Jeff Poniewaz (left) is survived by his longtime partner, the poet Antler (center). They are shown here in a meeting with Allen Ginsberg. Courtesy jennifer-turner.com

I recently shared a couple of fine heartfelt poems on Facebook by local poets Harvey Taylor and Sarah Moore that served as tributes to Milwaukee Poet Laureate Jeff Poniewaz, who died recently.  But I quickly realized the obvious, that proper honor to this extraordinarily loving, sweet,  passionate and engaged citizen of the planet would be to post one of his own poems. As a poet, Jeff was an eco-visionary, writing insightful homilies and bracing jeremiads regarding the human poisoning and ravaging of this earth, long before such awareness was fashionable.

I can’t think of anything more apropos at this time than his poem “Tomb of the Unknown Poet.” I’m not sure Jeff will actually have a tomb, because has been cremated, after a long, courageous and heartbreaking battle with cancer. I imagine he would want to have his ashes scattered along one of his favorite natural settings in the Milwaukee area. But that is probably up to his partner, Antler, a former Poet Laureate of Milwaukee.

I have also reproduced Jeff’s biography which, along with the poem, are from the website of Woodland Pattern Book Center.http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/jeff_poniewaz01.shtml

Jeff Poniewas taught “Literature of Ecological Vision” via UW-Milwaukee from 1989 to 2009. He also taught a course called “Whitman & Ginsberg: Liberating American Bards.” Ginsberg praised Jeff’s work for its “Whitmanesque/Thoreauvian verve and wit.” His poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies. His book Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way won him a 1987 PEN “Discovery Award.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Jeff’s epic “September 11, 2001,” written during the closing months of 2001, “the best poem I’ve seen on 9/11.” Excerpts from it were published in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond; An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind—Poets on 9/11; Van Gogh’s Ear out of Paris, France; and as a chapbook titledSeptember 11, 2001. His other chapbooks include Whales Hover Over the Freeway (2007) and Polish for Because—Meditations of a Former St. Josaphat Altar Boy (2008). A volume of his Selected Poems written since 1965 is on the near horizon. He was chosen Milwaukee Poet Laureate in March 2013. His last name is pronounced POE-nYEAH-vAHsh and is Polish for “because.”

The Tomb of the Unknown Poet

Why no Tomb of the Unknown Poet?
Wasn’t he killed as sure as the Unknown
Soldier?
Didn’t he die running wild after
the wildest beauty the same
as Wilfred Owen?
Didn’t he step on the toes of landmine
minds?
Wasn’t he mowed down by machine-guns
of mechanization?
Didn’t he throw himself on the grenade
of scorn lobbed at Poetry?
Drape a green flag of living grass
over his casket.
Blow his taps on panpipes:
phoenix syrinx!
Unknown Poet launched into the Unknown
like a poem in a manila envelope
addressed to Immortality
Care of the worms who edit scrupulously
but send no rejection slips. 

The Bad Plus recently performed at The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee, December 19-20. Ethan Iverson, piano, Reid Anderson, bass, Dave King, drums. Photo courtesy of Matt Turner and The Jazz Estate Facebook page 

The Bad Plus @ The Jazz Estate, Milwaukee. Dec. 19, 2014

If the Bad Plus made their reputation as an alt-jazz band bristling with rock attitude, they threw a sucker-punch to open the first of a four-show two-night stand. The opening title, “Pound for Pound,” sounded tough. Yet, on the club’s newly acquired Steinway, pianist Ethan Iverson disarmed the audience with a delicate, stately melody that, as he repeated and developed it, grew questioning and then yearning, quite moving in its taut simplicity. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the club — rare for a group this popular — and perhaps it acknowledged that Menomonie-born Iverson was back among his native state folk. Soft-spoken bassist Reid Anderson, who served as the emcee, later noted that an Iverson-penned tune “Self-Serve,” from their new album, intends to honor the Wisconsinite’s “can-do spirit of self-sufficiency.”

None of this means the set was touchy-feely. The second tune “Wolf Out” leapt with a scampering tempo, drummer Dave King pushing the trio with sharp, skedaddling accents, and Iverson hammering out minimalist, almost punk-like repetitions. Yet, the group plays with accomplished skill, rather than crude rockers mimicking jazz. They relish making the rock attitude interesting, surprising and intelligent.

Iverson is rather original in his pianistic concept and attack, yet the influence of Thelonious Monk dwells in the fragmented phrasing that almost never smooths out to boppish fluency. Still, by contrast, bassist Reid’s compositions, such as “I Hear You,” court true melody, here almost hesitant and yet growing into a slightly querulous chord pattern and almost pained lyrical undercurrent.

You begin to see how this group has a broad audience among both open-minded jazz fans and rock-oriented listeners. “Elect That” seems to thumb its nose at the whole electoral process, with King kicking a sharp, literally metallic attack, hitting with the bottoms of his brushes and then switching back to wire brush heads with little loss of snarky edge. Yet Anderson unfurled a probing, Charlie Haden-esque bass solo, taking deep musical breaths, letting the notes ring and fade, a sense of something lost.

So again, surprise and dynamic contrast reigns. By jazz standards, the tunes never lasted too long, often ending by snuffing what might be a groove vamp.

And BP chooses quirky ways to engage in specifics of the world. King’s “1972 Bronze Medalist,” supposedly commemorates “the triumph of the human spirit,” as Anderson described it, in depicting a Frenchman who won the medal. The pushing, plodding, driving beats did suggest life’s uphill trials and pitfalls, and finally a “triumph,” in resounding piano octaves.

But this seemed presented in quotation marks, a postmodern take on Romanticism. So you might scrutinize, embrace or dismiss the notion. And still, the “emotional core” is what they really care about, Anderson says. The Bad Plus has appropriated and absorbed the ironies and contradictions of the age, as their very name implies.

_______

This review was first published in The Shepherd Express

Image courtesy St. Nicholas Eiscopal Church, Hamilton,GA stnicholashamilton.org

I informally call myself a Unitarian Universalist, though I attend church only occasionally. I was raised Catholic and what still holds up most for me in the Christian tradition is observing and living with Jesus Christ’s historic legacy. It’s something I’m inclined to ponder this time of year. Other writers help me.

My October road trip to San Francisco, highlighted by a visit to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s legendary City Lights Bookstore, prompted me to go back to my autographed copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, that poet’s most famous book. I bought it years ago at the great Milwaukee bookstore Woodland Pattern, where Ferlinghetti appeared and read and signed copies of his books.

I hadn’t looked at the book in a while but today (Sunday, December 21) my Woodland Pattern book mark immediately opened it to Ferlinghetti’s poem titled “Christ Climbed Down.”
The poem was published by New Directions Publishing in 1958, first copyright of 1955, and yet it speaks as eloquently and pointedly today about how we’ve lost track of the meaning of Christ’s birthday. I don’t mean to diss anyone’s religious practice, as long that practice doesn’t diss other practices or beliefs.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, courtesy elpoetaocasional.blogspot.com

But Ferlinghetti was speaking of how we commercially exploited, desecrated and indulged, to “honor” Christ’s birthday in the 1950s, which continues unabated today and probably in far worse manner.
So I reproduce the poem here for your consideration.

CHRIST CLIMBED DOWN

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crèches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carolers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

___________

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Christ Climbed Down,” from A Coney Island of the Mind, New Directions Paperback, 1958  pp.69-70, or http://www.blogcitylights.com/2012/12/17/a-coney-island-of-the-mind/

B/W New Directions book cover of “Coney Island” courtesy of citylightsblogspots.com.

50th Anniversary edition image Courtesy blogcitylight.com

Miguel Zenon. Courtesy blogs.wsj.com 

My literary side continues to pursue the best songwriting I can find, usually in a context of so-called roots music. But this year, jazz impressed me more across the board, signaling that America’s original art form is alive and quite well.

So I went more in depth in my commentary on the best jazz of 2014. My choice for jazz musician of the year is alto saxophonist-composer Miguel Zenon, for his ongoing work as the only-remaining founding member of The SFJAZZ Collective, which won the 2014 NAACP Images Award for best jazz album for 2013’s The Songs of Stevie Wonder. The SFJC’s Tenth Anniversary album topped my list and Zenon also released his brilliant new concept album Identities are Changeable.

“Mboko” by pianist David Virelles was our choice for jazz album cover of the year — and a top ten jazz album. Courtesy jazzdelapena.com

My list of the top 10 roots music albums follows after the jazz commentary.

I hope you search out and enjoy plenty of this music. First, here’s my top ten (11 actually) 2014 jazz album list, including historical jazz, with commentary following:

1. SFJAZZ Collective — 10^th Anniversary: Best of Live at the SFJAZZ Center, October 10-13, 2013 (SFJAZZ Records)

2. Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra — Habitat (Justin Time)

3. Miguel Zenon — Identities are Changeable (Upcal/Mielmusic)

4. Andy Bey — Pages from an Imaginary Life (High Note)

5. David Virelles– Mboko (ECM)

6. The Bad Plus — The Rite of Spring (Masterworks)

7. Joachim Kuhn Trio Trio with Archie Shepp — Voodoo Sense (ACT)

8. Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden Last Dance (ECM)

9. Jason Roebke Octet — High Red Center (Delmark)

10. (tie) No Fast Food — In Concert (Corner Store Jazz), Marcin Wasilewski Trio with Joakim Milder — Spark of Life  (ECM) 

Honorable Mention: Chicago Yestet — Just Say Yes, Devin Drobka, Bell Dance Songs, Jackie Allen — My Favorite Color, Tom Harrell — Trip, Fred Hersch Trio — Floating, Jack Bruce — Silver Rails, Pat Metheny Group — Kin, Bill Frisell — Guitar in the Space Age, Hafez Modirazadeh — In Convergence Liberation, Mitch Shiner and the Blooming Tones Big Band — Fly!, Wadada Leo Smith — Great Lakes Suite, Nels Cline and Julian Lage — Room, Tyshawn Sorey — Alloy, Ellen Rowe Quintet — Courage Music, Sara Serpa and Andre Matos — Primavera, Paul Bley — Play Blue: Oslo Concert, Myra Milford — Life Carries Me this Way, Steve Treseler Group — Center Song, Tom Gullion – Time It Is, Russ Johnson — Meeting Point.

BEST WEBSITE QUOTE, Chicago Yestet: “Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four), I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.” – Howard Zinn http://www.chicagoyestet.com/

.

COMMENTS:

1. 10^th Anniversary: Best of Live at the SFJAZZ Center, October 10-13, 2013 —  (SFJAZZ) After a decade, this all-star band seems somewhat under-recognized nationally, while maintaining touring, recording and a world-class presence in the superbly-designed center inspired by it, which I visited this fall. This album exemplifies a group whose range and depth draws profoundly from the vast jazz tradition and invigorating inlets from cultural strains its diverse membership represents. No jazz group does this better today.

Partial proof lies in the originals here —  generally stronger than the classics they interpret brilliantly, including vintage Monk, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder’s “Visions,” fired up with an infectious vibraphone-based rhythmic pattern. Ex-collective member Dave Douglas’s “Alcatraz” evokes San Francisco’s infamous prison island by breaking out of jazz impressionism’s pitfalls by flaring to life, like the sun burning into the souls of its spiritually tortured inhabitants. Eric Harland’s “Union” has a warm and vast embracing quality and, in the middle, a dynamic, demonic dance between saxophonists Miguel Zenon and David Sanchez. And Zenon’s own “Lingala” proves further that this altoist is non-pariel today. His inflamed solo floats deftly amid supple textures of marimba and percussion.

2. Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra — Habitat (Justin Time) Getting antsy for a Maria Schneider jazz fix? Try Jensen, another stunning creative painter with the large jazz orchestra palette. Yes, she’s influenced by Schneider who will bring out a new album in 2015 and who is creating the most beautiful jazz in the world. On Habitat you hear intimations of images, large sonic swatches breathe and vibrate with vivid life, though never overdone. Quebecian Jensen has a somewhat more austere northern sensibility than Minnesotan Schneider and nearly as strong lyrical gifts, for color, rhythm and melody.

The ensemble’s call-and response interplay on “Blue Yonder” is glorious stuff. And yet you might sense large birds soaring through wintry winds beneath snow-covered landscapes. Jensen finds her own specific thematic subject matter such as “tree lines,” or her emotional response to the horrible earthquake that devastated Haiti. “Tumbledown” conveys that tragedy’s angst and loss — building a picture with a static wall of structure — but still ends up sounding beautiful. And both Schneider and Jensen share a great soloist — trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, yes, Christine’s own sister, so the genetic blend has radiant personality.

3. Miguel Zenon — Identities are Changeable (Upcal/Mielmusic) The most ambitious concept jazz album of the year works superbly. Miguel Zenon, a MacArthur fellowship winner, alto saxophonist and composer explores the increasingly bifurcated nature of racial and national identity in America, typified no more strikingly than in our Puerto Rican culture. He Interviewed numerous people in New York City and Puerto Rico and their testimony about fluidity and duality of identity ring fresh and true. “I think more people are realizing that you can be more than one cultural self at the same time,” comments Juan Flores.

This translates into music well, perhaps no better than in the piece “My Home” in which musical lines commingle beautifully — they float, shift and melt together rather than the more typical countrapuntal interplay or harmony of multiple instruments. The mutating complexity suggests the day-to-day, breathing and laughing — living and growing. The power of the ending line has an implicit dual-yet-one tension. Zenon also captures genuine beauty, perhaps love and caring, especially in “The Second Generation Lullaby.” And his well-placed uptempo bebop alto conveys a vibrant human multiplicity, set against the urban sonic backdrops he paints. But for the interviews occasionally distracting from the music, this might have been my top pick of the year.

4. Andy Bey — Pages from an Imaginary Life (High note)

Hearing Andy Bey is a bit like stumbling upon a man alone with his heavy heart, or perhaps praying softly. The sense of intimacy — the stark piano and exquisitely naked voice — might feel too close for some, but it’s their loss. The singer follows his Grammy-nominated album The World According to Andy Bey with a recording conceived as a musical diary of four pages — three to four songs per page. He sounds like he was born to sing a song like “My Foolish Heart” or a lyric like “I could cry salty tears.” His poor heart may get him in trouble and he may shed tears. But, in the moment, he has strength enough to turn pain or complex emotion inside out, so it’s beautiful and moving for you, rather than merely private.

His roomy baritone of many octaves often massages a lyric with a grainy tenderness and sometimes hoists it into an aching yowl. Yet he does so intelligently, with the wisdom of lived life. And his piano self-accompaniment conveys a pungent presence, with piquant chords and ambling phrases that are scenes unto themselves. His self-possession and courage as his own confessor and accompanist suggests how he makes his own way in this world, according to Bey. (SE)

(NOTE: Other reviews marked (SE) at the end were originally published in The Shepherd Express in modified form.) 

5. David Virelles  — Mboko (ECM)  The most refreshing and probing pianist to hit the scene in some years. He works in a shadowy, often dissonant harmonic realm but with a private touch and measured attack. This music emerges, arises and erupts from his keys, often seeming to be conjured or braized. This is an evocative honoring of a “masked dance” Cuban “male initiation society,” which sounds esoteric and mysterious but not forbidding or chauvinistic here, more quietly celebratory, a cultural gesture his gender needs desperately.

6. The Bad Plus — The Rite of Spring (Masterworks) The propulsive “Augurs of Spring” rhythms and the contorted “Ritual of Abduction” must’ve called out to Minneapolis’ muscular alt-jazz trio. They bravely delve into Stravinsky’s transformative epic The Rite of Spring. Yes they boil down the orchestra; yet Ethan Iverson brilliantly funnels Stravinsky’s glittering, dissonant orchestration through his keyboard. Bass and drums stoke the suspense and ecstasy, the thunderous drama, the sense of wonder at life and the planet’s riches, strangeness, madness and beauty.

This amounts to one of the most seamlessly successful jazz fusions of classical material, And that’s partly because the group has a strong rock sensibility, and if The Rite isn’t classical rock music in its essence, I don’t know what is. It may not be metal, but it sure is stone. And a good bad plus, you gotta like Iverson’s tongue-in-cheek unpretentiousness when recently identifying the piece after they had performed the 45-minute work live in Boston. “That was a tune by Igor Stravinsky called The Rite of Spring,” he deadpanned. As a paean to paganism that spurred a riot at its May, 1913 premiere, The Rite still casts naked light on its world, and never grows any older than springtime. (SE)

7. Joachim Kuhn Trio trio with Archie Shepp — Voodoo Sense (ACT) I love hearing Archie Shepp do almost anything. He’s evolved into one of the most satisfyingly mature masters of the tenor sax, bringing Ben Webster well into the 21st century. Pianist Kuhn, still full of unfettered chops, and one of Europe’s finest modernists of Shepp’s generation, makes an inspiring choice for the lead-off and centerpiece of Voodoo Sense. The mid-late-era John Coltrane vehicle “Kulu Se Mama” unfolds as a 20-minute exploration of the Juno Lewis African-esque ritual composition. Majid Bekkas adds the enchanting vocals, the guembri and kalimba (African thumb piano) on the piece. Shepp, for all his inherent balladic warmth, still can still drive his tenor into the deepest sonic wilds, but his phrasing almost always retains a pleasingly discursive and often witty vocal earthiness. The annotator says that Kuhn has “retained his childlike curiosity even at the age of 69,” and that trait takes him and his band into freely burning Afro-Arabic realms too-infrequently heard these days.
The late Charlie Haden and Keith Jarrett recording “Last Dance.” Courtesy fiprado.com

8. Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden Last Dance (ECM) What did they know when they titled the last recording released before Haden’s death on July 11? That his boyhood polio had returned, fatally as it turned out. Polio long ago robbed his young singing voice. So he became perhaps the most songful of bassists. That instrumental voice captures the nostalgia of “My Old Fame” with the gruff huskiness of a burly romantic , whispering the song in her imagined ear, or dancing in his dreams — an uncertain step or two, then finding his inner Astaire. The rhythmic poise carries a resounding, muscular  tone — Haden dwelled in the bass fiddle’s natural depths, rather than trying to make it zip around like a guitar, as so many contemporary bassists try to.

So he became one of the best duets players ever, going back the quiet revelation of these musicians’ duets on Haden’s 1976 recording Closeness. Nobody listened or responded more closely than Charlie Haden. In this 2007 session, he fleshes out pianist Jarrett’s every lyrical turn of phrase with splendid harmony, or spare counter-melody. Some striking substitute chords make the overplayed Round Midnight beam like a new moon.

Haden’s extended solo on “Where Can I Go Without You?” magnificently extends the melodic contours and the meaning of the song as if the rhetorical question had been deposited directly in the heart of the listener. Yet his epitaph might be another standard, “Everything Happens to Me.” Not as a solipsistic whine, this was a humble man. Rather, he was person who lived a full creative life, embracing all life’s wonders, cruelty and strangeness with his artful gifts and passion for justice, while battling the infidels of his body and spirit, to the end. Haden could also swing and fast-walk the bass buoyantly, as on Bud Powell’s “Dance of the Infidels.” Last Dance’s uninvited infidel was polio,* and by the time it ends — with “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and then “Goodbye” — you know how he and Jarrett hate saying goodbye, and yet can’t stop saying it, and singing it. (SE)

9. Jason Roebke Octet — High Red Center (Delmark) Mingus and Ellington managed this sort of deft blend of deep history and modernist reimagining and expansion. The concept and sound spiral from the depths of sensual jazz harmony grounded with pivot-on-the-heel precision, sashaying looseness and unfettered awareness — that is, being as free while remaining contained in the music of the moment. Perhaps this band is creating the Chicago equivalent of its greatest forebears.

10 (tie, see below) No Fast Food — In Concert (Corner Store Jazz) — This two-CD set is a godsend for the lover of unadulterated modern jazz blowing. There are some fine compositions framing the improv and the liner strives to align them with the trio tradition begun with Bill Evans in the late 50s. It’s about playing, listening, energy and musical telepathy. The bigger names are saxophonist-flutist Dave Liebman, a fiery expressionist, and bassist Drew Gress, nimble, strong and inventive. But often the least-known member, drummer Phil Haynes, steals the show. Partly its due to him having composed all the pieces. But with uncanny skill, Haynes has appropriated Elvin Jones’s triplet-based drumming style. Many have attempted this, but I’ve heard none accomplish it with such loose-limbed, off-kilter deftness, akin to Jones. And yet, like his model, this drummer almost always swings, in his own way.

10. (tie) Marcin Wasilewski Trio with Joakim Milder — Spark of Life  (ECM) Speaking of Bill Evans, this piano trio more clearly exemplifies the Evans Trio tradition. They’re best known as the backing group to the great Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko. I saw Wasilewski’s trio plat live a few years back — with a rare sense of one-ness that allows them to sing together like a crystalline choir without ever opening their mouths. That almost mystical cohesion continues on Spark of Life with the addition of tenor saxophonist Joakim Milder, whom I was unfamiliar with. He’s clearly an artful veteran with a superb, glowing tone akin to Stan Getz and Jan Garbarek. This creative music is ruminative, but romantic and often quietly cinematic. They cover Sting’s “Message in a Bottle,” Herbie Hancock’s “Actual Proof,” and Krzysztof Komeda’s “Sleep Safe and Warm,” from the late Polish composer’s superb soundtrack to the classic horror film “Rosemary’s Baby.”

HISTORICAL JAZZ

1. John Coltrane – Offering: Live at Temple University (Resonance/Impulse Records) Coltrane album image from Pitchfork.com

Here’s the CULTURE CURRENTS FEATURE REVIEW of “Offering” : https://kevernacular.com/?p=4780

2. John Coltrane — Afro Blue Impressions (Pablo) — Less revelatory and challenging than “Offering,” nevertheless this two-disc set compiles live recordings from late 1963. So the classic Coltrane quartet flies in high telepathy, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones following Coltrane to nether realms of modal jazz, into deep spiritual yearning and testifying. Yet this set provides the listener comfort factor of familiar fare, including “Naima,” “Chasin’ the Trane,” “My Favorite Things,” “Afro Blue,” Cousin Mary,” “I Want to Talk About You, etc.

***

BEST ROOTS MUSIC ALBUMS of 2014

1.   Rosanne Cash — The River and the Thread (Blue Note)  My recent long road trip helped me relate to the perspective of traveling musicians. They roundaboutly get a manageable take on America, and points far beyond. Cash’s POV is among the best, among reflective, poetically inclined singer-songwriters. First, she deftly recast and personalized Norman MacLean’s metaphor of the river: “A feather’s not a bird/The rain is not the sea/A stone is not a mountain/but a river runs through me.”

To me, the road, her history, experience and wanderlust add up to “the thread” tying her fluid consciousness together in time and space. Her quietly dazzling Blue Note label debut often has a blues feel without kowtowing to that form. A song like “The Sunken Lands” evokes her ancestors’ hardscrabble roots in an Arkansas region that sank during the earthquake of 1811. Still, during FDR’s New Deal, her father’s family survived — her grandmother’s the hero of the song. Cash shows some global synchronicity in “Modern Blue,” a lyric that ties a trip to Barcelona to a Memphis experience. Several songs evoke the Civil War, most notably “When The Master Calls the Role,” as Cash has ancestors on both sides of the war. So she draws from “the best tradition of heartbreak, like the old Celtic or Appalachian story ballads,” as she comments in the notes. This mini-epic co-composed with her ex-spouse, the great singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell, and her current husband, multi-instrumentalist-producer John Leventhal (Music can muster complex harmony!).

The the song title’s gospel context also suggest the solid faith Cash retains, in life’s strange unpredictable miracles — her recovering her voice and certain brain functions after devastating illnesses, and finding a mid-life soulmate in the resourceful Rosenthal, who contributes greatly to the music’s beauty and tempered power. As for powers any higher, Cash seems to not presume to know for sure, and yet prayer or, as she says, “Tell Heaven,” is in her ongoing strategy, unsurprising considering the rocky but solidly spiritual life of her late father, Johnny Cash.

2.   Magic Sam — Live at the Avant Garde, June 22, 1968 (Delmark) No Chicago blues star burned brighter, or flamed out faster than Magic Sam Maghett, “The King of West Side Blues.” In 1968, he electrified Milwaukee’s east side Avant Garde, the folkie coffeehouse evolving into a blues, progressive and roots music venue. This powerhouse, well-engineered recording proves that Sam’s gig was meant to be, as the embodiment of blues avant-garde. Nobody had ever heard such hair-raising vocal vibrato and guitar tremolo, a man possessed.

His exuberance infected audiences and these 16 excellent tracks crackle with striking mood-shifts. The pure, percolating boogie “Feelin’ Good” finds Sam wailing “Woooaaahh ah feel so good!”  Then he unfurls a slow, thick-as-a-swamp blues “It’s Still Your Fault Baby,” his vibrato groveling in the pit of suffering self-defense. His primal singing, sometimes in double-edged guitar harmony, simultaneously soared and plunged toward hell. Reactionary locals forced The Avant Garde to close a few months later. In December 1969, Sam died of a heart attack at 32. This Milwaukee milestone remains, a magic beacon, his last great recorded gasp of impassioned genius. (SE)

3. Michael Bloomfield – From His Head to His Heart to his Hands (Sony Legacy) Here’s a Culture Currents feature review of the Bloomfield box set: https://kevernacular.com/?p=3167 (Published in shorter form in Shepherd Express)

4  Richard Thompson — Acoustic Classics

5  Rodney Crowell — Tarpaper Sky

6  John Hiatt – Terms of My Surrender

7  Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s “Bitter Tears” Revisited — Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Kris Krisofferson, Bill Miller and others

8  Willie Nelson — Band of Brothers

9. Field Report – Marigolden

10 Sarah Jarosz — Build Me Up from Bones

BEST ROOTS MUSIC CULTURE BOOK: I just got around to reading singer-songwriter-author Steve Earle’s 2011 novel I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive, but it will stick with me. With a 1963 setting, Earl imagines the doctor who was rumored to have given Hank Williams the morphine shot that killed him, a decade earlier. The doctor himself is an addict who performs abortions and is vividly haunted by the ghost of the great hillbilly singer, and blessed with a living spirit of redemption, Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant. Incorporating the Kennedy assassination feels like genuine human response.

 __________

Andy Bey CD cover courtesy Amazon.com

Marcin Wasilewski Trio CD cover courtesy soksuwalki. eu

Despite his international renown, Wynton Marsalis (left, back row of trumpeters) was as generous with his band members as he was with his musical bag of seasonal goodies, for the “Big-Band Holiday” concert at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts Monday night. Courtesy latimesblogs.com

This season fits polymath Wynton Marsalis like a big white mitten. The artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center totes nine Grammy awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a bounty of celebratory musical goodies to share in spirit, as might the most soulful St. Nick.

He opened Milwaukee’s Christmas season with his orchestra of 15 elves who came across as a lot more than Wynton’s helpers. He’s likely the most celebrated living jazz musician but he splintered the spotlight into 15 different fragments, illuminating each member while perched in the back row with the other trumpeters. No ostentatious conducting, yet he’s mastered the jazz orchestra idiom, no doubt.

He also shares an astonishing wellspring of historical knowledge. Some critics consider him culturally retro, questioning how he uses his power to influence music. This night it felt like plumbing the past’s depths and bringing it on home, to now. The African-American bandleader certainly silenced those who once blamed a lack of diversity in the orchestra, with a handful of caucasians and Latino bassist Carlos Henriquez.

And with singer Cecile McLorin Salvant, he offered the newest female jazz vocal sensation going. Her trademark white-framed glasses, gossamer ivory gown and red shoes brimmed with perfect seasonal tonalities. And her mocha-rich voice ran the gamut of colors, octaves, textures, influences and manners — without drowning her identity.

Despite displaying influences and skills reminiscent of Sarah Vaughn and Betty Carter, award winning vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant retained a personal identity while singing holiday songs with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Courtesy allaboutjazz.com

On “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Salvant’s voice glided over piquant trumpet harmonies, her tones stretching like taffy. During “It’s Easy to Blame the Weather,” her supple singing slipped behind the beat like an eel, evoking the great Betty Carter.

For one of the band’s most ingenious renderings, “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” horns evoked mewling, mooing animals gathered in a tattered percussive structure, evoking the animals and manger at Christ’s birth. Arranger Ted Nash still retained the song’s shifting sands of middle-eastern minor modality.

On the venerable “White Christmas” a muted trombone swung righteously, garlanded with seasonal trinkets of tinkling piano and chiming bells.

Several tunes Marsalis described as “Negro spirituals” and he noted how we’ve come far since the days when the director of the black Fisk Jubilee Singers was almost arrested for playing a “Negro folk song” like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” at his own university in 1907. Marsalis updated it appropriately, noting the song’s importance to the 1960’s civil rights movement.

Wynton Marsalis recollected and played music originally popularized by The Fisk Jubilee Singers, a pioneering Negro spiritual group . Courtesy unforgettablechristmasmusic. blogspot.com

There was even something special for Milwaukee homers in Marsalis’ bag. Brew town pianist Dan Nimmer got a highlighted solo and delivered a rippling attack of sculpted, big-band style piano. Past master Marsalis, whose father is also a musician-mentor, made sure Nimmer’s parents in the crowd of 1,300 got a hand, and acknowledged the parental imperative of musicians: “You did not waste your money on these lessons.”

Finally Marsalis’ large group exemplified the democratic principle that jazz is about ideas and feelings coming together, and sharing the wealth of humanity’s hard-won efforts. All band members spoke their piece and everyone shared a peace, wind-blown and bluesy but warm and swinging.

Here’s a video of Cecile McLorin Savant singing the Richard Rogers classic “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G99FfalLFWQ

_________________

This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express: https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-24472-jazz-at-lincoln-center-orchestra-with-wynton-marsalis-and-cecile-mclorin-salvant-a-marcus-center.html

Raiders strong safety and NFL Hall of Fame shoo-in Charles Woodson (top) shows his athletic prowess with a pick of Chargers QB Philip Rivers last season, after the Packers determined he was over the hill for their youth-oriented roster. Courtesy news great.org
Woodson, with Tracy Porter (above, in 2014), remains a vocal and action-oriented team leader. Courtesy gallery hip.com

Noting that a posting from last November about football great Charles Woodson is among my most frequently viewed posts lately, I decided to update the piece, for your consideration, in honor of Woodson, one of my four favorite Packers ever.1 My revised post starts with a story about the Packer-Bears game this Thanksgiving.

“We won this game early in the week in practice … with our preparation,” (Bears cornerback Tracy) Porter (above, with 2014 Raiders teammate Charles Woodson) said.

“This one came down to the final minute even after Porter’s interception. The Packers gained possession at their 20 with 2 minutes, 45 seconds remaining and drove to the Bears 8 with 51 seconds left. They called for four straight passes, and four straight times the defense held.

Porter put a gold star on his night on third-and-goal by slapping down a lob to James Jonesin the end zone. On fourth down, Rodgers rolled right to extend the play. He fired for Davante Adams, but rookie Bryce Callahan contested the throw, which sailed through the back of the end zone.” http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/ct-tracy-porter-interception-aaron-rodgers-spt-1127-20151126-story.html

That was Chicago Tribune reporter Rich Campbell’s description of perhaps the most sickening and ignominious second half of any Packer game this season — letting a lead slip away away before half time, then pissing the game away, on Thanksgiving Day. Bear fans everywhere gleefully stuck a fork in the dead Packer turkey’s rump.

I raise this unpleasant but perhaps instructive memory, because Woodson mentored Porter last season when they were teammates in Oakland. That includes instilling the young cornerback with his deeply savvy knowledge of the Packer offense. “Preparation” was the key to the Bears win, Porter said. He seemed to toy with the Packers, including Rogers, and was, in effect, Charles Woodson in a different guise.

Woodson is possibly the most gifted player to ever roam the Packers secondary, which is saying plenty if you think back to Darren Sharper, Leroy Butler, Willie Buchanon, Willie Wood, Herb Adderley and Emlen Tunnell, who played with the Packers late in his storied career. Not to mention Don Hutson, who played defensive back as a two-way player, but who’s an NFL legend as a dominating wide-receiver who opened the door to the NFL realizing the potential of a wide-open passing game.

Tunnell was a comparably great player to Woodson, I think, but he played most of his career with the Giants, and his last three with Green Bay. He ended his career with a NFL record 79 interceptions (since surpassed by Paul Krause), which he returned for 1,282 yards and 4 touchdowns, and 16 fumble recoveries, along with another 3,506 return yards and 6 touchdowns on special teams.^[3]He was elected as the first African American in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967.^[3]

Woodson’s stats stand as an interesting comparison, which I won’t get into deeply here. But Woodson is sixth all-time with 65 career interceptions and 11 “pick sixes,” which is second all time. And he’s tied with Darren Sharper and Ron Woodson for most career defensive touchdowns, at 13. He has 139 passes defensed, and 20 quarterback sacks, along with 800 career solo tackles and 996 combined tackles.

Maybe one of the last NFL two-way players ever, Woodson started on both sides of the scrimmage at Michigan where he won a rare Heisman Trophy by a defensive player, and led the Wolverines to a national championship in 1997. And remarkably, Woodson also has 253 receptions as an offensive receiver in the NFL.

He was named AP Defensive Player in the Year with the Packers in 1997, and was absolutely crucial to the Packers winning the Super Bowl in 2010. But the longtime shutdown corner back lost a step as all players do over time, and was evolving into a mastermind and skilled safety.

And this is the supreme athlete that Packer GM Ted Thompson decided to toss in the old-man heap, from which Woodson’s first team, the Raiders, gladly snatched him up. In his third season back with Raiders this year, at age 39, he led the NFL in the early part of this season with five interceptions, better than any of the Packers current defensive backs have done all season. Check out the “old man” on this wide-ranging interception with the Raiders: http://www.nfl.com/videos/next-gen-stats/0ap3000000541140/Next-Gen-Stats-Charles-Woodson-s-interception

Had he stayed in Green Bay, he would’ve played safety better than anyone the Packers have installed at that position since he left. A sometimes uncanny playmaker, Woodson forced three fumbles in his first season back with the Raiders.

Even playing with a bad shoulder against the Packers last week, he had a forced fumble and made a terrific tackle behind the line of scrimmage, which unfortunately re-injured his shoulder. Yet he was back in the game shortly afterwards. His skill set and knowledge of the Packer offense allowed the Raiders to play him as a single deep safety so they could crowd the box and effectively shut down the Packer running game, which had trampled the Cowboys the previous week. And Woodson has two more games to add to his career totals.

Getting back to the magnificent Emlen Tunnell, Woodson was far more important to the Packers, helping them to their first Super Bowl in 2010 since the Butler-Brett Favre-Reggie White-led Packers of 1996, an all-around juggernaut who dominated the league all year. That was unlike the 2010 Aaron Rodgers-led Packers, a team that — with a modest 10-6 season record and a sixth seed in the playoffs — heroically put on a late-season charge with a stunning blast through the playoffs to beat the tough-nosed and talented Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl. As with most Super Bowl champs, a huge part of the story was the defense, led by Woodson. That thieving, opportunistic group had four Pro-Bowlers — Woodson, Clay Matthews, Nick Collins, and Tramon Williams, and also young nose tackle B. J. Raji, in his only great year as a Packer.

When Woodson retires at the end of this season, figure on him being one of the quickest inductees to the NFL Hall of Fame in recent history.

My first blog on the possible Packers ageism was prompted by a friendly debate with a good friend, but I’m not here to play “I told you so,” rather to honor Charles Woodson.

I know Culture Currents doesn’t have lots of sports fan readers. But I still invite anyone to weigh in on Woodson — and the possible Packer ageism topic — which relates to another mature cast-off picked up by the Raiders, receiver James Jones, who — after leading the Raiders and receptions last year — came back with the Pack this season and helped salvage the team’s foundering passing game, after the loss of Jordy Nelson.

Some people say Jones was over the hill two seasons ago, especially with Davante Adams “poised” to take over. How well has that worked out?

Here’s my initial post:

My dear fellow blog readers I invite you to weigh in on this, and I should be able to tabulate the votes given this blog’s meager readership.

I recently began a good-natured debate with my good friend Ed Valent,  a gentleman and an unassuming scholar, who enjoys the verbal joust and, especially, jest. 

After we began our little debate, I sent him the news of 38-year-old Packer cast-off Charles Woodson winning the AFC defensive player of the week award for his nine tackles (two for losses), quarterback sack and one pass defensed in the Raiders’ huge upset of the Chiefs recently.

I just don’t know if Ed knows how much of a loser he is on this issue. I’m talking about a loser like hairy, socially-award Rob Lowe who just has cable for his worldview, or at least for sorry-ass NFL “packaging” in his stinky-pizza man cave.

Put a cheesehead on Ed and he’d be Abert Einstein. For now, he’s Albert the Alleycat.

Sticks and stones aside, and seriously (somewhat, considering the state of the world), what do you think about this issue? It matters to me most pointedly because of the ageist subtext, but also as a green-as-Kermit-the-frog-doing-Irish Whiskey-shots Packer backer who, like Kermit, doesn’t know he’s just as ugly as the Rob Lowe of your choice.

Ah, but like Kermit (and Rob for the ladies) this proverbial Packer Backer is just as lovable as the Packers. 

Here’s the e-mail response which prompted my response (and invitation). And it goes without saying, Ed, you’re invited to defend your position further, if you so chose.

Ed sed: “If it were up to you to you, Favre would still be QB for the Pack.”

I wrote: “Ed, my man, 

I was dragged back to an old, troubling memory during my recent drive out to the West Coast. It arose again today when I read a review in The Book Review of The New York Times on Sunday.

I omitted this anecdote from my blog account of that journey because of the travelogue’s expanding length, and due to the unsavory nature of what I experienced — both on that westbound highway, and on an eastbound highway many years ago.

Now a new book compels me to share this, because the issues it raises are too important to ignore as the evidence, only a bit figuratively, stares back up at us from our dinner plates. Yet, the experience did not deter me from indulging in processed meats at least once more on the trip, at a restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska. The accompanying photo reveals all, which I am now slightly ashamed of, though my facial expression is slightly self-mocking. I’m also aware of the irony of wearing a T-shirt from the culturally enlightened City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

If you are what you eat, did I know what I was, and how all that stuff got to be food? Photo by Ann Peterson.

As road partner and girlfriend Ann Peterson and I drove west, I don’t recall exactly where it was, probably Nebraska, but it felt like the middle of nowhere.

We smelled this nowhere before we saw it. Until then, the trip had been, among other things, a liberation from the foul smells and sights of urban pollution, and I rejoiced at having finally purchased a car with a sunroof, which let the pure air of America’s “Big Sky Country” surge over and into our car cabin as we sped down the highway.

Suddenly a skin-crawling odor infested our space, like a detour into hell on earth. For the living creatures we soon encountered, it surely must be.

There on the right, we saw — acre after acre — hundreds of beef steer trapped in large pens. They all seemed just stuck, with nothing to graze upon but the muck — mired amid their own excrement — beneath their snouts, squishing between their hooves, splattering their hides, with meager hope of finding a few stray tufts of grass.

“It’s a corporate farm, for sure,” said Ann, who strives hard to be a vegetarian, precisely because of her moral and visceral revulsion at the act, the notion — and the massive, obscene business — of killing animals for human consumption, all too much of it, in mostly inhumane manners.

As she drove I looked on in increasing disgust and amazement. I never imagined the olfactory revulsion this experience triggered. (It strikes me that the adjective “olfactory” might be “Olefactory” in Spain, a play upon the bullfighter’s cry of “Ole!” shortly before he gores the bull — wedded to the function of a big meat-processing plant.)

The new book is called The Chain: Farm, Factory, and The Fate of our Food by Ted Genoways, from Harper/Collins. In ways it amounts to a historic updating of Upton Sinclair’s pioneering consciousness-raising investigative novel The Jungle, which exposed health violations and unsanitary practices in the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century, based on an series Sinclair did for a socialist newspaper.

The stench of the corporate factory we encountered should be little surprise when one reads how Genoways argues that the industrial system behind “little cans of Spam” is “inextricably linked to a variety of social problems: animal cruelty, water pollution, foodborne illness, worker exploitation, a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, government corruption and largely unchecked corporate power, “ writes reviewer Eric Schlosser.

“Once celebrated with some irony by Monty Python, ‘lovely spam, wonderful spam’ looms as a sinister force in The Chain, a hidden source of misery in the nation’s heartland.”1

So as we drove past the hoards of creatures crammed into those slovenly, infectious spaces, I thought of Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

It’s probably also true of such animals, although here they are somewhat free to express their desperation. Yet, after a point most probably stand silently waiting for their brutish destiny, emitting no more than heaving exhalations and, sometimes, an inconsequential snort, in mute resignation. Until the moment of truth.

In fact, Thoreau completed his thought with this sentence: “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

The quiet desperation of a beef factory farm. Courtesy kdur.org.

So we left the slaughter farm behind with relief from our senses, but not from our sense of guilt, which made my Ketchup-slathered meatloaf on the trip back a week later, slightly gruesome, in retrospect.

Which leads me to old memory of a trip headed East from Wyoming to Milwaukee. I was hitchhiking back home after having flown out to The Grand Tetons one August of 1974, I believe, for a mountain-climbing trip in our nation’s greatest range of Alpine mountains. Hitchhiking home helped to offset the cost of the airplane ticket.

Perhaps I was lucky to not befall any misfortune on such a long journey dependent on the kindness of strangers. Except for the one occasion when a fellow gave me a lift and drop me off somewhere in Southwest Minnesota on Interstate 90. I dropped my hulking backpack on the roadside dirt and stuck out my thumb.

After a while,  I stood there while hundreds of cars passed me, I felt a little forsaken, and lost, like befuddled Cary Grant, dropped off in the middle Indiana farm cornfields in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Grant has a strange-enough encounter when a crop-dusting plane tries to do him in.

My experience was somewhat more subtle. A while after being dropped off, I began to hear strange noises. Aural hallucinations in the wind I thought at first. But there they were: strangled cries, almost human but not really, inarticulate, but high-pitched and clearly anguished. I turned around and for the first time noticed a long large warehouse-type building on the prairie, down an incline a short distance away from the interstate.

Strangely, I could see no sign anywhere identifying what the building as. It still didn’t hit me what I was hearing. Then, a short while later, I saw a large semi-truck coming from the east, slowing down right in front of me, but headed in the wrong direction. Now as the truck pivoted on to the a dirt road just west of me and trundled down it, I saw the red letters painted across the side of the truck: “HORMEL Foods.”

In that instant, I shuddered and my blood nearly froze — I understood I was hearing the death cry of hogs inside the slaughterhouse I stood in front of , like a fool witness to a crime.

I suspect there was an enclosed open space behind blank walls which allowed the pigs certain amount of freedom before their execution, thus the audible cries, unearthly yet as earthbound as any creature so fated. Now I wonder why I don’t recall smelling any stench. Perhaps the wind, blowing in the opposite direction, obscured it.

As Schlosser’s book review reports, Hormel has a major slaughterhouse in Austin, Minnesota.

So I looked on my road atlas, and after all these years, found the hellish spot where I had ignorantly stood: just outside Austin, Minnesota, right on Interstate 90, about 38 miles southwest of Rochester. Now it’s all the more incriminating that Hormel chose to not identify its slaughterhouse with any signage visible from the highway.

I am not making this up. Here’s a map with the Hormel location. wikipedia.com

Aside from its various pork based products, Hormel is the maker of the lowly and highly questionable but amazingly long-lived meat product SPAM. According to the most recent information I could find, Hormel saw its corporate profits rise in 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/business/22hormel.html?_r=0 by 3.7% from the previous year, and they totalled $80.4 million in profit, over 2008’s $77 million bottom line clearance. The recession clearly forced millions of middle class consumers to cut back on eating out which helped kitchen-table food manufacturers like Hormel. 2

Genoway’s illustrated book offers ample evidence about the sort of massacres endured by those pathetic hogs in Minnesota and those stoic steer in Nebraska, how their hide and flesh are stripped and their entrails extracted from their fracturing skeletons.

There is no pretty way to put it, and that would only be evasive euphemism. This is why even though I have some chicken breasts in my freezer, I suspect I will move ever closer to vegetarianism, even though I still believe the vitamins and protein of meat is an important part of a healthy, balanced diet. But I rarely eat red or ground meats, and will strive to avoid especially mammal meat.

I will try not to judge others in their dietary choices although it is difficult not to feel certain pangs of regret and remorse for the type of diet that has led so many of Americans to obesity and to death, from coronary issues.

And there is a more directly human issue haunting his book — “The poor treatment of slaughterhouse workers who lead impoverished lives.” Genoway tells us how “poor immigrant workers are treated only somewhat better than the hogs at a Hormel slaughterhouse.” Genoway depicts the lives of these workers “with great skill and compassion. Those who remain healthy are driven to cut meat at ever-increasing speeds; the injured are harassed, bullied and forced out of their jobs ‘I feel thrown away’ one worker says. ‘Like a piece of trash.’”

And of course, regarding Pres. Obama’s recent immigration reform executive action, many undocumented immigrant slaughterhouse workers live in fear, elected to report violations of the labor code. I’m also acutely attuned to a workplace menace the book reveals called ”progressive inflammatory neuropathy.” I suffer from an inflammatory neuropathy that is also an autoimmune, although thankfully mine — likely the result of an errant flu shot — is not progressive.

But the slaughterhouse workers’ disease include symptoms of quote pain, fatigue, headaches, nausea, numbness of limbs and partial paralysis. Investigators from the Mayo Clinic and the Minnesota Department of Health Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that, as Genoway explains, “Some one of the chain of command, someone at Hormel, had found a buyer in Korea were liquid pork brains are used as a thickener in stir-fry.

“To meet the overseas demand, workers use compressed air hoses to liquefy hot brains, standing at the ‘head table’ for eight hours or more each day, inhaling the fine pink mist. Once it seemed clear that inhaling dismissed could produce neurological damage in human beings, machines were shut off. But the workers affected by the new disease had to fight for medical benefits and some of those too sick to continue working got financial settlements only by threatening to sue.

Genoway explains: “After attorneys fees, each received $12,500, one-half year’s pay.’”

Schlosser notes that a book like The Chain “may induce smugness among lifelong vegetarians.” But he reports that migrant workers who harvest America’s freshest fruits and vegetables earn wages even lower than those of meatpacking workers, and also suffer debilitating injuries on the job.”

So again, it comes down to a brutish, inhumane profit-driven corporate culture of food gathering and processing. Schlosser also asserts that Genoway’s book “does a better job of portraying “the impact of the food-processing system on the people at the bottom, the destruction of rural communities and the backlash of racism” than does another fine book published this year, The Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard.

Of course, things are changing for the better. Implicit consciousness of the pervasive abuse of humane processing practices has even extended to mainstream supermarkets, where you can often find meat that’s labeled as humanely raised and processed. Alternative, health food stores such as Whole Foods and, in Milwaukee, the wonderful Outpost Food co-ops, have flourished in recent years as consumers become more aware of healthy eating and food production practices.

We even see now a paleolithic food diet movement, which essentially eschews the whole concept of farm-produced food of virtually all types, in favor of a diet of naturally-occurring foods that predate modern farming, or a so-called “hunter and gatherer’s” diet.

Schlosser concludes hopefully: “An outraged public, a refusal to ignore the exploitation of the poor, a willingness to confront powerful vested interests, a desire to expel the influence of money from politics – a movement characterized by all these things in force 100 years ago, (after Sinclair’s The Jungle appeared) and within a generation achieved its principal aims.

With more books like The Chain, more anger, knowledge and compassion, I see no reason that history can’t repeat itself.”

Perhaps the change begins with the choice we make in the food market, with what we choose to cook and place on our dinner plates. It’s a challenge that even braces against our cherished holiday of Thanksgiving this week. I suspect I will eat some of my sister’s succulent turkey, but after my long road trip, I am now chastened and wiser.

_______________

1 Eric Schlosser, “What Goes In, What Comes Out,” a review of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of our Food by Ted Genoways, The New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2014, 28

2 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/business/22hormel.html?_r=0

Photo of corporate beef farm courtesy of generationawakening.com

Photo of hog pens courtesy of planetoftheanimals.blogspot.com

Photo of hamburger courtesy of reformedmascot.blogspot.com

Singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Claudia Schmidt will perform a benefit concert for the Urban Ecology Center Saturday. Courtesy triblocal.com

Hear  that?

No? Well, OK, there’s a major music buzz in my brain — a crosscurrent between the part that hears it and the part that decides where I’m going, to hear live music.

You see, the pressure began last Thursday when I missed some surely excellent live music, which I regret. I was feeling under the weather and little tapped out financially, after a two-week road trip to the West Coast and back.

So last Thursday offered both roots rock singer-songwriter par excellence James McMurtry and his band at Shank Hall, and the Wisconsin Conservatory faculty sextet We Six performing live the classic Blue Note album Speak No Evil by the great jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter — yep, both on Thursday night. I’ve seen McMurtry live and he’s a serious roots rock artist. Imaginative, melodically and harmonically startling modern jazz doesn’t get any better than Speak No Evil. 

But more to the point, this weekend offers another happy conundrum of sorts — at least three very compelling choices in Milwaukee, with two performances on Friday and two on Saturday.
They are, listed alphabetically:
The Atlantis Quartet,  The Jazz Estate, 2423 E. Murray Ave., 9:30 PM Friday — This Minneapolis-based group is accomplished and highly listenable, and splits the difference between a Pat Metheny-esque electric textural expansiveness and an acoustic, introspective, almost navel-gazing mood, perhaps epitomized by the title “Stargazer Shoegazer,” on their latest album Expansion. That’s meant as a characterization more than a criticism. The band can also blow fairly straight ahead.

The Atlantis Quartet, from Minneapolis, visits Milwaukee Saturday. Courtesy jazzink. blogspot.com

“Br(OK)en genius,” produced and created by Christopher McIntyre. South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, 901 15th Ave., South Milwaukee, via I-94 E/Interstate 41, 7:30 PM Friday and Saturday — McIntyre is a young, gifted and perhaps even visionary black man who is drawing naturally on his personal experience in the racially and sometimes culturally oppressive environment of Milwaukee (for young black men especially). But he’s striving to deliver a message of healing and hope. The interdisciplinary, multi-media stage event is “a prayer, a plea, a song,” that will include several spoken-word artists, a musical band, and McIntyre’s photography projected onto the stage in large form. If you want to get inside the head of a worthy young African-American male in contemporary Milwaukee — to understand his plights and challenges as well as his drive and vision — this is just the ticket. Here’s a WUWM interview with McIntyre about the project: http://wuwm.com/post/broken-genius-healing-milwaukee-through-art

Several of the performers in “Br(OK)en Genius” show a little genius for publicity. facebook.com

Claudia Schmidt, Urban Ecology Center, 1500 E. Park Place, 7:30 PM Saturday — Schmidt is a vibrant singer-songwriter-guitarist-dulcimer player who brews stews of gospel, folk and jazz influences with a clarion voice and powerhouse passion. What she describes as her own “inner snark” might call her “Joni Mitchell on uppers.” This troubadour now resides on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, so we may hear “Wisconsin Country,” her uncanny evocation of a long drive through our state in bleak November, haunted by Native American ghosts. But drive on, she will. The former Milwaukee resident has a soft spot for some of our worthy institutions, such as the Urban Ecology Center, for whom this will be a benefit concert. The center works hard to advance ecological values within the city, most recently creating a natural prairie in a large area of property adjacent to the center, all situated right along the Milwaukee River, just south of Locust St.

Claudia Schmidt playing her dulcimer. Courtesy galleryhip.com

MacArthur fellowship-winning alto saxophonist-composer-arranger Miguel Zenon (foreground) lights the fire. Zenon is the only extant founding member of the 11-year-old SFJazz Collective. Courtesy all about Jazz.com

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal — Part 3 (With a bit of overlap with Part 2, this concert review concludes this cultural travelogue)

SAN FRANCISCO — Saturday night we hooked up with my old compatriot from The Milwaukee Journal,  Divina Infusino, and her and longtime husband, ex-Milwaukeean Mark Schneider, for the ostensible raison d’être of our trip, the SFJAZZ Collective at SFJAZZ Center, the exquisite performance center that was built largely inspired by this group’s world-class talent and concept.

Infusino, who’s written for Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post and other publications, has broad musical tastes, as does her husband Mark (formerly of Dirty Jack’s Record Rack, a pioneering Brewtown record store), but both are rock-oriented. Yet both were deeply impressed by the jazz collective.

Our post-concert drinks conversation got around to Divina explaining how San Francisco’s politics “realizes socialistic values as a reality rather than simply an ideal,” something that the SFJAZZ Collective exemplifies on its own multi-cultural terms. In this collective once again jazz embodies an exemplary cultural template for our democratic way of life. A profound acknowledgment of talent meritocracy elevates their wedding to democracy, with high standards of processing and expression.

As current Down Beat cover subject Miguel Zenon explains on this video, “it’s really the different personalities of the band that is the essence of group, how different personalities, come from different places, and different ideas about what music should be come together to make the this music.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS8pmw6sZHA

The current edition of the SFJAZZ Collective includes (left to right), Edward Simon, piano; Matt Penman, bass, Obed Calvaire, drums; Warren Wolf, vibraphone; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Avishai Cohen, trumpet; David Sanchez, saxophones, and Miguel Zenon, alto saxophone. Courtesy sfjazz.com 

This video rehearsal of Henderson’s bossa nova tune “Recorda-Me” was played in another part of the SFJAZZ Center, The Joe Henderson Rehearsal Lab, named for the great saxophonist and composer who resided for decades in San Francisco. Henderson first became a pivotal figure — bridging modern post-bop and cutting-edge jazz. *

He then became a Grammy-winning jazz ambassador to wider audiences with a saxophone voice as warm and form-shaping as it was liberated. All those qualities permeated this band in the two nights.

My companion Ann was smitten by the “cute drummer” but also felt capitvated by the virtuosic flow of complex, commingling ideas and emotions, which they typically make palatable and inviting, rather than forbidding. That’s partly why there’s no group in music quite like this one — exemplifying undoctrinaire jazz repertory work while being, to a man, an original composer and arranger (by contrast, say, to The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra).

Young drummer Obed Calvaire was new to me, and a revelation, a near-effortless amalgam of Billy Higgins’ dance-ability and Tony Williams’ ripping explosiveness. And he revealed himself, on his own deeply moving composition “Absolving,” very much his own man. The limpid ballad was also as nakedly honest as Calvaire admitted writing it for the mother of his child as a musical request for forgiveness, which he explained in simple, direct words, as if she were standing right there in front of him.

The listener felt like he was eavesdropping and warmly welcome in the same moment. Here, Calvaire forsook the hard drumstick, echoing his plea in the muted, delicate touch of his mallets on the drum’s skin-like surface, and the cymbal’s sonic sheen. David Sanchez’s saxophone solo beckoned for the truth as it exists beyond subjective pain.

The group interpretations of Henderson — who often wrote with authoritative flair in Latin styles — and their original tunes revealed much more than their solo playing, which decidedly eschewed showboating. Some originals, like “Jet Rickshaw” carried a tricky sense of virtuosic momentum —  a high-speed rickshaw speed ride through Chinatown — and we heard just enough supple, bracing collective improvs.

But several other pieces on Saturday night (all superbly arranged by band members) seemed to gradually expand, with a commingling spaciousness, as if a sonic atmosphere had formulated over the stage with billowing textures and floating filigrees of melody. The band recorded all four nights of their Joe Henderson tribute project for an upcoming album. They’ve done similar recording projects for the last 11 years and their recording of Stevie Wonder’s music earned the Outstanding Jazz Recording of 2014 award, at the 45th annual NAACP Images Award Ceremony. Here’s a sample from that album: Wonder’s “Visions,” arranged by Stefon Harris, the group’s former vibist. You can hear his vibraphone rhythm in the arrangement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjDv0XD8ywM&list=PL86997F82404BF4DC&index=9  A copy of the SFJAZZ Collective’s NAACP Image Award-winning “Songs of Stevie Wonder.” The Collective’s pianist Edward Simon spoke with me after the concert and kindly signed the CD. Front and back CD cover photos by Joe Goldberg. 

Zenon is a Guggenheim and MacArthur “genius” Fellow, several are bandleaders, and trombonist Robin Eubanks comes from one jazz’s most recognizable musical families. Zenon and Sanchez are from Puerto Rico,  trumpeter Avishai Cohen from Israel, pianist Edward Simon from Venezuela, bassist Matt Penman from New Zealand, and the others from around the United States.

What other group so absorbs its tradition’s greatest qualities and visions and meticulously transforms them into meaningful and nourishing music for today and tomorrow? The SFJAZZ Collective defines the terms and the fertile turf.

 San Francisco from Telegraph Hill. Photo by Ann Peterson

All classes see each other constantly because they are very close. They communicate and mix with each other every day, they imitate and envy each other; that suggests a host of ideas, notions, and desires to people that they would not have had if ranks had been fixed and society immobile. — Alexis de Tocqueville on “democratic, enlightened, and free centuries.” 1

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal, Part 2

The state borderline into California brought us to a real-live obstacle — a checkpoint at the border manned with uniformed inspectors. We stopped and I rolled down the window and a man peered at us, his broad brimmed hat, sunglasses and a green uniform resembling “The Man with No Eyes” in Cool Hand Luke. He was inspecting for undesirable contraband. “The Man with No Eyes” from “Cool Hand Luke.” Courtesy democraticunderground.com

“Do you have any animals or plants or fruit in the car with you?”  

I didn’t expect the question, so I turned to Ann warily and gulped. I looked back to the officer and said earnestly, “Well, um, we have some raisins in our trail mix.” A pregnant pause as he inspected the car. I held my breath.

He (seemed to) look at me again, and said, “That’s fine. You can proceed.”

When we slowly drove on, Ann fell into uncontrollable giggles over my guilty expression and my answer to the officer. I may be sophisticated about some things but I guess, like cherry tree-chopping George Washington, I cannot tell a lie (though I may have hedged on the truth occasionally).

High in the Sierra Nevada mountains the sun disappeared quickly so we tried to stop for dinner before pressing for the coast. We saw a sign for a place called “Rustic Kitchen” which sounded inviting, so we pulled off. We drove down a heavily wooded road not far from the highway, as dusk engulfed us in gray-black murkiness.

There it was. But as we drove up we noticed a handful of men in the restaurant. In the next instant, as several of them peered out at our car — all the lights went out inside.

“This isn’t a good sign,” said Ann, ever wary. Moments later, one of the men came out with a crooked smile on his face. “Just wondering if the restaurant’s open,” I said. “We came a long ways.”

“Nope. Funny thing but we just had a fire here recently so we’re closed temporarily. Sorry about that.”

He pointed yonder and told us of a couple of dining options down the highway. We drove away and agreed that it looked suspicious: the lights going out as we drove up, the man coming out to make sure we would not enter and see the goings-on inside.

The alpine evergreens stood, silhouetted against the last glimmer of sky light, like giant shrouds. Ann felt spooked and I flashed on David Lynch’s psychological thriller TV series Twin Peaks, set in rural Washington State. Did I hear slithering bass clarinet music following us? The restaurant scene may have been innocent, some guys playing a dollar-a-hand poker game. But what would ace detective Adrian Monk think? After all, he solves crime mysteries in San Francisco, just where we’re headed…”It’s a jungle out there.”

We actually reached “The City” in deep night, at the end of our third day of driving. We crossed the majestic, glimmering Oakland Bay Bridge and found our hotel without too much difficulty. Well, Ann may beg to differ — she was driving and I tried to navigate us through busy one-way and ultra-steep streets. You see, the third game of the World Series — Giants versus Royals — was happening the next night at AT&T Park, a short drive away from our hotel. Little did I know, booking the stay months earlier, we’d blow in amid “October Madness.”

We finally reached our destination: Encore Express Hotel, a.k.a. Music City Hotel, 1353 Bush St. Owned by a local rock musician, the hotel’s reputation and name derives from offering fully-equipped rehearsal spaces for local musicians to play in until 11 PM each night. We got a very reasonable rate considering this place brimmed with SF-style charm with original commissioned art throughout and musical instruments adorning the hallways and an actual trumpet hovering from the ceiling over each room entrance. We shared four bathrooms with other guest on our floor.

The Series-winning Giants crucially won all three of their home games while we were there, and the frenzied fan celebration spilled out like beer-foam lava all along, and into, bar-riddled Polk Street, right around the corner from our hotel. But the “music city hotel” has solid old brick construction and Giantmania didn’t disturb us in our room.

Speaking of “music city,” I imagine most people who’ve visited San Francisco have an indelible memory of the first encounter. Mine came flashing back, from the very early 1970s. My friends Frank Stemper, John Kurzawa and I inevitably visited Haight-Ashbury, which had just begun its slide into post-Summer of Love decrepitude, though it remains today.

The cover of The Grateful Dead’s new album “Workingman’s Dead” stood emblazoned atop the Fillmore West Auditorium, as a huge billboard. Where else but in San Francisco?

For two nights, we went to the legendary Fillmore, the multi-purpose basketball gym that was the nexus of the psychedelic San Francisco rock music scene. First we saw left-handed blues giant Albert King slinging his “flying V” guitar, with his honey-dripping-on-your-chin-stubble voice. The next night featured an early Southern redneck rock band called Black Oak Arkansas, fronted by a ratty-hired, white-trash Mick Jagger mimic named Jim Dandy, and an excellent blues-rock trio called Aum. Short-lived and undercredited, San Francisco-based Aum boasted distinctive vocal harmonies far from the same old-same old. Check out Aum’s album “Resurrection.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhkQb9tU5E

As Aum played, we stood on the far right side near the front. A woman was standing next to us whom we’d barely noticed. Then, at one point a man emerged from behind stage and walked up to the woman, who was smoking a joint. The ‘fro hairdo and the mustachioed dark looks were unmistakable: Carlos Santana. The woman apparently knew Carlos and was soon sharing her joint with him, right next to us. At one point, Carlos threw his head back, eyes closed, approximating the ecstasy of unleashing one of his patented guitar sostenutos. The joint never quite got over to the gawking Milwaukeeans. The Santana band performing at Fillmore West ca. early ’70s. Note the basketball hoop in background at left, above guitarist Carlos Santana’s head. Courtesy nuevamusica clasica.blogspot.com

A short time later, Santana went onstage to jam a bit with Aum. At one point, Santana announced, “I’d like to introduce you to a brilliant young guitarist. Come on out, Neal!” A skinny little 16-year-old white guy with another fuzzy hairdo came on stage with a Gibson Les Paul and started some mighty impressive riffing. His name was Neil Schon and he would go on to play in Santana’s band and become the lead guitarist with Journey.

But back in 2014 SF, we set out for Fisherman’s Wharf Several times we reached the precipitous crest of several streets with about 45 degree descents. Ann’s heart jumped up in her throat and dribbled there madly like a Harlem Globetrotter basketball. (We remembered why Hitchcock filmed Vertigo in San Francisco)

Ah, but I had faith in my Corolla, and it took the downhills like an Olympian. Still, this geography must be murder for people driving stick shift.

The Wharf is a gargantuan python of hawking and buying humanity uncoiling along the city’s ocean shore. It’s jammed with street-strutting seagulls, who seem to own the place (humans just visit or rent space), kitschy and funky historical distractions, alluring art galleries, steaming seafood and street musicians including a one man band-singer-drummer recalling Isaac Hayes on uppers. We saw a smattering of homeless folk, and some fishing docks. Strangely fascinating, though more commercial than I would’ve hoped.

But this is a great destination city and this one of its most famous attractions. A whole gift shop is dedicated to mementos of Alcatraz Prison, on the infamous island in the San Francisco Bay, also known as “The Rock.” It was a federal prison from 1933 to 1966, prompted by the Depression era of gangsters and prohibition. Amid various grainy, glorified photos and sometimes bizarre mementos of surly Al Capone and other notorious inmates, I fell for a funky refrigerator magnet, depicting a couple of prisoners trying to escape.

We also visited Telegraph Hill, the city’s trademark high point, with its sumptuous picture-postcard views of the city. Inside iconic Coit Tower, the first floor bears a mural from perhaps America’s most enlightened era — the post-Depression WPA, which gave artists of all media new work, and gave America a renewed sense of self-defined, multi-cultural identity.

Bernard Zakheim’s mural “Library” depicts fellow artist John Langley Howard crumpling a newspaper in his left hand as he reaches for a shelved copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with his right. You see workers of all races shown as equals and the mural’s sometimes eccentric awkwardness gives it a class-free charm.

The misty aura of a moody afternoon in the Bay area hovers over beds of verdant beauty on Telegraph Hill. As a mysteriously sensual caller once requested of Dave Garver (Clint Eastwood), a disk jockey in nearby Carmel-by-the Sea: “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Alcatraz Island is visible on the left, in the lower photo. Photos by Ann Peterson

Saturday night we hooked up with my old compatriot from The Milwaukee Journal,  Divina Infusino, and her longtime husband, ex-Milwaukeean Mark Schneider, for the ostensible raison d’être of our trip, the SFJAZZ Collective concerts at the SFJAZZ Center, the exquisite performance center built largely by inspiration from this group’s world-class talent and concept.

(Please see my full review of the SFJAZZ Collective’s Friday and Saturday concerts of originals and Joe Henderson music, which ends this travelogue, to be posted soon.)

Infusino, who’s written for Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post and other publications, has broad musical tastes, as does her husband Mark (formerly of Dirty Jack’s Record Rack, a pioneering Brewtown record store), but both are rock-oriented. Yet both were deeply impressed by the jazz collective.

Our post-concert drinks conversation got around to Divina explaining how San Francisco politics “realizes socialistic values as a reality rather than simply an ideal,” something that the SFJAZZ Collective exemplifies on its own multi-cultural terms. In this collective once again, jazz embodies a cultural template for our democratic way of life. A profound acknowledgment of talent meritocracy elevates their wedding to democracy, with high standards of processing and expression.**

The talk with Divina, the experience of “The City,” with its politically enlightened WPA murals and of that community’s extraordinary jazz collective led me to the Tocqueville quote that opens this part of the travelogue.

It struck me that the buzzing density of this compressed, yet ever-flowing city feeds the potency for a democratic environ that may well have evolved into viable socialist principles of shared struggle and growth, invention and potency — without betraying the American ideal of individual liberty. If anyone is an individual, it’s any given San Franciscan on the street, even if the saddest was a sunburned, probably homeless millennial, shuffling around near our hotel at 9 a.m. chugging a 36-oz. jug of beer. He stood uncertainly on the sodden side of bereft.

Perhaps inevitably, this fairly evolved city will betray signs of the messy democratic experiment, like America, where current polarization strains mightily for such closeness, likely a major reason for the sorry recent mid-term election results, reportedly the lowest voter turnout since 1942.

Finally, I must mention our trip to City Lights Book Store, which has morphed slowly over the years from a beatnik hole-in-the-wall, opened by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, into a three-story mother lode of literary wealth, and a publishing press, with as densely packed and as meaty an inventory of books as I have ever seen. Kevernacular visits City Lights Bookstore. Photo by Ann Peterson

I easily could’ve bought the four or five books but I considered the overall expenses of my the trip. So I settled for only one, literary critic Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, a sort of personalized, politically and culturally informed etymology of numerous significant words: from “aesthetic” and “alienation” to “welfare,” “Western,” and “work.” I also nabbed a fire engine-red City Lights T-shirt and a post card of one of the most incongruously delightful photos I’ve ever seen, of Virginia Military Institute students reading Beat poet Allen Ginsburg’s subversive masterwork “HOWL.” Photo by Gordon Ball, copyright 1996 by Ball, and postcard copyright by City Lights

Perhaps the City Lights success story affirms a viable synthesis of capitalist and socialist business strategies.

***

One more day awaited before we headed back east. I’d always loved the long surf and cliff-filled drive up Highway 1 with my pals, back in 1970. So, on a sun-kissed morning Ann and I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into enchanting Marin County.

The Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny October day (above). Faithful travel partner and girlfriend Ann Peterson takes in the expansive romance of Highway 1, thirty-four years after I first did. Photos by KL

We wended our way through leafy hamlets that led to the great coastal highway, which deserves its top-of-the-list numbering, as if all of America’s potential laps up like the essence of natural resource, along the long and winding shore, right below our car wheels. We finally reached a small maritime museum that serves as headquarters for Point Reyes National Seashore, and its extraordinary peninsula — a half-hour drive away. This would be our final Westerly destination.

The thrusting geographic leg may extend further into the Pacific Ocean than any other point in the continental U.S. The remote shore locale is a playground of unfettered wildlife, at any given time: deer grazing nearby, elk herds at a fork in the road, seals on the rocky shore and California gray whales, beyond but often visible. After a few minutes of squinting into the ocean, I could’ve sworn I saw a gray whale break through the waves. But I didn’t swear to it. No doubt, however, about the gray whale skull mounted atop the dauntingly long staircase leading to the lighthouse. A California gray whale skull (gulp) greets visitors at Pont de Reyes (upper photo). The actual lighthouse is situated down a 300-step flight of stairs (lower). Photos by Ann Peterson

The ancient Point Reyes lighthouse sits on a precarious tip of rock accessed by a 300-step descent, with breathtaking views down sheer cliffs to the roiling surf far below. The whole peninsula is windblown by a Poseidon with lungs the size of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and nearly as chilly. So leave your hats and your coiffure vanity behind. This bracingly beautiful westernmost point might have been the trip’s elemental high point.

***

On the long road back east, we stopped in Cozad, NE, home of The Robert Henri Museum, named for the founder of the famous American artist group “The Eight,” and a leading figure of the the “ash can” school of art. But the museum was closed for the season. Nevertheless it’s worth a visit.

Cozad was actually founded in 1873 by Henri’s father, a gambler and real estate developer. Henri was an insightful and sometimes provocative portrait artist, evidenced by this image of “Salome,” the disturbing biblical figure with a necrophiliac (or spiritual?) attraction to beheaded St. John the Baptist. Clearly Henri and other “ash can” artists like John Sloan and George Bellows broke far away from the era’s conservative American art academy, especially in their unprecedented depictions of gritty urban life and poverty. Henri also unleashed their clear impressionist influence to capture, with a swirling yet deftly poised brush, the still-brawny but penetrating vitality of post-industrial revolution America.

Robert Henri, “Rough Sea Near Lobster Point,” 1903 Courtesy earlywonder. wordpress.com

As I noted in a review of superb show at the Milwaukee Art Museum (which included Henri) in 2005 titled “Masterpieces of American Art 1770-1920,” such early modernist works capture “a profound American pride in its own character, natural bounty and largely Christian grappling with the sublime — matters that increasingly would inspire boundless envy, emulation and resentment. How wisely we learn from such arts revelations remains an urgent contemporary question.” 2

Again, I thought of Tocqueville’s insight about cultural-political dynamics and American potential, both waiting and wasted.

We promised ourselves a saner drive home and spent a few leisurely days back in Boulder, shopping, hiking and seeing the new Bill Murray movie St. Vincent, a tear-jerker but quite worthwhile to see Murray as a misanthropic Vietnam Vet. Our host, Kris Verdin, led us on a long hike with her dog Ella — a high-spirited Labrador-Hungarian Vizsla mix — up into the mountains near her home. Despite the current disabling neurological condition in my arms and hands, I tried a few climbing moves up a mountain face we reached. I felt my upper limbs protesting and refusing to secure me, so I meekly reversed myself. Cripes minnie manure! Our Boulder host Kris Verdin’s irrepressible dog Ella (in the distant background on the trail) sometimes broke free to hurry our pace on a long hike up to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Photo by Ann Peterson

Back on the road, we began making good time again. In fact, “The Man” busted poor Ann with a speeding ticket for driving 87 in a 75 MPH zone, after my g-force-pushing transgressions on the way out. The patrolman had me roll down my passenger-side window and, slightly intoxicated, I almost blew it by responding with my impersonation of “The Dude” Lebowski, which had just been entertaining Ann.

Chastened, Ann slowed into the descending darkness of Wyoming, and worried about the deer crossing signs. Ten miles down the road our headlights illuminated an animal form…standing smack in the middle of the Interstate lane strip. It was a coyote, and Ann slowed down. The scruffy canine peered at us, then scampered away.

“Whew!” she exhaled.

“Don’t worry about a deer, with that encounter odds are you won’t even see a deer,” I reassured her. I was right. However, another five miles down the road another Wile E. Coyote made another heedless display of his furry fanny, in the same between-the-headlights spot. We just missed him and all I could think of was the famous cartoon character plastered on a road. Long-suffering Wile E. Coyote in arguably the funniest cartoon series ever, “The Roadrunner.” Courtesy zocalopublicsquare.org.

Once I saw this video, I understood what our Wile might’ve been up to on the highway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ieb1Y1VCY

Our last big stop was Lincoln, Nebraska, again, but a tad more highbrow than King Kong Burgers. The Sheldon Museum of Art, on the University Of Nebraska campus, featured a permanent collection including strong works by Jackson Pollock and his under-appreciated spouse Lee Krasner, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and others.

A painting by Rockwell Kent (renowned for his 1930 illustrations of Melville’s Moby-Dick which helped popularize the book for modern readers) Headlands, Monhegan Island (see below) reminded me how the craggy, ceaseless shore seemed to haunt us (or at least me) with its serene, raging and mysterious moods, like a siren-spirit following us everywhere in a cloud of briny surf. A current Sheldon exhibit explored the experience and sensibility of Nebraska. The Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, offers a rich array of art, from classical to contemporary, including the welded steel sculpture by Michael Todd (upper image), the brooding shoreline by Rockwell Kent and Elizabeth Honor Dolan’s mixed-media maquette for the mural “Spirit of the Prairie” from the Nebraska Capitol Law Library, an intriguing and inspiring experiment in Americana. Photos by Ann Peterson and KL.

In that show, an 1930 experimental blend of oil pint, multiple paper layers and Masonite by Elizabeth Honor Dolan for a mural by “Spirit of the Prairie” at the Nebraska Capitol Law Library, depicts a bedraggled pioneer woman with infant in arm and faithful dog beside, which skirted Norman Rockwell sentiment with its daring stylistic ruggedness and the woman’s mute courage.

Outside, the bustling, friendly, red-emblazoned crowd and roaming bass band players defied the cold with sunny anticipation of the Nebraska Cornhuskers-Purdue Boilermakers football showdown later in perpetually sold out Memorial Stadium.

Ann and I began anticipating home. If the car courted internal chaos by the time we returned, the virtual kaleidoscope of memories, emotions and sensory impressions began settling into the places they would take in our cognitive and psychic history, and future.

The great American backbone rose behind us, its bristling glories, stories and mysteries intact.

________________

Editorial assistance by Ann Peterson, Kris Verdin, Edward Simon, Divina Infusino, Mark Schneider, Frank Stemper and John Kurzawa.

* The prototype for the SFJAZZ Collective is undoubtedly Joe Henderson’s 1966 Blue Note album Mode for Joe, a brilliant septet recording showcasing his originals and arranging, with a front line of Henderson’s sax, trumpet (Lee Morgan), trombone (Curtis Fuller), and vibes (Bobby Hutcherson). Hutcherson was also a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective. The vibes are perhaps the band’s trademark instrumental component.

** The concept of socialism and capitalism as complementary or even symbiotic systems is discussed in an essay on the iconoclastic leftist writer Martin Sklar by James Livingston in the November 3, 2014 issue of The Nation, p. 27. Livingston argues that Sklar’s ideas are greatly under appreciated partly “because no one knows what to do with (their) revolutionary implications.” For example, after a certain point of production, capitalism has become superfluous as an inducement to work in production, Livingston writes.
Livingston also addresses the issue of how, in our capitalist-dominated system, socialism could be easily co-opted rather than become the proper corrective to capitalism’s excesses and ultimately needlessness to “economic necessity” — beyond profits that could not be “reinvested in productive ways.”

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000, 432

2  Kevin Lynch,  America’s Best: Show Spotlights Masterpieces from 1770 to 1920, The Capital Times, July 2001.

Outdoor photo of Fillmore Auditorium in 1970, courtesy wikipedia.