The panoramic, rugged and historically tragic Donner Pass in western Nevada, along today’s Interstate 80. Courtesy panoramia.com. *

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal

If the Mississippi River is America’s main artery and lifeblood, I consider the plains and mountain states this country’s backbone. I say this as a lifelong Midwesterner, believing my native grounds as America’s heartland, as do many others. To complete the metaphor, perhaps the East is the nation’s august head and shoulders.

My traveling partner Ann Peterson and I set out in late October to traverse the vast, mighty backbone once, in a road odyssey from Milwaukee to San Francisco and back, which totaled close to 4,500 miles. Some friends had scoffed at us doing the car road trip.

We aimed to get to San Francisco in three days. Our first and most challenging goal was to drive from Milwaukee to Boulder — or 1,062 miles — in the first day. Our halfway-there host, my sister-in-law Kris Verdin, had written that it was “insane, but doable.” But the West Bend WI native hadn’t done that since she and her husband Jim had been young.

Ann and I are now in our early 60s. Packed up, we finally got past the freeway over-development in Wauwatosa and Brookfield that is further ravaging our state’s ecological balance and livability. Westbound and wide-open ahead, my 2010 Toyota Corolla growled as I gunned it. We were off.

It was Tuesday and we wanted to reach San Francisco by Thursday night, so we’d have time to decompress and be ready for Friday’s first of two consecutive nights of the all-star SFJAZZ Collective. They would perform the music of the great saxophonist-composer Joe Henderson and their own originals at the SFJAZZ Center, the only building in America designed specifically for jazz performances. The performances would be recorded for a future CD. (The band’s co-founder and lead alto sax player Miguel Zenon is the subject of the cover story of the latest Down Beat magazine.)

It would also my re-union with Divina Infusino, my former colleague at The Milwaukee Journal in the 1980s, when she covered rock and pop music and I covered various music and visual art, with a jazz specialty.

We ended up not exactly following the Trip-tik route that Ann had taken pains to gather and print out. Instead we forged through Southwest Wisconsin’s “God’s country,” which blazed with a fall color panorama, even a week or so past peak. We would soon encounter more spectacular mountainous contours, but there’s no greater undulating autumn beauty than in the sinuous hills of southeastern Wisconsin. The colors burn into the eyes, a kaleidoscope of crimson, gold and orange with wave-like, wind-swept textures. Even prodigal son Kareem Abdul-Jabbar marvels over Wisconsin’s fall beauty in the recent Zucker brothers TV commercial for Travel Wisconsin. “I can’t believe I ever left this place!” Jabbar exclaims, reprising his pilot role in the Zuckers’ hit movie Airplane! The all-time NBA scoring leader had also lobbied for the Bucks coaching position not long ago.

But we were leaving for two weeks and needed to make good time, to “ball the jack,” as Jack Kerouac once called it, but with a purpose (“No sooner were we out of town than Eddie started to ball that jack ninety miles an hour out of sheer exuberance.” –Jack Kerouac) 1. I also hit 90 miles an hour, but not until we reached the flatland straightaways of Nebraska, and my Corolla smoothly zoomed to 98 at one naughty spurt, which I hardly noticed till I glanced at the speedometer.

I wanted to reach Boulder by 2 a.m. (the hour of the body’s deepest sleep alpha waves) even though a detour and a slight disagreement on the route kept Ann and I from escaping Milwaukee by 9 a.m. So I was balling that jack out of sheer determination.

Iowa provided striking distractions at several of its Interstate rest stops, including Iowa sculptor Tom Stancliffe’s handsome, witty brushed stainless steel and bronze sculpture Harvest, columns arranged as a row crop (below). Among the depicted resources is a book, a reminder that this farming state is also home to the world-renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop which has produced 17 Pulitzer Prize winners (most recently Paul Harding in 2010) and four recent U.S. Poets Laureate. Ann Peterson posed with “”Harvest,” Tom Stancliffe’s 1999 sculptural rendering of Iowa’s important resources and icons, including corn, sunflowers, acorns, fish, hogs and books (detail below). It’s at the Cedar County Area Rest Stop and Welcome Center on I-80. Photo by Kevin Lynch Photo by KL Photo by Ann K. Peterson

At the top of the tower at left (above), Stancliffe interpreted in bronze Grant Wood’s famously bounteous 1930 oil paint landscape Stone City, Iowa (below, courtesy newyorkarts.net). At another point in Iowa we looked dumbfounded –at the longest truck rig I’ve ever seen, parked at a rest stop. The endlessly long white shape mystified us. Was it a portion for a gravity-defying Santiago Calatrava building? A wing for a giant stealth bomber? Further down the Interstate the wind blew the mystery away when — at another rest stop — we suddenly saw the identical form standing at proud, erect attention, seemingly scraping the sun. In a huge concrete and steel base stood a wind turbine propeller blade.

A gift of  the Mid-American Energy Company and Siemens Energy, the blade is 148 feet tall and weighs 23,098 lbs. Photos by KL

Such mechanisms, of course, are a key to the burgeoning renewable energy movement. And word has it, engineers are now working on creating turbines that are less hazardous to flying birds.

Yes, the trip had blown pretty cool since escaping Milwaukee. However at about 150 miles, I noticed a light on my dashboard signaling “MAINT REQD”

“Oh shit!” I muttered. I had dutifully taken the car into the Toyota shop right before we left –the mechanic had pronounced it ready to roll to the coast and back. Ann proved the cooler head, figuring the signal had kicked in because I had passed the 3,000 mile mark since my last oil change. She assured me that Click and Clack of Car Talk on NPR say that you only need to change oil after about 5,000 miles. They are the Holy Trinity-minus-one of car advice, so I felt blessed by the cosmos.

Sure enough, when we reached Nebraska and night fell, a vast and vivid canopy of the night hovered overhead — “billions and billions and billions” of stars, as the late astronomer Carl Sagan might’ve put it. I was really glad that — after my last car was totaled by a hit-and-run driver — I bought a car with a sunroof. I got a little high on the real, infinite thing right over my head as Ann drove.

In Lincoln, Nebraska we stopped for hearty salads at Wendy’s and for a quicker peek at King Kong, a small regional burger-Phillie steak-gyro chain, across the road. King Kong stands atop the sign for the fast food joint in Lincoln, NE named for him. The sign was too hot in contrast for this night photo to make out the words “KING KONG.” Photo by KL

The joint boasted a delightful King Kong motif, with hairy gorilla dolls hanging from the ceiling, and big, blazing posters from the original 1933 movie with Faye Wray and Robert Armstrong and, of course, Kong! The French were very big on the original “King Kong,” as this inspired poster by a French artist indicates. Courtesy highlight Hollywood.com Here’s Fay Wray, the “beauty (who) killed the beast.” Once, when I saw “King Kong” in a movie theater, Ms. Wray came on screen and a lecherous guy in front of me muttered to his companion, “What a dish.” Courtesy bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com

However, I was disappointed to find the burger shop didn’t have the original King Kong on constant replay on their TV screen. Kong fends off the airplanes atop the Empire State building, as epic a battle as the movies has ever given us. Courtesy highlight Hollywood.com

(Instead they had the World Series on — we’d get plenty of World Series mania when we reached San Francisco) “I’ve been here for years and you’re the first person who has asked about the movie,” the Kong manager said. “Good idea. I’ll have to suggest that to the owner.”

I hope to return to King Kong someday and munch a Kong burger as fictional film-maker Carl Denham sagely intones to the mustachioed NYPD officer, “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty that killed the beast,” in glorious black and white. And yes, that Empire State Building death battle helped cement the East as  America’s head and shoulders. With Kong’s blood streaming onto the Manhattan street, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong in tuxedo, left), delivers his famous closing lines to the original “King Kong” (“Oh no,…”) courtesy bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com

I did my best nasal impersonation of Denham’s closing lines for Ann and explained to her that my old Marquette High poster club buddies and I act out the complete death scene of Kong with full theatrics and sound effects. We would do a command performance the next time the three of us are together. Wisely, she’s not holding her breath.

My sister-in-law Kris called by cell shortly after we had left Lincoln, and estimated we’d get to her house in Boulder “by two-ish.” Her watch dog Ella would surely wake her, but that’s OK, Kris assured.

This only steeled my determination to get there earlier. We drove late into the night and what kept us awake was the CD player: Richard Thompson’s latest CD Acoustic Classics, the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra’s Habitat, Wilhelm Kempff’s classic recordings of Beethoven’s “Pathetique,” “Moonlight,” “Waldstein” and “Apassionata” piano sonatas and country singer Patty Loveless’ Mountain Soul (my tastes are nothing if not eclectic). Patty Loveless’s rootsy bluegrass CD “Mountain Soul” courtesy of amazon.com

Then we settled in to listen to Lorrie Moore’s latest collection of short stories Bark on CD. The author reads the stories in her warm, breathy, slightly phlegmatic voice, with her New York accent still curving certain words, despite several decades of living in the Midwest as, until recently, a chaired professor of creative writing at the UW-Madison. Moore’s tersely adroit reading of her own story helped us plow through the darkness.

The opening tale “Debarking” told about about Ira, a hapless divorced father of a teenage daughter sticking his toe into the dating scene after years of marriage. He falls for a divorcee named Zora who pierces his heart as surely as might Zorro (Moore never misses a chance for pointed, symbolic wordplay). But Zora’s emotional lance is actually embedded in her adolescent son Bruno, to quite Oedipal depths, and the lad treats Ira like a bothersome stray dog.

The story is set during the American bombing of Baghdad in the Iraq War. Ira and Zora begin a wobbly, sometimes tender interplay of emotional “debarking.” It doesn’t end well. Zora finally informs Ira she’s been on anti-depressants and really misses Bruno, who’s merely at school for the day.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, though he wouldn’t. He backed out of her driveway…Was he too old fashioned?…He headed to a dank, noisy dive called Sparky’s where he went to just after Marilyn left him… All his tenpenny miseries and chicken-shit joys would lead him once again to Sparky’s. Those half-dozen times he had run into Marilyn…he had felt like a dog seeing his owner…But at Sparky’s he knew he was safe from unexpected encounters with Marilyn …

Ira ordered bourbon straight up. “He let the sharp buttery elixir of the bourbon warm his mouth then swallowed its neat, sweet heat …over and over, ordering drink after drink …until he was lit to the gills.”

Ira made a rambling toast: “Happy Easter…The dead shall rise, the dead are risen, the damages will be mitigated. The Messiah is back among us, squeezing the flesh…Okay, God looked away for a second to look at ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns, but he is back now…He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps.”

“Somebody slap that guy,” said the man in the blue shirt at the end. Hard-working nurse practitioner Ann slumbered however, there at the story’s end, the passenger seat tilted back, her head against the plush bed pillow she’d brought along.

I pressed ahead. I’ve never driven that late into the night — midnight, 1 a.m. — without fatiguing. I hung on hard to the wheel and kept leaning forward. It helped that the Corolla ran smoothly at 80 MPH-plus, so my body didn’t endure a shaking car but still felt its energy.

When we reached the Nebraska/Colorado border, night prevented the view I got last summer of the striking contrast in landscapes right there. You enter Colorado and the somewhat green expanses of Nebraska suddenly transform into desolate desert, with almost nothing but sand, sagebrush and tumbling tumbleweeds. Nebraska apparently cornered the market on viable farmland when their state border was demarcated in 1867, nine years before Colorado.

***

We finally reached Denver, then jumped on a northwest turnpike to Boulder. Scorning my trusty Rand McNally atlas, I went on my memory of Boulder from last summer when I drove out there for a Tedeschi-Trucks Band concert at the magnificent Red Rocks Ampitheater. So it took a bit more meandering but we finally found Snowmass Ct. and rang Kris Verdin’s doorbell at 1:45 a.m. mountain time. Milwaukee-to-Boulder in one day. We’d beaten Kris’s arrival estimation, which had also been our target time.

Sure enough, Ella the watch dog greeted us at the door with “ROWF! ROWF!” I asked Ella if I could quote her, and so I have. My trusty Corolla cooled its jets, with narry a blip on the trip (nor for the rest of Kevin and Ann’s Excellent Adventure). With Kris’s ready graciousness, we crashed quickly in her guest room.

The next morning she’d left for work, and the Verdins’ gleaming, high-tech coffee-maker threw a hissy fit (I failed to follow Kris’s directions). So we stopped at a Starbuck’s and hit the road as quickly as we could, again chasing the West’s golden sun which glared at us imperiously as it slowly settled, like a queen in gilded robes, onto her throne — the mighty mountains on the horizon.

We had the popular Road Food app, a guide to interesting restaurants on the American highway, but all it listed in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was a bison burger farm-restaurant that actually gives you a ride onto the ranch where you pick out a majestic creature to slaughter. They proceed to shoot, chop and grind your fresh burger. Such brutal, culinary intimacy appealed to neither of us.

So gas-stop locals recommended The Tortilla Factory, an unassuming Mexican joint with a backside parking lot entrance.  Swollen, steamy enchiladas and gloppy refried beans were just the ticket. With renewed gas exhaust — from within and without — we pressed ahead.

Here’s where the roads began to really cut into mountainsides, and creep steadily around their massive shoulders. As we climbed the steep highway we passed plenty of groaning, heaving semis. In my mid 20s to age 30, The Grand Tetons in northwest Wyoming were almost my yearly destination for mountain climbing. I had never visited southern Wyoming and now the trip along Interstate 80 proved how stunningly picturesque the state also is down here. The photos below only hint at their presence.

The massive craggy formations come alive with an almost breathing aura as the sun falls lower into the west and the shadows the rocks cast stretch, long and ominous. The combination of ripped-rock formations and lower vegetation-covered mountains made for a wonderful textural Yin-Yang. Wyoming on Interstate 80. Photos by KL

On increasingly steep and winding interstate stretches, we began seeing signs warning against trucks tipping over on treacherous turns and the emergency braking lanes for runaway trucks. Considering the intense pressure truckers feel to drive as far and as fast as possible, it’s hard to imagine hauling a loaded semi through many of these precipitous highway curves and drop-offs at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour, with the risk of a run-away rig hurtling much faster. A trucker balls the jack through mountainous Wyoming highways. Photo by KL

But they do it, and at many stretches of our trip we saw more large trucks on the road than automobiles. It underscores how important it is for America to keep its infrastructure in tip-top shape, especially in today’s globally competitive world. The treacherous Highway 5 in B.C., also called the Coquihalla, has claimed many victims. Courtest driving. ca

That night we made it from Boulder to Salt Lake City and by then driver Ann was cross-eyed and gassed. I realized we had nearly 200 miles to our theoretical destination in Nevada, so we decided to call it a night. I asked a hostess at Olive Garden for directions to a nearby motel and she directed me to the downtown Main Street. We gamely followed her directions and found State Street, with the Utah state capital building visible at the far end.

However, at this end of the street things seemed hardly stately. It smelled like the city’s red-light district. We spied a few hookers tottering around on spike heels and scant clothing in the chilly night.

Ann shuddered as I slowly drove past motel after motel. How bad could it be? I wondered aloud. This is the home of the holy-roller Mormons! We finally pulled into one motel parking lot that seemed momentarily civil, and immediately several men opened motel doors to peer at us in unison, like an over-rehearsed scene in an X-rated movie. “CUT! One at a time, you idiots! Not so eager for the beaver!” the director with the hairy chest and gold chains would shout from his megaphone.

Suddenly I felt like a greasy pimp and Ann felt like Linda Lovelace — long before her hard-earned Deep Throat experience.

“Let’s get out of here,” she shivered, “This is really creepy!” We meandered through the night till we found a Motel 6 on the outskirts of town, and hard pillows never felt so good. At least they were clean, despite the cigarette burn hole in the bed spread. Suddenly a slightly tattered Motel 6 seemed like Nirvana. Courtesy blog.trekeffect.com.

After an omelette breakfast at a Denny’s teeming with policemen and guerrilla-garbed soldiers, we took aim for San Francisco. I hit my highest speed crossing the seemingly endless straightaway portion of US 80 that bisects the great Salt Lake Desert. But hey, world records for highest land speeds are regularly broken here on the salt flats.

The desert is an odd phenomenon: It’s a shallow lake 81 miles wide — over a bed of sand a thin layer of salt hovers, covered by a glaze of water. During Jedediah Smith’s 1826-7 expedition, Robert Evans died in this desert; and in the 1840s, westward emigrants used the Hastings Cutoff through endless the desert to reduce the distance to California. 2 Shadowing the ancient trail of explorers would lead us to a daunting historical discovery.

Past the salt lake, I grew curious about the river following the now-twisting highway. So we Googled it on Ann’s smart phone and discovered it was the Truckee River. We soon reached the cavernous Donner Pass (formerly the Truckee Pass, see photo at the top of this travelogue). I began reading a bit about the Donner Party, and again thanked the car gods for a trusty Toyota.

The Donner name hearkened to over a 150 years ago when people tried to traverse this brawny and unforgiving beauty before motor vehicles were invented.  The Donner Party were pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train, from Springfield, Illinois. The journey west usually took between five and six months, but the Donner Party fatefully followed the newly named Hastings Cutoff, which crossed Utah‘s Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert. The rugged terrain, and difficulties encountered while traveling along the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada, resulted in the loss of many cattle and wagons, and splits within the group.

By the beginning of November 1846 the emigrants had reached the Sierra Nevada. You can see by the panoramic view of present-day Donner Pass (see link at bottom of post), the sort of head-swelling natural beauty that filled their senses and lured them further — into equally treacherous terrain. They became trapped by an early, heavy snowfall near Truckee (now Donner) Lake, engulfed by mountains and brutal winds.    An artist’s rendering of the The Donner Party’s hardships. Courtesy corvallistoday.com.

Their food supplies ran extremely low, and in mid-December some of the group set out on foot to obtain help. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the immigrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness. Here are entries from the diary kept by party member Patrick Breen:

“… Peggy very uneasy for fear we shall all perish with hunger we have but a little meat left & only part of 3 hides has to support Mrs. Reid she has nothing left but one hide…”

— February 5, 1847

“… J Denton trying to borrow meat for Graves had none to give they have nothing but hides all are entirely out of meat but a little we have our hides are nearly all eat up but with Gods help spring will soon smile upon us”

— February 10, 1847

“… Mrs Graves refused to give Mrs Reid any hides, put Suitors pack hides on her shanty would not let her have them. says if I say it will thaw it then will not, she is a case”

— February 15, 1847

“… shot Towser today & dressed his flesh. Mrs Graves came here this morning to borrow meat dog or ox. they think I have meat to spare but I know to the Contrary they have plenty hides. I live principally on the same”

— February 23, 1847

“… The Donnos told the California folks that they commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago, if they did not succeed that day or the next in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow…”

— February 26, 1847

Here’s an actual sample of Breen’s diary:

 Page 28 from the diary of the Donner Party’s Patrick Breen, recording his observations in late February 1847, including “Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that she thought she would commence on Milton and eat him. I don’t think she has done so yet; it is distressing.” (about 3/4ths of the way down the page) 

Rescuers from California attempted to reach the emigrants, but the first relief party did not arrive until the middle of February 1847, almost four months after the wagon train became trapped. Of the 87 members of the party, 48 survived to reach California. Historians have described the episode as one of the most spectacular tragedies in Californian history and in the record of western migration. 3

The tragedy is dramatized in a 2009 feature film and documented in a PBS American Experience episode, both titled “The Donner Party.”

End of Part 1. To Be Continued

_________________

*Here’s a panoramic view of Donner Pass, by the great American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt:

Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830-1902)Donner Lake from the Summit, 1873Oil on canvas: 72 1/8 x 120 3/16 in. (183.2 x 305.3 cm)Gift of Archer Milton Huntington, 1909.16

1. Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll, 1957,  edited by Howard Cunnell, Viking, 2007, 123.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake_Desert

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party

Lorrie Moore’s Bark book cover, courtesy ofblogspot.com

Shepherd Express editor Louis Fortas makes a fundamental and crucial citizens request — to vote. He notes that the Shepherd Express’s fearless reporting may rub some people the wrong way, but it is always striving to be factual.
That’s why the newspaper’s current endorsements stand up to scrutiny or cynicism.
As a free-lancer, I can personally vouch for SE’s commitment to factuality and fact-checking, which they may do to a fault. They chose to not run a recent review of a George Bernard Shaw play that I wrote. I was miffed at the time because I’d decided to focus on Shaw’s brilliant dialog at least as much as the particular performance. Few playwrights are more substantial, timeless or quotable. FYI the review is here:https://kevernacular.com/?p=4573

My larger point now is that SE feared that I might have not attended the play, and used a script instead. They were quite wrong in that instance, BUT they erred on the side of their sense of factual reporting.
So you can count on these journalists to give you the truth. Please consider their fact-based endorsements and vote! 

https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-24264.html

As for Culture Currents, we endorse Mary Burke for Wisconsin governor and Gwen Moore, Kevernacular’s current Congressional representative, for re-election.

Charles Lloyd Best DVD the people invited him and…”they thought it was responsible for a human uprising…”the people ended up in Siberia it was heartbreaking.” i wasnt looking for fame and fortune I was looking for the holy grail.”

Moon Man featured the debut of Charles Lloyd as a poet and vocalist. He remained an in-demand guest soloist at the time and recorded with Canned Heat, the Doors, former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn, and the Beach Boys. where did that tender Sound come from a radio interviewer asks. Lester Young. Ours felt the world needed more tenderness>

Lloyd beat his addictions and became a follower of transcendental meditation.

“chlarles soundscape is more global” explains pianist     composer Jason Moran.

John Coltrane – Offering: Live at Temple University (Resonance Records)

How far out did John Coltrane go at the end? Or how far inward, to the depths of the universal, Emersonian self most of us rarely touch? Was his quest fueled by mere artistic restlessness or by a sense of how to face, or embrace, his own impending mortality?

Such questions loom over this new release “the first officially sanctioned release of an undiscovered, complete Coltrane performance since 2005.” Indeed it bears the classic Impulse! Records logo and graphic layout, with the trademark orange and black spine, in an arrangement with Impulse’s owner, Universal Music Company.

For those to fear to tread into the “free music” of John Coltrane’s late, post-A Love Supreme period, know that this 1966 recording includes three repertoire staples from his greatest popularity* and draws from a long talked-about bootleg taping of one of his last recorded public performances.

This is a fascinating, powerful, sonically remastered document — with some unavoidable technical flaws typical of bootlegs — certainly for Coltrane fans and provides a vivid sample of the controversial period of his musical and spiritual questing to the outer limits of jazz aesthetics.

The notion that he was digging to excavate his deepest self — and to reach old friends and family — is underscored by recounting Coltrane’s return to Philadelphia, the city he grew up in, and because his family’s house, in which his mother still resided, was a 10-minute drive from Temple University.

Offering annotator Ashley Kahn also relates that a few weeks before this November 11, 1966 concert. Coltrane stopped at the nearby Church of the Advocate, where various percussionists were apparently jamming. One of them, Robert Kenyatta, recalls: “Trane came by and asked, do you mind if I sit in with you guys?‘ I mean, come on. “Man, what’s the matter with you? Of course — just pull out your horn. At first it seemed he was trying to feel his way because horn players don’t always play the right kind of feeling with so many rhythms. By about the third week he was playing some stuff I’ve never heard anybody else play on a horn or, just like he was a drummer, but in the melodic sense, and it just rocked all us. Then the next thing he asked some of us if we would make this gig with him at Temple University. I told him. ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’”

This church jamming and Coltrane’s invitation to the percussionists shows how exploratory and experimental Coltrane became after the disbanding of his classic quartet with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, who felt that Coltrane was straining hard against the limits of the post-bop modern swing vernacular. Their replacements — Coltrane’s second wife Alice on piano and Rashied Ali on drums — played in a manner that veered toward free tempos, which jettison the reference point of conventional swing.

Those who recoil against the loosening of standards of jazz process and form might question Coltrane’s democratic openness to players seemingly incapable of the formal conventions of modern jazz. However, this recording, incendiary as it often is, shows that his own playing almost invariably maintains its inherent and highly developed sense of form, construction and inexorable forward purpose. In fact, few modern jazz players had reveled in byzantine harmonic structure with such blazing intensity as had the Coltrane of Giant Steps.

Offering begins with Coltrane’s first solo on “Naima,” his signature ballad named for his first wife (albeit with his second wife playing piano on this recording). The melody however is evident immediately in the phrases of the saxophonist’s solo. But the recording engineer missed the opening statement of the beautiful tune, a construction of achingly wide intervals to very lyrical effect. The drumming sometimes surges to virtually drown out the piano, an apparent quirk of the recording balance because drummer Rashied Ali seems to playing with far less power as his predecessor Elvin Jones.

Rather, Ali delivers a skittering, crackling freedom of rhythmic phrasing. And there’s also the pay-off: we do get at the end, the majestic theme restatement and sweetly transcendent ascending final line of “Naima.” Coltrane’s solo should tip the listener off that by far the most rewarding aspect of this recording is following, from this point on, this extraordinary musician’s line of musical thought and questing, regardless of what you make of the other soloists and accompaniment (his classic quartet bassist, Jimmy Garrison, was still here but another bassist, Sonny Johnson, is added).

Coltrane, Courtesy hqwallbase.com

I’ll get to this central topic but it’s my reportorial duty to try to convey the sonic shock that concert-goes must’ve experienced especially when Pharoah Sanders soloed first on the second tune “Crescent.” “Crescent,” the longest track at 26:11, is the title tune from an album in Coltrane’s popular middle period, a shapely, yearning melody with phrase endings that resound with Coltrane’s masculine vibrato.

But the first solo is from saxophonist Sanders and here’s where some listeners might get shaken. Sanders is up to something completely different from Coltrane, though the elder musician opens the door to expressionistic saxophone exploration. The unprepared listener might wonder whether such sounds could come from anything but an elephant in operatic death throes. An alto saxophonist named Arnold Joyner (another relatively unknown concert recruit) follows, striving to match Sanders’ unearthly free flying.

Finally Coltrane solos and, at the 24-minute mark of “Crescent,” leads us to the tempered rapture of the theme via the sort of well-formed, if high-energy, solo he delivers throughout.

But what of Sanders sonic onslaught? A receptive listener is likely to listen in wonder at the ceiling of sonic possibilities that he is battering himself against. To me, it’s almost like looking at the Sistine Chapel ceiling — if it were an abstract expressionist fresco. That may seem sacrilegious to tradition-minded art and music lovers, but throughout his career Pharoah Sanders has committed himself to this sort of ecstatic striving, which has an extremely lyrical side to it and thus befits my instinctive association to Michelangelo’s grandly beautiful evocations of humanity commingling with God in heaven.

Of course, there is also something very African-American about this. This is a gospel cry writ primal, something deeply ritualistic as in African ceremonies and music that most Westerners know very little of. And yet the primal fire might be for the “raging against the dying light” as Dylan Thomas would put it, and here the light is Coltrane’s — his imminent passing as a context for this intensity seems utterly apt. Thomas famously wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 1

You hear that? Coltrane was hardly old at age 40, but his light would be extinguished tragically by liver cancer, on July 17, 1967. In this context, “Crescent” also nominally signifies a celestial body’s passing light and sounds as a masculine song of the heart, the rise-and-fall phrases are heart swelling, breath exhaling. It’s likely that Coltrane either confided to his musical acolyte about his liver cancer or simply could not hide deteriorating condition. But Sanders probably knew because Coltrane was growing increasingly sick and cutting back on his performances. John Coltrane, in the background right, steps back for a saxophone solo by his musical acolyte Pharaoh Sanders at the Temple University Concert. Liner photo courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz & The Frank Kofsky Archives.

But as I’ve suggested, Offering is valuable ultimately for his extraordinary playing. So let’s “ride the Coltrane” for a bit. The focus should begin with his instrumental voice. Though Coltrane famously said he’d give his right arm “to be able to play sax like Stan Getz,” he had one of the most distinctive and pure saxophone voices in jazz. Though lacking Getz’s almost inimitable lyrical airiness, Coltrane’s tone possessed a steely songfulness that is familiar to many listeners, certainly from his huge 1961 hit “My Favorite Things,” which is performed at this Temple U concert, although in a thoroughly transformed manner.

Pianist-composer Cecil Taylor, one of the deepest thinkers in advanced jazz, had this to say about John Coltrane’s instrumental voice: “In short, his tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can’t separate the means that a man uses to say something. What ultimately sets. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.”  2

Author Eric Nisenson notes that Coltrane offered an otherworldly response to when asked what he planned to do in the next 10 years. Coltrane said: “Become a saint.” Nisenson thinks this quote indicates that Coltrane was perhaps somewhat “blissed out.” “Constantly studying mystical texts, intense thought given over to spiritual matters, meditation, special diets, fasting, frequent LSD trips and even his constant practicing, possibly pushed Coltrane to live in an increasingly otherworldly state…The statement may have had something to do, however, with his growing awareness that he was seriously ill. Many photographs from this time show him holding his hand on his abdomen, where he was probably feeling the first horrible pains of liver cancer.” 3

So even though Coltrane’s solo on the opening “Naima” begins by clearly quoting the melody’s intervals, it soon turns to wilder winds. But it’s important to have the actual thematic material of “Naima” in mind (one might go back to an earlier recording of the tune, on the Atlantic album Giant Steps) as one begins listening, due to the missing opening theme statement. Even in the almost ravaged intensity that Coltrane reaches, most of his phrases end by referring to the melody or harmonic structure of it. Finally those references emerge from the fiery woods he has led us into.

Yet what’s evident certainly as he states the melody of “Crescent” is the hard-earned eloquence, particularly in how he uses his incantatory yet not over-played vibrato, even as he is repeating phrases and reaching into a sonic stratosphere. Then Sanders unleashes his aural torrent. I’m hard-pressed to detect a formal logic or melodic reference in this solo — it’s more an experience really, though the honking at about seven minutes has a strange “calling” quality.

The same might further be said about Sanders long solo opening “Leo,” which nominally is more abstract as a projection of a lunar sign. So the solo might be understood as an aural trip akin to say the mind-bending light-show trip to Jupiter in Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film “trip” admittedly is far more aesthetically pleasing. Here’s where a recent critic of the album like Geoff Dyer might appear to have ground to stand on for his assertion that this late phase is a “catastrophic” mistake in Coltrane’s career.

Yet I feel that assessment ultimately misses Coltrane’s Sunship, as it were, by forsaking potential listeners the extraordinary experience of this artist’s search. Coltrane does some wordless vocalizing during Sanders’ solo, as well as in the ensuing percussion work out, further advancing the ritualistic, perhaps religious aura, almost as if speaking in tongues. He also reportedly beat his chest during his several vocals, a kind of act of abdication or supplication. This I see as the man’s well-documented humility facing his higher power, “a love supreme.”

Yet the moment Coltrane puts the horn back in to his mouth, the almost unearthly beauty of his cry predominates, even as he pushes himself to extremes of expression. I understand this as an extension of everything he had worked on over his whole career, as a virtuosic, intensely committed artist of the saxophone with few peers who influenced several generations of musicians for reasons both musical and spiritual, for better or worse, as it clearly led to much ensuing instrumental indulgence. The strange beauty is clearly evident on the brief, serene title piece “Offering,” and on the closing “My Favorite Things.” Here we hear by far Alice Coltrane’s most compelling and transporting piano solo, drawing from both predecessor McCoy Tyner’s modal language — here swirling more than Tyner’s cascading style — and from the inherent lyricism of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, even if it seems light-years away from The Sound of Music. John and Alice Coltrane. Photo coutesy of lounge.obviousmag.org.

Almost invariably I am deeply moved and impressed by Coltrane’s playing, no matter how far out it gets. I see it as appreciable, fearless musical climbing, what bassist-singer Jack Bruce once termed “Rope Ladder to the Moon.” I understand Sanders playing as growing roughly through the very gracious accommodation of this master musician.

And if Sanders here lacks the lyrical side that he’d soon be also known for, I hear him both feeling his Afro-centric oats and adding an extraordinary expansion of the language of jazz, admittedly to its outer limits. So this is music for the intrepid or for those searching for artistic possibility, for inspiration beyond the norm, something we should expect and desire of the artists who might reveal the myriad voices in music’s vast realm of the verbally inexpressible.

__________

*Regarding Coltrane’s popularity, it’s interesting to note that the editor whom I first pitched a review of this album to turned it down. Perhaps he thought that Coltrane’s time had passed, and that he was now mainly of interest to only jazz aficionados. And yet this album of admittedly challenging music is currently ranked number two on the Billboard jazz sales charts, trailing only Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s chart-topping slingshot Cheek to Cheek, as I write, Oct. 4, 2014. It speaks well for Coltrane’s persevering name, at the very least.

Photo of cover of Offering CD courtesy jazzandbluesblogspot.com

1 http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

2 Bill Cole, John Coltrane, Schirmer, 1976, 193

3 Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane in his Quest, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 212.

The Gypsy Lumberjacks showed their impulse to wander by venturing into territory that so far remains a wasteland for them — Milwaukee, specifically, a gig at Catch 22, a sports bar where virtually all downtown dwellers were outdoors, savoring some of the last few beautiful summer evenings.

So, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, September can be a pretty damn cruel month, too.  Yet these woodsy gypsies  “bred lilacs out of the dead land”  — performing a set of fresh inspiration and forward-thrusting bloom, to their own high professional standards on the premise that people might show up.

Indeed, there was something faintly heroic about it, tinged with pathos, the lonely lumberjack felling a mighty tree that no one hears in the forest.

So listen up – if they’re in your town — or hear this: The touring Minneapolis-based band’s vibrantly colorful and emotionally nuanced new CD Pulling Upon the Strap demonstrates intriguing instrumentation, which showcases their stylistic originality — including an accordionist and a violinist, and percussionist Ben Karon who specializes in the cajon. Originated in Peru but used often in Africa, the six-sided box-like instrument is also the percussionist’s seat as barefoot Karon slaps and paradiddles it barehanded between his knees — with staccato power and nearly a master tabla-player’s dexterity.

Lumberjack percussionist Ben Karon specializes in the Peruvian cajon, which he sits on and beats like a tabla player. Photo by Kris Verdin.

It’s no Mary Tyler Moore show set, but the Gypsy Lumberjacks happily call the the clean airiness of Minneapolis home. Singer-songwriter-guitarist Leif Magnuson is in foreground. Courtesy reverbnation.com

But at this gig, with the only the band’s core trio —singer, songwriter and Flamenco-inflected guitarist Leif Magnuson, bass guitarist Pete Verdin* and Karon — performed a long set of original music climaxed with a songful Bela Fleck cover,  demonstrating their commitment to a high standard of musicality. In fact, the musical synergy was extraordinary considering they’re just starting a tour and hadn’t played for three weeks before their previous gig in Madison, according to Verdin.

So I can only begin to imagine them live under ideal circumstances, with a responsive audience, which is evident on their first album Live at the Sound Gallery.

The Gypsy Lumberjacks with a more hospitable crowd. Courtesy gypsylumberjacks.com

The latest CD of all originals, Pulling Upon the Strap, begins with “Chicha Fria,” a skipping, infectious guitar and percussion rhythmic pattern, overlaid with spoken voices like a dial radio between two stations. But the voices debate the qualities and power of knowledge, also suggesting the multi-layered experience of today’s social media-obsessed life.

“Who am I and why should I care? Who are you you, why do we share?” Magnuson sings to the main melody which beguiles oddly, as do the refrain’s lyrics: “Don’t follow me ! I know just where I stand, don’t follow me! No matter where I stand…follow them, you’re running out of time…” Despite the singer’s disclaimer, the song conveys a pied piper-like magnetism and a certain urgency, an apt beginning. Magnuson possesses an appealing and resonant voice that can bellow clarion strong, yet in this album he reigns in the slightly elephantine tendencies that sometimes marred his vocals on the first album. Now Magnuson does more just to his song’s nuance and meaning, enriching expression rather than trampling it.

“Ploughman’s Blues” is no conventional blues but its minor-key refrain phrase virtually glides, eliciting a work song-like tension-and-release, riding Cliff Smyrl’s organ-like accordion —  the sort of motion that historically sustained labor, from chattel slaves to ploughmen or lumberjacks. Vocal harmonies call: “The sweat upon your brow,brings the silver that you need.” But life’s never simple or easy: “The solace that you sought is fraught now with disease.. .Then you cry out loud. No one seems to hear.”

This is hardly just a band backing up a strong singer-songwriter. The ensuing instrumental “Blaenau Ffestiniog” shows the Lumberjacks capable of substantial improvisation dynamics and invention. Here Verdin’s supple bass drives and lifts from underneath the band’s blend of zydeco, traditional and progressive bluegrass.

Bassist Peter Verdin’s supple fluency drives the Gypsy Lumberjacks sound from the bottom up. Photo by Kris Verdin

Another instrumental follows, “Caspian’s March” led by James Berget’s pirouetting violin, revealing a  strong Spanish strain, drawing on Magnuson’s background. He learned to master strong aspects of Flamenco guitar while in South America and Spain.

The two mid-album instrumentals cast an expansive aura that drives the gypsy spirit, an imaginative and daring programming strategy that works superbly.

Then the limpid melody of “Miner’s Dross”  helps contemplate humanity’s proverbial fall from grace. “When you gather your thoughts all you have are the miner’s dross.” To wit, the cruel life gut-punch often accompanying flawed behavior can also drain the brain and spirit — due wisdom for relatively young performers. And yet, in the ensuing “Elephants Underwear” Magnuson ponders: “His time, his fate, is it too late to do something great?”

Verdin’s playing, especially on “River Song” recalls the great Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna bassist Jack Casady in the bass’s almost vocal yet sturdy resonance, and harmonic fluency.

“Riversong” declares “We’ll keep movin’ on, movin’ on like water.” And though the lyric leads to the ocean floor, the group radiates forward motion and rising inevitability. These gypsies are coming, as is their time.

The Carribbean-cum-African Hi-Life lilt of the closing “What You Wanted Here” may seem to push the stylistic envelope to bursting, yet they pull it off. The band’s nearly seamless vernacular cross-stitching encompasses a global awareness that extends far beyond the ostensible Americana they were first associated with.

There’s not a weak number on the record, a rare accomplishment, and a measure of the balance of songcraft and musicianship. And in true lumberjack style, they’re pulling the strap tight to haul their loads of stylistic cuttings. They seem ready for the long haul.

________________

The Gypsy Lumberjacks remaining tour is listed here: http://www.reverbnation.com/gypsylumberjacks

The CD Pulling Upon the Strap is available athttp://www.gypsylumberjacks.com/

*Full disclosure: Peter Verdin is the writer’s nephew by a previous marriage.

Photo by Ann K. Peterson

At 83, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott might be shrinking a tad — there didn’t seem too much there under the long, gray curls, the big cowboy hat and the sturdy old guitar Friday night at Milwaukee’s Shank Hall.

Ah, but that leaves the timeless charm, the cavernous memory and the storytelling way with songs, and the twisting tales between them. All that still oozes at a steady, impressible rate, like Vesuvius set on medium flow. And truth is, the man’s physical bearing still radiates smart charisma, in a sly smile, a mock-heroic pose, and a face that vividly collapses into a lifetime of memories and feelings.

He opened with what sounded like a secularized rendition of the old, dark spiritual “Nearer,  My God, to Thee.” After the applause he muttered, “You’re not supposed to clap at that.”

So a packed house embarked on a mine-filled journey, even if at times the anecdotal tributaries seemed to outrun the songs. But following-him-where-he-may-go is a big part of the appeal and adventure of a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott performance.

Through his long career, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has traveled far in song, story and distance. Photo courtesy of gbae.org.

You encounter moments like when Elliott stopped smack in the middle of a song line — to ostensibly talk about the song — but then led us on a picaresque journey, the song left unfinished. Maybe on his next time through.

He told about being on the road in 1954 with a 20-years-elder Woody Guthrie, stopping in Woody’s hometown of Kansas City, where Woody ironically got abused by someone who recognized him, while Jack slept in the car. But the young Elliott was blessed, he claims. “I didn’t have pimples as a teenager. Back then I did everything backwards.”

We heard the tangled tale about the rodeo clown who gave him his first cigar for fifty-five cents, and somehow persuaded him to go back to high school, and then college, which he got partly through. Yet Jack roundaboutly ended up in “a stolen whale ship boat going down the Thames River.”

“Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie,” 1961. Photo by John Cohen, courtesy of nyphotoreview.com

Or there was the Guthrie naval story about his ship being torpedoed by German U-boats, but Woody manages to save his slogan-branded guitar and his fiddle. That did lead logically to Guthrie’s song “Talking Sailor”:

“This convoys the biggest I ever did see/it stretches all the way out across the Sea…Look out, you Fascists!/I’m just one of the merchant crew/

I belong to the union called the N.M.R./I’m union man from head to toe/I’m USA and CIO/fighting out here on the waters/when some freedom. On the land.”

Such unvarnished Guthrie politics seems anachronistic in an era where union power seems perpetually under the capitalist boot. And Elliott, virtually a pure song interpreter, seems out of step, too, when every person today with a guitar and two lungs seems also a self-proclaimed “songwriter.”

Do we ever need a guy like Ramblin’ Jack, who seems to have most of America’s folk song history in the tattered backpack of his brain. So this crowd waited for each transporting turn though time.

Photo of Jack Elliott courtesy tadd.txt-nifty.com

We heard the old Roy Acuff train song in which, before starting in the wrong key, Jack finally hit the track and his careening falsetto caught the train’s long, lonesome whistle, like a bird soaring into a slipstream.

At this point in his career, besides his set break, Elliott turns the mic over for one song to his Tim Grimm, who offered a song mythologizing the storied folksinger for whom he has served as a driver for, due to Grimm’s high regard for the aging legend. But first, Grimm fiddled with Jack’s instrument for a moment, then asked him, “Do you ever tune this guitar?”

From a spot near the men’s room door, Jack demurred, “It was in tune when I bought it.”

Of course, Elliott’s musical meanderings inevitably led to Bob Dylan, whom he once influenced, and who, after hearing Jack perform Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” said, “I’m relinquishing the song do you, Jack.” So Elliott did it in the voices of several different people – slipping in and out of nasal mimics of Dylan at pointed spots in the trademark song of sullied romance.

And yet he also flipped to Dylan’s bright side, with a pulsing version “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

Jack Elliott (right) with Bob Dylan and John Sebastian in the heady musical days of Greenwich Village in 1964. Photo courtesy the worldsamess.blogspot.com

By contrast, his riveting rendition of Merle Travis’ classic mining song “Dark as a Dungeon” proved even more harrowing than his recording of it with Guy Clark — here a focused mini-opera with noirish shades of fear, blackness, rain and measured nuance.

Elliott’s career has been too shambling to ever court commercial success. But eventually he’s gained recognition, from Dylan’s recollections in his biographical book Chronicles, to a Grammy award for Best Traditional Folk Song album in 1995 for South Coast, the National Medal of the Arts in 1998, and another Grammy, for Best Traditional Blues Album in 2009 for A Stranger Here.

Through it all at Shank Hall, Elliott’s guitar playing still bounced and crackled just enough to keep each song moving smartly. Of course, there was always another story to subvert his own music-making.

“Did you hear about the time I landed the space shuttle in Dakar? They said it was a perfect three-point landing.” After a calculated pause he added. “I wish I’d known you then, I could’ve invited you onto it.”

By then, he had the crowd almost in synch with his unpredictable stride. So it didn’t matter that he’d clearly crossed the line into fabrication. We were about ready to follow him anywhere. Even time seems to wait to hitch a ride with Elliott. Grimm said he drove Jack from Denver to Milwaukee in one day.

Ramble on, Jack Elliott. Hope to see you back this way again some time.

Irrepressible Ramblin’ Jack Elliott even had stories to tell for a number of fans waiting in line for him after a recent performance at Shank Hall in Milwaukee. Photo by Ann K. Peterson

Artist-in-residence and Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch (left) works with the Wisconsin Conservatory Music Jazz Institute’s award-winning students saxophonist Lenard Simpson and student pianist Peter Garofalo.

Jazz ain’t the music that made Milwaukee famous. However, like beer, the music’s innate effervescence is part of this city’s cultural DNA. Improv and swing are rising locally, and reflect the creative brewing of musicians – like sax and brass players – who literally blow life into their instruments.

I’ve been extremely impressed by the young-musician generation since returning to Milwaukee, two decades after extensively covering the jazz scene here.

“A difference today is a very strong crop of young players in town,” says trumpeter Jamie Breiwick.

For a serious art form, jazz education is essential for performers and to cultivate audiences, unlike more innately popular folk- or mass media-based arts. Education  creates musician’s work, as it has for decades with an art form that commingles sophistication and soulful grittiness. Down Beat magazine extensive annual October jazz education guide provides a documentation of the art form’s ongoing growth at the roots of youth nationwide, and is considered so important that Jazz Times has begun offering an annual jazz guide as well.

UW-Milwaukee offers a bachelor’s degree in jazz studies, begun in 1990. Photo courtesy of The Peck School of the Arts.

UW-Milwaukee’s jazz studies degree program, begun in the wake of the city’s 1980s jazz revival, is directed by noted veteran reed player Curt Hanrahan, and signifies the music’s growth and demand, as does the ambitious Jazz Institute at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, which holds concerts, summer camps and annual residencies by Milwaukee-born trumpeter Brian Lynch, a Grammy-winning former Jazz Messenger with Art Blakey. Plus, The West End Conservatory opened on Vliet Street a few years ago with a strong faculty of young professional jazz musicians.

A highlight of the jazz education year will be the second annual Music Education Day at Summerfest on Wednesday, September 17 (with a free lunch) featuring nationally known clinicians, including New Orleans drummer-bandleader Adonis Rose, who leads his own quintet and has worked with Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton and other jazz luminaries. Jazz Institute director Mark Davis will also lead a group. Last year’s event drew 600 school-age music students.

The Conservatory’s accredited jazz degree program, launched in 1971, crucially sparked that era’s early 1980’s jazz renaissance. The Jazz Institute, underwritten by the Batterman Foundation, also selects top high school players for scholarships in private lessons, theory classes and concerts. In addition to the Prospect Avenue Conservatory home, The Institute now also has branch locations in Fox Point and Brookfield.

For the third consecutive year, the program’s Batterman Ensemble placed as a finalist in the International Charles Mingus Jazz Competition, and in 2013 won the competition’s “Mingus Spirit” award and the group’s trumpeter Travis Drow won an outstanding soloist award. The current ensemble took first place for best high school ensemble in 2014 at the Eau Claire Jazz Festival. In 2012, the Batterman’s 17-year-old saxophonist Lenard Simpson won the Mingus event’s “outstanding soloist.”

The Jazz Institute’s Batterman Ensemble recently won the award for best jazz high school Jazz Ensemble at the Eau Claire Jazz Festival. The ensemble includes (L-R) Jordan Rattner on guitar, Gervis Myles on bass, Amy Clapp on tenor sax, Hannah Johnson on drums and Travis Drow on trumpet.

This sounds like a dynamic art form in town, yet an old saw endures: “Jazz is dying.” “Compared to what? For the last story about that, we had a joke: All the jazz musicians were unavailable for comment,” responds the Conservatory’s pianist Davis.

“All the musicians I know are constantly working,” concurs Breiwick, also a professor at the UWM program.

“You really need to work at it, but it pays off,” adds Jeff Hamann, the city’s “first-call” bassist, a Conservatory instructor and house bassist in Michael Feldman’s nationally-syndicated radio program “Whad D’ya Know?” “My peers seem to keep busy.” However, Hamann has noticed less work for some veteran players. “Everyone’s path to success is a little different.”

“The value of jazz education is that you can play just about any type of music with it,” Davis says. And yet, he adds, “some music programs are dwindling, especially in the inner city.” But WCM and other higher-ed programs provide scholarships — and the Conservatory faculty ensemble, We Six, does residencies and performances — at these schools.

“Milwaukee seems on a real upswing, with numerous incredible Conservatory-trained high school and college players coming up: Lenard Simpson, trumpeter Alec Aldred, guitarist Tommy Antonic, saxophonist Robert Larry (from UWM) and percussionist Jake Richter — now on full scholarship to Indiana University.”

“Their success comes from education, the jazz community and musicians acting as mentors, if only through their playing. Guys like Jamie Breiwick. Last night, Jordan Rattner, a great high school guitarist and trumpeter Cody Longreen sat in with us. You can’t just teach jazz in classroom. You gotta be out in the real world,” Davis says.

“You hear criticisms that academia creates musical clones, who all sound the same. I think it’s a reaction to more jazz education and less playing opportunities.”

Jazz still fights against American anti-intellectualism, and it lacks the funding base classical music enjoys. Yet jazz persists.

“You have to learn how to hear those harmonies to really understand it,” Davis concludes. “Most jazz musicians recognize the need to give something back, to educate people to create an audience for tomorrow. Most people I taught 20 years ago are adults and hopefully it’s part of their culture.”

• 
• My friend Stuart Levitan prompted this list by posting his Facebook list of “Books that mattered the most to me.” I gather such lists are a viral trend right now on the Internet, so a blogger, if anything, can be trendy.
• However, I hope my list of BTMTMTM (also on FB) stands the test of time, much longer than any list-making fashion. For me, they already have.
• Feel free to comment on my list or post your own list. And think about checking out these books. I’d also be happy to comment on specific books on my list, by request.
• BTMTMTM, in the order they came to mind. Note the slashes for separate books by the same author:
  Moby-Dick/ Tales, Poems and Other Writings (Ed. John Bryant) – Melville 
  The Idiot — Dostoevsky
  American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman – F.O. Matthiessen
  Dubliners — James Joyce
  The Trial — Franz Kafka
  Cloudsplitter / Continental Drift — Russell Banks
  Lyrics 1962-1985 — Bob Dylan
  News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness — Ed. Robert Bly 
  Humboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow 
  On God: An Uncommon Conversation — Norman Mailer and Michael Lennon
  Mystery Train/The Old Weird America – Greil Marcus
  The Arts Without Mystery – Denis Donoghue
  Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America – Tom Piazza
  Thanks to Stu for mentioning Dave Maraniss’ excellent and important book about the Vietnam War, They Marched into Sunlight on his list. While reading “They Marched” in January of 2004, I was afflicted with my auto-immune neuropathy. Note (in scan below) how my p. 143 and ensuing notations are written left-handed, cuz my right hand was in hell. It forced me to stop. I must finish it, soon.

  

  I’d also want to add Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Daniel Martin by John Fowles and Independence Day by Richard Ford, and two by the superb literary critic Ihab Hassan: Selves at Risk & Radical Innocence.
• Finally, I would include Susan Sontag’s essay collection, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, published in 2007, three years after her death.

  Because it’s the most recent book on my list that I happened to write a review of, here’s my review of At the Same Time. I believe the book is available in paperback now from Penguin.

  Regarding Sontag’s interesting quote on the back of her book (see below), I believe my “community of writers,” as listed here, includes slightly more dead than living writers.

  

  

  (Below) The back cover of the hardcover edition of Sontag’s At the Same Time.

  

In Gray, 1919

Because I have too much other writing to do today, I’m merely going to give you this little image essay of the fabulous Vassily Kandinsky exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, running through Monday, September 1. This is a great way to spend some of the Labor Day weekend, especially if the weather continues as it is right now. Don’t miss it, maybe the best art show of the year, at least in the Milwaukee area. A friend of mine who walked into this show saying, “I don’t really understand abstract art,” raved about it continually throughout, and that says as much as anything I can say.

The paintings are not presented here in chronological order. One suggestion or two: Enjoy the representational paintings as such, but then try to look at them as abstracts, to appreciate their compositional, sensual, and even spiritual qualities.

Consider also that Kandinsky did his work before, during and after World War I. Kandinsky said that war stress and imagery can be detected, including cannons and barbed wire fences. During the war, he was exiled to Russia and suffered great privation there. He also wrote a short book, a sort of ruminative aesthetic manifesto titled “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.”

Unless otherwise noted, all the artwork is oil on canvas. Yellow-Red-Blue   Panel design for the “Juryfreie” exhibition, Wall A (Entwurf für das Wandbild in der Juryfreien Kunstschau: Wand A), 1922 Goauche on canvas Fragment 1 for Composition VII   Composition IX    Old Town II Old Town II
 Painting with a red mark 1914  Improvisation III

Composition IX

Simple 1916 Watercolor and india ink

Song (Leid) 1906

This was the setting for my August 24th presentation and reading for my forthcoming (hopefully soon) book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts in Milwaukee. The illustration on the wall at the right above is a photo of Chuck LaPaglia, the founder and owner of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. After changing the course of jazz history in Milwaukee, LaPaglia went on to become the talent booker at Yoshi’s in Oakland, which would become one of the greatest jazz clubs in the United States.

I used a music stand for a podium and among my props were a bathroom back scrub brush (for an anecdote about a very clean Sonny Stitt), a Hal Leonard Jazz Fake Book, and a boombox.

Among the visuals was this wonderful image by Rockwell Kent which was part of the 1930 illustrated edition of Moby-Dick, which popularized Melville’s great work in the 20th century.
I briefly spoke of how Melville is one of the precursors of many writers my book discusses who understand the jazz and democracy relationship. In Moby-Dick, the whaling ship The Pequod, and its remarkably multi-cultural crew, serve as a striking metaphor for America as a melting-pot democracy.

I was blessed with a remarkably attentive, literate and responsive audience. It didn’t hurt that they had been fortified with a delicious array of food from the potluck provided by a variety of attendees, mostly from the Riverwest neighborhood.

Among the attendees was Bill Schaefgen (above), the gifted Milwaukee trombonist-composer and bandleader, most notably of the group What on Earth?  I played a recording by the group and also described their music in part of the reading from my book’s second chapter, titled “The Milwaukee How-Long Blues: An Unlikely Jazz Scene Flourishes.” The band blended “a controlled spaciness, mock defiance and post-bop freedom with both traditional jazz forms and structural ideas drawn from contemporary classical music.” We also took a moment to allow Bill to tell us about the genesis of “Flow,” the tune of his that we played.

Young visitors to the Jazz Gallery’s Habeas Lounge Riverwest had fun with the bean bag chairs.

______________

All photos by Linda Pollack/Habeas Lounge.

Special thanks to visiting artist Linda Pollack, Mark Lawson, The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts and the Riverwest Artists Association. Also thanks to all the contributors to the pre-presentation potluck.