Historian Timothy Snyder reveals the moment’s urgency pending a meeting in Munich on the Ukraine-Russian War

Ukranian soldiers disembark from a tank. Kyodo News

Timothy Snyder’s historically-informed essay is easily the most insightful writing I’ve read on the political and World War implications for appeasement of Russia, which Trump is moving heedlessly towards. Appeasement of Germany in Czechoslovakia in 1938 led to World War II. Please read this to gain understanding of where we’re now situated. Then perhaps contact one of your representatives to help send a message, at the very least.

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/appeasement-at-munich?r=5n8ot&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Russia is not America’s ally. Trump and Putin in Helsinki in 2018. Brookings Institute.

Ahoy! Present Music does “Moby Dick,” as a new silent film, with live music

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

A new silent film by Wu Tsang, accompanied live by Present Music’s ensemble.

Orchestral Music composed by Caroline Shaw, Andrew Yee and Asma Maroof

***

A silent film version of Moby-Dick, accompanied by a crew of live musicians “on the deck” of the theater.

The notion intrigues and evokes…One imagines, in their questing voyage halfway around the globe, the sail-propelled whaling ship Pequod must’ve had vast stretches of yawning silence, though only from human speech.

Yet Herman Melville’s epic fictional trip, based his experience on such ships during the 19th century heyday of whaling, was surely accompanied by a layered array of sounds, musical in various ways and otherwise.

The rhythmic, surging crash and splash of the sea against the creaking wooden hull, echoing through the slats into the forecastle, the forward portion of the ship below deck where the the common crew members lived. In tight quarters with bunks against the inside hull, the rolling music of the ocean surely seeped deeply into many a seaman’s dreams. The rhythms likely reached back to Captain Ahab’s quarters.
Imagine also the ocean wind whistling and howling across the deck, and rippling and slapping powerfully against the mighty sails, causing further sequenced creaking from the wooden masts.

And, of course, sailors themelves were renowned for the sea chanteys they sang and played on fiddles and tambourines. A key character, the Black cabin boy Pip, is a tambourine player.

A silent “Moby-Dick” also recalls the first-ever film adptation of the great novel — the silent “The Sea Beast” from 1926, which starred John Barrymore as Ahab. It was remade into the first talkie version as Moby Dick in 1930, also starring Barrymore. The more definitive film version didn’t arrive until 1956 when the great director John Huston took on the project, casting Gregory Peck as Ahab, and Richard Basehart as Ishmael.

Without any modern special effects, much less digital magic, that film’s dramatic scenes of fighting the massive white sperm whale remain fairly breathtaking.

And though some questioned the casting of “good guy” Peck, he embodied the strange man’s stentorian eloquence and charisma, his stern fixation on the horizon of doomed destiny, an often-raging captain obsessed with revenge against the whale that tore off his leg and virtually demasted his manhood.

“Moby Dick; or, The Whale,’ a 2022 film by Wu Tsang, presented with a live orchestra. Photo by Diana Pfammatter, Courtesy Wu Tsang.

Silent, but not literally, is this new film by Wu Tsang (pictured at top), who is a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship winner. Along with the music, she takes the viewer by the hand in that her film does have a narrator, of sorts, though it’s not Ishmael, Melville’s narrator. Rather, in a twist, it is the book’s “sub-sub-librarian” who adapts a script from the book’s “extracts,” his  eccentrically encyclopedic array of quotations about whaling that prefaces the book’s famous opening line “Call me Ishmael.”

In an interview with Flash Art, Tsang describes this “librarian”: “In our version, he lives inside the belly of the whale, and he’s a kind of a Jonah-like god figure. He can provide these different layers of research and commentary that maybe the characters in the story are not able to reflect upon themselves.” 1

Tsang explained how her interest in the subject arose only a few years ago.

“A friend of ours, a film studies scholar named Laura Harris, was giving a talk about C. L. R. James’s book Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, which is a postcolonial reading of Moby-Dick.” 2

“Laura’s reading of Melville via James was an important opening that got me super excited to think about how something so old and historical can also have a very contemporary feeling to it. The book is also a prism through which to look at the present, even if it’s a very old story.”

Indeed, this writer is working on a novel about Melville, and in my extensive reading on the author and his work, James’ 1953 book remains among the most pertinent. One can argue the current crisis of leadership worldwide, where “strongman” leadership is ascendant, derives from the unregulated overabundance of capitalist economics. James, who identified as a Marxist, addressed this problem in drawing upon the clear significance of the whaling ship Pequod as a symbol for America and democracy under siege by an oppressive, self-interested leader.

Like America, Melville decribes an extremely diverse crew population, 44 men from the U.S. (including Native American), northern and southern Europe, South America, Africa, Polynesia, Iceland, the Azores, China, and India.

Monomaniacal Ahab convinces the crew to forsake its general mission of whaling, for the captain’s sole puropose — pursuing and killing Moby Dick. 3

Publicity for the new film indicates it addresses the issue of capitalism as well as colonialism.

Tsang comments in Flash Art: “Most modern forms of political leadership are not even straightforwardly about world domination or war, although we also experience that as well. It’s the drive to organize society in a capitalistic way, for an abstraction.”

In his book, James draws out the ways in which the Pequod’s crew and captain illustrate the structure of capitalism. The crew, James writes, is “living as the vast majority of human beings live . . . seeking to avoid pain and misery and struggling for happiness.”

Above them all sits Captain Ahab, the chief executive who wields centuries of accumulated knowledge and labor for his own gain, but who — not unlike Donald Trump and his circle — would blindly throw all of it into the abyss.

For James, the novel forces readers to consider whether this kind of civilization can even survive.

***

Tsang continues, “I also was looking at different research around the maritime history of that time period. There’s a book called The Many-Headed Hydra (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000) that, like C. L. R. James, focuses on the ‘motley crew’ of sailors, and how this social class of people were coming from all over the world. The book talks about how the ship was a place of mixing for cultural exchange, news and information, and even spreading revolution.”

A significant part of the cultural exchange ocurs at intimate and personal levels. Thus the new film will play up a subtext of the book, homosociality and homoeroticism.

It portrays Ishmael, the American novice sailor, and Queequeg, the Polynesian lead harpoonist, as lovers, and the ship’s crew as a community that has partly transcended gender and race. It features queer sex, costumes codesigned by Telfar Clemens and, of course, sailors grasping gelatinous whale blubber.

Melville’s book doesn’t specifically depict gay sex but it’s not difficult to imagine the goings on in a ship of men at sea for many months at a time. And in the book, Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed in a crowded New Bedford inn of necessity, yet “upon waking next daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” Ishmael relates. “You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Later in the chapter “A Bosom Friend,” Ishmael continues, “how it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often live and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cozy, loving pair.”

And then, “and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we…”

Although long-married and the father of four children, Melville was most likely a man of strong bisexual feelings, most markedly for his fellow contemporary author Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he ardently dedicates “Moby-Dick.”

In her comprehensive Melville: A Biography, Laurie Robertson-Lorant insightfully writes, “His essential bisexuality, more conscious and less guilt-ridden, thanks to his sojourn in the South Seas, than that of the many repressed Victorians, would enable him to envision social organizations that would liberate human personality, not constrain it; yet he, too, was a child of his culture and his time, just as deeply wounded in his maleness as women were in their femaleness by a patriarchal culture that repressed the feminine in man and the masculine in woman…” 4

And the very end of the grand tale — with the ship sunk in a whirlpool by Moby Dick, Ishmael is the lone survivor to tell his astonishing story — carries symbolic weight regarding the profound relationship between the two shipmates, bosom frends, singers of the sea’s engulfing song.

It is a sort of call and response, Queequeg, in his final breath, in effect calls up to his friend to take his air-filled coffin, which he requested built after a near-death experience. Ishmael responds, grabbing and embracing it to his bosom and surviving afloat for several days until another passing ship finds him.

As for the film’s music score performed live, I expect Present Music to execute it with vivid aplomb and style. There are good reasons they maintain an international reputation while remaining loyally-based in the town of their birth in 1982. Their Thanksgiving concert at St. John’s Cathedral was one of the most richly diverse and moving events I’ve experienced in some time.

_____________________

  1. Filmmaker/installation artist Wu Tsang’s full interview with Flash Art: https://flash—art.com/article/wu-tsang/
  2. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, c. 1953, reissued in 2001, University Press of New England, Dartmouth College (with an introduction by Donald Pease).
  3. In the early 1800s when “Moby-Dick” is set, whales were hunted primarily for their oil, which was used for lighting lamps, the main source of illumination before the invention of electric lights. Whale oil lamps were in use from the 1780s to around the 1860s. Over time many lamps were converted from whale oil to kerosene or camphine and eventually to electricity. Whale oil was extremely popular because it burned cleanly, brightly, and lasted longer than candles or other oil.
  4. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, Clarkson Potter, 109                  The “sojourn in the South Seas” the biographer references includes Melville’s time spent among the naturally unrepressed Typee people. That experience led to his first, and highly successful, semi-autobiographical book Typee, which included, for the time, quite sensual descriptions of the islanders, who often spent time in the nude.

The story of Bob Dylan’s “plugged-in” drummer Sam Lay and his flying drumstick

A broken drumstick from the drummer Sam Lay, part of the famous Butterfield Blues Band that helped Bob Dylan “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This was from a concert Lay played in the  early 1970s. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Here’s a postscript story to my blog review of the popular and worthy new Bob Dylan bio-movie, A Complete Unknown. The climax of the film — and a pivotal inflection point in pop music history — is when Dylan plugged in and “went electric.” This happened in the photos depicted below, when he played with the ground-breaking Butterfield Blues Band on Sunday, July 25, 1965. At the evening concert, he played “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm” and other now-iconic songs for the first time most had heard them played live.

This loud performance electrified many but shocked as many others, who valued the acoustic nature of traditional folk music. Folk singer and Dylan champion Pete Seeger amost cut the band’s power cord with an axe. The electric style also opened up Dylan’s poetic sensibility to the possibilities of amplified music and the rock and urban blues traditions.

In the second photo below, an animated Dylan, in the polka-dot shirt, rehearses for that evening show with Butterfield Band members, including (from left) guitarist Mike Bloomfield, (whom Dylan declared “the best guitarist he had ever heard”), drummer Sam Lay, bassist Jerome Arnold.The man in white shirt at center is a Newport production person.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Pictured are (L-R) bassist Jerome Arnold (partially hidden), guitarist Mike Bloomfield, drummer Sam Lay, vocalist and harp-player Butterfield and guitarist Elvin Bishop.

Bob Dylan rehearsing his own set at a sound check for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with members of the Butterfield Blues Band, including (L-R) Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, with Dylan at far right. 

Bloomfield and Dylan at the controversial evening concert at Newport in July 1965.

This is a well-recounted historic story which I revisit not because I was there, I wasn’t. How does it feel? as Dylan once asked. Well, sigh, I sure as hell wish I coulda been there. You can’t let others get your kicks for you… Well, yes, but sometimes that’s the best you can do. I was just graduating from elementary school that summer, in Milwaukee.

However, I happen to own a broken drumstuck tip from Sam Lay. At one point in a concert the powerful drummer broke his drumstick and the tip went twirling into the air and landed at my feet, perhaps 40 feet away, near the front of the crowd. It was a concert he played at the UW-Milwaukee, when I was a student there in the early 1970s. 1

It’s the most authentic piece of music memorabilia that I own and something I’ve always treasured for Lay’s place in music history. Besides their playing with Dylan, the Butterfield Band was the first integrated blues band on the scene, and they brought blues and rock to new creative heights. The band was deeply influential on rock, blues and some jazz musicians.

Award-winning writer/broadcaster Tom Reney explains: “Dylan had already ‘gone electric’ in January of ’65 when he jumped down the manhole of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and scored his first chart success. ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ recorded a month before Newport with Bloomfield playing the song’s signature leads and turn-arounds, was all over the radio by the festival weekend.

“In his book-length study, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus hears in Bloomfield’s playing something ‘triumphant, like a hawk in the sky…when, out of instinct, out of desire, out of a smile somewhere in his memory, Bloomfield finds the sound of a great whoosh, and for an instant a rising wind blows right through the rest of the music.’ ” 2

Sam Lay played a six-year stint with Muddy Waters, and also with other blues and rock ‘n’ roll greats including Howin’ Wolf, Magic Sam, Bo Diddley, Junior Wells and Little Walter. Among Lay’s many credits is playing on the Chess album Fathers and Sons, which documented a concert joining blues pioneers Waters and pianist Otis Spann with artistic offspring Paul Butterfield, Bloomfield, Lay, Buddy Miles and Donald “Duck” Dunn.

Bassist Dunn, by the way, was part of the real band in the celebrated comedy film, The Blues Brothers. Coincidentally this writer happened to appear driving my car in the background of a climactic scene in that movie, a story for another day.

____________

1 To clarify, Sam Lay was not with the Butterfield Band when I saw him at UWM. Lay was the bandleader. Unfortunately this event predated my beginnings as a music reporter, so I don’t recall his bandmates.

2 Tom Reney’s extended passage is from his excellent in-depth story on Dylan, Butterfield, and Bloomfield at the historic 1965 Newport Festival (from NPR and New England Public Media): https://www.nepm.org/jazz-world/2022-05-25/paul-butterfield-plugs-in-and-bob-dylan-follows-suit

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Hear Martin Luther King’s great speeches, or read and contemplate them

Decades ago, he had a grand dream for America, high in the sun of a mountaintop, an arc bending toward justice.

But it’s not lost in the ether of faded memory, like most dreams. Here’s one way to celebrate, comtemplate and be inspired to act from the wisdom, courage and vision of Martin Luther King Jr., on his holiday. (Apologies, this is a day late)

Fine new editions of many of his greatest speeches from HarperCollins and the King Library. You can get audio books or the texts.

I Have a Dream includes a foreward by Amanda Gorman, America’s youngest-ever poet laureate. Visit here: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/mlkjrlibrary

Nosferatu lives! A great new adaptation of the the vampire horror story is can’t-miss cinema

Nosferatu (2024) review: 'Full-blown Gothic melodrama'

Here’s an excellent review of a great new cinematic work of gothic art,  Nosferatu, which I saw and agree with the reviewer’s paise. Don’t miss it in a theater

:https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/robert-eggerss-nosferatu/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%201.7.2025&utm_term=daily

'Nosferatu' First Reactions

 

 

Trumpet whiz Brian Lynch multiplies his talents again, times seven

 

Album review: Brian Lynch — 7 x 7 by 7 (Hollistic MusicWorks)

Trumpeter Brian Lynch knows and cherishes jazz history and his jazz story. His achievement is “a place in a lineage,” he comments. He opens his latest album with a warm, lovingly stylish tribute to a formative experience, winning a college jazz contest with his Wisconsin Conservatory of Music ensemble.  “In the Riv” references the Buick Riviera driven by Tony King, the genius educator (I studied with him, too) who led Brian and company long ago to a Notre Dame music competition his ensemble won gloriously.

One of Brian’s first regular professional gigs was playing as a front line fill-in for touring arists at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. I once saw him do a gig at a Milwaukree bar with bop sax giant Sonn Stitt. He would return later join bands led by Horace Silver, Phil Woods, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

The two-time Grammy winner is internationally acclaimed, but another sign of his local loyalty was picking Milwaukee-born saxophonist Greg Handy who absolutely shines throughout.

Tenor saxophonist Craig Handy (left ) and leader Brian Lynch in the studio, recording Lynch’s new album, 7 x 7 by 7.

“High Point of the Hang” turns up the Latin beat, a Lynch specialty, and Handy’s solo deeply digs the pocket while telling a wonderful short-short story. Part of the triplicate concept (seven tunes by seven musicians) is all tunes running seven minutes flat, a feat of recording studio manipulation. This contributes to concise solos throughout. Yet tempos and moods shift tastily, until Lynch takes a deep conceptual and temporal breath with “Greeting on 87th Street,” an ode to his lover. Lynch unfurls ardent tenderness and Handy ups the passion quotient with his tenor’s fiery soulfulness. Only a tenor sax can blaze like this. The other hidden star is pianist Luis Perdomo, who especially delivers late: on “Greeting” his pealing arpeggios and clangorous yet tender chords make the lover believe him.

Then on the closer, “Finnegan’s Garden,” an ode to Lynch’s pet dog, the pianist’s thick chords feel like their stroking fur then a sinuous melody sings joyously, an alluring sequence where a dog might just howl along.

Get 7x7by7 at Amazon here.

____________

This review was oriiginally published in The Shepherd Express, Here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/7x7by7-by-brian-lynch/

You think you know Bob Dylan? A new film will give your head a spin

 

Timothy Chalamet as Bob Dylan. WSJ 

Film review: A Complete Unknown Directed by James Mangold

I had been moved to tears by movies plenty of times, but this time Bob Dylan made me wonder through a stethoscope to his heart. I’m not surprised – I like countless others have been moved and inspired by his work often. But here we get so many songs (though fragments) performed live superbly, all by the actors, often with Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Dylan’s itinerant lover and devotee. As Dylan, Timothy Chalamet molds a searingly tender, combustible chemistry with her. So, I felt generous. Chalamet’s winningly convincing interpretations stand up well to one’s innate memories of the material.

The cumulative effect on my psyche was magnified literally by being forced with incorrectly administered seat tickets to the theater’s first row, where the view proved almost painfully panoramic (but not too loud!). So, song piled upon song, 32 in total, triggers aplenty. That’s admitting plenty of subjectivity but it’s a primary effect of the film given that its subject is our greatest singer-bard, the perpetually scruffy Nobel laureate adored by cultured masses.

The film’s 73% Rotten Tomatoes score doesn’t surprise me, upon reflection. My biggest problem is feeling cheated by those countless flirtations with his greatness fully embodied in a very attractive actor. Imagine hearing one “live” chorus of Like a Rolling Stone in such a provocatively manipulative context. It’s only arguably the greatest rock

song of its times. Director James Mangold shoulda let loose at lease this once.

Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez) and Timothy Chalamet’s chemistry are hard to miss in “A Complete Unknown.” The New Yorker 

Also, it’s a fairly conventional if swiftly-crafted biopic — given what it jam-packs in — sticking to romantic conventions of artistic drama and relations. The title is apt in that a 19-year-old Minnesotan hits upon the Greenwich village folk scene like a hellion outlaw brandishing a six-string.

He hits women the same way: Barbaro and Elle Fanning’s bohemian artist Sylvie Russo (a renaming of the historic Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s Freewheeling album cover girl) are proverbial moths around the flickering flame, artistically distracted as he often was. And a fleeting Mavis Staples (Laura Kariuki) declares that she “loves him” upon just meeting him, a scene whose brevity insults that magnificently talented woman. On the other hand, Doe-eyed Fanning especially bleeds pure poignance as she eyes Dylan and Baez making musical love in public.

Elle Fanning and Timothy Chalamet mirror a famous album cover “Freewheeling Bob Dylan” in this scene from “A Complete Unkown.” WTYE 

The New York folk scene seems thirsty for a visionary artist — Edward Norton’s obsequious Pete Seeger is about six-proof banjo swizzle, a bit too hopped-up hootenanny, while Dylan is raw flesh and blood — an id, ego and alienated conscience in naked array, an incendiary harbinger and miked-up rebel perfectly attuned to the changin’ times. Pete knows this right away, too.

So does Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) in this telling. But the man in black reportedly was a back-stage run blocker for the diminutive Dylan through the hysteria and naysayers. And, of course, they sounded like long-lost brothers on “Girl from the North Country” on Nashville Skyline.

Remember this is a liberal interpretation of a man, a sped-up, almost shrink-wrapped narrative and I can’t argue with critics who assert it fails to capture “the real” Dylan, quintessentially elusive, better than any other such films.

His relationship with his dying idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is the dramatic linchpin and here Mangold almost overplays, letting things ride for several almost agonizing powerful encounters with the preternaturally eloquent activist Guthrie, reduced to muteness by Huntington’s disease.

“Hey, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song.” He and Seeger are transfixed by the “complete unknown” strumming at his bedside.

This is besides the fact the film really climaxes naturally when Dylan infamously ”goes electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and a lovingly aghast Seeger does his Paul Bunyan routine. The Butterfield Blues Band’s key role in that event also seems trimmed, at best. Yes, he’s probably a genius, but after all, Dylan “plugged in” alone isn’t much a of relevation.

The real Bob Dylan (right) with the Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival. New England Public Media

I may sound like I didn’t enjoy the film nearly as much as I did. I’m kind of picking over the stray seams. Nevertheless, I stand in awe of what Dylan accomplished in five years. Try reading his Joycean liner notes, or his novella Tarantula — during that period — to get a feel for how he emitted pure poetics, almost like his cold Minnesota breath.

These performances and songs transcend flaws and, I repeat, the film’s impact was stupendous for this “Dylanophile.”

Really? I not sure I think of myself quite in those terms, but soon I’ll be cueing up those early Columbia sides, bringing it all back home, the sure sign of a performer’s triumph.

 

Restless searcher Jamie Breiwick knows jazz history also shines forward

The Jamie Breiwick Quartet performs, “Spirits: Live at The Jazz Estate,” Thursday Dec. 5. 7 p.m. $10-$15.
Album released May 4, 2013. Recorded live at The Jazz Estate, Milwaukee, WI — Nov 30th, 2012
Tickets: 
Restless searcher Jamie Breiwick wisely knows jazz history also shines forward. He leads a hip-hop jazz group, KASE, but also another dedicated to bop genius Thelonious Monk’s repertoire. Another is the fluid “book” of innovative trumpeter/pioneering world musician Don Cherry.
Several other performance projects ebb and flow through his prolific talents, including recently the daring paired-solo-sets at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts with powerhouse East Coast trombonist Joe Fielder. He’s even written a tune that is a luminous soundtrack point for an adventure/thriller film, Deep Woods.
That suggests some of the range of his interests. But also how the horn player/conceptualist understands that American music’s lineage casts profoundly forward. Or, you might call it the ever-flowing nourishment of “culture currents,” especially those where vernaculars, musical and literary, “speak” to audiences of the past, present and future.
Reviving the album live — Breiwick’s artistic breakthrough project — will take place this Thursday, Dec. 5. It was recorded in this very hallowed Milwaukee jazz space, known for decades as the Jazz Estate (which can apparently now be rented out for musical events, though no longer a regular jazz joint).
I was honored to write the album liner notes (included a few paragraphs below) based on the recording. Spirits: Live at the Jazz Estate was the first jazz album I’ve heard to cover Taylor Swift, back in 2012, before she became a Beatle-esque four-artists-in-one phenomenon (comparable talent is another story).
There’s also a Death Cab for Cutie cover, as well as one by Wayne Shorter, jazz master of visionary obliquity who, after Monk, might be the most-covered modern jazz composer. Also you’ll find a tune by Breiwick’s Wisconsin-born contemporary, trumpeter Philip Dizak (a Milwaukeean now East Coast-based), plus originals by Breiwick and two band members.
The album closes perfectly with the incomparably timeless Duke Ellington, the apt and poetically titled “Sunset and the Mockingbird.”
Jamie Breiwick. Photo by Leonardo Moscaro
What’s more, Breiwick may be as gifted a graphic artist as he is a musician. His daringly stylish album covers, which boldly extend the Blue Note design tradition, adorn scores of albums and have been used by such notable jazz labels as Verve, Palmetto, Sunnyside, Candid and Mack Avenue.
In this case, he honored the club’s  legacy by originally displaying the red door entrance to The Estate on his original retro-Blue Note typeface cover (see below). Later he decided to capture the spirit of the album by re-imagining the cover into one of his most inspired visual creations (at top).
Here, Spirits soars into the stratosphere. The highly stylized title typeface, to me, suggests aeronautic striving, as a gaggle of birds frolic through the sky buoyed by a painterly cloud floor. The whole effect carries a faintly mystical aura — the space between humanity’s striving to transcend gravity and the bird’s natural gift to do so.
The new cover is so elegantly striking I might’ve found a different cast for the liner notes I wrote for the album. Kind of like, all his knowledge shines forward in time, as far as the light can reach.
The quartet Thursday is the same as the recording except, instead of Tony Barba, acclaimed Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi will perform (his own musical unearthing includes a recording reviving “The Music of Moondog”). Laurenzi has also recently toured with Grammy-winning indie-rock artist Bon Iver.
 There’s no guarantee though that, like most jazz musicians, Breiwick doesn’t stray from the implied script of the album’s tunes.
As it is, here are those original notes to give you a sense of the music to be played:
Jamie Breiwick – Spirits: Live at the Jazz Estate (BluJazz). 

Open the door on the album cover and you enter the Jazz Estate, a Milwaukee club that exemplifies a venue that nurtures modern straight-ahead jazz and makes money at it. This recording was made there one night, even if the program has the well-considered sense of purpose of a studio recording.

The melody of the opening “Gig Shirt” has a slightly skewed trumpet-saxophone harmony, recalling Ornette Coleman’s classic/radical quartet, which certainly influenced the album’s piano-less instrumentation. The theme bodes well for a musical departure, especially in its expansive rising last notes.

This journey’s departure mean’s arrival at many musical ports, including some adapted pop-rock. “I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, is a mournful yet oddly resolute melody. Breiwick’s muted trumpet sounds playful, as if he’s wooing a young woman with a joke. The rhythm players burble along in the same coy spirit, lifting the interpretation’s insouciance and the band ends with an exquisite exhalation.

“Safe and Sound,” by country-pop artist Taylor Swift, is another strong and pliable melody that tenor saxophonist Tony Barba builds from close, pinprick-sharp variations until he unfurls some Joe Henderson-like flag-waving. Breiwick’s own “Little Bill” is a funky, amiable tune that honors the memory of his Grandfather Bill and also refers to the cartoon of the same name, which Breiwick’s children love to watch. “Dad” adopts a slightly gruff tone and Barba is almost flippantly offhanded, befitting the sit-com mood.

This band has a svelte-but-sure grip on the harmonic and rhythmic tension of “Capricorn,” a Wayne Shorter theme that seems to move in two directions at once while flowing as a seamless melody — characteristic of Shorter’s ineffable compositional genius. If that sounds like a chops-busting practice-room etude, “Capricorn” rises like an indelibly hummable melody. The band swings hard out of the gate, as Barba plunges in with pithy Shorterisms — slanting shards, open-throated exhortations and quotes of the sorcerer-like theme. Breiwick shifts gears, then creeps into a softly growling, splattered tone that recalls Don Cherry. He’s clearly finding his own forward-pushing place in the trumpet tradition. Bassist Tim Ipsen steps in like a heady middleweight contender, with a sly combination of punchy harmonic intervals.

The aphoristically titled “Walk through Daydreams, Sleep through Nightmares” reflects Breiwick’s magnanimous depth as a member of the jazz community. He leads two jazz bands, including a more pop rock-oriented one called Choir Fight. He’s also an educator, organizer and all-around go-getter, having co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, a musician-run organization that promotes the local jazz scene, especially with an excellent website: mkejazzvision.org. This tune is by one of Breiwick’s own former students, Philip Dizack, a fast-rising young trumpeter of uncommon lyrical strength and compositional maturity. Breiwick acknowledges that crafting a songfully expressive melodic line is a primary concern of his. “I believe the album’s aesthetic intent points to a depth of feeling in the music,” he says. “Beyond technique, which is obviously hugely important, emotional communication is a priority.”

“Walk” opens with swelling mallet rolls and cymbals. The two horns resound like one voice, or mind, experiencing a revelation. Then everyone pulls back, as if in a slight state of awe, to contemplate the implications of the eureka moment. One imagines a lightning bolt having struck the narrative consciousness right at its precipitous leap from daydream to nightmare. It recalls John Coltrane’s more pensive lyrical moments in his late years, when he pushed the spiritual-empowerment envelope like the shaman Dr. King might have met on that windswept mountaintop.

The program follows appropriately with Barba’s title tune “Spirits.” A simple rising interval, extrapolated and harmonized, seems like a wisp of a theme, yet these men plumb its modality as if climbing the branches of a majestic tree. It stands like a spirit, inviting as it is inherently challenging for the earthbound.

Consequently the closing tune, “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” is also apt, from the pen of Duke Ellington, a timeless jazz presence. This is Duke’s indigo mood, and Barba proves he can fabricate a short story whole cloth from textured whole notes, while Breiwick is a mockingbird with genuine feelings. He evokes Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams’ muted sorrow, as an elegy to whatever the sunset bade farewell, something to cherish, and live up to.

Spirits demonstrates extraordinary range and vision from this new jazz generation, and delivers on promise as if tapped into a musical wellspring flowing through their veins.

Kevin Lynch

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Lynch has written for Down Beat, The Village Voice, CODA, American Record Guide, The Chicago Tribune, The Milwaukee Journal, The Cap Times, and other publications, and blogs at Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak).

credits

 

Eric Jacobson delivers the accumulated experience and wisdom of a meaningful journey on “Heading Home”

HEADING HOME | Eric Jacobson

Album review: Eric Jacobson – Heading Home (Origin)

The album title suggests the cumulative memory of a journey that, once you hear this recording, may have been epic. There’s nothing grandiose about the Milwaukee trumpeter Jacobson’s new album but his journey has inspired a whole album of original material and its strong stuff, one through eight. It opens with a burner that asserts not just the ability to play at a ridiculous speed, but as if they need to, given the title, “Survival.”

By contrast, the rest of the album provides a wide range of palatable yet challenging dynamics. The ensuing “Three of a Kind” is an alluring melody, right from the solo piano intro by Bruce Barth, reaching through sumptuous whole notes to find plenty of breathing room. Speaking of Barth, the quintet is the exact group of aces as on Jacobson’s previous album Discover, and the continuity makes a difference. Jacobson himself is a sort of lean Freddie Hubbard without the excessive cuteness.

Or perhaps more aptly, Jacobson suggests what Lee Morgan might’ve sounded like had he’d been able to live a full life and grow into a more sophisticated musician without losing his soulful edge At age 33, Morgan was shot by a jealous woman. He was indeed searching “for a New Land” as one of his last album’s title indicated. Jacobson’s Heading Home suggests that he discovered some of that new land. His previous album was titled Discover.

Eric Jacobson - ABOUT ERIC

Eric Jacobson

“Manty Time” clearly tributes Milwaukee “godfather of jazz” Manty Ellis, with the sort of bluesy swagger, Manty can eat up with his blend of Montgomery-esque octaves, bristling chords and piquant linear phrases. “Sunset Suite” paints a glowing setting of fulsome grace and style with saxophonist Geof Bradfield offering a beguiling solo, with shapely, hip swaying phrasing. The album alternates lyricism with the deep-pocket boogaloo that made “soul jazz” a style that connected with a broader audience, especially African-Americans, after the hectic austerities of pure bop.

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An album release event is scheduled for Nov. 30, at 7 (sold out) and 9:30 p.m., at The Estate, 2423 N. Murray Ave. in Milwaukee.

Get Heading Home at Amazon here.

This review was first published in The Shepherd Express, herehttps://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/heading-home-by-eric-jacobson/

Arshile Gorky art “The Plow and the Song” newly adorns blog theme image

Dear Readers,

I just wanted to identify the new work of art gracing my blog theme image, above. It’s an oil painting from 1947 titled “The Plow and the Song,” by the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. It’s one of my favorite works of abstract art. As others have noted, it reveals Gorky’s indebtedness to Joan Miro, in its fanciful biomorphic surrealism, however this image is much more grounded in a “landscape” than most of Miro’s work.

The image and title allude to the verdant Armenian farmland recollected from Gorky’s childhood. I especially appreciate the painterly variety of color and texture and the vibrant, sinuous forms, all of which make the image breathe and pulse, for me.

The evocative yet abstract scene allows the viewer’s imagination both guidance and stimulation. I hope you enjoy it, and if so (or not) feel free to comment below.

Thanks,

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch)