Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington (John Pribyl, foreground) in full blowhard form in “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

SPRING GREEN — American Players Theatre’s Saturday production of The Doctors Dilemma saw playwright George Bernard Shaw let favorite archetypes tumble into a philosophical pecking order, where artists shone brighter than those with the means “to sometimes cure and sometimes kill.” Morally challenged MDs end up on the bottom with the bedpan.

They know “pain doesn’t come until after, when they get bill.” Merely the least buffoonish of the medicine men dabbles with “the doctor’s dilemma” — whether “to kill someone, so that another might live.” Shaw renders truth timelessly stark, wherein “40 out of 50 people are condemned to death.” So what does a doctor do to save the other 10?

Further, is an “artistic genius” worth saving over one of those lives?

While we chew on those fascinating quandaries, Shaw’s loopy gaggle of Irish characters help unfurl a seamy would-be romance. Despicable Dr.Colenso Ridgeon (Brian Mani) ponders euthanizing the stricken painter, Ralph Dubedat, while lusting for his red-headed wife Jennifer (Abbey Siegworth).

Long-time American Players Theatre favorite Paul Bentzen (right), adds his inimitable comic flair to Shaw in the final year of his career.

Among the other doctors adding to the chaotic fun are craggy Paul Bentzen, longtime APT comic foil, who’s retiring his lean-boned jocularity this year, and especially a foppish, blonde-mopped doctor named Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington. “So many of my patients are better dead (than useful),” Bonnington shrugs. “My tastes are simple.”

Or “good wine, happy endings, touching gratitude, enchanting woman, gentle nature…”

He’s not the only one who conveys wit by letting his overactive mouth expose himself. It’s one of Shaw’s most winning ways but, in this play, might also have amounted to a bit of self-mockery, intended or not.

You can’t help liking Shaw’s moniker mongering. There’s also Dr. Blenkinsop (David Daniel), who provides some of the playwright’s most barbed social satire, as a physician too poor to afford his own treatment. Or Minnie Tinwell, a maid, who’s caught up in the unseemly steaminess.

Sir Colenso Ridgeon (Brian Mani) has eyes for Mrs. Jennifer Dubedat (Abbey Siegworth), the wife of one of his patients.

Despite Ridgeon’s amorous advances, Mrs. Dubedat is dedicated to her wispy, mortally-sick husband, whose corporeal remains seem 98% inspiration and 2% perspiration. What’s left of Dubedat (Samuel Taylor) seems hanging from a tube of paint.

However, ailing Dubedat, an “above it all” artist, is also a master money-grubber and a bigamist. Shaw finally frames things in existentially human terms.

However, the playwright couldn’t stop writing. Judging fate interceded where an editor didn’t — an audience member actually keeled over and a medical emergency stopped the play for nearly half an hour.

That merely slowed Shaw’s brilliant discourse, which should’ve ended with Dubedat’s death, an exquisite set piece by the company, a virtual Pieta on stage, pure spiritual pathos. “I think I’ll recover after all,” the artist murmurs. “I suddenly went to sleep.”

Ralph and Mrs. Jennifer Dubedat in Ralph’s death scene.

That said, this superbly crafted production includes another stunning set piece, actually 48 of them – backstage panels of portrait paintings, ostensibly by Dubedat, of celebrated 19^th century medical and cultural icons. These presences frame the dilemmas and shenanigans like so many witnesses to humanity’s folly, grace and endurance.

All photos by Carissa Dixon and copyright of American Players Theatre.

________

The Doctor’s Dilemma runs throughout October 3 at American Players Theatre’s “on the hill” theater, 5950 Golf Course Rd. Spring Green, Wisconsin. For information, call 608-588-2361 or visit www.americanplayers.org

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 countermelody. 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.

Pianist Keith Jarrett (left) and the bassist Charlie Haden, who died July 11, take a break during the sessions that produced “Last Dance.” Courtesy amazon.com 

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.

A somewhat shorter version of this review was published first in the Shepherd Express.

* Haden died of post-polio syndrome. He had contracted polio as a child.

Some of this material was part of a CC obituary profile of Haden at https://kevernacular.com/?p=4420

Imagine you are an orphan in a West African village, today. You live in the orphanage because your parents died of AIDS, like countless other parents in Africa. One hundred degree heat beats on your brow, and you are thirsty. But you are also getting sick — from the only drinking water you have.

I may be stretching the perceived boundaries of Culture Currents for this posting. But this elasticity is justified: Culture Currents is interested in the uses of social media, which is now crucial for this effort at helping orphans survive in Africa. The effort began with an e-mail (see note with accompanying photo above). The sponsoring organization, It Must Work has gained support from a Facebook-driven non-governmental organization Electricians without Borders 1 for well-building plans and now is doing online and Facebook promotion for a fundraiser upcoming on August 6 at the Highland House, an excellent restaurant in the Milwaukee area which is donating money for each person attending the event (see below).

The Culture Currents blog is joining the effort and is always interested in the social and political aspects of contemporary media and communication, because they help define our contemporary culture — that is, the actions and expression that define who we are, and what we value, as a group of people and, more largely, as a common humanity (thus my blog’s sub-title).

So, this is a matter of imploring humanity to care about orphans in dire need. 

The orphanage’s relatively crude cistern is contaminated “from water runoff from roof gutters overhead and other impure sources,” explains Ed Valent, a Milwaukee educator and IMW board member.*  (see photograph at the bottom right, on the attached flyer.)

So building a well will be the practical solution to the water problem. “They are also trying to grow crops and have a fish farm,” Valent said. “But water is an ongoing problem, and it depends on the rain, which is seasonal. And the temperature there is always between 90 and 100 degrees.”

The effort is spearheaded by a remarkable Midwestern-born Peace Corp worker Rebecca Casper Harles, who worked at the orphanage in Benin, Africa. Here’s a message from Valent:

Hello,

I’m inviting you to join me for lunch or dinner or drinks at the Highland House on Wednesday, August 6. I’ll be there from 11:00 AM until closing time at 10:00 PM…. for a good cause, so you aren’t just getting an invitation, you’re getting a story too (see below and attached for more on the story).

The Highland House is a great Mequon restaurant and bar that has offered to contribute money for each customer who dines or drinks at Highland House on August 6 for our Build-A-Well-For-An Orphanage fund raiser. You’ve gotta read the story for more on that… but here’s more about Highland House:

Highland House is a family friendly, reasonably priced restaurant (managed by the son of my childhood friend, Frank Stemper)

Here’s their web site: Highland House.

Here’s their address: 12741 N Port Washington Rd, Mequon, WI 53092

Here are driving directions from Milwaukee:

I 43 North to Mequon Rd (exit 85), left on Mequon Rd to cross highway, right on Port Washington Rd for 2.9 miles. Highland House is on the left.

Now (if you’re still reading), here’s the story I promised:

The Water for Orphans Story: Several years ago, Rebecca (Casper) Harles came back from her Peace Corps assignment in Benin, Africa with a mission. While she was there, she befriended Mathieu Honzonon, who has an extraordinary story.

The small town where he grew up was coping with a heartbreaking result of Africa’s AIDS crisis: a large and growing number of orphans. Benin’s citizens rely on the generosity of neighbors to address family crises, but the scope of the problem was unprecedented. Mathieu began an orphanage for about 35 school aged children and set about the job of providing them with an food, shelter, an education and love.

The orphanage has always relied on a cistern system to supply all of its water. Recently, contamination in the cistern water has sickened both animals and children. The solution: a new well. The problem? No money. Fortunately, upon Rebecca’s return from Africa, she set up a non-profit to be able to continue supporting Peace Corps related work in West Africa. Her organization is called, “It Must Work”, the English translation of the name of the orphanage.

Mathieu has reached out for support from “Electricians Without Borders” for well plans and expertise and to “It Must Work” for funding. As a board member of It Must Work, I can attest to the legitimacy of this group. Since it’s beginning in 2009, 100% of every donation for the annual projects the group has undertaken has gone for the charitable work of the organization. All “fundraising” expenses have been paid by board members themselves.

 

A day or night out at Highland House sounds like a good time, but if you can’t join me on August 6, and you’re moved by the cause, the orphans and I would appreciate a donation. You can mail one to:

 

It Must Work c/o Paul Casper, Treasurer

1325 N. Van Buren St. #603

Milwaukee, WI 53202

For more about It Must Work, see: It Must Work’s Facebook Page (and like us while you’re there if you want to stay in the IMW loop).

Yours for the orphans,

Ed Valent

929 N. Astor St. #2207
Milwaukee, WI 53202
414-257-2448

Attachments area

Preview attachment Water4Orphansv3.pdf

Water4Orphansv3.pdf

___________

1 Electricians Without Borders FB page is https://www.facebook.com/ElectriciansWithoutBordersUsa

* Ed Valent and It Must Work founder Rebecca Casper Harles’ father Paul Casper, are old friends of mine, and fellow classmates from Marquette University High School.  For full disclosure, The Highland House restaurant hosting the fundraiser is managed by Frank Stemper Jr., the son of another fellow Marquette High classmate of ours, Dr. Frank Stemper. 

I took this photograph shortly after the small tin piano-shaped music box on top of the buffet shelf began playing its song, after several years of sitting silently. The music box formerly belonged to my deceased mother (who happens to be pictured beside the piano with my late father).

I’m a bit bewildered by small, spooky occurrences of late, that resonate with sentiment.

I’ve experienced three such happenings lately.

Now, feminist scholars of 19^th century literature, especially written by women,

inform us that sentiment ain’t a bad thing, culturally speaking.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the feminine John Brown, they might argue.

Yes, I get that.

But a recent afternoon I was browsing through Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,

feeling burnt and wired, after a lousy night’s sleep.

Then, I hear a slight tinkling, teasing my brain.

I walk into the dining room…

I’ll be damned if it ain’t my late mother’s piano-shaped music box

that’s sat on the buffet silently for a couple of years.

Suddenly, it’s playing its tinny little heart out, a few feet away

from the cassette tape of my eulogy of father Norm’s funeral,

which appeared, out of nowhere, not long ago right on the bookshelf.

The piano’s melody is touching but sappy: “We’ve Only just Begun” by Paul Williams,

which…The Carpenters nailed together into a hit.

The piano’s song “began” a few years ago

when I first wound the tin piano up,

shortly after Sharon’s funeral. I let it play out —

or so I thought — then eventually set it down in the dining room.

Now I’m compelled to ponder Sharon’s affection for the melody, a sunny C major chord

which takes a striking modulation to seven successive minor chords

offset by one E Major 7. The minors help “sell” such sappy lines as “white lace and

promises…” The wide intervals of the phrases do as well.

So, Williams had a craftsman’s command of music.

And now the dippy lyrics nag at my brain

though I wanted to read more of what Tocqueville had to say

about “the people” informing the intelligentsia,

with his certain faith that American people

were fairly intelligent.

My own Tocquevillian faith in “the people” is tested regularly,

as much as my faith in a higher power,

but I seem to persist in such battered, residual beliefs,

still simmering in the petrie dish of my brain.

Rolling Stone lists “We’ve Only Just Begun”

as 405 among The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

And to be clear, the Paul Williams who wrote that song

is not the same one who started Crawdaddy magazine,

one of the really seminal rock critics.

If Paul Williams the critic were still alive, it would be interesting

for him to meet with Paul Williams, the soft-rock songwriter

and have them argue whether the song

deserves to be in the all-time top 500.

It’s a pop song. Often played at weddings.

These days I sometimes wish I was 30 years old

and could have Jeffrey Foucault sing his wedding song

“One for Sorrow” (two for joy they say) at my wedding.

It always lifts my spirit. And he writes a hell of a lyric.

But then, how different is Williams’ song than

some of the Tin Pan Alley Songs I’ve played on piano —

plenty romantic, and for Norm and Sharon’s wedding anniversary?

“My One and Only Love” and mom’s fave “Here’s That Rainy Day.”

I feel the heart tug and resist, or do I?

After all, The Carpenters sort of made my skin crawl.

Strange thing is, poltergeists don’t seem to. Not quite yet.

As long as they don’t start tossing furniture around the room

or de-alphabetize my CD library, or turn on an “Addams Family” video and, along with

Boris and Natasha, do a steamy tango with my startled cat (supple Chloe could at least handle the kicks, the boleo, the head snaps and the female’s deep backwards back bend. But I doubt she would dig it. And I’d be “Ghost Busters” spooked.)

But what of the weirdness of these occurrences?

Dad’s eulogy tape surfacing mysteriously a few weeks before mom’s piano plays,

out of the blue?

I shrug it off, sort off.

But still.

I’d like Tocqueville to be in the room with those two Paul Williams.

Tocqueville seemed to feel that “we” the people “had only just begun, to live.”

Ditch the “white lace,” expand the lovebirds’ first-person plural to

“We the people…” He wrote a 700-page political science masterpiece

based on America’s “promises.”

It would be a conversation with four writers, if I attended.

I’d prefer not to talk much.

I’d be a Kakfa-esque bug in the corner,

too ugly for anyone to acknowledge.

So, I keep following my psyche through my mid-afternoon Twilight Zones

but also keep thinking and writing because

Norm and Sharon would want me to, I’m sure.

Then, there’s my dead ex-wife Kathy, and the third creepy occurrence — which fit

her impish personality to a T (too complicated to explain here, having to do with a computer screensaver “joke.”)

I’ll just say Kathy, who died in 1999,

was bugging me to finish my long-postponed blog remembrance

of her — by her birthday, which I finally did.

So maybe that’s one spook silenced.

Maybe.

Unless I start pondering the “astrological psychic energy” of birthdays and anniversaries

and of “Occurences at Owl Creek Bridge”  yet to come.

_______

The Kathy Naab remembrance is posted here:https://kevernacular.com/?p=1547

• An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge is a haunting 1890 Civil War story short story by Ambrose Bierce, which was aired in 1964 on The Twilight Zone in a film adaptation. It was actually a black-and-white French film, rivière du hibou, directed by Robert Enrico, and won awards for best short subject at the 1962 Cannes film festival and 1963 Academy Awards.
• The Bierce story’s subtitle is “A Dead Man’s Dream.” I just hope I don’t have a dead man’s dream tonight, or anytime soon. Dad, you can hang onto your dreams, until further notice. Are you listening? Um, hello?
• Suddenly, I feel like Hamlet, the brooding, haunted Dane…
• Now what should I do? What’s this? I just heard a small voice somewhere, whispering, “Psst. Hey dude. Your money or your life.”
• To quote Jack Benny (not Hamlet), “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
• p.s. OK, I made up that last “ghostly” quote. As for any of the rest of this blog, (to quote a contemporary “philosopher”) “I did not make that up.”
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge
• HERE “IS AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE” ON YOU TUBE:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DocXC-kobmU

Courtesy bluenote.com

Blogger’s note: On Aug. 7, I will add to this posting a more complete review of Charlie Haden’s last released recording “Last Dance,” when it is published by The Shepherd Express. 

On the new ECM CD, Last Dance with pianist Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden’s extended bass solo on “Where Can I Go Without You?” magnificently extends the melodic contours and the meaning of the song, as if he has deposited the questionnaires 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, this musician lived a remarkably full creative existence, 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.

“I want to take people away from the ugliness and sadness around us every day and bring beautiful, deep music to as many people as I can,” Haden said in a 2013 Interview with the Associated Press shortly before receiving his lifetime achievement Grammy Award. Eventually his body, debilitated by post-polio syndrome, took his music and life from him.

Born on August 6, 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa — Charlie Haden died at age 76, on July 11, shortly after the CD’s release. This great bassist, composer, educator and bandleader has a vast and wide-ranging recorded output (see selected discography below), from powerfully rhetorical, politically acute large-group records to duets, where you hear the man most intimately, which is why I am starting this appreciation with a consideration of his duet recordings with several different pianists.

Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden recording the sessions that produced “Last Dance” and “Jasmine.” Courtesy npr.com

Besides Jarrett, Haden also recorded excellent duet albums with pianists Denny Zeitlin and Hank Jones, actually two superb recordings with the latter — of spirituals, hymns and folk songs, which reveal some of his roots as a boy singer in the popular country radio act The Haden Family.

But Haden’s most artfully beautiful duet album was Night and the City with the master of New York piano jazz, Kenny Barron. Haden the role player understood restraint and understatement, and knew, with a pianist of bounteous pianistic and harmonic resources like Barron, the bassist can slip a bit further into the background. Yet Haden remains the recording’s deep-breathing presence, the knowing inner voice perhaps weighing the difference between the dark and light angels within each human, for this is a musical symbiosis of two sensibilities as one whole.

Haden’s “Waltz for Ruth” from Night and the City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gbhHA_nrEY

The CD’s cover image, Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous 1927 painting “Radiator Building – New York” is the perfect visual analog to Haden’s heartland-to-big city career arc. O’Keefe, a Sun Prairie, Wisconsin native, became the student and spouse of New York sophisticate art photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who understood her genius, here interpreting the ultimate urban setting.

The cover of “Night and the City” with Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting of the Radiator Building in New York. Courtesy blue-train.es

The painting’s architectural starkness parallels Haden’s stripped-down structural strength, the dancing wisp of smoke suggests his lyricism, and the lights reaching to the heavens, his spirituality. The music echoes not only O’Keeffe but also the poem quoted in the liner notes, Mark Strand’s “Night Piece,” which itself pays homage to Charles Dickens:

…And people moved like a ghostly traffic from home to work

and home,

and the poor in their tenements speak to their gods

and the rich do not hear them, every sound is merged,

this moonlit night, into a distant humming, as if

the city, finally, were singing itself to sleep.

Haden produced the album with his wife Ruth Cameron, who co-produced most of his later work. You get a muted sense of Haden’s gifts for album concepts and socially-consciousness expression. There was a bracing, highly political side to Haden, most evident in the recordings he made periodically with his Liberation Music Orchestra with pianist-arranger-composer Carla Bley.

The first album, Liberation Music Orchestra from 1969, lends pointed purpose to the maelstrom of musical creativity, and social and political unrest that remarkable decade produced.

The first Liberation Music Orchestra album in 1969 set a standard for political jazz in a pan-cultural cast. Courtesy public-embarrassment-blues.blogspot.com

The Liberation Music Orchestra’s last recording, Not in Our Name, recorded in the summer of 2004, is a protest against the Iraq war, among other travesties of justice. The album also introduced many in the music world to the brilliant young Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, who may have no peer today on his instrument.

Not in Our Name superbly blends originals and folk-derived pieces by Bley, and various Americana: a sardonically harmonized “America the Beautiful,” part of a medley including a majestically soaring, trumpet-borne, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and a quote from Haden’s old bandleader Ornette Coleman’s powerfully searching tone poem Skies of America. There’s also “Amazing Grace,” and “Goin’ Home” (the folk song used in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony).

The album closes with their interpretation of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The original material may not match that of the first Liberation Music Orchestra album, one of the great recordings of the modern jazz era, and perhaps this Adagio inevitably, with 12 musicians, couldn’t quite equal the luminous, searing orchestral beauty of Barber’s masterpiece, as scored for strings.

But few artistic statements in recent memory have shown a surer artistic and critical grip on the America of the present, without forsaking, trivializing or glibly diminishing it.

“People sometimes ask, does it make any difference to make a recording like this?” Haden and Bley wrote in their liner notes to Not in Our Name. “What is important is that we choose to express our concerns, when the circumstances warranted and our natural mode of expression is music.”

Haden knew that music has the vibrational power to move people unlike any other art form. He used that power wisely. He toured worldwide until his body began to break down.

Perhaps one of the first documented clues to this tireless creative musician’s deteriorating condition arose in an interview he did for Jazz Times in May 2011. Writer Don Heckman wrote:

“At the moment, seated in an Italian restaurant near his home in northwest suburb of Los Angeles, it’s a coffee he’s drinking that’s bothering him. He’s been coughing since he took the first sip. ‘Coffee!’ He mutters. ‘I keep drinking it, and I keep coughing,’ And then in his typically whimsical fashion, he laughs at the inadvertent pun.”

Respiratory problems are among the symptoms of post-polio syndrome. Heckman aptly characterizes Haden as a Renaissance man, and the interview ends with the journalist asking Haden if he thinks Renaissance men are born or made.

“Well, my parents were like that, too, and I’ve always, from the beginning, wanted to play different music from different parts of the world,” Haden replied. “And then, as I was exposed to the problems of society as I was growing up — racism, Vietnam — that affected me, too. But I think the simple answer is this: who you are and what you do comes from what’s inside you.”

A humble man of vision and ambition, who knew who he was, and what he became, and how to share that with world. In his speech given when he received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy award, you sense vulnerability in his crumbling stature and unsteady voice. Yet he always seem to know where he was going with or without anyone else.

His career had a magnificent sense of purpose, perhaps no more overtly is when he formed the Liberation Music Orchestra, one of the most powerful and eloquent ensembles ever dedicated to the idea of freedom. His eloquent solo on “Song for Che,” from the first Liberation Music Orchestra album from 1969, will burn through the ages as surely as the memory of Che Guevera, the man it commemorated.

Haden’s “Song for Che” preformed with Ornette Coleman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmoj_vdk_5U

I saw him play twice in Madison, once years ago with Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet with Dewey Redman and Paul Motian, a concert of lyrical and acerbic urgency. The second time was with his Quartet West, a project which explored his noirish, romantic side. The great Joe Lovano was to be special guest but needed to cancel, so an old West Coast compadre, Gary Foster, flew in for the gig.

Foster’s a fine post-bop/post-cool school player, but the concert didn’t fully persuade without Lovano, who can do romantic on tenor sax as well as anybody (see Lovano’s Celebrating Sinatra album). Some fans longed to hear a fiery Liberation Music Orchestra-type concert, but it’s good to remember that Charlie was also a romantic, which was part of his LMO idealism, but also his natural lyricism. And jazz concerts by definition always risk not fully working because they’re all partly improvised.

Regardless, Haden played magisterially, in the center of the stage, behind see-through studio-type acoustic baffles, always supremely attuned to his songful tone quality.

Courtesy charliehadenmusic.com 

At his strongest, Haden sounds like a man carving his bass notes into an ancient oak tree.

Now people are commemorating him, singing songs for him, as he was once able to do with his family’s country music repertoire. The Haden Family was a popular Midwestern radio act when he was a boy and known as “Cowboy Charlie,”  on the verge of being a star singer. Polio struck, robbing his singing voice.

He switched to bass and became interested in jazz after hearing Charlie Parker perform with Jazz at the Philharmonic. He headed to Los Angeles to study music and began performing with such local musicians as pianist Hampton Hawes and saxophonist Art Pepper before meeting iconoclastic saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

Charlie Haden on bass in the early 1960s, with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Ornette Coleman on plastic alto saxophone and Ed Blackwell on drums. Courtesy dailykos.com.

“Ramblin'” by Ornette Coleman with Charlie Haden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqwdRBWvPs0

Almost a lifetime later, Haden’s soft tenor voice gives a stunning rendition of “Wayfaring Traveler” on his Quartet West album The Art of the Song from 1999. You hear a man who’s willing or compelled to wander and yet, as he did as bassist in the “free” jazz of Coleman’s pioneering quartet, he always seemed to know where he was headed. That was a secret of his success as an intrepid improviser. “Wayfaring Traveler” is actually a spiritual.

Haden founded the jazz studies program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982, and emphasized the spirituality of improvisation. So he was always on his way home, at least in spirit. He died in Los Angeles, with his musical family beside him, says ECM label publicist Tina Pelikan, who announced his death.

Rambling Boy from 2008 is a gorgeous, moving and fascinating document and, in effect, a modern-day Haden Family album, with a gaggle of guest roots-music stars – a measure of the respect he’s earned across musical vernaculars and

in the jazz, country, folk, classical and world music realms. This is Charlie the global rambler finally coming full circle.

You hear Haden, wife Ruth Cameron, the piquant harmonies of their triplet daughters Rachel, Petra and Tanya, their son Josh and son-in-law, actor Jack Black — and Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Dan Tyminski, Bruce Hornsby, Ricky Skaggs, Pat Metheny and others.

“My roots have never left me … because the very first memory I have is my mom singing and me singing with her,” Haden said in a 2009 interview. The CD includes Haden’s first recorded performance – an excerpt from a 1939 Haden Family radio show on which 22-month-old Cowboy Charlie yodels on a gospel tune, already with an innate feel for phrasing.

A vintage photo of the original Haden Family with “Cowboy” Charlie Haden in center, (wearing a vest). Courtesy newswbt.com

Amid the bigger names, Haden’s unheralded son Josh offers “Spiritual,” a stunningly confessional supplication to Jesus: “I don’t want to die alone.”

The last song on Rambling Boy is Haden himself singing “Oh Shenandoah,” like a prodigal ghost. He returned, longing to hear Shenandoah, again, that rolling river.

The Shenandoah will always sing, for Charlie Haden. Night, and the city, singing itself to sleep, will as well.

____________________

Editorial assistance by Harvey Taylor, Michael Goldberg, Howard Landsman, Gary Alderman and Steve Braunginn.

A selected Charlie Haden discography:

With Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This Is Our Music, Atlantic, early 1960s recordings; Beauty Is A Rare Thing (box-set reissue) Rhino/Atlantic, 1993; Crisis, Impulse! 1972, The Complete Science Fiction Sessions, with Bobby Bradford, Jim Hall, Cedar Walton, Ashla Puthli,  and others, recorded 1971, Columbia, 2000.

With The Keith Jarrett Quartet: Death and the Flower, Impulse! 1977; Survivor’s Suite, ECM 1977

With Rickie Lee Jones: Pop-Pop, Geffen,  1991

With Abbey Lincoln: You Gotta Pay the Band, Verve, 1991

With Joe Lovano: Universal Language Blue Note 1992

With John McLaughlin: My Goal’s Beyond, Douglas 1970

With Helen Merrill: You and the Night and the Music, 1998 

With Pat Metheny: Song X, with Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJohnette, Geffen 1986

With Old and New Dreams: Old and New Dreams, with Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell, Black Saint (Italian) 1977; and Old and New Dreams ECM 1979 (re-issued in 2005 as Lonely Woman on Universal.)

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Charlie Haden:

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, with Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Gato Barbieri and others. Impulse! 1969

Closeness (Duets), with Keith Jarrett, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Paul Motian, recorded 1976. Jazz Heritage

Time Remembers One Time Once, duets with (pianist) Denny Zeitlin, ECM 1979

Silence, with Chet Baker, Enrico Pieranunzi, Billy Higgins, Soul Note (Italian) 1987 (six months before Baker’s death)

Etudes with Paul Motian, featuring pianist Geri Allen, Soul Note (Italian) 1988

Dream Keeper, Liberation Music Orchestra, with Joe Lovano, Branford Marsalis, Ken McIntyre, Tom Harrell and others, Blue Note, 1991

Haunted Heart, Charlie Haden Quartet West, Verve 1992

Night and the City, duets with pianist Kenny Barron, Verve, 1994

Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs, duets with pianist Hank Jones, 1995

Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) with Pat Metheny, Verve, 1996

The Art of the Song, Quartet West, with Shirley Horn, Verve 1999

Not in Our Name, Liberation Music Orchestra, with Carla Bley, Miguel Zenon, Curtis Fowlkes and others, Verve 2005

Rambling Boy, Charlie Haden Family & Friends, with Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash, Jerry Douglas, Dan Tyminski, Bruce Hornsby, Ricky Skaggs, etc. Decca 2008

Jasmine, duets with Keith Jarrett ECM 2010

Sophisticated Ladies, Quartet West, with Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Renée Fleming and others, Decca Emarcy (import) 2010

Come Sunday, duets with Hank Jones (Jones’ last recording) Verve 2012

Last Dance, duets with Keith Jarrett, ECM 2014

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“Rambling Boy” CD cover courtesy mike-oldfield.com 

John Steuart Curry’s “Wisconsin Farm Scene,” oil on canvas, 97 by 89 inches, 1941. Lent by The Chazen Museum of Art, Madison.

John Steuart Curry’s relationship with his native state of Kansas was as troubled as a convulsing tornado, and the raging soul of John Brown. Curry became famous when he gave that state indelible public images.

His paintings of their swirling escalators to Oz and the anarchistic, slave-liberating Brown, and of fundamentalist baptismal dousings in a wood barrel, embarrassed early Kansas critics likely hoping his fame might help boost the state’s nation image in the newly modern and chic 1920s.

But Curry painted “the American scene,” with the same rough-hewn, real-life observational sensibility of Thomas Hart Benton and more craftsman-like Grant Wood. They would become renowned as the three major Midwestern regionalist artists,  comparable to another new American storytelling art form, the more urban “Ash Can School” artists, who preceded them  by a decade or so.

While Kansas worried about flying witches and other cultural blights, Wisconsin and in its visionary Big Ten university lay poised, deep in its rolling hills and forests, to woo the man to help artistically express its ideals, a man who created a new art largely independent of modern European influences.

Wisconsin made all the right moves, as is evident in the artwork and underlying story of John Steuart Curry at Home in Wisconsin, the new exhibit at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, which is running through September 14.

This show title is slyly docile, domestic as a curled-up cat. But more’s afoot at this ambitious flagship for Wisconsin art. MOWA made a good move itself, when it re-defined part of its mission to exhibit not only native Wisconsinite artists like photographer Edward L. Curtis, but also artists, like Curry, who “lived in the state for a period of time and had a transformative experience here,” as MOWA executive director Laurie Winter explains.

An impressive show in Madison at the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now, The Chazen Museum) in 1998 traced Curry’s impact in defining the Midwest from the standpoint of the era’s natural and societal turmoil. The MOWA exhibit provides Wisconsinites with a fuller sense of a crucial if more internal story – of outreach-style rural education and collective state-side war efforts. But the cumuli-graced air he painted was also sometimes filled with UW flying footballs and a big buzzing vibration called “The Wisconsin Idea”, which helped the painter transform into a state citizen and ambassador for his adopted state in the progressive sense the idea espoused.

In November 1936, Curry was the first artist featured in the new LIFE magazine which would help “America’s foremost painter of cyclones and circuses” move squarely in the middle of American consciousness.

Curry, the nation’s first artist-in-residence at a university, poses in front of “Madison Landscape,” a painting familiar to Madisonians for having hung previously in The Madison Civic Center lobby, and currently part of the collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. 1941 photograph courtesy of UW Archives.

Wisconsin’s savvy talent scout was Chris L. Christiansen, Dean of the College of Agriculture, who lured Curry to Wisconsin in a telegram on display here, and hired him for $4,000 a year as the nation’s first “artist in residence’ at a university. By then, fame had virtually compelled Curry to move to the East Coast, but he was never comfortable in the high modernist climate there, and he longed to return to the Midwest.  Unsurprisingly, Kansas sent no zephyr whispers his way and, by 1939, the state became immortalized as the ultimate tornado state, when Dorothy murmured “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Nor was Curry who, though possessing the least draftsman skills among the three big Regionalists, had a big-sky state vision that understood the power and meaning of the brawling and sprawling American landscape. As the often-acerbic Benton himself wrote of Curry’s famous “Wisconsin Landscape”: “(It is) a strange picture. It is at first sight slightly repellent.” But Benton’s second thought was, “this damn thing is a masterpiece of some sort.” 1 The painting, property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and not in this show, is surely Curry’s masterpiece.

Benton sensed how Curry’s Kansas eye fell hard for Wisconsin’s far shapelier curves, and the work reflected the way UW-driven Wisconsin Idea was modernizing the farmscape, striving to bring modern technology and know-how in synchronicity with extraordinary natural resources.

MOWA curator and director of collections Graeme Reid explains that the UW’s art and art history departments were in the mix for getting Curry as their department star. But Oskar Hagen, head of the school’s department of art history and criticism, anticipated the political “bickering” that would likely ensue among the culture-vulture departments. So he let Ag have Curry, and the whole university and state ultimately benefited from his prominence.

The shy but affable Curry embraced his state ambassador role here and, like the other American scene painters, was also well attuned to symbolic resonance of their work, drawing connections “from Capitol domes to silo domes,” as Reid puts it.

“View of Madison with Rainbow,” 1937, oil on canvas, lent by the Kiechel Fine Art Collection.

This is more than simple realism; clearly something vast and even heroic radiates from the verdant potency of the three great landscapes seen at MOWA shoulder to big shoulder — “Wisconsin Farm Scene,” “Madison Landscape” and “Landscape with Grouse” — all painted in 1941, for the First National Bank as a sort of triptych. Together for the first time in decades, Reid says, they convey the sweep and grandeur of “God’s country” in the deep wheat fields and swelling hills and skies that seem to float among the tree canvases like a big-as-the-sky entity.

“Landscape with Grouse,” oil on canvas, 1941, lent by the Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of The First Wisconsin Corporation and The First Wisconsin National Bank of Madison

Curry’s technical mastery of the big landscape seems to increase with each ensuing section that he did, as if he was bringing it all slowly into focus for us. The underbellies of the clouds increasingly glow golden, reflecting the sun-drenched wheat and haystacks below. He illustrates how the UW Ag department has taught area farmers to till across the grain of a hill to minimize runoff erosion which, in rainy growing seasons, steadily produced a sort of inversion of the biblical Red Sea flood, dispersing valuable fields into decimated catastrophe which contributed to the 1930s Dust Bowl.

And Curry’s fairly breathtaking view of Madison shows the capital city, a virtual “city on a hill” as New England Puritan pioneer John Winthrop once idealized, on its verdant isthmus. The the rainbow and cathedral-like clouds seem like the rising revelations of a new way of living, working and thinking about the relationship between a forward-looking government and university and an increasingly educated citizenry — courageous European immigrants and their offspring — and the state’s vast natural resources and industry. The Wisconsin Idea gestating.

Curry painted a somewhat aggrandized portrait of an iconic Wisconsin farmer in “Our Good Earth” in 1941, as part of Wisconsin’s World War II-era public relations effort. Lent by the Chazen Museum of Art, UW-Madison, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, gift of US Treasury Department.

Then, when Curry zoomed in from his sky view his gift for symbolic image gave the state a full makeover that proved iconic with the majestic “Our Good Earth.” A photograph of Curry painting it reveals his model as a gawky hayseed farmer whom Curry transformed into a square-jawed, musclebound symbol of America’s impervious sense of “manifest destiny” which, in 1941, signified a defiance of the fascist Axis of the world war. But here and in other works Curry’s palette renders his humans as at one with the landscape and environment. The golden-hued children in “Our Good Earth” seem almost like rootsy cherubs growing right out the soil.

The notion is akin to the ideals of human and environmental harmony espoused by other progressive Wisconsin cultural leaders of Curry’s era, like architect Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalist and environmentalist philosopher Aldo Leopold, who was also a pioneer at The UW-Madison in conservation and forestry.

“What is the meaning of John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood?” Leopold once wrote. “They are showing us drama in the red barn, the stark silo, the team heaving over the hill, the country store, black against the sunset. All I’m saying is that there is also drama in every bush, if you can see it. When enough men know this…we shall then have no need of the word conservation, for we shall have the thing itself.” 2

John Steuart Curry (at the top of the scaffolding) and an assistant work on his 1942 mural “Wisconsin Agriculture Leads to Victory.” The mural is not in the MOWA exhibit because “it is MIA,” says curator Graeme Reid. Its whereabouts has been unknown for a number of years. 

Indeed, Curry allegorizes the conservationist’s universal impulse in another drama, the mural “Youth Helps Rebuild a World.” A group of rural Americans march towards something an oracle-like farmer points to: the smoky haze of a desolate, bombed-out city, in the far-right portion of the mural. Yet this work from 1946 implicitly acknowledges that this political and environmental tragedy could be the Allies-bombed Dresden, or even Hiroshima, profoundly tempering whatever jingoism one might initially detect.

Curry’s sprawling (308 by 95 inches) mural “Youth Helps Rebuild a World” from 1946 conveys Wisconsin’s progressive spirit of socially-conscious activism. Lent by the collection of the Helen W. Schultz Revocable Trust.

The young woman in the mural curiously wears a skirt far shorter than 1940s fashion. UW-Madison art historian James Dennis sees a pattern in Curry’s depiction of women. This contrasted with Benton, who often sensually objectified his female subjects.

Curry’s paintings “transgressed any fixed art historical label in their woman imagery,” Dennis has written. So a young woman like this “left traditional academic forms of allegorization behind, the first requirement of (her) modern independence.”

Dennis adds that, beyond 19^th-century conventions of migrating womanhood, Curry created “a contemporary ‘girl-woman’ to whom he assigned his most crucial social causes.” 3

Curry died in 1946 of a heart attack at age 49, right after finishing “Youth Helps Build a New World,” with the help of assistant Bob Hodgell, in time to see the mural’s installation at The Wisconsin State Fair.

The show’s paintings and drawings of UW football action seem lighter fare, but they convey the powerful communal spirit that college football engendered. Back then, it had become much easier for the children of rural farmers and outlying city dwellers to get education from the UW, which would develop one of the nation’s leading multi-campus extension systems, a crown jewel of “The Wisconsin Idea.”

Curry, an athlete himself, exulted in the school’s sports fever. Harry Stuhldreher, one of Knute Rockne’s legendary “Four Horsemen” of Notre Dame, coached the Badgers, and the receiver catching the football in “An All-American” (1941) — is David Shriner, a two-time UW All-American who, though drafted by the Detroit Lions, would join the Marines and die fighting at Okinawa.

A large question hovers implicitly in this show: How well do the state’s current citizens, educators and political leaders live up to the ideas and ideals that forged Wisconsin’s modern identity?

One wonders what visionaries like Curry, UW Ag department’s Chris Christiansen, and Wisconsin Sen. Robert LaFollette would think of current Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to dismantle the internationally respected UW and its extension system, in the name of “freedom.” Charles Pierce, political blogger for Esquire magazine, examines Walker’s political machinations in a recent post, and re-defines The Wisconsin Idea quite well, without the bias of a Wisconsin native.
Pierce writes:

“The Wisconsin Idea was a manifestation of the creative process of making a self-governing political commonwealth that had its beginnings with the Mayflower Compact and that had been, in fits and starts, the main engine of American political and social progress for the entire life of the country. Specifically, the Wisconsin Idea was a manifestation of that process that arose in response to the vast centrifugal forces of corporate power and organized money operating within the government during the previous Gilded Age.

“The Wisconsin Idea produced improvements in agriculture and medicine through the university’s laboratories. The Wisconsin Idea produced improvements in government because it produced people like its greatest political advocate, Robert LaFollette, and his successors in Madison after LaFollette moved on to the Senate.”
4

Curry publicly embodied the creative process of the idea, which Pierce describes. In a post-modern culture morphing into a pluralist, multi-cultural, global and inter-connected world, there’s plenty of flashier, more exotic, and more cutting-edge art around, compared to Curry’s. His work, clearly is a product of its historic moment and place.

Yet the significance of the pioneering regionalist artists seems to grow in time, partly because pluralism is a fertile culture, less restrictive, and elitist, than post-modernism and much of modernism arguably was.

I’ll never forget UW-Milwaukee English Professor Ihab Hassan, the great literary critic who helped define post-modernism, say to our graduate English seminar in 1985, “We are all pluralists now.” Hassan seemed amazed by how fast the times were changing, even then.

The phenomenal growth of so-called American “roots musics” is kindred to Curry’s kind of art. And is the underlying idea of Curry’s art passe? Wisconsin’s progressive ideal is far from moribund. 5

Though only mildly modernist, Curry’s artwork has a straight-talking, “big-shouldered” heartland strength, akin to that which poet Carl Sandburg famously attributed to Chicago, Wisconsin’s big, noisy, dynamic neighbor.

And even before he ever got to Wisconsin, Curry understood and captured the historic, radical, and transformative import of abolitionist John Brown. Though not part of this show, his John Brown images are central to Curry’s legacy. He titled his incendiary mural of Brown, in the Kansas Statehouse, “Tragic Prelude.” The apt title allows the controversy and potency of John Brown’s legacy to resound through time, on its own terms.

In 1859, Herman Melville described Brown as “the meteor of the war,” in his superb poem “The Portent.” 6.

Curry shows us the meteor, ablaze.

“Tragic Prelude,” a mural portion by John Steuart Curry, in the Kansas Statehouse. Courtesy pixgood.com

Curry saw Brown as “a living symbol of mankind’s need to fight oppression,” wrote art critic Theodore Wolff, who knew the artist. 7 Also, Curry’s scenes of destruction from the 1929 Kaw River flood had produced wrenching images such as “Mississippi Noah” (1935), a black father imploring the merciless heavens, with his family and cat huddled on their cabin’s roof. Did Wall Street investors have it worse in 1929? And by the evidence of the photo below, today’s college students at Kansas University have embraced the vivid power of a Kansas artist, who died before their births, deemed too crude for wanna-be modernist Kansas critics.

Kansas University students brandish a modified reproduction of John Steuart Curry’s famous mural of John Brown at a KU sporting event. Courtesy www2.kusports.com

Yes, it’s a fast world. Still, as time passes, Curry’s tornadoes and firebrands — and his brawny Wisconsin landscapes and pulsing, progressive scenes — seem to stand taller, in the wind, in the stately clouds, and in the long light of history.

All reproductions courtesy MOWA, except as noted. For information, visit: http://www.wisconsinart.org.

_________________

A shorter version of this review was published in OnMilwaukee.com.

1 Thomas Hart Benton, “Wisconsin Landscape” an essay on Curry, in Demcourier, April 1941, 13

2 Aldo Leopold, “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” 1939 http://books.google.com/books?id=6HLo7ltlKP0C&pg=PA273&lpg=PA273&dq=Aldo+Leopold+John+Steuart+Curry&source=bl&ots=MrULoJSg6_&sig=xY8ea6Yn2Ld5m3YmCdM-=-] Q2tET4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lnm9U5WmEIqNyATJr4LACw&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Aldo%20Leopold%20John%20Steuart%2

3 James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 245

4 Author and journalist Charles Pierce is Esquire magazine’s chief political blogger, and contributes to ESPN and NPR. A Massachusetts native, Pierce graduated from St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and from Marquette University in Milwaukee, with a journalism major in 1975. So his perspective may be informed by both classic New England political values and Wisconsin’s progressive tradition. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Death_Of_The_Wisconsin_Idea?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_140346841

5 Wisconsin’s progressive ideals regained international visibility with the massive populist protests and recall election against Gov. Walker’s draconian budget cuts and cronyism policies which undid, among other things, some of the work of a truly popular three-term Republican governor, Warren Knowles, who believed in another aspect of “The Wisconsin Idea”: “That it was possible to reduce political pressures on the governing process by putting professionals in charge of determining whether the books balanced,” writes John Nichols, in Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, Nation Books, 2012, 74. To date, Walker’s flagship job creating agency WEDC has produced a documentable 5,840 jobs, ninth best out of 10 Midwestern states, barely a percentage point higher than Illinois, which Walker’s belittles for its job creation horrors. Yet he just hired an Illinois audit firm to investigate Wisconsin’s job creation. Who’s in charge here, doing what? http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/06/187732/how-many-jobs-has-walkers-wedc-created

Yet he just hired an Illinois audit firm to investigate Wisconsin’s job creation. Who’s in charge here, doing what?http://democurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2013/08/wisconsin-hires-illinois-auditor-to.html

Another excellent example of the state’s ongoing tradition is the annual political chautauqua Fighting Bob Fest, named for Robert LaFollette, which features an array of prominent progressive leaders, writers and activists. In recent years, the event has drawn upwards of 10,000 people. The festival will be held this year on September 13, at its original site in Baraboo, at The Sauk County Fairgrounds. For more information, visit

http://www.fightingbobfest.org.

6. “The Portent” is the opening poem of Melville’s under-appreciated work of poetic experience and evocation of the Civil War, Battle Pieces, and Aspects of the War. Prometheus Books, 2001, 11

7. Theodore Wolff, “John Steuart Curry: A Critical Assessment,” essay from John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West,  Hudson Hills Press, 1998, 87

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Ahem…Introducing my readers and friends to…ta da!… Queen Cleopat — er, Chloe.  Well, you see,  I’m still getting used to talking to her, which begins with properly addressing her. I’m not on bended knee, yet.

But I did call her “Cleo” already by mistake. Worse, at this point I call her Maggie more often than Cleo, after 11 years of living with my previous dearly departing cat, Maggie (a.k.a. Magpie, Poopface, Super-Duper Pooper).  As you’ll soon see, Her highness Chloe has some slightly eccentric preferences, as long as you don’t think your consideration is among them. A dog’s world is: “Me, meat and you, dear master.” A cat’s world is: “Me, myself and tithes, my servant!” 

But she also has ways of ingratiating one’s best service. And she’s a natural charmer for the camera, whereas my dear neurotic Maggie actually became wary of the clicking shutter. But now, it’s hard not to get a good photo of gorgeous Chloe the calico cat. She’s sort of my “soul sister” as I think you’ll see in her face (though I dare not say that in her presence, yet). So forgive me if I overdo it a bit with the pictures here.

Without further ado, I will proceed with the introducing-you-to-Chloe photo essay, with appropriate captions. . Unfortunately, lovely as she is, Chloe sometimes is too busy nosing into dusty corners to always put her absolute best face on for the camera, as was the case in these two early close-ups of her — after she had just spent some time rooting around in the basement. She came up with dust goobers on her left ear and forehead. She’s very exploratory and somewhat fearless, so I’ll have to keep my eye on her, Note to self: Assign her personal secret service agents. Chloe’s a serious chow hound, er, cat. I’m trying to resist giving her table scraps but with a pretty puss like hers…it’s just a matter of time. Here she was, behind my back so who knows how much she wolfed down, er, ate? When she gets her squishy canned Fancy Feast she does tend to wolf it. “You’re a cat, Chloe. Don’t wolf you food,” I say.

She’ll glance at me with a withering glare.

“Your Highness, that is! Seconds?” Here she is, sizing up her subject (moi), deciding whether she’ll keep me. I offer a tentative petting hand for her pleasure… I start with fingers to the neck, a slight nuzzling stroke and slowly work my way to the relative royal intimacy of a full palm massaging of her upper body. “Hmmmm, yes, I believe he’ll do, for now…But what sort of a name is Kevernacular?” 

All preceding photos by Ann K. Peterson. All ensuing photos by Kevin Lynch, except as noted. Sunlight does wonders for Chloe’s queenly complexion… …But she’s far more than just a porcelain-pretty kitty. Here she springs into action, pursuing a real (or imagined) bug by squeezing herself into the one-and-half-inch-wide space between the window screen and the window frame. Maggie would never have dreamed of trying a stunt like this. BTW The wood sculpture is “Chained Life Force” by Kevin Lynch (Kevernacular). Queen Chloe really likes basking in the balcony sun, but the flora and fauna soon get her dreaming of the wilds of the jungle. Before long, she is prowling around, doing her best “caged panther” routine. At least she seems to strike terror in the heart of my concrete gargoyle! Chloe decides to try out my office desk. She measures the space and the clutter… …and decides it suits her just fine, to my great relief. …before long she realizes in that position she is too subject to my inadvertent elbowing, not to mention the ongoing clutter of papers, books, CDs and pens… So she decides to relocate to my messy “inbox” above my desktop computer’s keyboard. Here she takes on a new and greatly valued role as my sharp-penned editor in, among other things, my quest to complete my novel about Melville. Soon I may need to fit her with reading glasses. But any truly royal Kitty soon tires of the lonely pursuits of the the literary life.  I push my luck by suggesting some good reading material for her. “Ach, it’s just a bunch of ideas and opinions,” she sniffs. “Did that Einstein fellow have any good theories about  perfecting the ultimate squishy cat food? Huh?” Photo by Ann Peterson “I’d much rather you take me out to the old ballgame,” she persists. “You can have the beer but I’d gladly try the hot dogs and brats. I especially like biting into dogs and, then, not having to run.” Photo by Ann Peterson  Then at the end of the day, another faux pas by yours truly: “Why has my bubble bath not been drawn?!!” the queen cries. “Off with his head!” (…I know the sleazy tabloid video cameras will be rolling for this, she thinks, [Sigh] ‘Tis a queen’s burden. I must keep the peasants and riff-raff entertained every blue moon, or they get surly and start grumbling about filthy streets and other weary rubbish…)

“What’s that? Let them eat cake, as long as they leave me an offering of squishy Fancy Feast. I stole that ‘cake’ line from that French hussy who stole my Antony, in a time warp, I’m told… I have not yet begun to fight.  I stole that line from, um..yes, one of those hot-headed American revolutionaries. Remind me to hang onto my court historian, the next time I purge the ranks of useless hangers-on and boot-lickers, though I do like some schmoozers, when I’m in the mood.” Well, it seemed like a trial under fire, a harrowing gauntlet, for me to gain the queen’s approval and trust, when suddenly she leapt up to the desk and…Fast friends!…so it seems. Yep, fast friends. Everything’s purrr-fectly hunky dory. I’m OK and she’s my queen.

Ah, but the afternoon light grows dim, and a queen’s royal duties can take their toll on her regal brow. Her eyelids grow heavy. Shhhh.

THE END

Sarah Day as Joan Didion. Photos by Zane Williams

The audience laughed at, “You know when they assign you a social worker you’re in trouble.” But  the humor often hangs uneasily in American Players Theatre’s staging of Joan Didion’s adaptation of her riveting memoir of death, suffering, mental surreality and “magical thinking.”

On the night before New Year’s Eve in 2003, noted author John Gregory Dunne died from a fatal dining-room table coronary, while sitting across from Didion, his spouse and partner of nearly 40 years. The title phrase is Didion’s term for her wishful striving to save him and, somewhat less improbably, to save her only child, Quintana — in extended intensive care for septic shock  from flu-related pneumonia in both lungs, contracted a week before her father’s death.  “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” One’s tempted to keep quoting Didion, a lapidary phrase turner.

And despite the difficult subject and at times, searing intensity, it’s an exquisite pleasure to hear one of the Midwest’s finest actors, APT’s Core Company member Sara Day, handle the entire script. This one-woman show is, at times, breathtaking, with no dramatic theatrical effects: a small two-level stage garlanded with a few flickering candles, a non-descript waiting room-type chair, an end table and book.

The power derives from Day’s skills and attunement. She often bores her intense gaze right into the audience. You feel she’s handing you her bared soul, showing you how trauma and grief make might make you crazy, a theme of the story. Didion’s stage adaptation cuts back on her book’s obsessive poring through records and arcane medical books, but Day conveys the woman’s self-aware mental surreality. Dunne’s dead, and she returns from ER, and “blood and the EKG electrodes are still on the floor.”

Such details trigger the desperate detective in her who, if she can just piece together enough information, might just resurrect him or save Quintana. Her denial fuels her quest, especially potent in pursuit of Quintana’s recovery. The newlywed had fallen sick on Christmas Eve 2003, placed in an induced coma and life support.

The work’s success is curious: Didion’s character adopts a reportorial tone and isn’t particularly likable, more supercilious — alluding several times to the Arthurian knight Guwain, to tiffany bracelets, fancy writing assignments and films adapted from her work.  Guwain is metaphorically apt, the denied rightful heir to Camelot’s kingship. And grandiosity is clinically common “magical thinking.”

Day’s virtuosity fascinates, myriad nuanced gestures and emotions, on the brink of “the void.” The play breathes, through deft pacing, with director Brenda DeVita’s able collaboration. Day often pauses or strolls around her chair and ponders silently. In one superb moment, she suddenly asks the audience, “Do you remember when I told you I got her a bracelet like this one?”

The long pause — her wrist raised in the air — is clarity, and her farewell to magic and Camelot.

Quintana Roo Dunne died in 2004, after this story’s end.

The Year of Magical Thinking runs through Oct. 4 in Spring Green in APT’s indoor Touchstone Theater. For tickets, visit www.americanplayers.org.

___________

This review was first published in The Shepherd Express.

Kathleen A. Naab (June 22, 1953-September 20, 1999) Photo by Kevin Lynch

Blogger’s note: This is the most personal blog (and perhaps the longest) I have written to date, but there is a reason. Yes, Kathy Naab was my first spouse, and she died tragically in 1999, after our marriage ended. And there’s certainly personal perspective, but I post this on her birthday because her story is little-known: She was a cultural person and a significant contributor to Milwaukee’s culture as an entertainment columnist and movie expert. She was also a fairly remarkable person. (Posted June 22 at 8:53 p.m. CST)

I could write a preface on how we met/ so the world could never forget…Then the world discovers as my book ends/ how to make two lovers of friends. — Lorenz Hart, from “I Could Write a Book.”

The moment I first saw the woman who would become my wife was peculiar– the opening salvo of a tiny turf war. I had walked away from the desk that The Milwaukee Journal features editor Don Dornbrook had just assigned me, as a now-regular freelance contributor to his department.

In retrospect, the moment is a measure of the respect that this woman never achieved at The  Journal, even as a full-time staffer: Kathy can share her desk with a freelancer, no problemo.

A decade later, leaving the paper would precipitate her decline.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I was standing a few few feet away from  the desk, and I heard a sound and turned around to see a bespectacled young woman with her palms slapping down several times on the desk. She eyed me with a trace of quirk, almost like a chimp vying for attention. I soon learned it was turf instinct.

“Um, this is my desk,” she said, in her throaty voice, almost swallowing the words. Something in that voice disarmed me.

“Oh, your desk?” is an approximation of my ringing retort. “Oh, excuse me. There must be a mistake or…” We negotiated a bit of shared space and time, exchanging each other’s schedule information.

Actually, I wasn’t really attracted to her right away. At the time, she was quite thin, 5’6” and maybe 97 pounds, with large glasses that accentuated the leanness of her face. In fact, she had the high cheekbones of a beauty, something it took me a while to really notice, partly because of her dazzlingly big peepers.

But her clothes downplayed her looks, almost always a virtual uniform of somewhat baggy brown pants and penny loafers topped by a red-and-brown plaid blouse . She would often sit at her computer terminal with her legs folded over yoga-style. She clacked away at a secretarial speed.

Still, my initial response was shyness perhaps because I was a rookie Journal freelancer and this was actually a pretty woman with a lively and tart sense of humor. And she was a journalist. She started to grow on me, and was very helpful, showing me the ropes of paper, and negotiating the ins-and-outs of the computer system. And she was a font of quick information on many matters entertaining.

I finally got around to asking her out to dinner and a flick because this woman was a movie aficionado. But all I remember is the very end, when I was about to leave her house. I followed her to the door and she turned around and I sort of had her cornered. I decided to move in, for our first kiss. I closed my eyes and planted a fat, wet one — almost on the doorway screen. Surely a demure fly waited on other side for my hungry lips. The question is, who was hungrier, the insect or the guy?

Almost staggering, I opened my eyes.

No Kathy.

I peered down. There she was, sitting at my feet, on her haunches, her green eyes peeking back at me. Our first kiss had suddenly devolved into a guerrilla-warfare tactical blunder.

“Uh, sorry.  Ah dunno, it’s been a while, y’ know,” she said.

“Gee, what made ya do that?” I blurted. But she was too embarrassed to come up with the response I’d have preferred, like “Oh, you really made me weak in the knees.” She slowly stood up and I awkwardly found my labial target.

***

Life with Kathy was, among other things,  a movie-trivia game par excellence. She was a feature writer, copy editor and wrote a popular entertainment question and answer column for the Journal feature section called You Asked.

Kathy Naab doing some early entertainment “research” that foreshadowed her years as a columnist for The Milwaukee Journal features section. 

In retrospect, the simple selflessness of the column title, a step removed from a servant response, reflected what I would come to understand as her confoundingly low self-esteem. I felt the actual journalist doing the column called for a more clever moniker, which she was fully capable of.

And yet, I would come to understand her critical sensibility was strong, largely influenced by Pauline Kael,  the storied New Yorker film critic who was one of the first to come to terms with addressing middle-to-lowbrow movies that had redeeming value as popular culture. Kathy had well-thumbed copies of all of Kael’s severalvolumes of collected reviews and features centered over our shared desk, along with a small raft of books on entertainment and especially film, such as Halliwell’s Film Guide, Roger Ebert’s very first review collections, and David Thomson’s erudite and often arguable Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Kate Naab (right) was intellectually curious yet unpretentious.

This was all pre-Internet, of course. That’s a big part of why her column was so successful. People still relied on print journalists for information and she provided knowledgeable, bright and witty responses.

Although she appreciated some highbrow music and liked jazz well enough, she loved cultural slumming, with an acute sense of camp. One of her favorite refrains was “It was so bad it was good.”

A punky adolescent Kathy giving a “beach bully” a raspberry.

So she really was fun and easy on the eyes. When she doffed her specs, her deftly made-up orbs and auburn hair – often a stylistic experiment — coalesced with her fine-boned features.

And over the next few years she started to put on a few pounds which was nothing but good on her. I’d like to think her comparative health had to do with the growing happiness of our relationship, but I don’t know.

Most the time, she was perky and sweet, leavened with several shades of snark. Yet she could fall into funks as if she were physically imploding, and sequester herself in her bedroom room for several days, recalls former roommate Annette Gelhar. And she could always out-drink me, like a Frank Lloyd Wright waterfall cascading into the kitchen. At the time, I knew virtually nothing about clinical depression, or alcoholism. In fact, in the 1980s medicine still had a paltry grip on what turned out to be a bipolar condition.

So the ups and downs gradually began to get me in a slo-mo tizzy. We decided to take a break from dating.  I met a stylish, artsy older woman, a painter, and started seeing her.

When Kathy found out, she took a nosedive. A friend of hers finally informed me some weeks later, and we had a talk and ended up getting back together. I think this is when she started putting on a bit of weight. She turned into a fairly alluring woman because she had that almost comical, irreverent personality and keen, pomposity-piercing intelligence.

I never realized she had spent six months in the hospital for anorexia, in her adolescence. She’d always kept that from me. Her younger sister Kris Verdin shared that fact with me recently. The obsessiveness of anorexia may have been an early manifestation of bipolar tendencies, Kris and I both now suspect. Kathy herself said she had “mother issues,” but who’s to say how that played out.

***

I felt my affection growing for the once-geeky chimp girl I’d first met. I’ll fast forward through the marriage and some good times, for efficiency. But I’ll say we made a great match —  when was she feeling good. We virtually never argued, either.

One delightful trip out east involved me doing an interview in Brooklyn with jazz pianist Cecil Taylor for a Down Beat profile. We also visited Franklin Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, and Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park, went upstate New York and hit Cooperstown, the Baseball Hall of Fame, taking our turns in the batting cage with a mechanical pitcher.

A madcap parking-detour trip through what seemed like Milwaukee’s near south side had gotten us to the Brewers’ pennant-winning game in 1982. And then, dashing down to grab a hunk of the dirt from under walk-off game-winner Cecil Cooper’s masterful batting stance felt like a Hall of Fame thrill we shared with Kate’s West Bend high-school pal Ann Rosso.

Also on the New York trip, like countless others, we went to the top of ill-fated twin towers of the World Trade Center. The picture of her up there touches on a token of the paradox of her self-esteem. She was a hearty down-hill skiier. Also, notice the wonderful family photo of her (below) as an adolescent with her three siblings, Bryan, Kris and Steve. She’s momentarily the only one brave enough to peek over the edge of the Olympic-height ski jump they’re clambering on during the summertime.

Kathy atop the World Trade Center in 1986. Photo by Kevin Lynch

In 1989 I finally got a full-time job at The Capital Times in Madison. Kathy was struggling mightily with her un-diagnosed bipolar condition and her drinking. It was tough enough for us to have waited this long for some financial security. We had postponed beginning a family and she was grappling with the idea of moving to Madison.

“Kathy always had a hard time with change,” her sister Kris says. We agreed I would move by myself to start my job as an arts reporter, and she managed to make it six months later.

But those six months entrapped her like the web of a black widow spider. She lost her job, I think due to absenteeism from increased drinking and depression. That isolated her in the Milwaukee flat I’d left her in. I slowly came to realize that her life had grown unmanageable, to use the AA euphemism.

***

Our “new-and-improved” life was too much of a step for her to take. That’s how much this illness and alcohol can screw up a person’s perspective. At the time, bipolar manic depression still seemed poorly understood even by medical pros and, frankly, very few of the medical people whom I encountered did her much good.

One day I walked into the hallway leading to the bedroom and she emerged very drunk. She retched on the white runner rug. Then she staggered to the kitchen and pulled out a sharp knife and waved it groggily over her left wrist.

I grabbed the knife and quickly got her to a fairly new nearby Madison mental health facility. The main thing they did was give her shock treatments. The facility didn’t last long. And to my own shock, that crude and ugly technique would also be the last strategy tried on her repeatedly before her death ten years later, courtesy of the world-acclaimed Mayo Clinic. To me, the medical system has the most tenuous grip on many mental health issues, certainly bipolar condition exacerbated by alcoholism.

After another sad suicidal gesture in Madison, her father Henry and I took her to the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital, where she lived, in and out of rehab, for over a year, while I lived and worked in Madison.

I realize I may see a different Kathy in the mists of memory. She never really got with the AA program. She’d work at it, eventually relapse, rehab and, I’m told, struggled with “honesty” as a recovery program issue. Our joint credit card account began bulging with cigarette, medication and “spirits” charges. One friend says she treated me poorly — and she did at times, but I might have neglected her in those too-many months apart, even though therapists and Al-Anon counselled me, for my health, to “detach from my co-dependency.” During the short time she lived in Madison, I had begun facilitating her “jonesing” for alcohol, which I hated doing.

But today, oddly enough I don’t remember much of that as painful, even though it really started to feel crazy for me. The walls sometimes began to close in, at odd angles, with her unpredictability. Kathy was often high maintenance, but not in the sense of a demanding shrew. For as much as she may have asked of me unintentionally, I remember her plaintively asking more often, “D’ya still like me?” even well into the marriage.

She never turned her insecurities into petty domestic tyranny. In the only video of her I know of, we are hosting Easter dinner and as she prepares an excellent dinner. She repeatedly asks me to set a smaller card table for the overflow of people and I — too busy entertaining my family — repeatedly fail to respond. She never gets irritated, as perhaps she should have. She’s having too much fun hosting, and she charms the camera man, my slightly lecherous brother-in-law, without even trying. She had a sort of mania for life, which could be infectious, but which also knocked her down to the mat, time and again.

Kathy, the hostess with the mostest, at least cooking accoutrements.

That see-saw played cruelly with our relationship, especially in those fraught nine months or so we spent together in Madison.

***

On the last phone call I had with her a few months before her death, Kathy told me of a harrowing experience at the Mayo Clinic and their shock “therapy.” My brain is so fried that all I can do is read mystery stories,” she moaned.

She had been an English major and she wrote a thesis paper on the ultra-literate Henry James. And she was a seasoned and gifted journalist and writer, with a bright and sassy wit to her style. Kathy Naab aspired to be a movie critic and was a true movie expert, which manifested itself in her deeply knowing and researched “You Asked” column. She scorned nationally syndicated entertainment columnist Jay Bobbin for his consistently easy entertainment Q and As.

Having absorbed the writing of Pauline Kael, she found an intellectual role model in the sometimes acerbic and eccentrically brilliant New Yorker critic.They both shared a general disdain for pomposity and an appreciation of both high art’s Jamesian nuances and its snootiness, and that a lot of “trashy” movies can contain their own peculiar redemption, for your apparent time wasted on them.

Kate’s catchphrase “It was so bad it was good” was in a sense, a kind of hip-pocket  aesthetic motto. A person who studied James and appreciated Miles Davis easily rode the ski lift from low to high culture without getting stuck in snobbery. She also loved the big-hearted and cornball sentiment of many musicals, reflecting her experience as a piano accompanist for her high school stage productions. She relished sitting down at a piano and, in her creaky singing voice, plunking out her favorite song, Rogers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book.” This was Kathy in her element. 1

Kathy with her grandmother Eunice Klumb, part of a musical family. Photo by Kevin Lynch

But she only got one chance to actually review a movie at The Milwaukee Journal in all those years as a full-time staffer who knew as much about movies, if not more, than anyone actually reviewing them. The movie was Ishtar, the 1987 Warren Beatty-Dustin Hoffman revival of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby buddy movie trope. Most critics sneered at it, but Kathy drew appreciation with a sharp critical aim, like a full-quivered archer. She called it a cinematically rich but over-budgeted screwball comedy-adventure, commenting, “Der Bingle isn’t rising from his grave but he may be spinning in it – and chuckling.” She deftly calls out the established female director for under-serving her female characters: “Setups for some Hope-Crosby-style sparring over (Isabella) Adjani’s affection start to simmer. But writer-director (Elaine) May is merely blowing bubbles. In the end, the talented Adjani has served little more progress than a prop. (Carol Kane and Tess Harper, talented actresses as well, are employed similarly and exit swiftly opening scenes in New York.).”

Kathy also ambushes any politically-correct complaints about Arab characterizations: “Ishtar is foremost a character comedy, next a cloak-and-dagger spoof. But it takes side roads into political satire and culture-clash humor, and they’re wittily, tastefully and incisively done. The Arabs aren’t the boobs; rather Hawk and Lyle (Hoffman and Beatty) are after they don Valentino-style chic garb to elude the CIA operatives.”

But judge for yourself. Here’s Kate’s entire Ishtar review in a newspaper PDF, with a jump to page 4B:http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19870515&id=PV0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iioEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2066,6481152

“What a talent!” is how Kathy was succinctly remembered by Jackie Loohauis-Bennett, another very gifted entertainment and feature writer for The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel  who died too young herself.* Kate’s talent was pigeonholed and clearly underused at The Journal.  That situation never did much for her self-esteem, which I’m sure now is a big part of what fed into her cliff plunges into darkness.

Jackie recalled the whole Entertainment Department fell into a quiet hush when I telephoned Kathy’s friend, entertainment writer Tina Maples, with the news of her death on September 20, 1999.

“She was an amazing, blazing intellect, and hilarious, too,” recalls Maples.

Kathy could “blow bubbles” with her nephew Danny, but not like writer-director Elaine May in “Ishtar.” (see above)

I’ll admit that I didn’t have enough understanding of what was going on with her then. In her fateful six months in Milwaukee, after I had started my job in Madison, her drink of choice had become champagne. I suspect she felt it was the one booze with an upper, that gave her a boost to her happily “higher self.”

Kathy in her bedroom (shortly before I got a job in Madison in 1989) with Irving Penn’s famous portrait of Woody Allen disguised as Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp.” Photo by Kevin Lynch

When we divorced it was her choice, but it felt painfully like all for the best. I didn’t realize what this would lead to, for her.

***

At some point, she had fallen for another Milwaukee Psych patient, a smooth-talking but disbarred pediatric neurologist, also with a drinking problem, from what I’ve heard. Finally, she went AWOL with her new lover. When she called to tell me she was in Green Bay with the guy, the news affected me in a surprising way. Oddly, I didn’t get angry or upset. Instead, I felt overwhelmingly dumbfounded.

I went speechless, as if catatonic, for the next few days. It may have been a byproduct of the loss-of-speech-faculties that I occasionally suffer as a symptom of epilepsy. I improbably ended up briefly in Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital — with my still-AWOL wife at the same time, a very bizarre circumstance. When she got back from her romp with the ex-doc, Kathy came to my room and said, “Kevin, I never wanted to hurt you.”

Lame as that sounds, I truly believed her. I could say nothing in response at that time. In retrospect, it seemed a perfect summation of the relationship gulf we’d arrived at. That’s something else the sickness had created, like the devil doing his dirty work, day after day after day, for God knows how long.

Kathy eventually rented a farm house outside of Elroy, Wisconsin with her boyfriend. A few years later, on a fall colors driving trip to Minneapolis, I stopped and visited her. She seemed somewhat happy then. Living out in the country, with a motley menagerie of cats and dogs she’d adopted, was something she always dreamed of.

Young Kathy Naab holds Keetzer the kat, in the backyard of her family home on Western Avenue in West Bend. 

But as AA preaches, alcoholics isolating together is often deadly, especially for the most vulnerable of the two.

After she moved there, her older brother Steve, who lives in Lodi, says he entertained thoughts of going to Elroy and “kidnapping her.” On my visit, I stayed there overnight. Her housemate Craig happened to be gone, probably back in rehab. He called, but she didn’t tell him I was there. When she went to bed, we had a moment that recalls for me the end of the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. It’s about a divorced couple who one night end up sleeping in the same cabin together, in different rooms. Like Cary, I had a long pregnant pause at the doorway of her bedroom, as she lay in bed and we bid each other good night. Then she gave me a long look. I’ll bet she thought of The Awful Truth, but perhaps any number of other things.

It did not end, as the movie ends, happily ever after. Had I more courage, had I known… That visit was the last time I saw her. In September of 1999, she died of an apparent drug/alcohol overdose in that same farmhouse, alone. Not long before, she had said to her mother May over the phone, “I’m 47 years old, mom, who would want me?”

What was she was thinking that last dark night of the soul?

“September, November, and these few precious days…”

Her father Henry, distraught at her wake, said simply, “What happened?”

She taught me things of value, including the idea that “it’s so bad its good” isn’t a critical cop-out. It’s a mental spade for digging up the good in even flawed cultural attempts (how many are perfect?), even though I still reflexively suspect many big commercial successes.

But most especially she taught me this: Kathy loved me first, I think, but never forced herself on me. We were “dating pals” until one day I realized what I had, right in front of me. She knew how to “make two lovers of friends.”

Lover and friend. She’ll always be both, in the part of my heart with the small crack in it.

_______

*Award winning Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writer Jackie Loohauis-Bennett died tragically at age 62, from heart failure after coronary surgery in July, 2013.

1 Maybe Kathy was onto something with musicals. There’s a new book out called Dangerous Rhythm: Why Musicals Matter. Partly they matter for their universality, because they easily traverse virtually all story genres, they “contain multitudes,” as a Whitmanesque reviewer recently wrote. Maybe Kathy also felt her exuberant “I could write a book” highs in their delirious production numbers, and her lows in their often-sappy depths. And yet the great musicals accomplish so much. For example, aside from their at-times- transcendent music, the glorious My Fair Lady arguably did more to raise consciousness about class differences, bias and challenges than any other film. And West Side Story brought us deeply into the gang world, then virtually invisible, that would become a pervasive part of contemporary subculture, profoundly impacting mainstream culture. In tackling issues of race, few productions or films ever did so with more indelible style, insight and soul than Porgy and Bess and Showboat.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos by Henry Naab, courtesy of Steve Naab. 

Special thanks to Steve Naab and to Kris Naab Verdin.

Richard Thompson sizzled on acoustic guitar on “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Courtesy willard’swormholes.com 

The Pabst Theatre crowd leapt to its feet and roared, and you knew he was coming back. Not only that, 65-year-old Richard Thompson suddenly scurried back out to his guitar, like a kid pouncing on a Christmas present.

I’m standing the conventional concert review on its head because, as excellent as Thompson was from start to finish, the surprising end was so remarkable and telling. Thompson proceeded to play a seven-song encore with little prompting, including Otis Blackwell’s rollicking “Daddy Rolling Stone,” and Dylan and the Band’s “This Wheel’s on Fire.” It’s often said that Thompson feeds off of live audiences, and it helped that he was the event’s focal point, unlike his last time in town, when he opened for Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. This was his audience. With all the bobbing gray heads in the audience, maybe he was helping keep us young.

But his boyish playfulness is fascinating to contemplate in that this man began the first major phase of his career drenched in tragedy, which seemed to inform the dark vision that persists to this day and adds edge, and incalculable depth, to his music, given Thompson’s songwriting talent and penetrating guitar playing.

I refer to the cataclysmic car accident in May of 1969 that shattered Fairport Convention, the seminal folk-rock band of which he was a charter member. A van accident killed the group’s drummer Martin Lamble and Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn, a gifted clothes designer, and injured two other band members. Yet, almost miraculously the group sorted through their shambles and psychic damage to produce,  over the next five months, their nonpareil album, Liege and Lief.

They found a way to transmute their musical priorities, to produce haunted originals and a melding of ancient folk songs and contemporary rock. Yet, as with many traumas during formative periods, this one deeply colored this artist’s work. The same seems true of the breakup of his artistically rewarding marriage to Linda Thompson, which produced the masterful Shoot Out the Lights, after Richard left Fairport Convention.

What ensued was one of the most auspicious and consistent careers by a solo artist in modern times. Thompson was always a virtuoso on the guitar and he only grew as a instrumentalist and as a singer and songwriter, as his life experience did. Virtually every album was a novella of raw yet exquisitely crafted observation, rendered in a singing voice nakedly impassioned in its bracing Celtic tones and yelps of anguish, directly releasing the depths of masculine pain, wit, tenderness and irony.

The quality, power and beauty of his song craft would inspire, in 1994, one of the first of the now-fashionable songwriter tribute albums Beat the Retreat: Songs of Richard Thompson, which featured renderings of his work by R.E.M., David Byrne, Bob Mould, Bonnie Raitt, X, Los Lobos, Shawn Colvin & Loudon Wainwright III, Graham Parker, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama and other American and British Isles artists.

Thompson is blessed, or cursed, with an acute and scholarly sense of history, which prompted him to once produce a deeply researched tour and and album presenting, improbably but impressively, 1000 Years of Popular Music.

But for such a songwriter, society is inseparable from music, and an especially memorable life was “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven.” At the Pabst, he displayed razor-sharp political instincts in prefacing the song about a bitter WWII veteran by rhetorically asking: “Are veterans in this country treated like they are in ours, always losing out on their benefits and all?” Perhaps he was unaware of the recent firing of the head of the VA due to pervasive problems in veterans’ treatment and neglect. But his certainty of the song’s timeliness was spot on: “Al Bowlly’s in heaven/and I’m in limbo now.”

Sensing himself in time’s passage, Thompson has never rested on his laurels, and after nearly 40 post-Fairport albums, he’s produced one of his finest in his latest, Electric, the backbone of his repertoire in this tour.

He began the concert with the album’s opener “Stuck on the Treadmill,” which deftly ranges across oppressive work conditions to the threat of automation and the uncertainty of standing up for worker’s rights. It could be the anthem for today’s working-class or the slip-sliding white-collar middle class. He fairly spit out the lyrics: The money goes out/the bills come in/Round and  round we go again/ I come close, but I never win./ Stuck on the treadmill./ Another day of punching steel/ Till my arms too numb to feel/ like a hamster on a wheel/ stuck on a treadmill! The lyric leads to: Strike’s coming, troubles brewing/whole town going to rack and ruin/Next year, what’ll I be doing?/Stuck on the treadmill.

The song resounded like a hammered anvil in working-class Milwaukee and collective bargaining-deprived Wisconsin.

Although many of his songs veer toward the Yeatsian sense of casting a cold eye on life, Thompson, like Yeats, sustains a tough compassion and sense of morality and justice. This was never clearer than on, “Good Things Happen to Bad People”: You stared me down without blinking/that’s when I really started thinking/you must’ve been running around/because you were smiling/Good things happen to bad people/but only– but only– for a while.

Yet Thompson can never be reduced to being merely a brilliant versifier. He knows the power of a lyric ultimately lies in its relation to its music. And he can extend emotional power and even a story’s tone and logic into his superb guitar playing.

Courtesy undergroundbee.com

As with many of his concerts, he let his guitar do serious talking on You Can’t Win, where his sense of outrage and irony sustained profoundly into a deep and wide-ranging solo that brought a standing ovation. This video helped me relive the number, (his solo begins at the five-minute mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLypHd3hJdU

He’s less blues-based and falls just shy of Eric Clapton’s peak intensity, yet Thompson. nevertheless sustains power and invention with a flintier guitar tone, an engaging formal logic, and more musical resources — from a slightly outrageous, sometimes sardonic array of dissonant, bent-string chordal shards, to octave leaps, to a melodic sensibility infused with curling Celtic folk melody and harmonic motion, especially the strutting Scottish bagpipe march rhythm, injected into electric guitar.

He possesses a marvelous sense of tension release: From a white-noise roar climax he unfurled a majestic line curling back and lashing itself. I’ve listened to his solo on the above video a handful of times and hear something fresh each time. And his “You Can’t Win” solo at the Pabst was longer, and perhaps better.

During the encore, his finger-style chops positively sizzled on acoustic guitar, especially in his self-accompaniment to his classic motorcycle saga, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”

This trio drives with the propulsive thump of drummer Michael Jerome, who used the whole kit as a sequence of prodding retorts. He fairly thrashes his drums but never laboriously like many rock drummers, rather with a deft, encompassing sense of contrast and accent. This elevates the rhythmic discourse, allowing Thompson’s guitar to up the ante without seeming showy, but riding the tidal crest, underpinned by bassist Taras Prodaniuk, who resembles a youthful David Letterman. If only Dave could’ve jammed with Paul Schafer like this, he might’ve lasted another decade on The Late Show — or had a heart attack years ago.

Richard Thompson’s Electric Trio includes longtime drummer Michael Jerome (above) and bassist Taras Prodaniuk (lower) Photos courtesy gapersblock.com

It’s understandable how the bandleader chose Jerome as a longtime percussion mate, who can be heard and seen as early as 2001 on Richard Thompson Live in Austin Texas (from the invaluable Austin City Limits concert video series). Jerome’s style strongly resembles that of Dave Mattacks, the crucial drummer with Fairport Convention. *

I wrote the above description of Jerome’s drumming and then encountered Rob Young’s excellent characterization of Mattacks. Compare Young’s description: “In his hands, the beats fall with a heaviness that seems to gouge at the earth itself, fleet footed enough to avoid getting bogged down…The funky plod of Mattack’s drumming proves the ideal foil for the mushy instrumental palette of English electric folk, propelling its accordions, fiddles, abrasive guitars and astringent harmonies forward without denying their bulk and grit.” 1

In his current Electric Trio, Thompson feeds off that loamy boil of rhythms and seems to funnel the accordions, fiddles, abrasive guitars and astringent harmonies into his guitar and music.

May he continue to feed himself and his audiences on the most elemental, and complex, of musical experiences, until “the spell is broken.”

_______________

* As historian Rob Young has suggested, Fairport was the closest British equivalent to The Band, in terms of its role in drawing from a deep wellspring of folk vernacular sources and synthesizing it into a resonantly hoary musical language and sensibility. Though they sounded very different, both bands helped demarcate post-psychedelic roots music.

For my part, being a huge fan of The Band, I recall playing Fairport’s Liege and Lief as much as I played The Band’s eponymous second album. Both are astonishingly fascinating cultural artifacts and innovations, aside from the supreme quality of the music.)

1 Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, Faber and Faber, 2011,

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