memory to lyrics of musicians old enough to be pa or grandpa. While Mellencamp did his harrowing farm tragedy saga, “Rain on the Scarecrow,” even a young stadium security guard sang along, with his back to the stage and eyes diligently scanning the crowd.

Yes, there’d been plenty of tailgating beforehand, which kept attendance at a slow trickle-in though the early afternoon acts like Randy Rogers, Robert Francis, Jamey Johnson and the Blackwood Quartet. Among those, the act too many missed was Johnson, whose Moses beard and hair hang as long as his foghorn voice resounds deep, seeping into the darkest caverns of the heart, with deftly self-deprecating storytelling. His Depression-survivor song “In Color” deserves to be a widely-covered classic, though I doubt anyone could deliver such craggy authenticity as does Johnson.

Though now middle-aged thick and lovable-attire slob, Mellencamp can still ignite and work a crowd – into what Quakers call (not so) gentle persuasion: At one point he asked all of the cell-phone toting fans to immediately call a friend to “thank them for supporting Farm Aid.”

He even grabbed one fan’s phone and thanked a doubtlessly startled “Steve,” on the call’s receiving end.

Farm Aid co-founder John Mellencamp at Farm Aid 25. Courtesy milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

By then, the crowd seemed primed to attack the back forty, after a bracing but short set from Milwaukee’s own seminal roots rockers The Bo Deans, and a beguiling one from Philadelphia folk-soul troubadour Amos Lee, and another by the appealingly high-energy alt-roots rock Band of Horses, who are galloping up record charts these days.

Milwaukee’s own, The Bodeans, at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

Yet the crowd perked up for the almost effortless charm of two young pop music phenoms, Norah Jones and Jason Mraz. The line-up’s only female act, Texas-raised singer-songwriter-pianist-guitarist Jones recently relocated to New York. She captivated with her sophisticated new look – punky page boy and fishnet stockings — and fluent eclectic flair, shifting from her sultry sweetheart mega hit “Come Away With Me” to Johnny Cash’s honk-tony beer lament “Cry, Cry, Cry” to her own increasingly dark and thoughtful originals.

Norah Jones at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel

By contrast, Mraz seems like his own brand of endless sunshine with a voice as boyish as Paul Simon’s but stadium-impact strong and with songs carrying a high melodic calorie count. He woos the listener like the boy Romeo next door, or the strapping young farmer down the road. He actually runs an avocado farm in California when not doing music or surfing. Too cool.

Between the Jones and Mraz sets, Jeff Tweedy — leader of the immensely popular and arty roots-rock band Wilco – delivered a curiously tepid solo set that suggested his true gifts are as a musical conceptualist/bandleader/songwriter.

You get the stylistic gist here — Farm Aid welcomes virtually all American music genres under its big farmer’s market tent. And to wit, many fans also partook of the outdoor Homegrown Market and chatted with farmers about their issues and tasty wares even through cold wind and some rain. That interaction is part of the important underlying purposes of this musical harvest.

Back inside, time-conscious bandleaders too infrequently introduced their faithful band members. But the show rarely dragged with Willie Nelson stepping in to add his “Texas herb” aroma to the sets of Jones and Lee, and with contemporary country star Kenny Chesney showing gleaming vocal pipes and sporting a New Orleans Saints cap instead of the expected ten-gallon hat.

And few complained about nepotism when Willie’s son Lukas Nelson scored a set, because he’s inherited the old man’s showmanship. No knockoff though, the younger Nelson’s style strives to virtually channel the ghost of short-lived blues rock guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan. His guitar-string biting impressed some, but made you wonder if Willie feeds the kid enough.

Dave Matthews, the Gen-X rock star who joined the Farm Aid board of directors in 2001 and is the fourth perennial headliner, started his duo set with guitar ace Tim Reynolds by unleashing Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which felt like a man reliving the song’s wild tale as a primal-scream dream. His intensity cranked the crowd up to a level that Mellencamp rode masterfully.

Yet, for this baby boomer, and surely many others, this all climaxed with Young’s set. He remains an uncanny blend of wizardly yet unpretentious song-storyteller/melody-spinner prone to deft feedback theatrics and spontaneous speeches. Few seem to care about farmers as much as he does. But an eloquent riff on being an aware consumer for small farm support –“read the label” is his mantra – immediately lost any hint of browbeating when Young launched into “Long May Young Run.” This is a gloriously warm-hearted salutation to a friend he last saw alive “in Blind River in 1962.” The winsome melody and sentiment seem to suggest – with a new line crucially added to the original lyrics – that the never-forgotten friend was a farmer.

Farm Aid co-founder Neil Young at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel 

Young’s always had a quirky a genius for balancing his fiery social consciousness with mournful, humane soul. Accompanied only by his own scruffy-scarecrow presence and solitary electric guitar, Young’s “Ohio” still seared into memories of the Vietnam war-era killing of four Kent State University student protesters by National Guard members.

Of course, Farm Aid always provides the salve of Willie Nelson to top off even reopened psychic wounds, and to send everyone home buzzed on musical vibe. That’s from toking up on ol’ Willie, twirling his smoky, behind-the-beat phrasing around another blessedly-crafted song. His concert-closing set ranged from tough blues-rock led by son Lukas, to reggae rhythms, to “one for Waylon.” On cue, all the headliners joined onstage to sing “Good-Hearted Woman,” a comfortable-as-worn-blue-jeans song by Nelson’s fellow progressive-country “outlaw,” the late, great Waylon Jennings.

Concert epics like this don’t get much more golden.

It was well after 11 p.m. and co-sponsor Direct TV had been telecasting the concert since Mraz’s set at 5, so one hoped the ideals and passion of this extraordinarily well-conceived and executed effort may spread like the winds of change, rather than like locusts or chemical farming-borne disease.

Time will tell. Meanwhile, long may Farm Aid run.

_______________

This review was originally published in YourNews.com, Madison edition

For videos about the Milwaukee event, go to www.farmaid.org.)

Madison’s 40th annual Atwood Fest had plenty to fill up the senses, the mind, and the spirit

 

Lead singer Jeff Taylor and The Altered Five Blues Band were among the big crowd-pleasers at the 40th Annual Atwood Fest on Madison’s east side last weekend. All photos by Kevin Lynch

I had a fabulous sun-soaked weekend at the 40th annual Atwood Fest, on Madison’s east side. This is the best street festival I have attended in some time. For starters, Madison lived up to its colorful and left-leaning reputation, something you could see, hear and smell — in the steady scent of burning cannabis drifting into our nostrils among a group of people gathered under some shade trees listening to Steely Dane, on Sunday.

However I didn’t quite see everything I might have, to get the full experience.

I had my head down and was wearing my broad-brimmed sun hat as I riffled through used CDs at the WORT radio station booth. I heard my girlfriend Ann say, “Kevin, you just missed a topless woman, who walked right by.”

That did get me to look up, long enough to catch what is called “the philosopher’s view” of a striking woman (which Ann assured me she was), receding into the distance. But from 20 feet away I saw her liberally tattooed back, and attached to her (covered) derrière was a sign that read “MY BODY, MY CHOICE.”

She was clearly and boldly making a protest statement about the recent Supreme Court overturning of Roe versus Wade which had guaranteed women legal abortions since the mid-1970s. It was a vivid bit of symbolism, signifying her gender and sexuality and the inherent motherhood of the female bosom. (Of course me, the inveterate music album browser, had to miss the full impact). Still I give the woman credit and for her courage and commitment to, um, raising consciousness, as well as eyebrows.

Elsewhere, less, provocatively, we saw several senior women walking around with blue hair. One younger woman had several piercings adorning every facial orifice, and created a few new orifices. It’s really something to see women of a several feminist generations in full force. And of course, tattoos advertised individuality (or now-dated trendiness?) galore, artfully bespeckling both genders

There was also plenty of delicious food, but I’m here to offer you a photo essay on the music. I was drawn back to the city I worked and lived in for nearly 20 years after marvelous day at the Madison Jazz Festival, on the Wisconsin Union Terrace beside Lake Mendota, earlier this summer.

For us, the music started relatively low-key with Inside Pocket, a jazz quartet leaning toward contemporary and post-bop styles with several shapely compositions by guitarist composer Pat Metheny, even though there’s no guitarist in this group. However the group’s tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin pulled us into a fine afternoon mood with, slightly brooding yet lyrical playing somewhat reminiscent of the cool-to-bop school of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon.

Tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin of the jazz quartet Inside Pocket eased us into the stimulating atmosphere of Atwood Fest Saturday afternoon. 

The next group we heard was actually playing their debut gig. Called with droll, non-P.C. panache, Lawnmower, it’s led my a fascinating and accomplished guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude. A UW Madison music department lecturer, Patenaude has performed globally in a wide array of world music and American vernacular styles and contexts, including playing on recordings by Metheny and The Grateful Dead. Patenaude has played with most of the region’s top jazz musicians, including the award-winning Tony Castaneda’s Latin Jazz Sextet. I ran into Tony as he took in this sun-drenched set. Louka’s eclecticism is a tribute to both musicians’ open-minded voraciousness, given that what Tony, the master Latino conga-player, was listening to was something like bluegrass music. This group didn’t even have a percussionist.

Guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude leads his new progressive bluegrass group Lawnmower (above L-R: Shauncey Ali, fiddle; Patenaude, guitar, Dave Havas, bass; Aaron Nolan guitar; and Isaac DeBroux-Slone, mandolin) and (below) takes a solo accompanied by bassist Havas.

Louka’s band had the peculiar soulfulness of bluegrass mixed with sophisticated string-playing interplay, by turns lilting and rhythmically charged. As Castaneda said to me, “call it progressive bluegrass.” Fair enough. They performed mostly original songs by Patenaude, who’s worth checking out on his most recent album of mostly originals under his own name, titled Testing Your Patience.  However, he did end the set with an exemplary version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” The album includes Louka doing a sardonically laconic rendition of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Annotator Joy Dragland calls the album Louka’s “fever dream.”

Tony Castaneda split to check out the New Orleans band Sam Price and The True Believers at another stage, understandably because, he said the group’s percussionist was borrowing Tony’s conga drum. Price’s band was next on my list of “must hear” bands and they hardly disappointed. This was the most collectively high-energy group I saw that weekend with a swampy, funk style reminiscent of Little Feat, replete with slickly woozy organ playing, and a vibe both jittery and jumping. It also included a feisty, bouncy female singer and Price, a leather-lunged singer and bassist. They spilled over the whole street of Atwood with an infectiously greasy, gumbo boil.

Now we be dancing despite ourselves, lubed a bit, in my case, by a sudsy glass of Oktoberfest beer.

Sam Price, and The True Believers, straight from New Orleans, rock and boogie the Heritage Stage at the top of Atwood Fest, in it’s 40th year.

We then moved to the Clyde Stubblefield Stage to catch The Altered Five Blues Band, from Milwaukee. the band sure plays like it’s altered, in the best sense, probably with some of “Milwaukee’s finest.” Lead guitarist Jeff Schroedl was ripping off a searing solo just as we walked up, as the whole band doled out heaping helpings of steamy electric Chicago-style blues, interspersed with the hard rock edge that blues-style helped infuse the venerable vernacular with.

Lead singer Jeff Taylor rides the power as Brew City’s Altered Five Blues Band fills it up with contemporary Chicago-style blues, with a full Milwaukee head. 

Rotund but rollin’ and tumblin’ lead singer Jeff Taylor may be “a heart attack waiting to happen” as retired NP Ann commented. But on this waning afternoon, he belted out the good gooey blue stuff with gusto, and a stentorian vocal heartiness recalling B.B. King. You can see and hear why this band as won awards, including current nominations from The Blues Foundation, for best contemporary blues album, Holler If You Hear Me, and the title song for “best song.”

But this afternoon, with beer in hand, I felt like the good-time strut of the band’s “Great Minds Drink Alike” :

After this set, gal pal Ann was running out of gas a bit, and my cup was drained, so we exited despite more good music to be had.

We planned to be back right when everything kicked off on Sunday with Steely Dane.

***

It was 12 noon when some folks are still in church, but the crowd gathered at the Clyde Stubblefield Stage ended up attending their own revival meeting. The resurrection is the music of Steely Dan. I’m normally not inclined to indulge much in cover bands. But I’d heard Steely Dane live previously and, frankly, they’re a gas. This band’s nominal wordplay conveys that it’s band members all reside in Dane County, the surrounding region of the one-of-a-kind capital city that is sometimes referred to as “sixty-four square miles surrounded by reality.” The way this world is right now, I was hungry for the hip escapism of those 64 squares, as epitomized by Steely Dane.

It’s a 13 to 15 member band, with four horn players, three female backup singers, and two keyboard players along with two guitarists, bass, percussion, and drums. Three members share lead vocals, striving to approximate Donald Fagen’s raring, chameleon-cobra singing. That fulsome force provides the pulsing flexibility of extremely dynamic musical muscles, which makes Steely Dan’s music so intoxicating and almost good buddy-like in it’s catchiness.

Steely Dane horn section (top): (L-R) Al Falaschi, Jim Doherty and Courtney Larsen, with keyboardist-musical director Dave Stoler. Another SD personnel segment (above) includes (L-R) guitarist-vocalist Jay Moran, bassist Phil Lyons, singer-keyboardist-co-leader Dave Adler, and background singers Megan Moran and Lo Marie.

So the effect was that this big joyous big crowd were SD true believers who knew many of the lyrics they sang along with, not unlike biblical verses duly memorized. Except wafting herb, as mentioned, is the substitute for incense. And Steely Dan is as secular as music gets. Steely Dan’s resident genius Donald Fagen crafted songs about love, loss and “the royal scam,” with a variety of intriguingly romantic, roguish and eccentric characters, and even sweeps us back to high school days without seeming corny or trite.

Steely Dane’s frontman Dave Adler’s evident Donald Fagen wannabe-ism has morphed, with diligent practice and zeal, into a Fagen might-as-well-be-ism. As gal pal Ann Peterson commented during the band’s exuberant 90-minute (without a break) set, “If you close your eyes, you can easily imagine that it’s Steely Dan.”

If that sounds like a perfectly ingenuous critical comment, it’s also spot on. This band has taken in, mastered and absorbed what sounds like most of Steely Dan’s repertoire, and they’ve got it down cold, that is to say, cool, but also quite hot, and utterly convincing.

The co-founder of the band, along with Adler, is the accomplished and respected Madison jazz pianist Dave Stoler.  And what a contrast in stage presences. Dave Adler bounces around, flailing limbs like Gumby on steroids. He sings with a kind of please-love-me-to-death ardency. You get the feeling he’d perform ’till he woke up the moon and, remember, this was noon.

By contrast, band co-founder Dave Stoler, studious and nearly immobile, is a Buddha with dancing fingers, yet absorbed in awareness of the musical whole, given that he does the arranging for this big ensemble. He’s previously fronted a full jazz orchestra project. To intro one song, Stoler also delivered an cappella piano solo brimming with extended chords and slowly spiraling substitutions.  

Guitarist Jay Moran does his best to muster the bite of Walter Becker’s guitar and ably handles some of the vocals. None of the lead singers quite matches Fagen’s elastic, gut-to-the tongue sass.

But the Dane ensemble is so strong, supple and committed to this material, and with gospel-like call and responses, it plunges into the memory and heart, and mainlines Steely Dan’s “when-Josie-comes-home” nostalgia amid sardonic philosophizing.

Here’s saxophonist-vocalist Al Falaschi, Adler and Moran highlighted in a goes-down-so-easy version of “Do It Again,” recorded at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee.

Similarly, In this band’s hands, “Aja” still unfolds as a gorgeous little suite, that breathes and arches its back like a big ol’ tiger. The “up on the hill” refrain has strong spiritual overtones, but mainly about social acceptance, and consolidation. “When all my dime dancing is through, I’ll run to you.”

. Tenor saxophonist Falaschi did a reasonable, though hardly imitative, Wayne Shorter solo. And drummer Joey Banks rippled through the long, polyrhythmic “Aja” outro made famous by “Bad” Steve Gadd.

By contrast, “Reeling in the Years” allowed listeners to dance way out on the memory line, with all the euphoria that caught everybody’s ear when Dan first hit the charts. The Dan-by-way-of-Dane waves of slithering funk is too delicious to deny, and you sense this is as good as it’ll get – especially given that the real Steely Dan rarely toured live, being largely a recording studio creature, as gleamingly brilliant and contagious as those got with hip, R&B-jazzy song jammin’. 1

During a short stint in the 1970s, I worked at the North Shore Milwaukee audio store Sound Stage, and SD’s masterpiece album Aja, was our favorite demo record, to show off the equipment. You see, the album’s production level, with Victor Feldman’s souped-up marimbas like tolling redwoods, is about as high as the music can get you. It felt about that way Sunday, as high noon unfolded into the after’s Mary Jane-filled glow.

_________

  1. Steely Dane has recently won “best cover band” awards from both Madison Area Music Awards and Madison Magazine.

 

 

James McMurtry’s synchronistic guitar playing is the yin to his songwriting yang

James McMurtry. Courtesy Texas Monthly

James McMurtry has embarked on his first tour in several years. He will perform solo in dates running through April, then continue with his band in May, on a tour running through the end of July.

Upper Midwest McMurtry dates include April 22 at Old Town School of Music, in Chicago, June 11 at the SPACE, in Evanston, June 12 at Shank Hall in Milwaukee (https://shankhall.com/), and June 14 at The Ark in Ann Arbor.

Here’s the full tour list: https://www.highroadtouring.com/artists/james-mcmurtry/itinerary/

 Imagining James McMurtry in his element: He squints hard, and sees humanity and the world with laser vision, in the cruel Texas-glare sun, amid imperious cactuses. Flies buzz like hungry little devils. James coughs in the dust, but a man knows what he’s gotta do. Especially if he’s as driven as he is. He could drive a cattle herd across that behemoth state, and beyond, like the one his father Larry McMurtry famously depicted in his famous novel Lonesome Dove.

But such epic drives are rare now, as cattle growing and marketing are bad for the planet. James knows this, even as he commemorates, partially in Spanish, a deceased cowboy friend and his tradition in his recent song “Vaquero.” So, he turns off his vintage Ford Falcon convertible, peers at the horizon, the hot wind rippling his long gray hair. He lifts his cowboy hat, wipes sweat off his grimy brow, then plops the hot hat right back on. Part of him wishes he has a horse raring to go, instead of a smelly old car. So, he reaches over to the passenger seat, unbuckles his 12-string Gibson acoustic guitar, climbs out, leans against the car, and starts up a big sky-type chordal pattern.

He sings, “No more buffalo…” This thought he seems to care about greatly, as metaphor and as reality. Why and how? The guitar has plenty to do with it.

James McMurtry at home: He ended another Livestream pandemic solo home concert recently with that song, set his guitar down and said “thank you” to the silent audience that can applaud only with Facebook comments. I think “No More Buffalo” is something of a signature song, and I think he feels that way, too. You could make an obvious case for “We Can’t Make It Here,” too, or perhaps “Just Us Kids,” or “Choctaw Bingo.” The majestically big-picture “Long Island Sound” and one troubled man’s stunningly confessional “Decent Man” are more recent candidates.

(As far as I know, McMurtry’s “Live with Restream” home solo concerts are only available on his Facebook page, which you can follow: https://www.facebook.com/watch/JamesMcMurtry/

But those songs are mostly anthemic, and clear hallmarks, whereas James is also an expert in understatement, of tracing the shadows of the underserved. Among his more indelible intimate American portraits is the stoic loser of “Rachel’s Song,” who might be quite typical of many contemporary divorced people, stumbling along spiritually on a deserted street. It’s telling that Jason Isbell, a younger talent of superlative songwriting skills, has covered this song, with tender insight.

As an American troubadour McMurtry rivals any we know today. But he’s also only the peculiar kind he’s capable of being. That happens to involve an atypical genius which has been insufficiently addressed to date, in its artistic fullness.

Indeed, the often-surly glory of his artistry is piling up just a bit: Not only have I not yet written about his latest album The Horses and the Hounds, but I’ve also come to realize that his fullest artistry doesn’t just lie squarely on his most salient talent, the lyric-endowed song.

McMurtry started playing guitar at age seven (first taught him by his mother, an English professor) but didn’t start writing songs until he was 18, he has said.

The stereotype is the gifted singer-songwriter as a type of literary whiz. We don’t associate their guitar-playing and songwriting skills as part of a shared prism of expression and narrative, especially coming out of the folk tradition, where a songwriter is expected to do little more than simply strum through simple chord changes.

James McMurtry performing “Down Across the Delaware.” Courtesy YouTube.

Today McMurtry seems, song after song, compelled to self-accompaniment as integral to his storytelling technique, like a sonic cinematographer, or musical dramatist. He’s never showy, yet the guitar can pull you into his distinctive musical world with a magnetic force and, when he’s playing 12-string, his rhythmic patterns and pulses sparkle with harmonic auras that can be stunning. His guitar blends rhythm playing, rich chording, and finger-style adornments. His digits tell their own story yet boost and entwine his songs, which explore a variety of cadences and moods, in well-observed and psychologically resonant narratives.

He admits he takes his sweet time writing songs. But performing his songs, with glimmering and chiaroscuroed backdrops, seems a weekly task of this troubadour, with his well-oiled work ethic. Witnessing that online has been a precious upshot of the COVID pandemic’s forced social distancing.

So, the realm of that interactive song-guitar dynamic is where we must assess McMurtry. He may be the greatest songwriter now working in his prime – one video-watcher, himself a songwriter, called him “The Dustbowl Dylan … and the best everyman songwriter alive.”

Yet McMurtry might also be our greatest singer-songwriter/self-accompanist, capable of extraordinary yins to his yangs. That’s why his assessment as an artist must be recalibrated. A comparable songwriter and more gifted singer, Willie Nelson, also is an extraordinary guitarist, but sort of when he wants to be – periodic fluent solos between verses on his battered old guitar named Trigger.

Another artist who comes to mind in comparison is Leo Kottke, but Kottke is known primarily as a virtuoso fingerstyle guitarist. If McMurtry set his mind to it, I think he could do a guitar-oriented set like Kottke does.

This has much to do with the virtuosity and artistry he has refined, especially over the last year and a half at his home. He has performed Livestream with skilled diligence each Wednesday and Sunday. This is a logical extension of his weekly, self-imposed Wednesday night gigs at Austin’s Continental Club, whenever he’s not touring. 1

This recalls somewhat our greatest living songwriter, Bob Dylan, because they both seem driven to constantly work or tour, Dylan especially at an advancing age. We should remember what Thomas Edison famously said: “Genius is two-percent inspiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration.”

***

I first became aware of the synchronicity of McMurtry’s guitar playing and song-craft when I got a 10-feet-away seat for a solo acoustic recital at Milwaukee’s Shank Hall in 2014. Here was my immediate response:

“Friends, it was Thursday at Shank Hall in Brew Town and James McMurtry was dealin’, alone, with nothin’ but a 12-string guitar. That surprisingly stacked the deck for a show that rated four aces, period. He’s so skilled – playing bass accompaniment to his typically deft figurations – that I never missed his band. At times, the 12-string’s shining harmonic resonances at a fast-chugging tempo sounded like a chrome-plated locomotive at full speed. Best 12-string playing this side of Leo Kottke.”

I’ve seen only brief video-response comments on McMurtry’s solo acoustic performances during the pandemic; we are more aware of his electric playing with his band. A singer-songwriter named Sean, the same person quoted about the “Dustbowl Dylan,” also comments: “Sometimes you can tell the road has worn him down a bit, but his guitar playing is always the driving force of his band. His electric sound is effortless, full, and he can create an amazing sustain.”

So, attention must be paid: McMurtry’s self-accompaniment has become even more deft, fluent, and effective as the driving force of his songs. It’s as if he insists on sustaining a strong or at least simpatico heartbeat for even his most diminished characters, like the nameless, quietly desperate person in “Cutter,” bereft yet clinging to better memories. The song – which also poignantly reflects the too-common gulf of understanding between even close friends – closes Complicated Game with stunning power.

I hope McMurtry considers shepherding and curating a dozen of the best solo acoustic songs he has Livestreamed in recent times for an album. Now that would be something, quiet but deeply resonant.

You see, I’m shifting gears: To fully contextualize my focus on his guitar-to-song-singing synchronicity, I need to delve properly into the depths of his song-writing prowess.

So, as I said, “No More Buffalo” (from the fatefully titled 1997 album It Had to Happen) is, too me, one of the great environmental protest songs we have. 2 It’s so good because it starts with a chest-filling chordal statement that portends something, in a G-D-A-G progression. The song sustains or suspends on that major key sequence until a few anguished B-flats, most tellingly on the phrase “I swear” on the late-in-the-song lyric: But man, they were here, they were here I swear. Yet, McMurtry sort of sidles up to that point, by telling a story of a group of graying guys who probably haven’t changed their ways in just about forever. But at least one of them remembers and feels something and sees how things have changed. So, the song’s narrator finally tunes into the problem. But see how the revelation sneaks up on him:

We headed South across those Colorado plains
Just as empty as the day
We looked around at all we saw

Remembered all we’d hoped to see
Looking out through the bugs on the windshield
Somebody said to me

(chorus) No more buffalo, blue skies or open road
No more rodeo, no more noise
Take this Cadillac, park it out in back
Mama’s calling, put away the toys

The narrator now remembers and believes, too – just maybe the noble, hulking giants are still out there. He continues until this interchange of voices:

I never thought they’d ever doubt my words
I guess they were just too tired to care
I’d point to the horizon, to the dust of the herds
Still hovering in the air
Somebody said it ain’t any such
Man you wish so hard you’re scaring me

‘Cause those are combines kicking up that dust
But you can see what you want to see
And go on chasing after what used to be there
Top that rise and face the pain

But man, they were here, they were here I swear
Not just these bleaching bones, stretching across the plain

Those anonymous “somebody saids” make the rhetoric work, persuasive without haranguing, or preaching. “Somebody” could be anyone, or his own subconscious and memory reflecting each other. So, we feel the loss, as if the hoary bison embodied something invaluable in life. Even the rodeo, the celebration of Wild West conquerors who helped desecrate the land and its creatures, and committed genocide of Native Americans – even the mano contra toro — has become passe.

And by the end, the title refrain, one more time, has gained momentum, a power you feel in your own bones. It’s like their car is speeding up, hurtling towards a horizon falling to the abyss of irrevocable passage. Since I heard it and it sunk in, I’ve never been able to think about the buffalo or the travesties and waste of The West without McMurtry’s song ringing in the back of my head.

This is a band performance of “No More Buffalo” but McMurtry, as usual on this song, plays acoustic guitar. Along with those chords, Daren Hess’s bass drum and tom toms open the song, resounding like cracks of revelation in a gorge of environmental ignorance. Then, listen to those drums, a brilliant stroke, rumble through the song, just like the tromping thunder of the great vanquished herds. This piece slays me every time, earning its emotional impact every step of the way. 2

***

Courtesy New West Records

This brings me to his latest album. The titular phrase, “the horses and the hounds,” recurs as several meanings. Ostensibly it seems to tell – as the wonderfully blue-tinged noir album cover does – of a working stiff who drives a horse-truck trailer. What other meaning? “The singer finally admits, “Still, I’m running from the horses and the hounds.” He’s running from horses?  These magnificent, larger-than-life creatures, often with very close relationships with humans – can occur in dreams, a phenomenon artistically acknowledged as early as in Henry Fuseli’s famous 1871 painting “The Nightmare.”

Henry Fuseli’s famous 1871 painting “The Nightmare.” Courtesy fineartamerica.com

As for the hounds: There’s always the mythical hellhounds that bluesman Robert Johnson endured, and maybe helped chase him to his early grave. They sure haunt his legacy and the blues tradition. It’s an enduring metaphor for psychological affliction or terror.

Hellhounds on the trail of blues legend Robert Johnson. Art print by Elena Barbieri. Courtesy INPRINT

McMurtry also often trades in the interface of hard-grit reality and troubled dreams or memories. He talks about one of the new album’s most substantial songs, “Decent Man,” a story that might give any man in this situation nightmares.

McMurtry reimagines a Wendell Berry short story, which derived from Woody Guthrie’s song “Tom Joad,” itself a musical portrait of the protagonist of novelist John Steinbeck’s Dustbowl tragedy The Grapes of Wrath.

The “decent man” is the guy the narrator kills with a .38 pistol. No less than his best friend. It’s unclear why he shot him, but he circles semi-coherently around his mental state:

If the truth be known, I wasn’t doing that well/ I wasn’t paying attention, I brought it on myself/ and I blamed it on the gods that seem to smile on everybody else/ I got so inside out, I didn’t know what was real.”

That sounds like what? Maybe like too-many men in tough life situations where a conflagration of circumstances put them in a paranoid or aggrieved state, and a gun is too easy to reach for, and to irrationally think it will solve a complicated problem. It usually makes thing worse, much worse. It’s an all-too American dilemma and tragedy, repeated with shocking, even numbing, frequency.

Listen: My fields are empty now/ my ground won’t take the plow./ It’s washed down to gravel and stones./ It’s only good for buryin’ bones. That is the song’s actual chorus, one of the most devastated choruses you’ll ever hear. It’s a murder ballad of uncommon ingenuity, yet understanding of common human foibles, and suffering. And loss. Most of all.

In McMurtry’s version of the story, the killer’s daughter, named Lola, visits him in jail. She still loves her dad, despite the horror of his deed, and that bothers the prisoner as much as the crime itself. His own daughter’s love throws this man off balance so that he must reconsider his still-fresh self-loathing. “I don’t know how she even stands to look on her daddy’s face,” McMurtry sings. There’s no better way to comment on this story than the songwriter’s summation: He was more than just a decent man/ best friend I ever had./ When you’re shooting at a coffee can/ a thirty-eight don’t kick that bad. / But it kicks right through my bones every second of every day/ clacking by like cobblestones under broken wheels.”

Even if he’s profoundly affected, in shock, he still doesn’t seem to know why he did it. Because life is too confusing or abject? Does that disquieting possibility offer any hope for absolution or healing?

It’s powerful stuff. How does Lola really feel? And the victim’s family? And “poor dad?” – The song strives for some empathy for him.

Laurence Fishburne played Socrates Fortlow in an HBO adaptation of a Walter Mosley novel. IMDb

The killer recalls Socrates Fortlow (pictured above), a fascinating murder/rape ex-convict created by novelist Walter Mosley who never understands the reasons for his crimes, yet becomes a street philosopher of redemptive power, while always remaining “at risk.”

McMurtry credits Horses producer Ross Hogarth who “probably got the best vocal performances I’ve ever done.” On “Blackberry Winter,” in his upper singing register, McMurtry is his most emotionally engaged.

A man looks back at the seeming end of his primary relationship, and having to refuse his woman, who apparently still has feelings for him, “to tell her no, to tell her no.” It’s a tough task to do at once, emotionally at least. And does he really need to? “Blackberry winter” is a Southern term for damaging early spring freezes, after blackberries have blossomed. Couldn’t he see if some berries – from the original branch their relationship grew upon – are still salvageable?

McMurtry is expert at painting pictures of troubled, just-barely-getting-by common folk, in the era of American democracy in peril. Or so it seems, with working folk still struggling while the rest of “the economy” – investors, Wall Street, big business, etc. – seems to flourish. Many of these working folk are now Trumpsters, sadly, because they had nowhere else to turn, feeling their dreams are threatened. So, they hang onto common biases of white fear or “supremacy,” as a psychological crutch holding up a nominal ideology.

Trump – a successful faux television demagogue to whom the Electoral College handed the keys to The Bully Pulpit – understood, voiced, and “validated” their grievances. The Democratic Party had forgotten about them a long time ago, as Thomas Frank argues cogently in “Listen, Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of The People?” So, the song’s emotional impact radiates like an extended electric shock, about a characteristic state of American being. It poses the implicit question: Do you know someone like this? Might one of these people be you?

What are we gonna do for these people? Will politicians ever address their concerns and suffering honestly, instead of only as an election ploy? Frank argues you won’t get it from the contemporary professional upscale liberal (think of Silicon Valley culture and comparable ones) where funding and values go to support entrepreneurship and “innovation” that does little for the plight or incomes of ordinary folk.

These may even be “innovative” ways to exploit them. Of the working class, these elevated folks think that, if you don’t have a college degree, it’s your fault, Frank explains. Even teachers, by their thinking, are suspect professionals, beneath their value system. The current Democratic party has shifted closer to addressing the huge lower end of the equality gap since Frank’s 2016 appraisal, but in 2022 President Biden hasn’t yet substantially addressed racial justice and other issues crucial to inequality, to bridge the political gap Democrats helped create for Trump to exploit and widen. Inflation and high gas prices don’t help, even if the latter helps the effort to protect Ukraine from Russian invasion.

The narrator of “Blackberry Winter” might be telling her “no” because he can’t afford to support her, or some other circumstance of a tough life, devalued and forsaken. McMurtry’s characters often live close to the edge, like so many Americans. “And tell you no,” isn’t delivered in a way suggesting any disdain, based on a contaminated relationship. In this vocal register he sounds a bit like Jackson Browne. 3 So there’s a plaintive weariness beneath his straightforward talk, which also conveys something palpable and spiritual, and common to humanity, like “everybody has holes to fill, and you know those holes are all that’s real,” as Townes Van Zandt. once sang.

McMurtry is akin to fellow Texas troubadour Van Zandt whom he’s covered him from time to time – he does covers very occasionally — including Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues” on his 1998 album Walk Between the Raindrops and on his live 2004 album Live in Aught Three. 4

In a 2019 interview, McMurtry commented on America’s current tribalism: “Everybody wants to feel a part of something. They are in a group thing. They don’t want to think individually. It’s easy to make money off of that. It’s not just American, it’s human. It’s always been like that…

“It’s hard-wired caveman stuff. We have to learn how to think our way around that. Basically, our minds will have to evolve faster than (our) simian brains are able to evolve on a cellular level. That hard wiring is going to stay in there unless we learn to short-circuit it in some way, or we are just going to perish.” 5

In solo renditions of his newest songs, his guitar-playing’s fluent sense of rhythmic propulsion and drama, and his quirkily apt harmonic changes – which sometimes recall those of Joni Mitchell – cast just the right tone, emotional grist, and gravitas. The Horses and the Hounds has plenty more character-packed scenarios, no more poignant than truck-driving “Jackie,” whose fate ambushes the listener with McMurtry’s matter-of-fact tone. And yet, there’s also the self-deprecating comic relief of “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call.” After doing “Decent Man” and “Jackie” consecutively on a Livestream, he peered at his setlist and muttered, “Well, I got a bunch a’ real downers in here this time. Break out the Prozac.” His speaking delivery is as dry as tumbleweed too old to tumble.

The Horses album, with old drumming mate Darren Hess and a bunch of studio aces, is a continuation of a major artist at the peak of his powers, who seems philosophically bittersweet, slyly heartfelt, and still cranky enough, and still comparatively obscure, given his talents. He’s capable of very catchy songs, but his ordinary-Joe voice always earns its emotional truths, and he’s no attention-seeking self-promoter, so he never compromises his art. In that way, he may be keeping himself close to the real people reflected in his characters.

His music is a vivid way to refocus reality to where our social responsibilities might best align. With “the people.” McMurtry’s seemingly forgotten folk dwell low in societal shadows, with some, in effect, face-down in American dirt, because you can’t get lower, without being buried alive.

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(Author’s note: This essay was submitted to nodepression.com, which didn’t accept it because, they said, “We don’t publish essays on individual artists.” Ironically, the first article they ever published of mine was also an essay of comparable length. Their editors have since changed.)

  1. I’m not a guitarist, so I won’t get gear-geeky here. But I’ll report that, on his Livestreams, McMurtry regularly alternates among four (or five) acoustic guitars: a 12-String Ovation, a 12-string Fender, a red 6-string Guild, and, I believe, a 6-string Fender. Sometimes he pulls out a big, dark brown 8-string baritone guitar, which he refers to as “The Beast.” In November, he used it to play the title song from The Horses and the Hounds. He seems to have slight preference for the 12-strings.
  2. Buffalo appear to be making a comeback. I’d like to think McMurtry’s song, released in 2007 made some difference in consciousness and action.
  3. “No More Buffalo” is also on the 2007 collection, James McMurtry, The Best of the Sugar Hill Years.
  4. Perhaps not coincidentally there’s an influence. McMurtry recorded most of the album at Jackson Browne’s Groovemasters Studio in Los Angeles.
  5. Caleb Horton, in a James McMurtry Primer blog, vividly explains the connection in the kinds of emotional impacts of their music: “The easiest way to explain it is that James McMurtry and Townes Van Zandt exist along a ten-beer continuum. McMurtry plays to that fourth beer, right before you decide to have six more, where you’re sitting down, and sadness somehow feels like the world’s only honest emotion. Van Zandt plays to beer number ten, where pharmacy vodka with a wolf on the label is in the cards and tomorrow doesn’t even exist because the sun’s down.” Horton continues. “Point is, I can only listen to Townes Van Zandt two or three times a year. The man’s music should come with a warning label…like they do with European cigarettes. James McMurtry is in the same tradition, but he opens the blinds in the morning. I can listen to him. And that’s how I recommend him to people.”  Caleb Horton, A James McMurtry Primer http://bitterempire.com/james-mcmurtry-primer/
  6. Mary Andrews, “McMurtry Remains the Harbinger of American Truth,” Glide Magazine https://glidemagazine.com/228503/james-mcmurtry-remains-the-harbinger-of-american-truth-interview/

 

 

 

 

 

 

NPR American Masters question: What single work of art changed your life?

This is the colorized cover of the Kindle edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” as illustrated by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 edition, but with the author’s name added. (see below) 
Well, I gotta right to sing the blues, Or to sing praises, like a fool, to the earthly heavens where art might come from. And if it is the blues, it’s the kind that inspires you rather than keeps your head just above water.
You see, my song sort of went on and on (by Facebook comment standards), spilling over the 12-bar blues form like water in a sinking ship. But the editors at PBS American Masters Facebook page didn’t jettison any of my load of responses to the provocative question: What single work of art changed your life?
They’ve received 247 responses and counting. Here’s my response. I couldn’t quite help myself. I have even expanded on it here, with a bit more text and imagery.
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As a long-time generalist arts journalist, I’ve encountered so much extraordinary art in all its forms. How to pick one? I might say seeing Picasso’s “Guernica,” but it was an oddly truncated experience, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed before I could see all of it. I’d literally been stopped in my tracks on the staircase for long minutes because the center of Guernica filled the doorway view at the top. Then the doors closed, as the museum was closing for the day. I didn’t have time to return before flying back home. The great work moved to Spain a short time later, in 1981. So, I live with a reproduction of it, and that oddly but profoundly unfulfilled experience. 1
Imagine seeing, through a doorway, the middle of this astonishing political mural by Picasso, being stopped in your tracks by it on a museum staircase — and then the gallery doors closing on you at 5 p.m. That’s my sadly truncated but unforgettable experience of seeing the mighty “Guernica.” Courtesy Magazine Artsper
“Guernica,” of course was named for the Spanish town bombed in 1937 by Nazi planes, complicit with Fascist dictator Franco  — the first act of modern war terrorism on a civilian population of nascent World War II.
***
And then, seeing Arshile Gorky’s often-gorgeous metamorphosis from surrealism to abstract-expressionism — closely reflecting my own artistic sensibilities — at the Guggenheim Museum of Art is another life-changing moment.
The plow and the song - Digital Remastered Edition Painting by Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky’s 1946 painting “The Plow and the Song,” (above) lyrically transmutes his memories of homeland Armenia to the modernist present. The memories were rooted in his long, desperate childhood escape, by foot, with his sister Vartoosh and mother, from the Armenian holocaust conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Their mother, Sushan der Marderosian pictured below — in this wrenchingly poignant Gorky painting from about 1926, with the artist at the age of their exodus — died of starvation in 1918. (Courtesy pixels.)
Pleased with my Milwaukee Journal review of the Guggenheim show, Gorky’s nephew Karlen Mooradian contacted me. I was fortunate enough to obtain an in-person interview with him and Gorky’s sister Vartoosh Adoian Mooradian (Gorky’s original name was Vosdanig Adoian) in Chicago, but I was never able to publish anything from the interview. I did glean great insight from Mooradian’s 1980 book The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky, about his artist uncle, who committed suicide in 1948. He profoundly influenced many abstract expressionists, none more than Willem de Kooning. 2
The Artist and His Mother, 1926 - 1936 - Arshile Gorky - WikiArt.org
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Then, music vibrates on and on in my life, where the single transforming moment could be the Butterfield Blues Band’s ground-breaking East-West album, or first hearing John Coltrane’s achingly eloquent and exalting A Love Supreme suite, or his searing Live at Birdland, and imaging being there, in that fire.
John Coltrane “Live at Birdland.” Courtesy deep groove mono
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Or, by contrast to such earnest passion, the lacerating sneer of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” which helped pinpoint the existential waywardness of the freedom my generation declared from bourgeois convention and responsibility. Or, by another contrast, Dylan’s affirmatively flashing “Chimes of Freedom,” poetry aflame in music
Or, hearing Beethoven or Mahler in fearless, heaving performances, in Milwaukee and Madison. Grammy-winning conductor John DeMain especially unlocked much of Mahler’s glorious might with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in a full Mahler symphonic cycle in the 1990s and 2000s.
In theater, a darkly, full-chested staging of Macbeth at American Platers Theater, and a thunderbolt-raging King Lear at UW-Milwaukee. So, yes, the commonality here seems an appetite for grand gestures, of many sorts.
***
That’s why I finally must land on the experience of reading Moby-Dick for the first time (as some readers of this blog might’ve guessed). I was already in my ‘40s and, knowing its reputation and having seen Huston’s movie version, I remained unprepared for how inexorably the book swept me away, even though many readers understandably turn back to the shore. And yet, there’s so much you’d miss. Even the cetology I gobbled up like so much krill going down a cavernous throat.
Yet the haunting had begun several decades earlier when I found a copy of the 1930 Random House edition which brought the book to widespread readership.
My plastic-covered copy of the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick, what I still believe is the definitive version of an illustrated edition of the book, with art by Rockwell Kent. Photo by Kevin Lynch
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The visual artist in me responded to this powerfully. I knew then, my day of reckoning with the book loomed somewhere in the future. There have been many illustrated editions of this book since, and some are steeped in their own fiery inspiration. But none so eloquently captures the spirit of the book as it manifest itself in the Depression era, as does that 1930 edition.
Rockwell Kent, in his way, approaches Melville’s genius in his 228 woodblock prints. The black and white Deco-influenced imagery is proto-noir, capturing the sense of lost-at-sea and impending doom and, in deft knife strokes, the essence of characters lurking inside their ravaged, or mortally infected, souls. 3
Infected by what? The blood-lust fervor of Ahab, akin to a demagogue manufacturing an enemy, in the whale that took his leg. The expansively stentorian Ahab, recalling Lear, captivates the whole crew in his questing rage — except for first mate Starbuck and, to a degree, Ishmael, who remains somewhat remote, and “aloft.”
Alas, Random House jumped on their perceived marketing coup with the new edition so strongly that they failed to put Melville’s name anywhere on the cover, only including “Illustrated by Rockwell Kent” on the spine. It was yet another of countless insults to the great and long-forsaken writer, right at the emergence of his genius to broader acceptance. The current Kindle version (at top), at least, corrects that “oversight” with the original cover (colorized though it is).
Captain Ahab — Rockwell Kent – Biblioklept
Here’s a brooding but burning portrait of Captain Ahab, by Rockwell Kent. 
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So, back to Melville’s text:
The extraordinarily antiphonal voices of Ishmael and Ahab echoed through my head and psyche, across the oceanic expanses of poetic writing, gritty details, and surprising humor, which might make some virtually sea-sick, but hang onto the horizon as the crow’s nest sways!
It was indeed postmodern in 1851, in how Melville strangely constructed it, and summed up his own creation as well as anyone: “It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.”
“Thar she blows!” from “Moby Dick,” 1930, illustrated by Kent. Courtesy “History of Art: Masterpieces of World Literature: Herman Melville.”
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Yet it persists, remaining afloat as a metaphor and allegory for America, in the tall, creaking bones of The Pequod, manned by people from many races. And what else did it all mean? Defying fate? Or God? Or nature? Or Nature? Hubris as delusion, or the destiny of grace embraced, one storyteller’s backward glance into timelessness?
Rockwell Kent Ishmael Going Abroad Giclee Art Print | Etsy
Here, Pequod first harpoonist Queequeg, who deeply befriends Ishmael early in the novel, remains vigilant for the White Whale, even while down in the forecastle where the crew bunks. Illustration by Kent. Courtesy Etsy.
From childhood, oceanic depths had always scared me. In time, Melville’s mounting whorl of words, and his own extraordinary life story, compelled me to begin writing a novel about its author.
These days, people critique the book’s scarcity of women characters. Yet, as Sascha Morrell comments. “On the other hand, the novel makes numerous appeals to the maternal forces of nature. It also breaks down gender norms and boundaries, from Ishmael’s surrender to Queequeg’s ‘bridegroom clasp,’ to Ahab’s boasting of his ‘queenly personality’ to the ambiguous mingling of ‘milk and sperm’ in the infamously erotic chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand.’”
Another she doesn’t mention is one of my favorite chapters, the stunning awe of gigantic maternal nursing in “The Grand Armada.” For that matter, tell (the late) Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a brilliantly concise and empathetic Melville biography, how much it lacks for a human female presence. Or Laurie Robertson-Lorant, author of a comprehensive Melville biography. Or Elizabeth Schultz, the doyenne of visual art about “The Great American Novel.”
Moby Dick breaches like a god reaching for the stars, (or to “kiss the sky,” as Jimi Hendrix would exult in the 1960s). in this image by Kent from 1930.
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On the other hand, one could quote any number of astute observers on the book’s magnificence: Hardwick, F. O. Matthiessen, Harold Bloom, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, and Lewis Mumford all come to mind, worth looking up. Most recently, I revisited D.H. Lawrence on Moby-Dick and he says: “A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.” Read his essay in Studies in Classic American Literature for more. 4
So, living on the Heartland edge of a Great Lake, I remain haunted by this and more, by Saint Elmo’s Fire and the diabolical blood ritual, by Pip seeing God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, by the Catskill Eagle emerging from the woe that is madness, by Ahab’s burning obsession, by the massive will and long, mysterious memory – is it consciousness? — of the white whale and, of course, by Queequeg’s coffin, a miraculous, sacred offering from a brotherly friend, somehow rising, just free of the hellish vortex.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf…”
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1 Picasso was adamant that Guernica remain at the Met until Spain re-established a democratic republic. It would not be until 1981, after both the artist’s and Franco’s deaths, that Spanish negotiators were finally able to bring the mural home.
2 Mooradian’s The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky includes 70 illustrations, a Q& A interview with Willem DeKooning about Gorky, as well as interviews with Alexander Calder, Lee Krasner Pollock, Malcolm Cowley, Reuben Nakian, Barnett Newman, Peter Blume, Meyer Schapiro, Saul Steinberg and other important figures in modern art and criticism.
3 The edition of Moby-Dick with Kent’s illustrations remains in print. I recommend the version with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, published by The Modern Library, in paperback 2000.
4. Studies in Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence, Penguin, 1923, 1977, 159

Musing about Michael (Bloomfield), gone too soon, like so many

I’m in a reflective mood and just ran across my favorite photograph of the tragic guitar great Michael Bloomfield, a man who’s always spoken to me for various reasons. Well, this photo is a close number one ahead of the famous shot (below) of Bloomfield playing and jivin’ with Bob Dylan when he infamously went electric at The Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  Bloomfield and Dylan cranked up the electric venom on “Maggie’s Farm” and, after that shock treatment, folk music was never the same again. A hoary but sometimes beautiful new creature was born: folk-rock.

(Musicians left to right) Michael Bloomfield, Sam Lay, Jerome Arnold, Bob Dylan. Pinterest

As for the revealing and, for me. rather moving Jim Marshall photo at top, it was taken at the famous Super Session recording with bassist Harvey Brooks affectionately needling Michael.

Bloomfield’s utterly chilled, prone position speaks volumes about the man: enduring extreme, chronic insomnia and drug addiction in the making. It also speaks to the man’s creativity and profound love for the music, especially the blues.

I would think Michael Bloomfield – the Jewish boy from Chicago, as much as any white man – bled blue.

The story continues to unfold: Michael lies amid the maze of wires, with a faraway gaze, a cigarette put out, or simply dropped, in the pool of spilled coffee on the floor. What are his eyes fixed on? What sort of vision hovers, almost taunting him with its distant guitar utopia? It would be fascinating to hear what he was actually playing at that moment, and what those phrases had to say. The man was clearly suffering, but persevering, for the time being, channeling his pain into the music, transforming it into something vibrant and redemptive, the essence of the blues.

Bloomfield played as well as he ever has that day, but could not even complete a whole recording session. Not long after this photo was shot, he informed singer-organist Al Kooper that he couldn’t continue, and Stephen Stills had to be called, finish what would become side two of Super Session.

It’s worth noting why this was to be called Super Session. Kooper, Bloomfield and Brooks had all achieved fame by recording Bob Dylan”s Highway 61 Revisited album, and the song that carved a mountain in the middle of the highway of rock music, called “Like a Rollling Stone.”

Soon afterward, Bloomfield became a freshly-crowned guitar god with the Butterfield Blues Band, which I’ll get to shortly. Although he started with Dylan and Butterfield playing the edgier Fender telecaster guitar (see photo with Dylan) it was with Les Paul’s Gibson guitar that Bloomfield found his true voice, in what he himself termed “sweet blues,” the sound for which you wanted most to be known. A biographical film is titled Sweet Blues: A Film About Michael Bloomfield. Kooper had formed pioneering jazz-rock bands, The Blues Project and Blood, Sweat and Tears, though he left the latter group early on.

The Les Paul guitar’s comparatively clean, singing tone replicated somewhat that of Bloomfield’s idol, B.B. King, who played a different sort of Gibson guitar. Waukeshan Les Paul’s gorgeously-sculpted physical creation allowed for a sonic vividness that captivated most leading rock guitarists at the time, who could all be seen playing the Les Paul shortly after Bloomfield took it up.

Another favorite Bloomfield shot reveals the man’s brilliant blues passion, at a rock fest with the Electric Flag in Santa Rosa, California.

The superbly produced Super Session is a great example of the guitar’s voice in the extraordinarily simpatico hands of Bloomfield.

How good was Bloomfield? Bob Dylan called him the best guitarist he’d ever hear. Or let’s hear Miles Davis, in his float-like-a-butterfly, sting-like-a-bee bluntness: “You could put Michael Bloomfield with James Brown and he’d be a motherfucker.”

To answer more personally, I now must refer backwards, to what would become his career masterpiece, the long instrumental piece “East-West,” which Bloomfield composed in 1966, as the title tune of the Butterfield Blues Band’s second album.

I have discussed the tune in a previous blog about the anthology box set Michael Bloomfield: From the Heart to the Head to the Hand. But what I wanted to say now, in light of the photograph above, is that he may have realized that “East-West,” composed while he was still in his 20s, was the pinnacle of his career. He would go on to play plenty, including Super Session, and great live follow-up albums for Columbia Records with Kooper, Taj Mahal and others.

He then formed the jazz-rock-R&B band The Electric Flag, but he was poorly suited as a long-term bandleader. So he embarked on a substantial solo career, as a scholarly maven of blues, of virtually all stripes. But because he intuitively fled from the personal spotlight like a heart-of-gold blues vampire (ergo the frequent nocturnal existence?),  he remains underappreciated to this day.

But the masterful blend of Ravi Shankar’s Eastern classical music, rock and John Coltrane’s modal music that became “East-West” also reveals something of the man in the photo above. The composition was famously created in a sleepless all-night jam and composing session, and one can imagine Bloomfield, in the wee hours, on the floor with his Les Paul again. Something mysterious arose that night. I believe Elvin Bishop, who brilliantly shares lead guitar duties on the piece, in a much grittier style, has related how the piece welled up out of Michael as well as becoming a courageous labor of stylistic synthesis:

“We listened to Ravi Shankar and Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Everything, you know? So yeah, it was cool,” Bishop recalled.

“But I’ll tell you the honest truth: the only person in the band who had any kind of clue about Indian music was Bloomfield, and his knowledge was …you know, you don’t really get into Indian music; it takes years and years. But the groove of the thing was based on a common blues thing in Chicago. A lot of times there would be a little revue happening, with a basic band and two or three different front guys; one of them would have a good name. And there was always what they called a “shake dancer,” a girl doing exotic dancing somewhere in the mix. The groove that starts out ‘East-West’ came from that. They would play an ‘exotic’ groove, something similar to ‘Caravan.” 1

For its diverse and unassuming roots, the piece is superbly realized as an extended composition. At times, it blazes like a house of blues afire, dueling with sun gods. Yet what always gets me is the quiet passages of the piece, which is miked so closely by producer Paul Rothschild that you can almost hear hear Bloomfield breathe, as he’s hunched over his Les Paul, in his typical manner. He played with tenderness, a balance of reverence and abandon, and assurance in the face of his personal abyss, and the sunburst of musical possibilities.

He had unlocked the doors of perception, between two great cultural traditions, and turned vernacular musics into high, revelatory art. “East-West” influenced countless musicians, and the nether blooming directions of creative popular music. Contextualized further, there had been no instrumental works as ambitious as this in American vernacular music in 1966. Few comparable works since have been as artistically successful.

Here it is. I recommend a hearty volume to get the full impact of the music’s wide dynamic range:

(L-R) Bassist Harvey Brooks, guitarist-singer-bandleader Michael Bloomfield, and singer Nick Gravenites of the newly-formed Electric Flag, probably shortly before they performed at the iconic Monterey Pop Festival in 1966. Facebook: Not Necessarily Stoned, but Beautiful: Hippies of the 60s and Beyond

I also just came across a third photo, which I decided to include because it is perhaps more upbeat, yet still complex. It shows Bloomfield with Brooks and singer-songwriter Nick Gravenites (who is credited with co-composing “East-West.”), about the time they had formed The Electric Flag, following all the music previously discussed. It was a marvelous group, bursting with grimy soul and ingenious jazzy finesse, but all too-short-lived. You can see the weight of life bearing down on Bloomfield, as a still-young man in his 30s. He was far from finished, but perhaps his fate was sealed.

He died in in his car, alone on a San Francisco street, of a drug overdose at age 37.

“Heroin, be the death of me.” — Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground

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  1. Elvin Bishop: Still Struttin’ His Stuff at 78 (part 2 of 2)