Author Archives: Kevin Lynch

About Kevin Lynch

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) is a veteran, award-winning arts journalist, educator and visual artist. He is the author of "Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy." He won his sixth Milwaukee Press Club award in 2023, a silver award for “Best Critical Review of the Arts” for the Culture Currents blog “Miguel Zenon Builds a Bridge from his Puerto Rican Soul to the World." Lynch was a long-time staff arts writer for The Capital Times in Madison and The Milwaukee Journal, where he was lead writer of a Pulitzer-nominated Newspapers in Education project called “That’s Jazz,” which was used in Milwaukee Public Schools and The Milwaukee Jazz Experience. Among other publications, he’s written for Down Beat, No Depression Quarterly of Roots Music, and NoDepression.com, The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, New Art Examiner, Rain Taxi, American Record Guide, CODA (The Canadian jazz magazine), Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law and the Sacred; The Shepherd Express, OnMilwaukee.com. Lynch has taught cultural journalism, English rhetoric and composition (while earning half of the credits for a PhD. in American Literature), and film studies. He’s been a music program host for WLUM-FM and WMSE-FM in Milwaukee. Lynch is working on a novel, "Melville’s Trace or, The Jackal." He’s also a visual artist and studied jazz piano and theory at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. He lives in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee Jazz Institute will stage a concert to benefit a new scholarship for women jazz musicians

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Saxophonist Juli Wood and vocalist-accordionist Robin Pluer will be among the performers Sunday at the Pat Petry Scholarship Concert at the Jan Serr Studio. Courtesy urbanmilwaukee.com

The Pat Petry Celebration Concert will be held from 3 to 6 p.m. this Sunday, March 27 in the Jan Serr Studio, in the Kenilworth Building, one of the city’s newest event venues, at 2155 N. Prospect Avenue, in Milwaukee.

Though most of the Milwaukee Jazz Institute’s more visible musicians are male, things are changing. The aggregation understands its “motherlode” roots as a strong independent music organization, growing notably with the city’s modern history of women musicians. Those include singers Jessie Hauck, Penny Goodwin, Adekola Adedapo, Donna Woodall, Marcya Daneille, and vocalist-accordionist Robin Pluer. There’s also pianists Lynne Arriale, Martha Artis, pianist-organist Beverly Pitts, violinist Sonya Robinson, the duo Mrs. Fun, and saxophonist Juli Wood, among others. 1 The Institute’s co-founder and managing director is also a woman, Erin Davis.

The late jazz singer Jessie Hauck with Manty Ellis on guitar and Berkeley Fudge on tenor sax. Courtesy “Milwaukee Jazz” by Joey Grihalva 

Milwaukee organist and pianist Beverly Pitts. Courtesy Wisconsin Black History Museum/Facebook

 Then there was one Marilyn “Pat” Petry, a patron extraordinaire, during the star jazz student heyday in the 1980’s, when young Wisconsinites emerged with national reputations, including Arriale, multiple Grammy-winner Brian Lynch, David Hazeltine, Gerald Cannon, Carl Allen, and others.

So, time has come to honor that legacy, and the MJI’s ongoing one, for the sake of Women’s History Month – in Milwaukee. The Institute has founded a scholarship for aspiring women jazz musicians in Pat Petry’s name, and will present a two-day fund-raiser event, both live and virtual. 

. The Pat Petry Celebration Concert will include members of the all-star jazz sextet We Six: trumpeter Eric Jacobson, pianist Mark Davis, guitarist Paul Silbergleit, and drummer Dave Bayles. Other featured performers include vocalists Adekola Adedapo and Marcya Daneille, vocalist-accordionist Robin Pluer, bassist Clay Schaub, saxophonist Juli Wood, Mrs. Fun (keyboardist-vocalist Connie Grauer and drummer Kim Zick) and drummer Bob Ellicson’s trio.

Then, on Monday, March 28, the Institute aims for a broader educational celebration as guitarist and jazz historian Silbergleit hosts an online program Women in Jazz: Keys & Frets. This will investigate women jazz keyboardist, pianists, and guitarists in jazz history.

The late Marilyn “Pat” Petry, with her son Daniel Petry, attending the grand opening of the Jan Serr Studio, which will be the site of the Pat Petry Celebration Concert on Sunday. The event is a fundraiser for a scholarship, in her name, for aspiring women jazz musicians. Photo courtesy Daniel Petry

None of this would’ve happened but for the legacy left by Pat Petry, a woman who supported jazz with a zealous heart and, in her distinctive way, might be compared to Lorraine Gordon of Village Vanguard fame, or Pannonica de Koengiswarter, Thelonious Monk’s longtime patron.

She grew up in Menomonee Falls, married and raised three sons on a dairy farm. In the 1970s she began travel industry work, which allowed her to travel to favorite cities, New York, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, and New Orleans, while deeply cultivating her appreciation of jazz, according to her son, Daniel Petry, a scholarship organizer.

From the 1980’s until 2021, Pat Petry was a fixture at Milwaukee’s jazz clubs. In the crucial 1980’s, she friended the jazz faculty and students of the Conservatory, including Berkeley Fudge, Manty Ellis, David Hazeltine, Brian Lynch, Mark Davis, Juli Wood, Adekola Adedapo, Dave Bayles, Paul Silbergleit, and many others. As a travel consultant, she arranged trips for Lynch to and from New York and around the United States. She also worked with Wood on her many performance trips to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in the late 1980s and 1990s.

In the 1980s and 1990’s, Pat shared a weekend apartment in New York and regularly attended theatre, then haunted jazz clubs at night, rubbing shoulders with many jazz legends.

Pat’s other passion included Women’s Rights, as a volunteer for many organizations, including Sojourner Peace Center.

Pat died on July 11, 2021. “Thus, the Pat Petry Jazz Scholarship was established by family and friends as a tribute to Pat’s passions for jazz, young women and education,“ Petry said.

For tickets and information, visit: Jazz benefit information

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This article was previously published in The Shepherd Express, here: Shepherd Express article on jazz benefit

1 See forthcoming Culture Currents post about Lynne Arriale

 

Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane fly into a storm of American discord

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The situation begins to deteriorate quickly during a Jefferson Airplane performance which preluded the death of five people later at the infamous Altamont Motor Speedway concert. Photos courtesy The New Yorker
I just came across this video of Jefferson Airplane, which is illuminating and demonstrative in two contrary ways. The first is how it shows that Jack Casady is, in my book, the greatest bass player in rock history (as an ensemble player he exceeds Jack Bruce, perhaps a better improviser). It still amazes me how the propulsive power and rhythmic acumen of Casady’s playing drives this group. I think you can also feel how his bass intoxicates festivalgoers, along with some illicit drugs. His decades-long synchronicity with lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is also evident (The two went on to form the longer-lasing blues-roots duo Hot Tuna.) 1
The photos above of Altamont suggest how extraordinary these
live outdoor events had become for my generation, especially in that critical year of 1969. I make that claim with deeply bittersweet sentiment. That’s because the second demonstration of the video is the sad and ugly one. 
This was at the Altamont Motor Speedway Free Festival, which later in the evening turned deadly when Hells Angels killed at least one audience member during the Rolling Stones performance. 2
Here we see things not quite that bad. But the photo at top reveals a perhaps under-discussed aspect of the problem. The San Francisco-based Airplane, which had gained enormous popularity in the previous couple years, is on a small bandstand barely above ground level, and easily accessible by members of a crowd of stimulated young people that probably numbered several hundred thousand.
What we have here is a failure to plan properly. I mean this was a  “free” festival, for crying out loud. Other concert planners had been overwhelmed by the gargantuan crowd in rural Woodstock ,a short time earlier, so something should have been anticipated, even if Woodstock was a truly peaceful event.
In the video we see particularly the efforts of the band’s lead singer Grace Slick (and singer-guitarist Paul Kantner) in trying to get things under control, in her own inimitable way. Slick cajoles for calm, then points out that, even though Hells Angels are the heavies here, people in the audience are also getting out of hand by scrambling on stage.
It was the prelude to what many declared the death of the ideals of the Woodstock generation. Those ideals hardly died that night, but they began to face up to the harsh realities of life in America, as it teetered like a troubled neurotic between the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit complacencies of the 1950s and the Revolutionary 1960s. The Airplane, of course, embraced the later ethos with almost desperate heroism in their album Volunteers, released only months after Altamont. There’s very telling irony in the song the band was playing in this video: “The Other Side of this Life.”
Because of the visible violence, the video is age-restricted:

Here’s the YouTube clip:

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  1. For those further interested in this era from the viewpoint of a key Jefferson Airplane musician, Kaukonen’s engaging recent autobiography Been So Long is worthwhile.

2 For a far more in-depth piece on this event here’s an essay from The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-chaos-of-altamont-and-the-murder-of-meredith-hunter

Mary LaRose the singer resurrects Dolphy; LaRose the artist captures many jazz musicians in pastel

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Reviews: Mary LaRose – Out Here (Little i Music), and Out There: Visions of a Sound, jazz portraiture art book by LaRose

Jazz singer/visual artist Mary LaRose embarked on one of the most daring and enlightening projects I’ve heard in a long time. Out Here lovingly reimagines compositions by, an associated with, Eric Dolphy, the supremely gifted multi-instrumentalist who died tragically at 36, in a Berlin hospital, of a diabetic coma after physicians presumed him merely a drugged-out jazzer. 1

LaRose and an excellent quintet resurrect Dolphy. 2 Jeff Lederer’s clarinets superbly evoke Dolphy’s exclamatory, sinuous playing style. Drummer Matt Wilson goes “out there” like a dancing tightrope walker. LaRose ingeniously sets Dolphy’s music to vocalese and scatting. She reveals the meaning of tune “245” — the Carlton Street address in Brooklyn, where many jazz musicians resided. She’s a “fly on the wall” in this hippest of abodes.

She shows that Dolphy’s “Out There” — “You’ve got to push yourself, get out there.” — is cutting-edge but not free jazz, sustained like a gyrating thread of many colors. Her singing lends warm humanity to Dolphy’s wide intervals, his way of releasing, and containing, musical expression. “Music Matador” revels in Dolphy’s underexposed roots in lilting Panamanian rhythms.

“Serene,” is a Zen-like meditation on the sublime relationship between syncopation and relaxation. “Love Me” (a Victor Young standard Dolphy recorded in duet with Madison-based bassist Richard Davis), is here a duet between LaRose and bass clarinetist Lederer, who are married, and they radiate nearly erotic sensual interplay.

Finally, a Mal Waldron tune that Dolphy debuted, “Warm Canto” glows, accompanying LaRose’s poetic ode to death, as strangely moving as anything modern jazz song has produced: “When I am dead, make art of my bones, bleach and dry them in the sun/ pure white, startling as stars…”

LaRose recites these lyrics, in the first person, in a tender yet declamatory tone. She seems to strive to both honor and inhabit Dolphy’s long-passed but ever-present spirit. A vividly-imagined, wholly-personalized evocation of the man and the artist.

Give thanks that time has allowed her, and the sun Out Here, to rise and shine on his legacy, to lengthen it to more proper fulfillment.

This album review Was lowercaseriginally Published in the Shepherd Express in slightly shorter form:https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/out-here-by-mary-larose-little-i-music/

***

Jazz singer-songwriter-artist Mary LaRose in her studio, where she produced the art for her new book “Out There.” Courtesy Jazz Times

During LaRose’s period of this creativity, largely the pandemic, she produced far more than just a great album of music. She is also an accomplished visual artist, who studied with the famous realist painter Philip Pearlstein. She has also published, in conjunction with the album Out Here, a book of her portraits of jazz saxophonist’s, titled Out There: Visions of a Sound, (the main title is also the title of a well-known Eric Dolphy album).

The book is a limited edition of 100 copies, and at least as comparable an accomplishment as the album, in its own way. It’s one of the finest collections of jazz portraiture artwork I’ve seen, given that jazz portraits are far better-known in photography. 3 How many people can say they transmuted the year of the plague into so much quality productivity? 

LaRose consciously chose to set her work apart from jazz photography by not basing her portraits on photographs, but rather on videos of the musicians. That way, she could strive to capture more of the dynamic essence of the musician, without venturing far beyond her realistic discipline. Rather than hard-edged realism, she uses pastel crayons on black paper to highly evocative effect, on all of the portraits except for the color cover portrait of Dolphy, which is oil on canvas, and also the cover of the album.

That painting is much more of a painterly exercise, with dancing red tones around Dolphy and his flute, which seems to evoke, and perhaps defy, Dolphy’s famous quote, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it.”

Otherwise, she contains her interpretive and expressive skills in the depiction of the musician himself. In the No. 9 portrait of Yusuf Lateef, the musician who first inspired her to do this series, his eyes glint amid his most prominent features, all hovering in darkness, as striking as the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Yusef Lateef, by Mary LaRose, pastel on textured art paper, 2021

Pastel crayon is a still-underappreciated medium (which I myself have used extensively). It provides a palpable presence that is perfectly enhanced by the textured black art paper. This embraces the blackness of most of these musicians, but these could be called “noir jazz” portraits, given that noir aesthetics in film, typically accompanied by jazz scores, emerged in the 1940s and ’50s, when most of these musicians got their starts. Time after time, LaRose reveals how shadows haunt and mystify, to varying degrees, each musician, even as her colors render the face vibrant. Most features a distinctly sculpted, though alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who played for years with the great pianist Cecil Taylor, is almost abstracted into a dream of a jazz face on Mount Rushmore.

Overall though, there is little mistaking most every musician. So, a fun game to play — for those knowledgeable of jazz reed players from the ’60s and beyond — is to see how many you can identify, without seeing the name on the facing page.

However, the greater value of the book is the expressive artistry LaRose brings to her rough-hewn realism. She superbly she captures the facial traits along with the physical effort and technique necessary to play a reed instrument. In other words – – as her reed-playing husband and musical collaborator Jeff Lederer notes in the book’s introduction – she focuses on the embouchure of each musician, a fair assessment.

Still, it is her hand and eye, guiding the meandering line of pastel crayon on black paper that lends the vitality to these interpretive portraits. That attuned line and mottled texture almost work like a lasso, whirling and catching each subject or, as Miles Davis once put it, “chasing down the voodoo.” This cumulative effect renders them as “black saints,” the title character-type whom Charles Mingus addressed in his masterful album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. That titular character was reportedly inspired by Dolphy.

Among her most haunting portraits are two successive ones of the late Albert Ayler, who was found dead in New York’s East River in 1971, a mysterious “drowning” to this day. Ayler possessed a large-eyed countenance of radiant spiritual innocence. In the first portrait, Ayler is not playing. Rather he gazes directly into the viewer’s eyes, possessing here a curious serenity. In the second rendering (below), he’s playing his tenor sax but the eyes still remain riveted on the viewer. Does he see his darkly looming destiny? Or is it a spirit, reflected in you, the recipient of his fire music?

Albert Ayler, by Mary LaRose. Pastel on textured our paper 2021

There are many monochromatic portraits executed in white pastel, and others amount to lively masks of many colors. One of the most striking of those is of Guiseppe Logan who, in a life-worn face of crevasses and cavities, seems to feel “the black man’s burden” Here for every day that his life of abject obscurity subject him to.

Guiseppe Logan, By Mary LaRose, Pastel on textured our paper, 2021

There are six more portraits of Eric Dolphy’s handsome and sensitive face, aside from the cover painting, signifying the importance he holds in LaRose’s eyes. Here we see the range of his virtuosity on flute, alto sax, and bass clarinet. That brings a measure of justice to this musician, especially considering how his career was cut short – by what may have been racist stereotyping judgment by attending doctors when he died, just as this refined man was reaching full maturity as an artist. Not all these men are dead. Yet, such superb portrayals of such blacks saints who were, to varying degrees, “Invisible Men” in their lifetimes, amount to a tender, precious honor to them. With the music, it’s almost as if we can freeze-frame them in our mind’s eye – a moving image of musical life in the very breath of creative ferment.

The book also includes an artist’s statement, an introduction by Lederer, and an index of the video sources for each of the portraits.

Along with the innovative album Out Here, the book Out There is a treasure trove I will revisit often, and learn from, as a visual artist working in the same medium. Yet Out There has traveled far further than any mere academic exercise.

Both the album Out Here and the portrait book Out There are available at the record label’s Bandcamp page, here: https://littleimusic.bandcamp.com/merch

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1 Apparently unbeknownst to doctors, Dolphy was a teetotaler who didn’t smoke cigarettes or take drugs.[11]

Ted Curson, a trumpeter who worked with Dolphy in Mingus’s band, remembered: “That really broke me up. When Eric got sick on that date [in Berlin], and him being black and a jazz musician, they thought he was a junkie. Eric didn’t use any drugs. He was a diabetic—all they had to do was take a blood test and they would have found that out. So he died for nothing. They gave him some detox stuff and he died, and nobody ever went into that club in Berlin again. That was the end of that club”.[62] Shortly after Dolphy’s death, Curson recorded and released Tears for Dolphy, featuring a title track that served as an elegy for his friend.

2. LaRose previously did an excellent album titled Reincarnation, taking the same approach to compositions of Charles Mingus, the great bassist, composer and bandleader, who was Dolphy’s longest employer before he went solo.

3. The only recent jazz portrait artist I can think of with comparable quality is Madison-based Martel Chapman, who works in a very different, cubistic style of portraiture.

 

“Solve for X” finds Jamie Breiwick and Jay Mollerskov as a musical Holmes and Watson?

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Review: Jamie Breiwick & Jay Mollerskov – Solve for X (B Side)

Jamie Breiwick emerged by leaps and bounds as the most important jazz musician on the Milwaukee scene in 2021. The trumpeter-composer-conceptualizer works in both straight-ahead and cutting-edge realms.

His hip-hop/jazz trio KASE opened for Terence Blanchard’s E-Collective at the Marcus PAC, and he released a stunning bevy of albums, mostly on his own B Side label, but also, The Jewel (Live at The Dead Poet), a trio date on Ropeadope, with internationally-known drummer Matt Wilson, recorded live in New York.

Among the self-released albums, his latest, Solve for X, may be his strongest experimental album yet. The album cover by local printmaker Jay Arpin, depicting a massive iceberg, suggests the project’s quietly vast ambition and its “granular synthesis.” The album comprises “electronic works based completely on Jamie’s trumpet playing as the sole sound source.” The enigmatic title, borrowed from the Arpin print’s, suggests a creative inquiry as profound as the dimensions and revealing textures of the largely-submerged iceberg – the two musicians as a sort of musical Holmes and Watson, investigating a mysterious symbol perhaps signifying evidence of climate catastrophe.

Breiwick’s longtime friend, guitarist-synthesist Jay Mollerskov, took recordings of the trumpeter’s themes and solos, and mutated them into “granular landscapes” for the elegantly winged horn, a myriad of textures and tones. Breiwick displays exceptionally sustained lyricism.

On “Strata,” the ascending atmospheric spaciousness seems to virtually lift you out of your chair, beyond yourself, as if gazing down on the earth (in another strata), even suggesting a pensive moral pondering of humanity below. Here and elsewhere, the minimalist tonal aesthetic offers maximal textural effect.

“Traces of Things,” with its episodic fragments, suggests Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence.” Finally, “Reflect” delicately grounds the sonic outer limits like a mile-high kite-string, with rather gorgeous horn playing, including Breiwick’s son, Nolan, dueting with his father on trumpet.

Yet another Breiwick-brainchild album, KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House, was just released this week, featuring Klassik, the brilliant Milwaukee-based hip-hop singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

For more information, visit:

B Side Recordings

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This review was originally published in slightly shorter form, in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/solve-for-x-by-jamie-breiwick-b-side/

Trumpeter Brian Lynch honors the late Neal Chandek with his recording of “Chandek’s Den.”

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Pianist and trumpeter Neal Chandek (1955-2022) Courtesy Transfer Pizzeria Cafe

 

Music makes for memory that lives on, in the deep vibration and pulse of life everlasting.

Multiple-Grammy-winning trumpeter-composer Brian Lynch has done eloquent honor to a dear friend and to some of his musical roots by posting his composition “Chandek’s Den,” on the Facebook link to my blog tribute to Neal Chandek, 1 the remarkable Milwaukee keyboardist and trumpeter who died last week of complications of Covid-19, at 66.

When he still lived in Milwaukee, Lynch was a once a roommate of Chandek’s, and his composition honors the open-door crib that Chandek maintained in Riverwest for backroom jamming and music listening during the 1980s and early ’90s. This was when Lynch, Chandek, and the pianist on this album, David Hazeltine, were among a generation of musicians coming of age during a Renaissance for jazz in Milwaukee. I delve into this story in my forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.

Lynch’s composition is a superb historical signifier of that era. He actually wrote it for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the legendary jazz ensemble for which he played trumpet in its final edition. “Chandek’s Den” was recorded on Blakey’s album Chippin’ In, but this is a recording by Lynch’s own quintet on his 1989 album Backroom Blues, and the album title itself evokes that informal scene of creative ferment and dialogue.

The tune is characteristic of Lynch’s writing, with a sinuous, tricky, 16-bar theme in a propulsively swinging but easy blues mode, the sort of groove you might hear at a classic straight-ahead jam session, say, at Chandek’s Den. Though the extended theme is played in tight harmony, it has a give-and-take feel, resembling players in musical conversation. The soloing sections are highlighted by Milwaukee-native Hazeltine’s piano solo, which has a nimble, “leapin’ and lopin’ ” quality, reminiscent of the great post-bop pianist Sonny Clark.

The saxophonist is Javon Jackson, the bassist is Peter Washington and the drummer is the great Lewis Nash.

Here’s “Chandek’s Den” —  for Neal, and for everyone he ever played with, hung with, entertained and enlightened.

Thanks Brian:

 

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1 My blog remembrance of Neal Chandek:

Neal Chandek is gone. May his trumpet bellow from the heavens, and shake our souls with his power.

Neal Chandek is gone. May his trumpet bellow from the heavens, and shake our souls with his power.

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Kevin Lynch

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January 29, 2022, 11:45 a.m.
Had a marvelous, stimulating nearly 3-hour visit yesterday with my old friend (and former upstairs duplex neighbor), jazz musician Neal Chandek, who is in St. Mary’s hospital with a bad respiratory condition. He’s one of the most vibrant, knowledgeable and intelligent persons I know, and was in top form yesterday, aside from still being very dependent on induced oxygen, which he’ll need to continue with when he leaves. Thankfully now, he can periodically remove the full face mask to visit with friends (see photo). So please do so, he craves company.
***
“Descanse en Paz Amigo RIP” — guitarist Javier Mendez, in a farewell message to Neal Chandek
This death is devastating for me, the first personal friend of mine to die of complications of Covid. But I can only imagine what it means for the fellow musicians who were closest to him, and to family members.
Neal Chandek once dwelled near the heart of a booming Milwaukee jazz subculture, then for too long, in the shadows of even modest personal success – ever vital, yet a poor man in earthly goods. I suspect he even went hungry too often  And yet, what comes to mind is a quote from a film he might’ve “died for,” Babette’s Feast – “An artist is never poor.”
The notion serves up as mostly cold comfort to me today and yet, deep down, in the vast and sprawling feast-and-famine of life, I feel the warmth of this man’s heart, and the radiant energy of his creative intellect, and hunger for knowledge, beauty, and truth.
Yes, my still-warm and even pulsing memories of him center upon that wonderful afternoon in late January. This deeply-stricken keyboardist and somewhat-forgotten trumpeter had asked me to visit him, and to lend him a book, a biography or autobiography, he said, to immerse himself in, I think. to assuage, and perhaps find meaning for, his suffering.
So, I lent him my copy of Miles Davis, a biography by Ian Carr, a noted British jazz writer and trumpeter. Yet, when I spoke to him for the last time, by phone a few days later, sadly, this voracious reader and maven of jazz and history, could only tell me to come retrieve the book. He feared it might get lost when he is soon transferred. I never made it back in time.
I think he was also pondering a lifetime, his own, and perhaps how it might take the form of a biography, even if it is never quite written. But I hope it is inscribed somehow, on the stone beneath which he might lie, or in the wind of his ashes, even if only a musical sequence of dark marks dancing in the currents that eventually carry him to a higher ground.
My mind traces him with such a notion because, among the remarkable things we touched upon in that deeply-gratifying last conversation – mostly driven by his own desperate need to seize the day, a rare heathy one – was of a higher power.
As we talked, he delved into a profound justification for such a truth, by deftly exposing what he saw as the castle-on-a-cloud constructions of certain neo-atheist theorists, like Richard Dawkins.
I can’t do justice to how surgically he stitched together the underlying truth, as so much is implicitly understood, even hermetically sealed, yet so righteous, a perfectly resolved harmony of the spheres. His thoughts aligned beautifully with that which I carry within me, as a sort of spiritual ballast. I explained to him, I’m an agnostic who spends an inordinate amount of time searching, believing in something, even in the unprovable, which often seems to me so manifest that even The Greatest Silence resounds wordless in The Song of the Wind.
This admission of mine came as a great relief to him as, for some reason, he assumed I was an atheist. I now hang onto this harmonized exchange as a small reward of solace we shared, for him most preciously – for most persons encounter fears of the empirically unknown, while beginning to face mortality’s cruel countdown.
He also urged me to read the great lay theologian C.S. Lewis, who seemed a touchsone for Neal, and I plan on it, probably his Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, for starters, as I’ve read more about Lewis than his actual work, except as a adolescent, the children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I also will follow his urging to see the apparently extraordinary Nazi-era film Mephisto, an adaptation of the story of Doctor Faustus. And if I feel up to it, a book called Military Justice is to Justice what Military Music is to Music, a book by Robert Sherrill, with a title employing a Groucho Marx quote.
In those final 40-plus hospital-imprisoned days, the two-headed monster of COVID-19 and COPD pneumonia seared and ravaged his lungs. His pain and angst grew, until finally he could only reach out through social media with beckoning for prayers, the most genuine anyone could muster:
Neal Chandek Facebook Feb. 10, 11:52 a.m.
“Well, here I sit/lay. 34th day at St.Mary’s Hospital. Covid has scarred my lungs so badly that my body won’t absorb any oxygen. They’re not optimistic. I need your prayers. REAL PRAYERS!
READ MATTHEW 6/5 and you’ll know what I mean.”
Here’s Matthew 6/5 and 6/6, from The King James version:
6:5 And when thou prayest though shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
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Doubters, especially now, may reasonably question whether those “secret prayers” were “rewarded.” For sure, Neal clearly loved and cherished life, as a song in the wind he needed to draw from as long as possible. Might some measure of faith allow us to surmise that, by invoking the sacred Biblical wisdoms, Neal began gulping in a long breath of grace? Something to bellow his spirit upwards, and beyond?
The bellow would be the baying of his own trumpet, too-long forsaken, but essential to the musician he was.
Neal Chandek (right, on trumpet) with Bembe Orchestra, at Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Rainbow Summer, 1994. Pictured also, Alan Johnson, (left, on trumpet), Carlos Eguis Aguila, (center, on Bata drum – Okonkolo). Photo by Pat A Robinson.
I am deeply grateful that many friends have already honored him with spiritual salutations of many sorts on his Facebook page. In his last days, he surely had joyous memories of his 60th birthday celebration at Transfer Pizzeria Cafe, where a fulsome variety of friends, fans and well-wishers gathered that evening to hear him play with the Transfer Pizzeria Band, which he led there for more than a decade.
My oldest memories of Neal are of far-more-distant happy days in Milwaukee, when he lived upstairs from me on Astor Street, with fellow musician John Foshager. This was the mid-1980s, when I was covering jazz for The Milwaukee Journal, and he was playing piano and trumpet with La Chazz. That was a marvelous Latin-jazz group led by guitarist Toty Ramos. So Neal and I hit it off, with common interests extending even beyond the grand cavalcade of music of The African Diaspora.
I find it significant that, in the photo below of La Chazz, the band is gathered around a grand piano. That’s the instrument that Neal (second from left, in the photo) played and, as his very first Facebook honorific writer, Michael Reyes, recalls, Neil the pianist “could play a solid montuno, (and) he would often double on trumpet in the same ensemble.”
Image of La Chazz Courtesy of Cecil Negron Sr.
I’ll continue with a copy of Michael’s excellent memorial tribute to Neal:
Michael Reyes 
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Tuesday, February 15, 5:42 p.m. 
A monumental figure in the history of Milwaukee’s jazz scene has left us today at age 66. Neal Chandek was a trumpeter, pianist, arranger, educator, historian and provocative devotee of jazz, blues, latin jazz, salsa, son, rumba and beyond. Neal’s work with the groundbreaking Wisconsin-based supergroup “La Chazz” was nothing short of inspirational. A pianist, who could play a solid montuno, he would often double on trumpet in the same ensemble.
He dedicated his life to the music he loved. An alumnus of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Neal was part of a contemporary group of virtuoso musicians that included Jeff Pietrangelo (trumpet legend), Brian Lynch, David Hazeltine, Jeff Chambers, Carl Allen, Toty Ramos, Cecil Negron, Walter “Wally” Robles, Albert Rivera, Jerry Grillo, Dennis Fermenich, Bill Martin and many others.
Neal’s commitment to music was 24/7. He would practice, teach, study, perform, rehearse and then read and reflect and meditate on music as much as his mind and body would physically allow him. He loved music of the African Diaspora as well as European Classical Music.
During the late ’70’s through the ‘80’s , Neal would often invite musicians to his home for after-hours listening parties (and jam sessions) that would extend past sunrise. Neal’s former room-mate, Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Brian Lynch, composed and recorded a song entitled “Chandek’s Den” in 1989 memorializing those moments on his album “Backroom Blues” (Criss Cross Jazz 1042CD). Legendary Drummer Art Blakey also included “Chandek’s Den” in his final album “Chippin In” (Timeless) in 1990.
After a period of wide ranging musical freelancing, he started to give lessons on a larger scale. Thanks to musician and business owner Russell Rossetto, Neal began to enjoy the blessing of a steady weekly gig as leader of the Neal Chandek Trio at Milwaukee’s Transfer Pizzeria.
There he would hold court before excited audiences who often were treated to special musical guests who would sit in. Some of those guests included members of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, as well as local, regional and national musicians who would stop by to say hi. Neal also invited young students to sit in to get experience.
Condolences to Neal’s sister Jane Prentice and her family. Sympathies go out to all of Neal’s friends, family, students, bandmates and loved ones.
Farewell Big Brother Neal Chandek RIP (b. 6-30-1955 d. 2-15-2022)
Neal Chandek. Photo by Leiko Napoli
I’ll conclude with a few final thoughts on Neal the man, the artist, and the jazz communitarian, partly inspired by this delightful photo (above) of Neal by noted Milwaukee jazz photographer Leiko Napoli. I think she captures the mature Neal Chandek’s personality as well as any photo that I’ve seen.
The man had a huge heart and a huge mind. The heart I hope to characterize by one more anecdote of my last visit with him on January 29. He was talking very hopefully and boldly as we were discussing common interests. He discovered that I, like him, am a golfer, and we compared notes on local golf courses and agreed that we should play a round as soon as the weather permitted. How much of this was wishful thinking, I wondered, given his state of possibly a chronic deficiency of oxygen, if somehow his lungs could recover. I had heard he was even a candidate for a lung transplant.
Another subject he brought up was gospel music, and he asked if I would be interested in going to a church service with a powerful gospel choir. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I enthusiastically said yes. As it is, perhaps I will hear a gospel choir some time which will bring me a little closer to Neal, and what I fancy to be his archangel’s trumpet.
And then, as we were talking about gospel singing he let loose with a few bars of resounding gospel-like soul singing of his own. I’ve heard a recording of him singing “Georgia on My Mind.” So I knew what he could do with his voice, but I was stunned that he could even belt out a few bars in his oxygen-compromised condition.
Yes, he was a little larger-than-life nearing death, on that afternoon. As the photo above suggests, he had an impish wit and intellect.
He could discourse on any number of subjects of historical or cultural significance. Sometimes, when he was really cooking, his flow of ideas and opinions could get a bit overbearing. But I think he was conscious of that, and during our conversation he frequently pulled himself back, to hear my response. I, of course, wanted to feed him all the intellectual oxygen he could ingest, to transform into golden moments of give-and-take.
I have one last anecdote about Neal, the jazz-jam maestro, which is part of my forthcoming (I swear!) book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy. I will save it for the publication of the book. Neal knows the story very well, and it demonstrates how his ability to connect with, and gather, musicians extended to some of the most celebrated jazz players who ever visited Milwaukee in the 1980s and early-1990s, a heyday of jazz in this city.
Descanse en Paz Amigo RIP.
____________

Two Milwaukee-bred trumpeting beacons illuminate the city’s music scene this month

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Multi-Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch. Courtesy news miami.edu

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick with his hip-hop/jazz band KASE (l-r, Breiwick, John Christensen, bass, and Knowsthetime (Ian Carroll), turntables and electronics. Courtesy Brian Myr and Tone Madison

A pair of prodigious trumpeters blaze a sky-streaking reveille for Milwaukee music fans this month.

Perk an ear, to catch two of the best this town’s modern trumpet legacy has ever produced. The mirroring city-bred names are Brian Lynch, on Thursday, February 10, and Jamie Breiwick, on Friday, February 25.

In fact, these two trumpeters seem to have a mystical sort of synchronicity going, as they both graced Milwaukee with notable concert events exactly four years ago this month. See my article on that double event here:

Opening doors of modern jazz history with Milwaukee-native trumpeters Brian Lynch and Jamie Breiwick

To be clear, Lynch hasn’t resided in Milwaukee in decades. But he was raised in Milwaukee, attended Nicolet High School and The Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and developed his musical wings on the local jazz scene in the 1980s. A storied career  has seen him arguably surpass even legendary Green Lake-native Bunny Berigan as the premiere trumpet icon in state history. Yet he remains actively loyal to this city, returning annually for a trumpeting workshop and a recital.

This time, Lynch will do a free workshop at 6 p.m. followed by a 7:30 p.m. performance by his quartet at Bar Centro, 804 E. Center Street, the first local club date he’s done in quite a while. For tickets and information, visit: Brian Lynch Quartet at Bar Centro Feb. 10

Lynch’s quartet will include pianist Mark Davis, head of the events-sponsoring Milwaukee Jazz Institute; bassist Jeff Hamann (best known as longtime accompanist for the NPR radio program (now a podcast) “Whad’ya Know?”), and drummer Kyle Swan.

Lynch has never had a popular hit as big as Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started,” but Berigan claimed that distinction way back when swing jazz was the popular music of the day.

Lynch, has the honor of two Grammy awards and has reached perhaps unparalleled heights in recent years as a Milwaukee-bred jazz musician. Like Breiwick, he’s built on a historically informed mastery of the instrument and its musical tradition, most notably having won a Grammy award last year for Best Jazz Large Ensemble, for The Brian Lynch Big Band recording The Omni American Book Club/My Journey through Literature in Music.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 26: Brian Lynch of Brian Lynch Big Band accepts the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album award for The Omni-American Book Club onstage during the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards Premiere Ceremony at Microsoft Theater on January 26, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The two-CD aIbum grew from his deep reading of, among other writers, the pioneering African-American sociologist, socialist, historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. The album — featuring Donald Harrison, Dave Liebman, Jim Snidero, and Regina Carter, among others — climaxes a series of concept albums involving tributes to “unsung heroes” among trumpeters, a sequence which included his 2016 album commemorating the work of the great, short-lived post-bop trumpet master Woody Shaw, titled Madera Latino. That two-CD set — which also features fellow trumpeters Dave Douglas, Sean Jones and Philip Dizack — was Grammy-nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album. All of the trumpeter-tribute albums and the big-band recording are on Lynch’s own Hollistic Music Works label.

So, even if Brian himself is of Irish descent, most all of the trumpeters he has honored have been African-American, as have been the writers whose work inspired the big band album. 1 So, in several senses, his work honors Black History Month.

Over a long career, Lynch has done more than tribute the work of trumpeting predecessors. His latest album Brian Lynch Songbook Vol. 1: Bus Stop Serenade, suggests his own street cred, and shows that he long ago found his own voice as a composer, as well as a trumpeter, on previous recordings, often with African-American recording collaborators and mentors like Milwaukee’s Melvin Rhyne and Buddy Montgomery, and saxophonists Harrison, Ralph Moore and Javon Jackson with whom he paired up for the front line of the final edition of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, perhaps the most legendary hard-bop band in jazz history. He also worked with another iconic hard-bop group, The Horace Silver Quintet.  

The cover of Brian Lynch’s latest album. Courtesy lastrowmusic.com

And this Songbook Vol. 1 recording includes, besides longtime collaborator Snidero, two Black players, pianist Orrin Evans and drummer Donald Edwards.

The new album is the first in a series of “Songbooks” intended to reclaim the many original compositions that Lynch has recorded for other labels throughout his career. Those include at least one other tribute-type piece, Charles Tolliver, for yet another underrecognized post-bop trumpet stylist and composer. But the mining of his own material also reflects a great American tradition of freedom to pursue personal destiny: “I seem to have become quite stubborn in recent years about invoking artistic self-determination for myself at every opportunity, and having masters of my complete catalogue in my possession has become a bit of an obsession,” Lynch explains.

He has also specialized in Latin Jazz, having earned his first Grammy for the Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project’s Simpatico, as well as recording with The Buena Vista Social Club, Sheila E., Miguel Zenon, Roberto Magris, Tito Puente and Dafnis Preito, among others. 

I could go on about Lynch’s credits but, suffice to say, his is a musical career as auspicious as it is reflective of the great tradition he has extended.

So one expects, in his own compositions, the same high standards he has maintained for the exposition of historic figures deep within the jazz tradition.

***

Jamie Breiwick, actually a Racine-native, might be seen as a younger version of Lynch’s enterprising ambition via the instrument Louis Armstrong made the pioneering tool of supreme jazz soloists. He’s recorded several excellent albums of modern jazz and has, like Lynch, honored artistic forebears, with projects ranging from Thelonious Monk to Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. Breiwick has most recently exploded in the last year or so with a series of fascinating recordings facilitated by the creation, a la Lynch, of his own label, B Side Recordings.

The recordings have included several duets with resourceful partners, but Breiwick’s primary new vehicle has been a hybrid group called KASE, which synthesizes hip-hop instrumental aspects with jazz. One of the group’s pinnacle performance events to date was a collaboration with the jazz-oriented hip-hop singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Klassik, in a concert at the Stoughton Opera House. That collaboration has produced a new album on digital and very limited-edition cassette called Live at the Opera House. Breiwick will produce an album release event for the recording on Friday, February 25 (doors open 7 p.m., event at 8) at The Ivy House, a stylish new events-and-concert venue, at 906 S. Barclay Street in Milwaukee’s Fifth Ward.

Klassik, an extremely-gifted vocal stylist and songwriter, will perform a solo set at 8 p.m., followed by another set by KASE at 9, and a closing set by KASE and Klassik together, at 10 p.m.

Klassik (Kellen Abston), Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine.

The event will also be a print-media coming-out party for the B Side, if you will, of Breiwick’s talents, as a graphic artist, and his second business venture, B Side Graphics. This evening will debut the publication of Sound Museum, a book collection of his striking and stylish album covers, concert posters, and other graphic manifestations of his artistic talent. If you have seen any of Breiwick’s graphics work, you know it’s at a professional creative level comparable to his music. The cassette cover of Live at the Opera House (below) is a prime example:

Cover of “Live at the Opera House,” on B Side Recordings, designed by Jamie Breiwick. 

The event will also feature a pop-up shop by 262 Vintage, with select quality vintage clothing items for sale.

For information and tickets visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/kase-klassik-tickets-235636855177#map-target

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  1. Brian Lynch is no relation to this blogger, Kevin Lynch.

 

 

Letter (from a Milwaukee jail of my mind), to Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, on the state of our nation and her own psyche

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The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, DC. Courtesy The Travel Channel
E-mail from Louisa-Loveridge Gallas on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 17, 2021:
Dear friends.
I’m sending on a link to this famous Vietnam speech by MLK I go back to on MLK day, so pivotal in his career. Stunning that he was assassinated a year to the day after. And so brave as he found that he angered and disappointed a number of activists and allies for his stance against the war who felt he should stick to civil rights in the approach and focus he had been taking.
Also I’d like think out loud with you. In a very different way and historical context, I just want to add I am beginning to experience that Biden is being attacked at times, in ways I find irresponsible, for speaking out eloquently and clearly for the moral high road of history in his Georgia speech. I refer not only by Republicans but to comments by prominent Democrats like David Axelrod, Obama’s consultant, on CNN; NYT commentators like Maureen Dowd, and even top legislators like Nancy Pelosi. To name a few. Cheap shots, reaching for a way to insult on minor points, calling out strong opinions disagreed with as unbridled ‘rhetoric’ to name a few.
Of course reasonable, fact-based analysis has to go forward. May everyone be generous and informed as we precede with our critiques even in informal conversation. I know I’m not alone in witnessing that these are perilous times where a compassionate approach to each other and in the political realm is at risk in the zeitgeist of the need to one up, demean too easily and thoughtlessly These are such times of anxiety that inflame disagreements and difference; or enhance compassion fatigue.
I certainly don’t count myself out. I’ve been writing some pretty snarky op Ed comments. And make an occasional fevered phone call, as I did to Axelrod’s office. My fur can rise along with a hiss if a friend or relative isn’t on the same page with my take on all the complexities we are living within. I fail. I’m working on myself. I welcome any thoughts you may have to help me along and no pressure to respond, of course, as so many influences and responsibilities call upon us.
So them’s my thoughts and a link to his speech.
Take care. Be safe.
Sincerely,
Louisa *

Full speech text:  King speech

***

 

Dear Louisa,

How I love your caring, your awareness, your intelligence, your passion, and activist voice. And your brave, insightful analogue between Rev. King and President Biden.
Holy moly (forgive my dated boomer utterance), we all need some empathy and psychological guidance and salve, these days. Perhaps, take some deep, slow breaths, dear friend. Take a long walk beside the empowering tide of our Great Lake, or deep into the woods. Listen to the “conference of the birds,” the way they sing to, and advise, each other. Of danger, yes. They live stressed lives, as vulnerable creatures. And yet, they sing.
If only we could truly fly. Yet we can, in our mind, and drag our lagging, embittered, mudbound spirit aloft, which brings to mind a magnificent Herman Melville quote, from the last paragraph of  Moby-Dick, Chapter 96 “The Try-Works”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
flickr.com 
Only slightly less poetic is Robert F. Kennedy‘s speech in Indianapolis, after annoucing the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day after the tragic event. This video is a part of the speech but very worthy. Robert Kennedy is one of my heroes, more so than JFK.
I read the speech (2 pages) during a troubled, virtually sleepless last night, in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. 1 This is a priceless paperback, to me.
Kennedy quotes his favorite poet Aeschylus, from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy continues: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be whites or they be black.”
I ponder and treasure those thoughts, and rededicate myself to living up to them, to the degree I am able.
(BTW, Bobby Kennedy also had a wit comparable to brother Jack, with fine comic timing — hear his Ball State U speech, following this one on youtube.)
 

Then there’s those who would score “cheap political points” against President Biden, as you protest, Louisa — be they leftist, liberal, centrist, never-Trumpers or far-right Trumpsters.
Biden has only been any office one year, and has laid out perhaps the most ambitious vision and agenda since Lyndon Johnson‘s The Great Society. Yes, he needs to show — and effect — more fight and passion, but he’s getting there, I think. DINO Sens. Manchin and Sinema still sit on the fence like a couple of owls, saying “Who me?” as the 60-vote filibuster looms like the Sword of Damocles, over vastly important social initiatives that are very popular with Americans.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are slithering around from state to state, contriving new voter suppression laws. We need a federal oversight law on voting rights, especially to protect the rights and access of people of color and other disenfrachised citizens.
I am, for the moment, disheartened by all the clamoring special-interest factions of the Democratic Party, each of whom has profoundly legitimate concerns, perhaps most presently voting rights, and a woman’s right to determine her own body. But also the looming apocalypse of climate change… and more, of course.
But a lot of things can happen between now and November’s mid-term elections.

Dear Louisa, as Rev. King says, concluding the sacred but tough-minded speech you quote (echoing Frederick Douglass‘s famous thoughts about “struggle”):

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. The choice is ours. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I believe many tears, sweat and, yes, blood, will commingle with that mighty stream. We are psychically stained by John Kennedy’s blood, from 1963, and by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin’s blood, in 1968, and so many since.

No more, I pray and cry. May America’s profusion of inward-pointed guns desist!

But justice is a hardy soul, I believe. She can swim like a sleek yet powerful fish, or trudge, like a woman or man, long distances, in protest and dissent, which many politicans hear, if loud and pointed enough.

Robert Kennedy quotes Algerian-French author-philosopher Albert Camus as much as anyone in this Make Gentle the Life of This World collection. Camus, I believe, was then addressing the people of Germany, under the Third Reich.

Yet how his words ring on today — when Fascist demagogury and governments sprout weedlike over Mother Earth and here at home — like a great thunderous bell, clanged by mythical Quasimodo in Camus’s Paris, or his very real fellow ringer in Philadelphia, so that the big-shouldered Liberty Bill cracked. 2

Camus wrote:

“This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”

Ringing for truth, justice and love,

Kevin

_____
* Louisa Loveridge-Gallas is an acclaimed poet, body-mind counseler, op-Ed writer, music lover, and activist. She’s working on a new chapbook of socially-motivated poems, and on a “jazz novel,” set in Madison, Wisonsin. She’s a former long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and now resides in Michigan. 
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas. Courtesy Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
1 Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, 1998, Broadway Books, 42-43
2 The crack ocurred on the Philadelphia bell’s very first test ring in 1752, shipped from a French foundry (those French!), and it was clearly a flawed casting — like the great nation it signifies.
To me, now, the crack now resembles King’s waters of justice rolling down, the mighy stream. 
.

Here’s the results of an International Critics Music Poll, with Kevernacular’s contribution

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Chicago Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar and his Rivers of Sound Orchestra, pictured above, produced my choice for jazz album of the year. Photo by Tom Beetz. 

Yes, but what were the best of the year, and what does all that add up to?

Here’s one man’s opinion.*

I participated in the 14th Annual International Critics Poll of El Intruso, the Spanish publication dedicated to jazz, experimental and creative music. I have included the results of the NPR critics poll here in recent years. But for a change of perspective, it’s interesting to see what critics from all around the world come up with, as the best of the year (see entire international poll link at bottom).

Special mention: The documentary film Summer of Soul, directed by The Roots drummer Questlove, captures the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which reportedly drew 300,000, but got little fanfare, elsewhere. This provided the best new film soundtrack. Nina Simone, B.B. King, the 5th Dimension, the Staple Singers, and more. Here’s info on it  https://pitchfork.com/news/summer-of-soul-soundtrack-release-announced/ 

The international poll does not ask for top 10 album lists, I will list my choices of best albums of the year for the NPR poll:

Best Jazz Albums for 2021 NPR Critics Poll

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1. Amir ElSaffar Rivers of Sound Orchestra – The Other Side (Out Note) This was the surprise of the year. I didn’t expect ElSaffar do a big band and a very unconventional pan-cultural creature. But this is actually their second recording and a rare symbiosis emerges, beautifully conceived and executed. Yet one must set aside preconceptions of what a jazz orchestra should sound like. He’s a Chicagoan but has deeply investigated his Iranian roots and allowed the bitonal modalities to flourish like an exotic garden.

2. Charles Lloyd and the Marvels – Tone Poem (Blue Note) Tenor sax guru Lloyd and his stylistically elastic quintet, with simpatico guitar innovator Bill Frisell, lays his ineffable touch on Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Leonard Cohen and Gabor Zsabo, a concoction enfolded with a few worthy originals.

3.. Anthony Braxton – 2 Comp (Zim) 2017 (firehouse) _- One of the true geniuses and intrepid and prolific visionaries of the music called jazz or Black music (or what Braxton calls “Language Music” or “Holistic Modeling Musics”) surfaces again with a stimulating 12 hours of original music packed into a single Blue-Ray disc. Rediscover Braxton’s uncannily self-generated world of music, or take the plunge — into this transformative experience of creative possibility.

4. Johannes Wallmann – Elegy for Undiscovered Species (Shifting Paradigm) — Another masterful statement from the Madison-based pianist-composer, who shows how deftly he extends his compositional and conceptual palette to a chamber string orchestra. He spotlights two brilliant soloists for his jazz quintet with strings — Dayna Stevens, a limpidly inventive saxophonist whose plangent tone and superb phrasing almost mystically invoke Stan Getz. He also plays luminous EWI (electronic wind instrument). And trumpeter Ingrid Jensen has developed a deeply personal lyrical voice on her horn. Wallmann’s taut yet supple string writing remains always integral to the force of his expressive purpose, even in the surging romanticism of “Longing.” This elegy stirs the imagination (what species?) while deeply commenting on our global environmental malaise.

5. Lionel Loueke – Close your Eyes (Sounderscore) Wow, what a brilliant guitarist he’s become, extending the modern, harmonically weighty tradition from Wes Montgomery. He has dazzling rhythmic acumen and plays with tension like a master basketball dribbler. This was his first full-album statement “in the tradition” as the compulsive original Braxton once did, and almost all his takes are meaty and revelatory. He got a bit too clever by crunching the closer, Trane’s “Naima,” which lost the tune’s arching, iridescent lyricism.

6. Marcin Wasilewski Trio — en Attendant — (ECM) With this sad news this year of Chick Corea’s passing, and of Keith Jarrett’s apparently disabling stroke, Marcin Wasilewski joins the conversation as a darkhorse for “greatest living (and active) jazz pianist, or perhaps “best jazz piano trio.” Here’s my review of this recording:

Is this the best? Marcin Wasilewski’s cutting-edge piano trio forges ahead

7. Frank Kimbrough –  Ancestors (Sunnyside) Another great recent loss among jazz pianists, Kimbrough enhanced the Maria Schneider’s Orchestra expansively harmonic sound paintings, and really stepped out in recent years with his profoundly delicious Monk’s Dreams box set, and a few marvelous recordings including this one, gracefully asserting his place as successor to his artistic ancestors.

GREAT NEW VIBES SECTION:

8. Simon Moullier Trio – Countdown ((Fresh Sound New Talent) A virtuoso vibraphonist new to me dazzled in this deftly imaginative romp through a brilliant selection of modern standards (from Monk and Mingus to Kern and Porter, etc.). His monster chops stay pretty on course to compositional expression and illumination rather than detouring into mere showiness.

9. Joel Ross – Who Are You? (Blue Note) A vibrant (pun intended) quintet session led by vibraphonist Joel Ross, and certainly the best album of largely original music by a vibist I’ve heard in a number of years. It’s modern, straight-ahead jazz which shows how elastic the modern mainstream of the music form can get.

(See also honorable mention album “Marimba Maverick” by Mike Neumeyer,)

***

10.. Noah Haidu – Slowly: Song for Keith Jarrett (Sunnyside) An eloquent and moving tribute to Jarrett, One of the most esteemed and influential pianists of his generation, and in light of the stroke which may have permanently ended Jarrett’s performing and recording career. Pianist Haidu has the chops, sensitivity and gravitas to pull this tribute off.

Honorable Mention: Miguel Zenon — Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman (Bandcamp), Stephanie Niles – I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag – The White Flag (Sunnyside)?  Roberto Magris & Eric Hochberg – Shuffling Ivories (JMood), Jamie Breiwick The Jewel (Live at the Dead Poet) (Ropeadope), Silent Room (Enzo Carniel and Filipo Vignato) – Aria (Menace), Craig Taborn – Shadow Plays (ECM), Mike Neumeyer – Marimba Maverick (Voirimba), Marc Cary — Life Lessons (Sessionheads United) Craig Taborn – Shadow Plays (ECM)

Best Historical Albums

John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle (Impulse)

Bill Evans — Behind the Dikes (Elemental)

Roy Brooks — Understanding (Reel to Real)

 

Best Latin Jazz Album

Miguel Zenon and Luis Perdomo – El arte Del Bolero

Best Jazz Vocal Album  

Mary LaRose — Out Here (Little i Music)

 

Best Debut Album

Kazemde George – I Insist (Greenleaf)

***

Kevernacular’s ballot for El Intruso – 14th Annual International Critics Poll ballot for 2021 (see link to the poll below)

musician of the year – Miguel Zenon, Amir ElSaffar

newcomer musician – Kazemde George (saxophone)

group of the year –  Charles Lloyd & The Marvels, Emile Parisien Sextet

newcomer group – Silent Room (Enzo Carniel/Filippo Vignato duo)

album of the year — Amir ElSaffar Rivers of Sound Orchestra – The Other Side (Out Note); Charles Lloyd and the Marvels — Tone Poem, Emile Parisien — Louise (ACT); Lionel Loueke — Close Your Eyes (Sounderscore)

composer – Amir ElSaffar, Anthony Braxton, Johannes Wallmann

drums – Brian Blade, Joe Chambers, Nasheet Waits

acoustic bass – Buster Williams, Christian McBride, Reuben Rogers

electric bass – Steve Swallow

guitar – Lionel Loueke, Mary Halvorsen, Miles Ozaki

piano – Chick Corea, Vijay Iyer, Marcin Wasilewski

keyboard/synthesizer/organ – Lonnie Smith

tenor saxophone – Charles Lloyd, Chris Potter, Joe Lovano

alto saxophone – Miguel Zenon, Jim Snidero, Kenny Garrett

baritone saxophone – Gary Smulyan

soprano saxophone – Emile Parisien, Isaiah Collier

trumpet/Cornet – Wadada Leo Smith, Brian Lynch, Dave Douglas

clarinet/bass clarinet – Anat Cohen, Jeff Lederer

trombone – Gianluca Petrella, Filippo Vignato

flute – Nicole Mitchell

violin/Viola

cello – Hank Roberts

vibraphone – Simon Moullier, Joel Ross, Mike Neumeyer

electronics — Marc Cary

other instruments

female vocals – Cecile McLorin Salvant, Stephanie Niles, Mary LaRose

male vocals – Kurt Elling

label of the year — Sunnyside

Here’s a link to the El Intruso International Critics Poll:

https://elintruso.com/encuesta-2021-periodistas-internacionales/?fbclid=IwAR133PHWKdq2IPbyKPq3N7hgqgI0s4Y0cW9wJ0CX6F4A1xL0jrtIDjJq1_U

 

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  • Alas, I didn’t hear but one cut of Song for Billie Holiday by Wada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer and Jack DeJohnnette, which I regret, and most likely a high top-tenner.

Kevin Lynch, The Shepherd Express, Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak), nodepression.com

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Never dove into “Moby-Dick?” Or contemplate a revisit? The annual New Year’s marathon reading will quench the thirst

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Courtesy berkshirehistory.org

The 270th Anniversary Year of the publishing of Moby-Dick has just passed. But it’s never too late to take the deep dive. Here’s how to truly embrace the New Year. Let our august “Law and Order” thespian Sam Waterston offer us up Chapter 1, “Loomings,” of The Great American Novel (or epic prose poem, or whatever it is), with its epic opening line, “Call me Ishmael.” For the first time, I believe, the annual marathon reading of Melville’s masterwork, presented by The New Bedford Whaling Museum, is now a video. You can follow along at your own speed and pleasure.

Crusty Sam is a fine, resonant reader, as if recalling the greatest story of his restless youth. There’s also rhythmic pace afoot. After Waterson’s eloquently-paced pauses,  Chapter 2 reader, Gail Fortes, picks up the pace with alacrity. Among the other readers is Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey; Ashley Bendicksen, Miss Rhode Island for America Strong 20221; a handful of Massachusetts state senators; and, eccentrically, a member of the Flat Earth Society!

Orson Welles as Father Mapple reading the story of Jonah and the whale in John Huston’s 1957 film adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” Courtesy Alchetron 

I’ll say no more, except to urge you give Ishmael’s splendid opening meditation on the sea, your ears, and you may feel a bit of Atlantic brine wisp across your face. Among the cool stuff, and polar degrees of high and low-mindedness, there’s a lecture by noted Melville scholar Christopher Benfry and a Moby-Dick trivia quiz, plus a reader roster and a timetable for each chapter (averaging around a half hour, a piece, though some chapters are quite brief).

“It is time to get to the sea!”

Moby-Dick Marathon 2022