Bob Dylan writing in Woodstock, N.Y. during the period when he composed the songs for his earliest albums of originals. From the new book “Dylan:Disc by Disc” from Voyageur Press. Photo credit: Douglas Gilbert/Redferns/Getty Images

November has come, dour as a rusty pail, and I mourn my favorite month. October was a calendar painting delaying my spirit’s decay — when the leaves and thistle burnish and glimmer, and fill the air with the pungency of natural death cycles. So I’ll surely face the howling wind, as I’ve done Novembers past.

Yet old songs stir. I’ve realized that Bob Dylan did November’s song as well as anyone ever has. The times are a-changin’ to a wintry world and Dylan understood and expressed this in new found terms of old traditions. On the first page of Moby-Dick, Melville’s Ishmael had invoked “the damp, drizzly November of my soul,” when he found himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.”

Dylan invoked similar spirits in his early masterpiece, The Times They are a-Changin’  from 1964, even though he was merely 22 years old when he wrote and recorded these songs.

As often as we may have considered, loved or even forgotten it, the album is worth revisiting at least once again, to hunker in November’s chill.

This essay is also prompted by an elegantly crafted new coffee table-sized book Dylan: Disc by Disc, edited by Jon Bream and introduced by Ritchie Unterberger, with conversational and insightful comments on Dylan’s 36 studio recordings from Rodney Crowell, Robert Christgau, Tony Glover, Joe Henry, Jason Isbell, Rick Ocasek, Suzanne Vega, NoDepression.com editor Kim Reuhl and others.

Of course, we know that Dylan understood what he had accomplished with this album. He knew how, in 1964 it spoke to the war-mongering paranoia of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and a November election that resoundingly rejected that, with Dylan’s help. He spoke for the restless ferment rising from a new generation, and for black Americans finally calling for just rights with another poet/leader named King.

So it’s commonly understood as Dylan’s greatest protest album, and perhaps the greatest such album of all time. But it’s protest is not purely political or social rhetoric. It’s greatness lies in the cries for the lives of very specific people, whether very real or archetypes he dreamed up. Dylan’s complex compassion bleeds from his pores.

Yet he seemed to sense he could not top the album on its terms, so followed it with more private expression and poetic imagery in the ensuing Another Side of Bob Dylan. Nevertheless, he said he would always stand behind his earlier work, and I’m sure nothing gave him greater pride than The Times.

And yes, for me there’s irony in that I have stated previously and made it a mission to explore the increasing multitude of excellent singer-songwriters inspired by him, who followed and remain shortchanged because of his towering position. Still, this is an expanding literature of our roots musics, a new sort of American Renaissance.

Texas singer-songwriter Steve Earle once brashly declared “I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say Townes van Zandt is the greatest songwriter in the world.” 1

Yet, Dylan, while he breathes, remains the man. I swear you can talk of Dylan as if Shakespeare’s in the room and learn anew. The bard of his times dramatizes the truth in echoing lives and circumstances, be they Elizabethan or mid-60s America. For one thing, many white people still fear a rainbowed nation, as in 1964 or like the racism dwelling in say, The Merchant of Venice or Othello.

Although The Times brims with poetic fire, Dylan chose here to speak as plainly as he could. In many ways, this was his noblest effort, rich with incident, detail, drama, romance and ardor. He seems as committed as ever. Each song deserves an encomium, but I will pick and choose somewhat, and try to offer fresh insights. I shy away from the opening title song, as iconic as it is, as his echoing fanfare of truth and challenge, partly because it also speaks in the broad abstract, even with his brilliant particulars.

A liner photo from the 2005 CD re-issue of “The Times They are a-Changin’.”

I prefer to linger over the powerful story-songs and other pronouncements simmering with finely-hammered irony, and the two exquisite romances.

So “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” that sorriest of South Dakota settlers, follows with shuddering emotional power, driven beneath by the insistent drive of Dylan’s guitar drone, like church bells tolling in hell.

Your baby’s eyes look crazy/they’re a tuggin’ at your sleeve/you walk the floor and wonder why/every breath you breathe.

Doesn’t every despairing man ask why me? as a heart-lacerating refrain, even if there are logical reasons? What happened to bring it to this? I always worked things out, until now.

Your babies are crying louder now/It’s pounding on your brain/your wife’s screams are stabbing you/like the dirty drivin’ rain.

And then the horror creeps slowly upon his despair: Way out in the wilderness/a cold coyote calls/your eyes fixed on the shotgun/that’s hangin’ on the wall.

I’ll quote only the ending because hearing Dylan perform the climax is the only the way to do it justice. And yet astonishingly, for such tragedy, Dylan renders a last ray of hope with no false sentiment, not for this man in his befouled world. Nay, hope for every man who may be born that dark day, and learn and plow his field to plenty from the shroud of that November, even if he may not avoid such a fate himself.

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Dylan’s evocative mastery is as sternly cinematic as a black-and-white John Ford film. Indeed Ford could’ve wrought something with long craggy shadows from Dylan’s tale of Hollis Brown. Because we need remember, this is America as much as the ever-celebrated hope and will and caring.

Album cover photo by Barry Weinstein.

From this stark story, Dylan upshifts grinding gears to the epic American mythology of “With God on Our Side.” This is the second telling of his first great masterpiece of anti-war irony, “Masters of War” from the preceding album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which in many ways remains my favorite Dylan album, but only as a personal preference. And he brilliantly makes this broad-shouldered declamation with the most unassuming of introductions: Oh, my name is nothin’/ my age it means less/The country I come from/is called the Midwest.

His voice begins to recite our country’s darkest and most mythologized chapters with a slow, chest-heaving sorrow. Our history books tell it/ They tell it so well/The cavalries charged/The Indians fell/The cavalries charged/the Indians died/Oh the country was young/with God on its side.

Yes, we have Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and other magnificent testaments. But has anyone ever told the Native American story with such succinct rightness?

Dylan takes us through the Spanish-American war and both world wars and faces the Cold War in which he wrote the song: But now we got weapons of chemical dust./If fire them we’re forced to/ then fire them we must./One push of the button/and a shot the world wide./And you never ask questions/when God’s on your side.

He tells us that he spent a long time thinking about these matters before the song came and, despite his simmering anger, he does not speak as a moral arbiter. He humbly allows us our freedom.

He invokes Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ and concludes: so now as I’m leavin’/I’m weary as hell/The confusion I’m feelin’/Ain’t no tongue can tell/The words fill my head/and fall to the floor/if God’s on our side/ He’ll stop the next war.

Dylan is heroically honest yet bereft of a solution. Like so many before him, he invokes God in his darkest hour. I figure Dylan knew that God would not stop the next war, and this song remains the summation of the dire irony he laid before us, the countless grotesque ways that God’s name has been taken in vain. And Dylan seems to understand that the free will we exercise weighs on God’s heart much as anything. I suspect he might concur with Norman Mailer’s late-life cosmology which posited that God is not omniscient; rather that He is a flawed creative artist. So He may be unable to stop humanity’s fratricidal and ecological madness, until perhaps the Second Coming or whatever the final hour brings.

Dylan wisely follows this mighty jeremiad with pure grace, the album’s most hushed and intimate reflection, “One Too Many Mornings.” We hear what a superbly romantic singer he can be, the perfect counterpoint to his bracingly ironic voice.

The song takes a poetic measure of time akin to the following year’s “My Back Pages”: As the night comes in a fallin’/the dogs’ll lose their bark./And the silent night will shatter/from the sounds inside my mind/For I’m one too many mornings/and a thousand miles behind.

It’s a story of a young man reflecting from where he sits, having lain with his lover. That sun-filtered scene, and perhaps everything leading up to it, compels him to realize life can catch up to you, ambush you at any moment, even that one when you finally begin to truly savor it.

“North Country Blues” is a more muted death dirge than “Hollis Brown,” and a magnificent evocation of the coal miner’s life. It tells a true, harsh story that leads to the devaluing of the coal product and of the lives of those who labor for it.

So the mining gates locked/and the red iron rotted/and the room smelled heavy from drinking.

Where the sad, silence song/made the hour twice as long/as I waited for the sun to go sinking.

“Only a Pawn in their Game” tells the tale of Medgar Evers, one of the first martyrs of the civil rights movement. A handle hid out in the dark/ a hand set the spark/ two eyes took the aim/ behind the man’s brain/ but he can’t be blamed/ he’s only a pawn in their game.

Of course, it is a tale as contemporary as tomorrow. Because, for all the progress that Frederick Douglass believed in, and that we have accomplished, we struggle mightily with race, and the nation’s Original Sin. Dylan understands it is the contradictions of our system that betray us all, even the manipulators. Dylan sings with the weary regret of a witness who has seen it too many times before. That was 1964. How many of us are witnesses today of the same doleful sort? And what are we to do about it? Those were Dylan’s implicit questions, back then.

Again he wisely gives us respite, with perhaps his loveliest November evocation of romance in all its splintering splendor. “Boots of Spanish Leather” is like the ocean waves it uses as a metaphorical and literal setting for the distance between two lovers in a romance that may or may not have experienced one too many mornings. Dylan imagines the two lovers corresponding over the sea with letters. 2

One lover longs for the other’s lips. And yet, I got a letter on a lonesome day/it was from her ship a sailing/saying I don’t know when I’ll be coming back again/it depends on how I’m feelin’.

The seemingly forsaken lover musters gallant graciousness: So take heed, take heed of the Western wind/take heed of the stormy weather. And yes, there’s something you can send back to me/ Spanish boots of Spanish leather.

The lover repeats the word “Spanish” as a way of savoring the beautiful artifacts that might symbolize their love, and its leave-taking. It’s as if he cannot let go in that moment, and yet he does. Perhaps the vast ocean waves that have gently jostled beneath this tender story loosed the moorings of the love they once trusted as firmly entwined.

Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night/ and the diamonds from the deepest ocean/ I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss/ for that’s all I’m wishing to be ownin’.

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“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” tells another true story of American racial shame, one far less known, but no less potent, than Medgar Evers’. William Zanzinger killed Hattie Carroll, a maid. The wealthy young tobacco farmer reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders/and swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling/ In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking.

The killer gets a six-month sentence. Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears/Bury the rag deep in your face/for now’s the time for your tears.

Perhaps no song Dylan ever wrote more effectively juxtaposes wrenching pathos with boot-heel disregard, and the curious and wide range of reaction to the events that is peculiarly American.

Finally “Restless Farewell” is perhaps Dylan realizing he needs to end his great testimony to the changing times. Changes few could have predicted or forewarned except someone like him. He became our Paul Revere, our Raven quoting doom, our secular minister who preached with a harmonica hooked to his a neck, a wily voice and words to anguish, wonder and march to.

And in 1964, he was our bard of November and its howling reprisal of summer’s lost innocence. Most remarkably, he was a kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, as extraordinarily gifted as he was obsessed with America’s vernacular musics, brash and brawling, impassioned and commingling.

Oh, every thought that’s strung a knot in my mind/

I might go insane if it couldn’t be sprung.

But it’s not to stand naked under unknowin’ eyes.

It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung…

So I’ll make my stand/and remain as I am

And bid farewell and not give a damn.

___________

All lyrics, in italics, by Bob Dylan, copyright 1964

1 Today Earle competes for that title, as does Lucinda Williams or Roseanne Cash or Springsteen, among others. Or perhaps James McMurtry exemplifies the lessons that Dylan passed down on this album of monumental storytelling. His superb 2015 album Complicated Game demonstrates how he’s learned from Dylan as well as his father, the great Texan novelist Larry McMurtry, and made all that his own. So, if you want to go somewhere after The Times, where Dylan himself chose not to, go to James McMurtry who can sing story-songs with comparable compassion, anger and eloquence.

2 One of my very favorite interpreters of Dylan, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin-based singer-songwriter Bill Camplin, brilliantly underscored the emotional contrast of man and woman in his interpretation of the “Spanish Boots” narrative on his album Dylan Project One. Camplin clearly uses both gender voices, rendering the female with conviction, thanks to singing which effortlessly shifts from high baritone to falsetto.

Dave Liebman turns up the heat with a soprano sax solo with bassist Gene Perla and bandleader Elvin Jones accompanying. Saxman Steve Grossman lays out in the background. Photo by Kevin Lynch at the 1972 Lakefront Festival of Art. 

This blog is a birthday remembrance, honoring — one month late to the day — the monumental jazz drummer and innovator Elvin Jones, who was born on September 9, 1927 in Pontiac, MI, and died May 18, 2004. His passing prompted the original version of this appreciation, published in 2004 in The Capital Times Rhythm section, aptly enough. Now, the photo-essay aspect was also prompted by Racine trumpeter Jamie Breiwick’s assiduous recent efforts at building an archive of Milwaukee jazz history, here: http://mkejazzvision.org/milwaukee-jazz-archive/ – KL.

Elvin Jones has driven the jazz spirit in my mind and body since before I knew it. Besides countless jazz drummers, he’d influenced the double-drummer approach of The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band, and the Coltranesque dramatic flow of the Butterfield Blues Band’s pioneering instrumental epic “East-West” of 1966, which he praised with a sage sense of the musical zeitgeist. 1

I had already caught the Coltrane bug, and Jones’ drumming coursed though my veins as I followed Trane’s incandescent, rhythmically refracted quest.

Jones’ innovative drumming style boiled all the implications of a time signature into rolling accents and a sliding pulse that pulled the listener in, and freed the music with a balance of sly sophistication and muscular resonance. As the most integral member of the classic John Coltrane Quartet, Jones went somewhat underappreciated by wide audiences after he left that group. This was partly because his approach was baffling to many even as you heard and felt its effectiveness and power to carry and lift the music.

Some drummers picked up on his triplet-figured rhythmic attack and started approximating his ambidextrous polyrhythms, which created a unique dynamic tension across the drum kit while requiring a loose-limbed bodily execution. (Jones succinctly describes his polyrhythms as “many rhythms, coordinated rhythms”) But few could capture the essence of his marvelous motion. That included monstrous press rolls to rival Art Blakey’s and a roaring sonic totality when swinging alongside a saxophonist as inspired as Trane in full locomotion.

At times you could hear Jones grunting and groaning as he played, and those bodily exhalations seemed integral to his sense of rhythmic dynamic and propulsion, like a tai chi martial artist. The analogy came to mind not because I know he had knowledge of, or had studied, that artful discipline. But I know he was married to a Japanese woman, Keiko Jones, who also wrote music, sometimes for her husband’s group.

I recall hearing (and meeting Elvin and Keiko) in 1972 at Milwaukee’s Lakefront Festival of Art, which was the occasion of the photos I took, which you see on this blog. I was with one of my best friends, Frank Stemper, then a local jazz pianist who would soon become a composer, earning a PhD. in music (on which I collaborated with him on his final project) and becoming the long-time director of the University of Southern Illinois– Carbondale music department. Frank’s compositions have been performed worldwide, he has a sophisticated sense of musical time and was a big Buddy Rich fan. And yet, that day, intently watching and listening to Elvin, Frank finally exclaimed, “What is he doing?!” (More on that concert later.) 2

Clockwise from top left: (1) Elvin Jones played so powerfully that he had to nail a board to the stage to keep his bass drum from moving. (2) He chats with a fan while pounding. (3, and above) His quartet essays an ensemble section and (4) the quartet is framed by the lovely setting of the 1972 Lakefront Festival of Art in Milwaukee’s Juneau Park, on Lake Michigan. 

Racine-born, Wisconsin Conservatory of Music-trained bassist Gerald Cannon,  who has played with many world-class jazz artists, commented “I was the last bassist to play with Elvin Jones. I was with the (Elvin Jones) Jazz Machine for about seven years, and I thought I knew how to play the bass before I played with Elvin. I was wrong. I learned more about dynamics, time, groove, and melody from Elvin than any band I had ever played with before him. I really learned to trust myself and my time with him. He was a great man. I miss him dearly. God Bless Elvin Jones.” 3

Indeed, Jones had evolved into a sui generis master musician with an ensemble concept which he developed in a series of superb albums on the Blue Note label. He showed that his post-Coltrane jazz would be diverse and subtle, but swinging and declamatory, and need not be deathly serious in manner.

Sadly a number of these albums remain un-reissued on CD. 4. So I don’t hesitate recommending wholeheartedly The Complete Elvin Jones Blue Note Sessions on the limited-edition label Mosaic Records ($128, mail order only at 203-327-7111 or www.mosaicrecords.com), an investment that is rewarding, pleasurable and a deep slice of obscured music from modern jazz’s greatest drummer. A debilitating arm injury prompted me to listen to the whole 8-CD set recently, but each album is worth savoring.

Jones’ wizardly multi-directional motion filled the rhythmic role of piano accompaniment and his coloristic approach to drum tones and savvy bassist Jimmy Garrison and reed player Joe Farrell provided a remarkably rich trio sound in his early Blue Note sessions “Puttin’ It Together” and “The Ultimate.” Farrell, who died in 1986 at 49, was a resourceful master of saxes and flutes, and would not be fully appreciated until his later work with pianist Chick Corea.

Farrell was a consistently delightful and inventive musical thinker on these dates. Jones expanded his ensemble on the albums Coalition and Genesis and especially on one of my favorite jazz albums of the 1970s, Merry-Go-Round. The date included the masterful baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, ex-Basie tenor player Frank Foster and two young fiery Coltrane sax disciples, Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman. Merry-Go-Round had a carnivalesque variety and bristling joi de vivre, and among its highlights are Corea playing on the first recording of his small masterpiece of Latin jazz, “La Fiesta,” Liebman’s exultant hard swinger “Brite Piece” and bassist Gene Perla’s sassy strutter “’Round Town.”

Clockwise from top left: (1) With Elvin Jones at the drums, Dave Liebman solos on tenor sax, (2) then soprano sax. (3) Fellow saxman Steve Grossman tears it up (with bassist Gene Perla driving the pulse), and (4) finally Elvin Jones takes a drum solo.

I got a live earful of this great material at that unforgettable Lakefront Festival of Art performance. I also recall, near the stage, my dad Norm Lynch, a big jazz buff, hoisting my young sister Anne up on his shoulders, so she could better see and hear the fiery and sometimes blistering music. That muscular double-sax quartet (with Liebman, Grossman and bassist Perla) would soon produce an explosive multi-disc set called Live at the Lighthouse which is  intact in the Mosaic collection as an edgy, thrilling exposition of the band’s creative power. Throughout this mighty box set, Jones’ flaming, indefatigable musicality illuminates lyrical chamber trios, Latin-style percussion jams, octets and expansive live sets.

Still, it’s worth remembering, Elvin Jones came of age with John Coltrane, so to fully understand, or at least experience, him one must hear that body of work, largely available on Atlantic and Impulse Records.

“With John, everything I had learned up to that point, it gave it significance,” Jones recalls of the classic John Coltrane Quartet, with pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Garrison. 5  Having descended from the mountainous vistas of Coltrane’s spiritual expedition, Jones brought his own music somewhat more down to earth, wind and fire. And yet he could still take you on a journey that you can take nowhere else.

________________________

All photos by Kevin Lynch. This article was originally published in shorter form in The Capital Times in 2004.

NOTE: One of the first women to break into the upper ranks of modern jazz was Marian McPartland. The pianist and her trio (pictured below), opened for Elvin Jones that day in Milwaukee. McPartland would later go on to host a popular NPR jazz radio program where pianists would visit her live in the studio, discuss their music and play live solos and duets with Marian.

1. Elvin Jones — upon hearing Mike Bloomfield’s long and highly influential composition “East-West” on the Butterfield Blues album East-West — commented, in part: “Very well done. This has a nice feeling. I’d give that five stars.” – Down Beat Blindfold Test, Nov. 17, 1966.
2. Perhaps the best elucidation of Jones and his innovative percussion approach is on the video documentary Elvin Jones: Different Drummer. It includes Jones’ own vivid and eloquent descriptions of his style and its effects, which was a multi-color-related concept, as he explains it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn1xMVmLbWk A technically superior document of Jones in extended performance is the DVD Elvin Jones: Jazz Machine from a 1991 concert.
3. Gerald Cannon posted his remembrance of Jones on the comments section for the Different Drummer You Tube (see link in footnote 2).
4. Check the online All Music Guide for comments on availability of individual albums: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/elvin-jones-mn0000179379/discography
5. The Elvin Jones quotes in this article are from the documentary film Different Drummer.

David Cooper. Courtesy of Cooper’s blog allthingstrumpet.com

You know the cliché about art imitating life. What’s more significant is how music can sometimes embody life and life transform music. That happened to Cooper in ways he never dreamed of. In fact, he’s turned medical horror — a nightmare that threatened his life — into deathless music. The story speaks as much of courage as creativity, not to mention the endurance of pain, the face of mortality. Cooper is 51 years old.

We’re talking a trumpeter given a diagnosis of throat cancer in May 2014, shortly before the recent jazz recording The Journey was planned. It’s a bit like a boxer going down to the mat and the ref’s counting you down. Imagine the tragic movie Million Dollar Baby. The analogy is not much of a stretch.

Not only a cancer diagnosis but a fractured jaw. And it sort of gets grisly.

“I had to have all four wisdom teeth taken out,” Cooper recounts. “The cancer was under the skin so they were afraid it could potentially kill those teeth. To keep them clean would be just a mess, so they wanted to get rid of (the teeth) pre-emptively.

“So they knocked me out and actually fractured my jaw accidentally, removing the teeth. I started the radiation daily and chemo for six-weeks. They said in the last three weeks it won’t be good and after that it’s the worst, how treatment progresses.

“By the recording, I was in the third week of treatment. So my wife Kelly drove me back and forth to the studio, I couldn’t drive. The chemo and radiation just knocks you out, so I was loopy.”

Cooper, who lives in Black Earth and is professor of music and chairman of the music department at the University Wisconsin-Platteville, took a planned road trip to an international trumpet convention in June. 1

“Nothing had started, but my mind was reeling with the news of the cancer,” he recounts, and admits little recollection of the conference. “But the road trip now provided the context. I had time to think and listen to many of my favorite recordings.”

“Almost all the tunes are standards and are things I’d always wanted to do,” Cooper continued. “I thought, I have a bucket list of things to do. So I could write new heads, so they’re mine. Then I saw road signs and thought oh, that might be an interesting name for a tune.”

As the concept arose and came together the titles list congealed with an undercurrent of threat or danger: “Merge Left,” “Stop,” “Detour Ahead,” “Speed Zone,” “Rough Road Ahead,” “Slippery When Wet,” etc.

They serve as material for meaty musical interpretation, and as an extended metaphor for Cooper facing the threat of cancer and treatments, the violence to his person and psyche.

“There was a lot of fear and concern in that whole process,” he admits. Considering that, what’s amazing is how damn good The Journey is.

The cover photo of Dave Cooper for “The Journey.” Courtesy union.wisc.edu

And Cooper feels his playing was compromised by the illness. He had anticipated this quandary. So in the previous months he busted his tail getting himself into “the best shape of his life” for playing. If one compares The Journey to his recordings of his transcribed Bach unaccompanied cello suites, one may perceive less technical assurance or — in to his previous jazz recordings — bravura. Throat cancer wreaks havoc on a horn player’s embouchure, he said.

“If you get out of shape you need to continually rebuild the mouth muscles by exercising. But the pressure on the lower jaw when I played, that was painful. I didn’t know why at the time. It wasn’t diagnosed as a fracture until months later. I thought I had an infection in December, which really scared me. My face was so swollen they had to wait until it died down to search for the cancerous spot.”

Picture, say, a lopsided watermelon wilting in the heat and sliced open just enough to stick a trumpet in, like a knife.  And Dave’s a handsome fella.

His wife, the talented jazz singer Kelly DeHaven, deserved none of this. “Kelly went through every bit of this with me. Now she’s kind of exhausted and beat up. She needs the time to be nurtured. She was a rock through all of this. They did this carpet bombing: ‘Here are your drugs, hope they knock down the swelling.’ That’s when we all hit rock bottom. It did turn out to be an infection caused by tooth extraction which never healed well. “

Nevertheless, the opportunity had arisen, almost like a long-unrequited musical love affair too sweet for disease to deny, an Affair to Remember. You may hear a sense of mature wonder, a life faced and lived, and perhaps inevitable angst, which can take you a long way as a listener.

The strong material, mostly based on changes of classic tunes, sounds time-tested. The music resonates in my memory as a listener.

“It helped to provide a good structure and familiarity so the rest of the guys could come into the pieces much faster and be comfortable,” Cooper says unassumingly. He considers himself lucky in another way

“This band was basically my dream team, of the people I’ve played with in the last ten years.” That would be Madison pianist Johannes Wallman, Appleton bassist Mark Urness and Chicago drummer Ernie Adams.

But here’s where Cooper’s journey really does detour, through a virtual Death Valley. And the guy riding stagecoach was that nasty outlaw named Side Effects. And there’s no end in sight for that road, not yet.

“I’m still dealing with the radiation in my throat,” Cooper explains. “My whole throat and jaw area all contain salivary glands and are affected. Well, (the doctors) fried those and now I have constant dry mouth. The embouchure is really compromised without saliva. So I have to think in shorter phrases and always have a bottle of water by my side. That began during the session. It felt like the face wasn’t mine.”

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, or the power of creation.

“Perhaps I didn’t have all my tools available to me, I had to be judicious about what I say, and how I say it, and be more succinct,” he says. “Now that I feel my playing is back to normal I think I’ve learned from that. I’m trying to say more with less.”

Cooper’s resourceful courage is almost palpable on The Journey. And the band swings, swerves and hums through it like a finely-tuned Maserati, masterfully hugging the curves of the tunes. Plus, you have Cooper taking “Merge Left” based on “Green Dolphin Street.” The opening salvo of C to Cm7 to D7 to D flat to C is among the standard repertoire’s most satisfying sequences of naturally transporting changes. Other tunes are based on Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Terence Blanchard’s “Transform,” Wes Montgomery’s “Road Song,” among others. “In some ways it’s like my maiden voyage.”

The recording ends with a warm exhalation, Cooper’s solo rendition of Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust,” dedicated to his father. Tom Cooper, a trumpeter, taught young Dave basic fingering and other essential lessons of musicianship.

“Because of my dad, I wasn’t in just a sea of people,” Cooper recollects. “I was at the top of the class. So because of my dad I began practicing to stay ahead. That kick-started me.”
Here’s to David Cooper taking his sweet time with his bucket list, for a long, journey down the road before stardust befalls him for the last time.

___________

1. Cooper has music degrees from three schools: a B.M. from Lawrence University, a M.M from Akron University and a D.M.A. from UW-Madison.

The Journey is available http://allthingstrumpet.com/shop/ and http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/davidcooper22 and amazon.com

This article was commissioned by the Madison Jazz Consortium and originally published in Jazz in Madison at http://www.jazzinmadison.org/the-journey-a-deathly-odyssey-teaches-david-cooper-about-music-and-life/

Richard Wiegel – Wiegel Room

For this CD, the  leader of the popular Madison area roots-rock band The Midwesterners  left very little “Wiegel Room” for anything but his lonely and largely acoustic guitar. The strategy plays like a royal flush because he has some tricks up his sleeve. One tune, “Richard’s Rondo,” just won the Madison Area Music Award for best classical composition. He chose a classical form for “Rondo,” an utterly fetching sequence of expositions and recapitulations, enriched by bluesy harmonies.

This delicious CD is largely folk-blues based, as per 1960s virtuosos John Fahey and Leo Kottke and their country-blues/R&R precursors. The opening  “Buddy Holly” radiates all the genial charm of Buddy’s bespectacled smile and exuberant romanticism. By contrast, the mordantly vocal bottleneck slide picking  of  “Wednesday Blues”  sounds like  a working stiff mumbling  to himself, which the weight of “hump day” can induce. “Lazy A” is behind-the-beat picking with a third chorus of pinging chords hovering around the shuffling  A key like a taunting hummingbird. Throughout, Wiegel’s gifts for the droll aside and the lyrical sigh shine.

Richard Wiegel. Courtesy richardwiegel.bandcamp.com

Wiegel periodically enhances himself with adroit but never-overdone overdubs. and a few used a loop pedal. However Wiegel says applying those techniques may add a dimension but “you get what you get, you can’t go back and redo anything. Kind of like a Chinese watercolor.”

And the wisely ironic closer, “Slippery Slope,” from a James McMurtry chord pattern, uses relatively new-tech electric distortion on a 1970s Fender Mustang electric guitar, and recalls Bill Frisell. Wiegel suggests a human character — in a primping, inflated theme – a blustery politician who may not know he’s slipping? Ah, hubris, that old devil moon, you got me flyin’ high and low.

Perhaps the humble, those with little “Wiegel Room” for success, shall finally inherit the earth.

___________

Wiegel reports that, with the loop pedal, he can perform all these songs live. His only current solo live date is at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 5 at Fitz on the Lake, W11602 County Rd. V, in Lodi WI. For information visit: http://www.fitzsrestaurantlakewisconsin.com/. Wiegel Room is available at: www.richardwiegel.bandcamp.com And extensive liner notes to the recording are available at http://themidwesterners.com/news.

This review, in slightly shorter form, was originally published in The Shepherd Express.

Associated Press

Dawn BarbouRoske (second from left) of Iowa City, leans towards her partner, Jen BarbouRoske, after learning of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling in favor of legalizing gay marriage on April 3, 2009. Between them is their daughter Bree, 6. Their other daughter, McKinley, 11, reacts to the ruling at left.

Milwaukee-born author Tom Witosky will appear tonight at 7 p.m. at Boswell Books in Milwaukee to promote is new book.

The human story played out like a hotly contested gridiron drama, which is partly why two longtime sports reporters, Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen, took on a book-length story about a tale of “underdogs and victors.”

And the story’s conflict and heartbreak reverberated all across the nation.1

Yet the star of “Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality” would probably drown in a pair of football shoulder pads. McKinley BarbouRoske was the daughter of two plaintiff mothers fighting for their right to marry In Iowa. She was “the heart and soul of the case,” said Camilla Taylor, a plaintiff attorney.

“It was ultimately a story about family,” Witosky explains in a phone interview. (At Marquette University High School, I graduated with Tom, an all-conference football guard, as smart as he was tough.) He began covering politics as a Milwaukee Sentinel stringer in Madison, later covered state legislature and federal courts for The Chicago Tribune’s suburban section and then in Iowa before forging new ground as a sports reporter, investigating the politics and corruption of college athletics.

His book’s lucid narrative spotlights the human players and streamlines the legal complexities of a case that boils down to this: What should disqualify a same-sex Iowa couple from legally forming a family?

Nothing, the courts finally ruled. And a child played a crucial role in legal proceedings that had never before considered the most vulnerable. One day young McKinley heard about her parents’ situation, asked “Why aren’t you married?” and burst into tears.

“Her situation changed the entire dynamics of the case,” Witosky says. Artificially inseminated Jen BarbouRoske and her baby had almost died in childbirth. Then they endured elaborate adoption procedures requiring McKinley’s other mother, Dawn, to establish legal parenthood, “which no parent should have to go through,” Witosky said.

McKinley also suffered from harsh bullying in school due to her parents’ situation — a child clearly harmed. Another couple’s child, college student Zack Wahl, offered eloquent testimony about “the love that binds us.”

An old Wisconsin case also figured prominently in deliberations, Zablocki vs. Redhail (1978), when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a state law denying so-called deadbeat dads the “fundamental right” to marry.

“The Iowa court was doing its job: to look at a law and see if it is constitutional,” Witosky said. “To say that is wrong is the dictation of majority rule, a corruption of our governmental process.”

hkjk

A portion of the complex mast rigging of the 19th century whaling ship The Charles W. Morgan. Note the semi-circular lookout spots where sailors searched the horizon for whales. Photo by Katrin Talbot.

Katrin Talbot at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, Pittsfield, Mass. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Partly because my little poem in honor of Katrin Talbot’s birthday Tuesday July 21 was so well received on Facebook, I’ve decided to post it on my blog, along with a few more comments. But I’m doing this mostly because Katrin Talbot is an extraordinary cultural figure who contributes so much to our enrichment.
So I will also offer a small medley of photographs she took during our 2008 research trip out East in pursuit of Herman Melville.
Katrin is collaborating with me by providing her stunning photographs for my forthcoming novel about Herman Melville, with the working title Melville’s Trace or, The Jackal.

Katrin is extraordinarily gifted as not only a photographer, but as a poet and as a musician. She is assistant principal violist with the Madison Symphony Orchestra. It is hard to say in which of her chosen media she is best. Suffice it to say she is the most talented person I know. And as an arts journalist for well over 30 years I have gotten to know and befriended many gifted artists in all media and art forms. I first admired her viola playing when I moved to Madison to cover the arts in 1989 — she was playing with the Madison Symphony and with the Karp Family in their annual fall chamber music concerts (She is married to the brilliant cellist Parry Karp, of the Pro Arte String Quartet).

Then, as I recall, I did a feature story on a fascinating inter-disciplinary performance event she was involved in. It piqued my interest because it incorporated quotes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and was profoundly inspired by the book and author whom I had by then become obsessed with.
So Katrin’s interest in the so-called American Renaissance of literature was a natural entrée for our budding friendship.
When I got the idea of doing a research trip out East for my novel, part of my thought was to find a talented photographer to provide images to complement the story.
I asked Katrin and her enthusiasm and talent immediately lit up my hopes for the book .
We made plans and, in the final scheme, her daughter Arianna was free and interested, so the three of us made the trip together, of which these superb photos will give you a taste.
(Katrin and I also joined a very stimulating collaborative interdisciplinary group of artists called Arts Immersion, formed by Madison artist and psychiatrist Russell Gardner.  Later she and I collaborated on a paper I presented on Melville to the Madison Literary Club.)

I know, when my novel is finally published, the photos of Katrin’s in it will not do justice to the full array of wonderful images she captured on that glorious trip. So here is a sampling of her photos, along with my birthday poem for her, “And the Sun Smiled”

And the Sun Smiled

Years ago, the seed emerged as a Katrin blossom on this day, and lifted into the wind and rode the rhythms of poetry that would circle under a tree, and the vibrations that became a viola’s song.

Many years later, on a Melvillian trail, I was lucky her poetry and music filtered through a camera lense, from her poised and snaring eye, like a reflection in the eddying river that turns each glimmer into another piece of Nature’s ongoing masterpiece, sometimes as fleeting as a squirrel’s breath, other times as broad-shouldered as a cloud-burnished sunset.

She grew nearly as tall and as lovely as the tree she once composed poetry beneath. And the sun smiled, dappling through the leaves, pleased to know it warmed the place she grew.
— Kevin Lynch

In Pursuit of Herman Melville: a medley of photographs by Katrin Talbot, taken for illustrations for my forthcoming novel on Melville.

Kevin Lynch reads Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” at Melville’s tomb, Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York, summer 2008. Photo: Katrin Talbot

Kevin places a pen amid the many writing tools left atop the grave of Herman Melville. 

Gravestone of Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville

Bottom of Melville’s gravestone.

Gravestone of famed jazz trumpeter Miles Davis near Melville’s gravestone and beside that of Duke Ellington in Woodlawn Cemetery in N.Y.

Twin angels atop gravestones at Woodlawn

A schooner mast during a tour of “Melville’s New York,” hosted by Melville “doppelganger” Jack Putnam

Rigging of the N. Y. schooner reflected in the sunglasses of photographer Katrin’s daughter Ariana.

The Statue of Liberty from the schooner as we passed by the iconic monument.

A reflection of the old and new New York, juxtaposed.

Melville “doppelganger” Jack Putnam, 72, historian at the South Seaport Maritime Museum in Manhattan. For years, Putnam has done memorized recitations of whole chapters of “Moby-Dick” as part of his tours.

Photograph of Herman Melville in late 1860s, from Pittsfield Anthenaeum. He died in 1891 at 72, the same age as his current “doppelganger,” maritime historian Jack Putnam, when Katrin photographed him in New York. 

Detail of the large chimney that dominates the Melville home at Arrowhead, and the subject of Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney.”

A lithograph print by J.M.W. Turner from Herman Melville’s personal collection. Melville was an avid collector of art prints.

This appears to be a travel visa that Melville obtained for his trip to Europe and the Holy Land.

The piazza that Melville added to his house at Arrowhead. It provided the title for his acclaimed story collection “The Piazza Tales,” which includes such great works as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.”  

A peek into Melville’s study and writing desk at Arrowhead, where he wrote “Moby-Dick,” and other works. Imagine, a masterpiece written with nothing but quills, ink fountains and sheets of paper!

Herman Melville (left) and a visitor surveying in the fields at Arrowhead, photo from Pittsfield Anthenaeum.

Melville’s Arrowhead, with the famous piazza he added. The home is well preserved by The Berkshire County Historical Society.

Whale harpoon rack from The Charles W. Morgan, moored in Mystic. Conn., the last extant whaling ship from the mid-1800s, Melville’s era.

Porthole from below deck on the whaler The Charles W. Morgan

Harpoon rope for  whaling boat. The rope and boat would often be pulled by a harpooned whale on a “Nantucket sleigh ride” until the mighty beast weakened. Then the sailors grabbed the rope and hauled their prey in for the final kill.

Diagram for the cutting of a captured Sperm Whale by a whaling crew.

Forked spears, on the Charles W. Morgan, for hoisting whale blubber slabs into the tryworks for melting into oil.

A “widow’s walk” built atop a roof in the harbor at Mystic, Conn., where wives of whalers would watch the sea in hopes of seeing their husbands returning.

The masthead on the tip of the prow of the 19th-century whaler The Charles W. Morgan.

A jellyfish swims past the Charles W. Morgan in the bay of Mystic, Conn.A spectral reflection of the whaling ship in the water below its mooring place.

_______________

Meanwhile, yours truly tries to continue spreading the word of Melville — here prostelytizing with my “Call Me Ishmael” T-shirt from Arrowhead — with the Italian sausage of the famous Milwaukee Brewers sausage race.  I explained to him how much the Moby-Dick man loved Italy’s art. One of Melville’s traveling lectures was on “The Statues of Rome.” Photo by Ann K. Peterson.

Townes van Zandt with “Amigo,” Colorado, 1976

And lay me down easy where the cool rivers run/
With only my mountains ‘tween me and the sun — Townes Van Zandt, “My Proud Mountains”

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal 

I recently drove back out to Colorado which is not my home. But something draws me back, which feels as primal and perhaps as personal as it was for the late great Townes Van Zandt when he pondered, wrote and sang “My Proud Mountains.”

OK, part of it is my love for experiencing music in an extraordinary outdoor setting, so I head for the improbable mountainous concert venue of Red Rocks Amphitheater, outside Morrison,  Colorado. Here you drive up to caverns where you lose cell phone reception. You my need to climb a ways up rock and root-thicketed pathways, and then steep concrete staircases to get to your seat.

But there’s something more personal about the mountain thing for me. As my girlfriend Ann Peterson and I drove through Iowa on our way out last week, I popped in Van Zandt’s album The Highway Kind, which includes “My Proud Mountains.”

But first, there’s another song, utterly haunting, the title song, which I think is the only way I can get to “My Proud Mountains.” I had to re-listen to “The Highway Kind” several times (once while Ann was in a gas station restroom).  For me it feels like a sort of strange, disembodied rite, about a man who has to keep rolling his tumbleweed soul down the highway, drifting in and out of relationships, in search of a woman whom he loves and yet has never met. That sounds like the stuff of pure, goofball romance but Townes makes clear in the song that chances are that he will never meet this woman, which is a different kind of longing, the stuff of pure idealism.

Yet Townes has a gift for the twist — there is no simmering sense of “just maybe,” only a forsaken dream that a darkly blessed poet could envision.

The essentially modal song putters and drones along in D minor, like a car with a hole in each tire hissing out air, till you’re sitting pancake-flat on the highway in the middle of nowhere. Pour the sun upon the ground, stand to throw a shadow. Watch it grow into the night/ Feel the spinning sky. It was the perfect song for a drive from Milwaukee to Boulder in two days, because Iowa and Nebraska seem forever (I wish I’d brought the CD last fall, when I madly drove from Milwaukee to Boulder in one day.)

Ultimately Townes has to keep moving because he’s the highway kind, the restless soul who “only comes to leave.” And then he sings: “But the leavin’ I don’t mind, it’s the comin’ that I crave.” Enough to drive a woman crazy, so none could ever stay with him, although more than a few fell in love.

Nevertheless, Townes had a devoted, long-suffering wife, Jeanene, whom I suspect might concede that this is one of the songs closest to who he really was.

Here is a striking and under-heard version of “The Highway Kind”:

It was this sort of poetic storytelling that caught me almost unawares when I turned to Townes Van Zandt’s music after my second marriage failed. Many years earlier, his baroquely overproduced first album For the Sake of the Song had kept me from investigating his later output. Now I discovered I needed his mournful yet persistently outward bound and slightly cock-eyed imagination, one that dreamed up the mini- epic “Pancho and Lefty,” which Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard turned into a huge hit. Townes also led me to rediscover so-called roots music and the many newer singer-songwriters applying extraordinary levels of literary effort to song craft, a quiet sort of American cultural renaissance.

Anyways, I don’t really consider myself “The Highway Kind.” Being a Cancer, I’m even something of a homebody. Still, as the son of a traveling salesman, I do love the road — driving across the Spartan, mute, muscular and magnificent expanses of America.

I’m fascinated by such a quietly bedeviled creature as “The Highway Kind” and yet I respond with more of an open soul to a song like “My Proud Mountains.”

Colorado was the Texas singer-songwriter’s adopted state.

He lived there in some of the happiest times of his life as well as some of the most desolate. You can read one of the two biographies of his life, though I prefer John Kruth’s To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of the Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Despite its slightly hagiographic undertones, Kruth doesn’t flinch from the truth about a man who was a genius, and often a funny sweetheart and sometimes a cold jerk, especially when alcohol took hold of him. That demon ultimately killed him on January 1, 1997, at age of 52 — exactly 40 years to the day after his hero, Hank Williams, died, also from drink.

Kruth’s book title draws from the title of perhaps my favorite Van Zandt song, “To Live’s to Fly” a more sunlit variation on “The Highway Kind” theme. “To Live” examines the profound impulse to keep moving on, which the true troubadour lives for, because he or she simply cannot rest, with a soul as unsettled as the wind that sighs and howls almost ceaselessly through Townes’ proud Colorado mountains.
Despite the kinship between the two songs, I won’t peruse “To Live’s to Fly” in detail because it’s so well known among Townes fans.

“My Proud Mountains,” however, sounds like he wrote it in Texas or somewhere else far from Colorado, and invokes the deep-in-the-bone desire for the peak experience in piercingly eloquent terms. I may never live in Colorado; as a downsized staff newspaperman I lack the financial resources to move to Boulder, the splendid city I have visited most often.
So last week, my sister-in-law Kris Verdin  — who has hosted my visits every time I have seen and climbed in Van Zandt’s proud peaks — encouraged my girlfriend and I to scope out for-sale condominiums a few blocks away from her home in south Boulder, not far from the foothills of the Rockies. But those go for about 500 grand, which is way beyond me.

And yet, I return to Colorado because of the mountains, my love of which goes back in some primal way to early instincts, even though I am a lifelong Wisconsinite. I was always drawn to the mountains and when I finally got out west in 1971, a magnetic force seemed to pull me to a headlong climb up the vast, grand face of Teewinot Mountain, in the Tetons of Wyoming, a mountain often mistaken for the nearby Grand Teton.

Inexperienced and without any equipment, I didn’t actually climb the rock face. But the long trek and scramble to the base of the face and the way back, with my friend Frank Stemper, led us into a mountain cloud, hovering halfway down the mountainside, at dusk. Then rainfall began and the engulfing cloud cover forced us to simply lie down on the edge of the cliff, because we couldn’t see far enough to safely traverse either direction away from the precipice.

So Frank and I huddled in cloth sleeping bags, in the rain, pondering the sky and perhaps the fate toying with our unfolding lives, just into college. The rain fell constantly and the temperature dipped into the upper thirties. We lay with knees hunched up to protect our crotches and soon they were the only parts of us still dry. We hardly slept but Frank says he dreamed that our travel buddy John Kurzawa drove my mother’s trusty station wagon up the mountain to rescue us.
Frank shared with me the fourth and last cigarette I have ever smoked in my life, which proved somewhat comforting, amid the daunting heights of our situation. When the cloud cleared in the morning we found our way down with comparatively little difficulty.

Townes Van Zandt doubtlessly had similar feelings and probably with far deeper anxiety during the time he lived alone in a cabin in Colorado, with nobody but his dog and his horse Amigo. At that point, in his life he was so destitute and perhaps mentally destabilized that he ate dog food for his sustenance for a period of time, according to biographer Kruth.

My own life went to through a debilitating transformation when I, along with 26 other veteran journalists, was downsized out of my long-time job at The Capital Times in Madison in 2008. Shortly before that my wife divorced me. I had also contracted a rare, autoimmune nerve disease that rendered my  left hand partially paralyzed and both my arms and hands in chronic pain, which continues to this day.

So needless to say, I was distraught and at times bereft at this point in my life.
That is when I rediscovered Townes Van Zandt, like an unholy angel of deliverance.

His mountain song resonates like the tale of a mythical character, but Townes sings it with such abject honesty and honor for the spiritual wonder of the mountains that you can almost taste his wanderlust, his spiritual displacement. You can imagine yourself pulling on his dusty boots, and heading west for that big, brawny horizon, long down the road.

And yet, his song is about leaving the mountains behind:

My Proud Mountains, by Townes Van Zandt

My home is Colorado with their proud mountains tall
Where the rivers like gypsies down her black canyons fall
I’m a long, long way from Denver with a long way to go
So lend an ear to my singing ’cause I’ll be back no more

I left as a young man not full seventeen
With nothin’ for company but the wind and a dream
‘Bout all the fast ladies and livin’ I’d find
When I left my proud mountains and rivers behind

So I rolled and a-rambled like a leaf in the wind
Well, I found my fast ladies and some hard livin’ men
Well, I sometimes went hungry with my pockets all bare
Lord, I sometimes had good luck with money to spare

I made me some friends, Lord, that I won’t soon forget
Some are down under and some are rambling yet
But as for me I’m headed for home
Back to high Colorado never more for to roam

So friends, when my time comes as surely it will
You just carry my body out to some lonesome hill
And lay me down easy where the cool rivers run
With only my mountains ‘tween me and the sun

My home is Colorado.

_______________

1 http://www.metrolyrics.com/my-proud-mountains-lyrics-townes-van-zandt.html

Richard Deibenkorn, “A Day at the Races,” 1953. Courtesy the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

“Summertime was a time/ of lush and glaring riches/ you wanted all of.” I once began a poem that way, back in the 1980s, before I had really discovered the art of Richard Deibenkorn.

But I might have written it about his work, which is the West Coast art that, for me, has epitomized the depth and spiritual liberation of the summer experience, more than that of the more popular David Hockney, though I like his fancy-free pictorial art.

Deibenkorn, however, possesses lush, lyrical riches and his art glares luminously with its layers of verdant, golden, sun-drenched colors. I was spurred to this post (as well as to a recent FB post) by the Deibenkorn painting Berkeley # 54, which is a highlight of the superb exhibit Modern Rebels: Van Gogh to Pollock — Masterpieces from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. running currently at the Milwaukee Art Museum through September 20 (For a preview of the show see my article here: https://kevernacular.com/?p=6371 Richard Deibenkorn “Berkeley # 54.” This image doesn’t do justice to the scale of this painting (61 by 59 inches) currently on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum, through September 20. Courtesy albright-knox.com

I’ve always wanted to go to the Buffalo gallery, ever since the 1970s, when I fell hard for Sam Francis’s painting “The Whiteness of the Whale,” an allusion to the profound essay on “whiteness” in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Like that chapter, the Francis painting is a gorgeous and, I daresay, profound work of art itself. And it was the first art print I ever had framed.

For my money, Francis was Deibenkorn’s only competitor for “best California modern painter.”

My only real disappointment with the MAM show is that the Francis painting was not part of this exhibit. So don’t look for it in Milwaukee. However, a few years back MAM received Francis’s complete oeuvre of prints for its collection (unlike many abstract expressionists Francis was a prolific print-maker) and will present an exhibit of those in the fall.

4 R

Sam Francis, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” 1957. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery 

Ah, but the current show has so much to recommend, like Deibenkorn’s marvelous “Berkeley” series painting.

Deibenkorn is not only a pure abstractionist — he can tell vivid, witty visual stories as in “A Day at the Races” (at top), as well render ingeniously stylish landscapes and figurative portraits.

The figurative images (such as Sleeping Woman, not in the MAM show) readily show his debt to Edward Hopper, which suggests the Californian’s art entails fair more than sensory self-indulgence. “I embraced Hopper completely…It was his use of light and shade and the atmosphere…kind of drenched, saturated with mood, and it’s kind of austerity…it was the kind of work that just seemed made for me. I looked at it and it was mine,” Deibenkorn related, in a quote from an essay by Jane Livingston in a University of California Press catalogue of his work.

Richard Deibenkorn, “Sleeping Woman,” 1961 Courtesy irequireart.com

I believe I saw some Deibenkorn paintings at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison and then, in 1997, The Art of Richard Deibenkorn, the sumptuous catalog for a traveling exhibit  was published. The show never came to Wisconsin but, with the catalog, I felt really hard for his abstract expressionist/colorist revelations. He was a sterling first-generation abstract expressionist, but they never talked about him much when I was studying as an art major at UW-Milwaukee in the 1970s. Common consensus held New York the cultural Gotham City, the kingdom of the art world, in that era.

Richard Deibenkorn. Courtesy brainpickings.org. 

I would probably write more in depth about Deibenkorn, but I am about to embark on a road trip. So I am delving into my own journalistic archives (which I occasionally do, as with an unforgettable interview with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe). I wrote a review of the Deibenkorn catalog itself for The Capital Times which I present here, as a celebration of his art and a celebration of summer. Get a taste, and you want all of Deibenkorn you can get. Enjoy and seek out this book (from The U-Cal Press) and this man’s art, wherever you may find it: