A tugboat pulls the Charles W. Morgan out to sea for a rare historical informational festival tour about whaling along the eastern seaboard.

We stepped aboard the Charles W. Morgan, and its safely moored equilibrium belied the mighty battles with oceanic waves and sperm whales that it endured in nearly 40 voyages during the mid-1800s, part of the industry that slaughtered giant sea mammals and provided whale-tapped lamplight oil for the world, including Melville’s desk, as he wrote Moby-Dick in 1850-51.

My first instinct when onboard was to look up, to the masthead lookout spot where sailors men took turns peering across the horizon for telltale signs:  a fluked tail, or a misty spout of water or a black hump or, in the case of Ahab’s ship The Pequod, a white hump, “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air,” as Melville describes Moby Dick.

The masthead is the lookout perch on The Morgan where sailors searched the sea for whales. Photo by Katrin Talbot

The Morgan is the only extant ship from the great whaling era, so I was there at its dock in Mystic, Connecticut, doing research for my novel on Herman Melville, along with my collaborator, photographer Katrin Talbot, and her daughter Ariana Karp (also the daughter of Parry Karp, cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet).

As a former mountain climber, my longtime attraction to heights compelled me to gaze skyward, whereas Katrin quickly began exploring the deck and the guts of the ship with her camera, as well as peering straight down over the ship’s side into the sea, not unlike Ahab does in a famous scene shortly before the great three-day chase of Moby Dick, when he gazes into the water at his profoundly conflicted reflection and also sees that of his enigmatic, covert and faintly satanic hired harpoonist, Fedallah.

What Katrin discovered in the water, however, was more ghostly than satanic, a jellyfish pulsing by, in its elegantly spasmodic manner. She caught a couple of shots of this spectral miracle of the sea.

A spectral jellyfish swam past the Charles W. Morgan whaler during our visit to the ship. Photos by Katrin Talbot

Now I fancifully wonder, was the creature Ahab reincarnated, gravitating to the only vessel in the American coast that resembles The Pequod, his ship, rammed and sunk by the furious White Whale? Has Ahab Inherited “The Whiteness of the Whale” or is the jellyfish the Asian harpooner Fedallah, who is actually the one caught against Moby Dick’s white hide in a tangle of ropes?

In John Houston’s 1957 film version of Moby-Dick, Ahab has the dramatic honor of taking his last ride on Moby’s hide. But in the book, Melville dispatches the self-dramatizing captain with one existential swoop of a harpoon line, and he disappears forever into the sea, until when?

But our recalled trip is now newsworthy in that, after years of simply being a moored museum version of itself, the ship has unfurled its sails and embarked upon the Atlantic once again, in a journey along the eastern seaboard. This is the closest that contemporary culture can come to experiencing and understanding the glory, heroism and horror of mid-19th century American whaling (as documented in “Moby-Dick.”)

According to a recent NPR “Here and Now” report, after five painstaking years of restoration, the ship is ready for another voyage, “not to hunt whales, but to save them.” The ship will stop at various ports for historical presentations to explicate the story of 19th century whaling and to promote understanding of the value of preserving whales, which are still hunted by several countries. Here’s the radio feature:http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/06/13/whaling-ship-morgan

The complex of events will include a life-size inflated replica of a Sperm Whale, and has also generated a documentary film, premiered in May on PBS, on the history of the Charles W Morgan. Here’s a peek at a trailer for the film:http://www.mysticseaport.org/event/film-premiere-of-the-charles-w-morgan/

The Morgan had a complex and often-torturous “37 voyages around the world where this lucky ship survived freeze-ups in the Arctic, attacks by hostile natives, fire aboard ship,” and various other situations, “each of which had the potential to end the vessel’s life,” as recounted on the website of the Mystic Seaport Museum of America and the Sea. 1

The ship is still armed with the rack of harpoons for its killing work.

The Morgan’s rack of harpoons appeared to have been well used in the mid-1850s heyday of whaling. Photo by Katrin Talbot 

and with the try-works, the two vast kettles, in which the whale blubber was melted down for oil.

The try-works of the Charles W Morgan, the place where sailors melted giant slabs of whale blubber into oil. Note the two large wooden hangers that held the whale carcass in place while it was stripped of blubber. Top photo by Kevin Lynch, lower photo by Katrin Talbot.

In Moby-Dick, Melville vividly recounts the scene of sailors doing their dirty business with the try-works:

“With huge pronged polls they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pot, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces… Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.

“As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully clamped the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” 2

We can be thankful that Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb, which effectively brought the peak whaling era to an end. But The Morgan, the one last whaler from that century, serves as a reminder of the institutionalized rationalizations that, at constant risk to underpaid sailors, methodically killed an estimated 236,000 of the largest and most magnificent of creatures on earth.  3

________________

1 http://www.mysticseaport.org/event/film-premiere-of-the-charles-w-morgan/

2 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, 150th Anniversary Edition, Penguin, 2001, 463

3 http://io9.com/5930414/1846-the-year-we-hit-peak-sperm-whale-oil

Cafe Carpe has been a labor of love, and a family endeavor for co-owners Kitty Welch and Bill Camplin (center) and their offspring, Savannah Camplin (left) and Satchel Paige Welch (top). 

This is an updated version of an article originally published in July, 2010 in YourNews.com, Madison WI edition.

FORT ATKINSON – If the carp ain’t bitin’ folk here just start writin’ – and singin’ and pickin’. Actually locals have caught white bass lately in the Rock River, beside the café named for the infamous scavenger that slouches toward river bottoms. Does the Café Carpe, a rootsy music mecca, befit its homely name?

The music club-restaurant sometime scrounges financially but it basks in the harmonious rays of its self-generated musical sunlight. Truth is, the Carpe’s lovingly tended riverside rain garden, situated just below a screened-in porch, symbolizes the place as well as anything – with its dense growth of eccentric vegetation and a corner configured with small boulders and logs where co-owner Bill Camplin stirs up campfire sing-alongs and the spirit of big sky country.

The gifted singer-songwriter and his partner Kitty Welch began to feed the region’s cultural wellspring when they bought this house on the Rock in 1985. At the time, the tides were rising for roots music and they’ve rode ‘em ever since, through hell and high water. The Carpe still holds steady for hard-scrabble blues bashers and song hawkers who trudge the dusty highways of America’s great, broad hobbled back.

With its weather-beaten wooden sign hanging over the door, the Carpe lies all too easily beneath the suspicion of many locals and regionals. They often can’t sense the level of intensity, ingenuity and engagement radiating from the cozy corner stage in a rigorously enclosed listening space behind the restaurant-bar.

Cafe Carpe on Main Street in Fort Atkinson

Each Thursday through Saturday, an array of local, regional and traveling storytellers and musicians grace this clean, well-lighted place – a Heartland beacon where the hearty literary spirit of American vernacular music burns.

Hemingway is easy enough to imagine at the bar, gradually being stirred by the Carpe’s rough-hewn majesty as a safe haven for musical wordsmiths.

No doubt, the geographic heart of Wisconsin’s roots music voice breathes from the backroom of the sunlit cafe on 18 S. Water Street, a half a block off Main.

Many stripes of musical verifiers here signify a new sort of American Renaissance afoot. No towering Melvilles or Whitmans perhaps, but something else, far more multitudinous, like myriad new hybrids of wildflower appearing along highways and meadows — fresh affirmation of Melville’s fearless confiding: “Believe me friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.”

He wrote that in his famous American identity-marking essay Hawthorne and his Mosses, in July 1850. One hundred and sixty summers later, on the mossy banks of the Rock, you’ll find bards brandishing guitars mandolins and sharply drawn metaphors – and a few being born, in effect.

The Carpe has spawned, in its peculiar ways, some superb singer-songwriters: nurturing homebody Camplin, Milwaukeean Peter Mulvey and Jeffrey Foucault who grew up in Fort – and one year “home-schooled” Camplin’s son Satchel — for beer flow at the Carpe. Mulvey and Foucault have forged impressive touring and recording careers, and an even younger breed of “baby carpes”: Hayward Williams, Josh Harty, Blake Thomas and Satchel Paige Welch. Foucault will play the Carpe on June 20 (2014).

Cafe Carpe was artistically formative for singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, who performs here with his singer-songwriter wife Kris Delmhorst in a club in Pennsylvania. Courtesy www.pollstar.com

Once America’s great writers spun vast fields of poetic grass or poured Vesuvius craters of ink into great sea novels. Today they just as often let dazzling lines fly from their lips like hungry fish leaping for a firefly and emerging with a whale of an inspiration – a curious illusion possibly effected by the refraction of river water and the Carpe’s hearty port wines.

Their profile slowly rises. The place maintains a vibrant website www.cafecarpe.net, with a performance schedule chock full of artist bios by the relentlessly witty Camplin. Accordingly, his own live performances invariably blend tangential drollery; uncanny, falsetto-haunted crooning and impeccable taste in roots songs, especially his Dylan.

A recent Camplin performance ranged from his poignant character sketch Old Man, Where Are You Sleeping Tonight?  to Townes Van Zandt’s dusty, picaresque Pancho and Lefty, where he called up the two young set openers, Harty and Thomas, for a lovely three-part harmony, a scene typifying the Carpe’s nurturing artistic camaraderie.

The joint also draws diners nightly for trademark homemade pizza and jambalaya. There’s social lubrication available and sometimes a lonely local barfly nursing a tragedy in the bottom of a beer.

Cafe Carpe co-owner Bill Camplin is almost as handy in the kitchen as he is on the bandstand. 

Reality check: some nights the performers slightly outnumber the listeners. This partly reflects a decades-old cultural assumption  – despite Bob Dylan’s long preeminence as America’s greatest living poet – that “folk music” is a sentimental strain of button-down kitsch, a la the Kingston Trio. Consider Gene Santoro’s chapter on “the folk revival” in his excellent 2004 book Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock and Country Music. He describes how blues folk rabble-rouser Dave Van Ronk deconstructed Santoro’s musical expectations of folk when he first heard him in a Greenwich Village club in the 60s.

“Two things I knew even as I was alternately squirming and transfixed through Van Ronk’s show: he was a hellacious guitar picker, a real – and therefore in pop and folk circles rare musician and he was the only white guy I ‘d ever heard whose singing showed that he truly understood Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters,” wrote Santoro. “When he roared he felt like a hurricane blast shaking that little club.”

Most serious folk musicians have actually strove for Van Ronk’s standard ever since, and many white folksters reveal understanding, in their bones, of the great black fathers of american roots music. Dylan as much as anyone. Today’s folk artists seem to be real musicians for their purposes, while working to raise the bar with good ol’ American competitiveness which nice, pinko communal values still can’t obliterate.

As Armstrong once said: “All music is folk music. Horses don’t sing.”

Camplin has an interesting philosophical perspective on Café Carpe, which he calls a “failure” after 24 years of drawing a deep array of singer-songwriters touring which probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t opened the joint when the roots movement first gained traction. Yet he rues the fact he can’t dependably fill the 70-seat music space for traveling performers to make it worth the trip.

Still, they built it and they did come, and that’s where he admits laboriously fitful success.

“There oughta be several places like this in Madison and five in Milwaukee,” Camplin asserts. There’s no comparable venue in Wisconsin, though Milwaukee’s Shank Hall and Linneman’s Inn and Madison’s High Noon Saloon and Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse all add roots musics but none with the frequency, or focused quality experience of listening sequestered from the bar or plying waiters.

Chicago’s fabled Old Town of Folk Music also lends the music but not the intimacy. This remains part of the challenge of this movement, the paucity of small club owners willing to consistently commit to non-commercial, largely acoustic music. But Camplin’s “No Depression” philosophy copes with disappointment serviceably for now.

“I’m enough of a Republican to think that music shouldn’t depend on grants,” he says wrly.

Interpret his political colors from his new unrecorded song “The Fat Cats (are takin it easy),” part of Camplin’s forthcoming album Understory, a rollicking ditty which has had crowds buzzing of late. He’s a small businessman-artist with a big voice and artistic integrity. He expects a standard of excellence and commitment from artists.

“I think more musicians should try to build rapport with audiences rather than doing one-night stands,” he says. “The old jazz players knew how to do that.”

Cultural time may be on Camplin’s side, to see renovated small-town venues like the Stoughton Opera House, which a few years ago developed a full season of largely roots-style performance events that has given Madison’s Overture Center a run for its money. The names Stoughton has hosted recently positively glitter: Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, The Del McCoury Band, Iris Dement, Richard Thompson, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, The Cowboy Junkies, Rickie Lee Jones, John Sebastian, Leo Kottke, Dan Tyminski, the Smothers Brothers and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Gillian Welch plays at Stoughton on July 3 (2014) in a sold-out show.

The fabulously refurbished opera house has whizzed past Overture and the Wisconsin Union Theater as the hippest fancy night out in South-central Wisconsin. The revered Stanley and Tyminski – who dubbed actor George Clooney’s singing on the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Though Thou? were central to the success of that Coen Brothers’ movie, which singlehandedly sparked the bluegrass revival in 2000. Frankly, roots music lovers never had it so good.

This all bodes well for Fort Atkinson’s nobly bottom-feeding river cafe, but not if people simply opt for chandelier shows and neglect the roadhouses that begat each of those big names. Camplin and Welch have persevered with alt-business savvy. Camplin himself is almost as skilled in the Carpe’s kitchen and spent all of a recent Saturday garbed in a white chef’s frock, as he sliced fixings for a scrumptious (I attest) jambalaya and dragged huge, smoking-hot pans of chow out of the ovens.

Veggie chopping is dicey work for a guitarist, he admits. A few Camplin fingertips may have nestled in among the jambalaya ham bits over the years, he half-jokes. The restaurant also has a stable of able cooks, including Welch, and the couple has succeeded well enough to extensively remodel their home above the venue, and add the faintly funky luxuries of a riverfront patio and rain garden.

Their son Satchel Paige Welch, embodies the new breed of musical bard. His name, from the legendary black baseball hurler, bespeaks Camplin’s passion for the American pastime, particularly its dusky heroes like Henry Aaron, who’ll always be a Milwaukee Brave in these parts.

Maybe Paige will be the next Shakespeare born on the banks of an American river. Okay, he was two when his parents moved to Fort Atkinson but Rock River life and culture runs in Satchel’s currents.

He’s patiently cultivating his muse and craft, writing a perfect guitar riff for a Foucault refrain, adding his vocals, bass and production skills to his father’s latest CD and building on the promise of his debut CD at age 18.

This thoughtful, slightly angst-ridden young man bridles at those who persist in asking why he’s still at home, what he’s up to. (He’s since moved to Nashville and is music producing, including his dad’s upcoming CD) His situation mirrors others of a generation that, in hard economic times, has begun investigating older forms by making the past their own, like his friend Alex Ramsey of the excellent alt-country folk band The Pines, who also lives at home biding his talent. Ramsey’s father Bo added quietly dazzling resonator guitar to Foucault’s Ghost Repeater CD.

These are also children of better-know entities like the 30-year-old public television phenomenon Austin City Limits, the mushrooming annual South by Southwest music conference, also in Austin, Texas, a profusion of roots music festivals nationwide and the Americana Music Association.

Old Crow Medicine Show, Gillian Welch, Norah Jones, Justin Townes Earle, Hayes Carll, Josh Ritter, Tift Merritt, Diana Jones and recent Oscar-winner Ryan Bingham are a few of the big young talents on the roots scene. Such young talent represents the fresh warm crust of a deep dish pie of performing talent many years in the baking, and brimming with the mature fruit of previous Carpe performers, including Peter and Lou Berryman, Greg Brown, Rory Block, Ronny Cox (a singer songwriter best known as a film actor (Deliverance, Bound for Glory), Cliff Eberhardt, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Sleepy LaBeef, Country Joe McDonald, Geoff Muldaur, Utah Phillips, Jim Post, John Renbourn, Dave Van Ronk, Claudia Schmidt, John Stewart, Eric Taylor, Tony Trischka, Dar Williams, Robin and Linda Williams, among others. The Carpe has also hosted a reading by legendary author Ursula K. LeGuin and a political stump speech by legendary songwriter Carole King.

But don’t sons and daughters typically reject parent’s values and aesthetics? In fact, a whole generation of musical artists is asserting identity on their own roots-related terms, shaping new styles from re-thatched sprigs of the past. Such identity factors may account for more than any rekindling of the idealism their parents professed to change the world with, Paige says.

As he puts it: “I’m trying to globalize.” Then you hear his own generational idealism, sans transformative notions: “Why speak to one culture when you can speak to all cultures? If I’ve developed my style or voice right, it’s really important that I communicate with an 80-year-old as much as I do to an 18-year-old.” He slightly brings to mind the ambitiously the real, old Satchel Paige, who made America love him on his own terms, mythical or not.

In The Roots of Romanticism, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that the profoundly influential Germanic Romantic movement, which championed folk music and dance, asserted that culture involves “an infinite striving forward on the part of reality.” Folk art communicated the growth of human groups for which “organic, botanical and other biological metaphors were more suitable” than “chemical and mathematical metaphors of 17^th century French popularizers of science.”

“Truth is like a pearl,” Foucault sings in the song City Flower. Increasingly creative young Americans like Satchel Paige, following his namesake, aim for the outside corner of destiny, mixing pearls with their knuckleballs.

_________________

Unless otherwise indicated, all photos by Kevin Lynch

1. Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock and Country Music. Gene Santoro, Oxford University Press 1994 p 104
2. The Roots of Romanticism Isaiah Berlin, Princeton University Press, 1999, p 101
3. Ibid pp. 59-61.

“Moby-Dick or, The Whale” By Herman Melville. Published in 1851. Image courtesy of lukepearson.com 1

On the other hand, I have to say, I don’t think anyone owes Amazon or any of these websites any favors for unleashing amateur critics. Some idiot will write, Moby-Dick is a bore. I hate Moby-Dick.” Who cares about these people?  — Gary Giddins

I know that out-of-context quote is a little edgy, but I like the handle Gary Giddins has on things, the handle that brandishes that edge. The prize-winning critic, 2 best-known for his masterful jazz criticism, has also authored a Bing Crosby bio and nifty book on the history of film, Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema, from “the first moving pictures and peep shows” to today’s online streaming. He made the comments in a 2010 interview with JerryJazzMusician. 3

The distinguished American critic Gary Giddins

It’s a great comment on the state of mass media today in relation to criticism at a time when the notion of “everybody’s a critic” is more facile and, perhaps unfortunately, truer than it ever has been.

I’m all for hearing everybody’s critical opinion, but I agree with sports talk-show host Jim Rome, who says to radio show callers, “Have a Take.” Same thing should go for the Internet — whether an Amazon customer review, Facebook, a blog or especially Twitter.

In other words, use your brain cells as best as you can before you make your opinion public. That ain’t so unreasonable to ask. And believe me, I have to ask it of myself every time I post a blog, and I do try to do the same for Facebook.

Now, I know a couple of people who found Moby-Dick somewhat of a bore in not-so-many-words and they’re people I still care about. But I doubt they would be “idiotic” enough to post that opinion on the web.

Such opinions will never deter me from saying Moby-Dick is the greatest book I’ve ever read, and surely The Great American Novel.

I’m also struck by the way the Moby-Dick example arose seemingly spontaneously, in the Giddins interview, when they weren’t even discussing literature. So it’s a wonderful way of suggesting Moby-Dick is a litmus test for cultural literacy. Or, in Giddins’ terms, anyone we ought to care about, at least they’re critical opinion.

OK, I also know plenty of smart and fairly literate people who haven’t read Moby-Dick yet.

Another friend of mine called the experience of reading it “brutal.” But I really think he somewhat forced himself to read it, for his own probably admirable reasons, rather than out of the pure, unadulterated desire to read it.

Try that, like I did. Moby-Dick is best off being embraced as a reading experience.

My point of view is reflected in a very literate but honest friend of mine (who is also a jazz musician and a likely Giddins reader), who once admitted to me, “I didn’t get all the way through Moby-Dick. I feel like I’m not fully an American.”

I felt I finally began to know and understand America when I read Moby-Dick. From that day, I mark myself as having fully become an American. I also became somewhat of an “Americanist,” If I wasn’t one already, because the nation and its culture became intensely more fascinating to me. The so-called “American Renaissance” gradually began to mean to me that this nation’s literature sort of grew up in the 1850s, ironically and not un-coincidentally, shortly before the nation was about to come to cataclysmic terms with its greatest original sin, slavery.

I think reading Melville’s book is as much of an honor and a privilege as voting, though reading the book is a more memorable, challenging, transporting, exciting and enjoyable experience.

Although I’m asserting a “critical” opinion, my ultimate purpose is to be inviting about this, especially in the virtual-dialog ideal of a blog, where comments are always welcome, indeed encouraged.

Do you have a take on Moby-Dick? Your thoughts need not be long, just reasonably well-considered. And don’t worry, you can say “Nope, don’t like it.” But say why you don’t.

So friends, what do you think of Moby-Dick?

____________

1. The artistic rendering, by Luke Pearson appears to be a linoleum cut and it caught my eye as a stylish, fresh visual representation of the book, and as a nice artistic allusion to the style of Rockwell Kent, whose famous series of woodblock cut prints first charged my imagination about the book and became the definitive illustrated edition of the Melville’s masterpiece in its 1930 Random House edition.

My only caveat with Pearson’s fine design is a slightly pedantic one. It’s in easy mistake to make (and the blog that quoted Giddins made the same mistake), The name of Melville’s book is Moby-Dick with a hyphen between the two names.

However, when Moby Dick the whale is referred to in the text, it is without the hyphen, some odd compromise that occurred in publishing the book. But any reference to, or  rendering of, the book title should include the hyphen.

2. Giddins’ honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century, and an unprecedented six Deems Taylor Awards for music book authorship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Peabody Award in broadcasting, among others.

3. http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2010/06/giddins-jazz-warning-shadows/

Devin Drobka — Bell Dance Songs. CD review 

Devin Drobka evokes fellow composer-percussionist Paul Motian, one of his influences and heroes, like a kind of guiding light throughout this album. The CD-opening “Blues Town,” exploits the fraught relationship between a elegantly unfolding, mournful melody and a rhythmic pulse that pushes the melody like waves lapping against a rocky shore.

Bell Dance Songs brims with such melodic and rhythmic tensions, often evoking dance-like rhythms, as a bell’s ring might, resonating in circular fashion more than articulating step patterns or back beats. This creative activity is very characteristic of Motian, who always defied conventions of the rhythm-maker’s role.

Another eccentric but fecund jazz innovator, guitarist Bill Frisell, emerges as a contrasting inspiration to expand the sonic and conceptual palette on “It’s Been Days Since I’ve Heard from You.” This melody arrives at an even slower, a funereal pace, and Jay Mollerskov’s space-twang guitar creates a brief portrait, suggesting a lonely prospector with little hopes of discovering much more than the wind, and dust in his teeth. Bassist John Christensen and saxophonist Chris Weller plumb inconsolably sad notes. The idea of hearing from a friend or lover feels remote, another broken dream.

The pace picks up on “For Paul (Dia de)” when the drums again boost the melody to higher pitches. Saxophonist Weller and guitarist Mollerskov alternate in two-part solos, the former with Coltrane-esque courage, like the cry of a plunging eagle. Then the sax climbs a  steep and precipitous sonic plane. The latter plays a welter of angularity, increasingly atonal. Amid this, drummer Drobka unfurls a fusillade of drum rolls at different dynamic angles, in this explicit Motian tribute.

Drummer-composer Devin Drobka Courtesy wmse.org.

For its challenges, Bell Dance Songs allows breathing spaces, like “Restless Dogs” which cuts away the bricolage while maintaining the eccentric manner and articulation.

Although a pianoless quartet, Drobka’s group sometimes recalls pianist Keith Jarrett’s 1970s American quartet with Motian and saxophonist Dewey Redman, with its roiling rhythms and forlorn, piquant melodies. But on “Bring Out Your Dead,” free of pianistic harmonic underpinnings, the guitar and sax stoke a fire of sizzling expressionistic interplay, while forging their own entangled melodic ways. The composer confirms that this slightly madcap energy was inspired by absurdist British comedy troupe Monty Python, from a skit titled “Bring out Your Dead.”

This gives you a little idea of the the evocative power of these songs. In concert recently at The Jazz Estate, Drobka related fairly extensive and vivid anecdotes that inspired each composition. I asked him to elaborate on one at length, which involved a dream, a tune called “Ishan”:

“In the dream he was lying in his own bed but in a completely different room. A door opening awoke him and a shirtless man entered with long curly hair and a tattoo across his side, a highly stylized Audubon’s (rain) barrel body but with the head of a very geometric owl. I get up from my bed and asked who he was.

“Do not worry, my name is Ishan,” he replied. “I lied back in bed and he proceeded to sit at a desk in the corner. I looked away and when I turned back and look at him his hair is extremely short. He stands up and proceeds to walk out of the room. I follow and enter a gigantic rectangular room. Something like 150 by 45 feet, and all the walls were glass with dense foliage pressing against the windows. In the center’s great hall stood a long wooden table, about 90 feet, covered in books. The table is right underneath a skylight that was the same length as the table. Inside a tremendous storm arose. I could feel the wind and rain as if they engulfed the room.

Following Ishan closer to the table, one book stood out. “It was the largest book on the table and its pages were rapidly flapping because of the win. As I walked up I put my hand out to stop the pages and as soon as I did that, I awoke.”

It’s a not-untypical dream, a little peculiar but not too bizarre and with reasonably interpretable symbolism. Ishan seems to signify some kind of literary/environmentalist guru or shaman, and it suggests to me the desire for extraordinary guidance about our environmental crisis. The owl traditionally symbolizes wisdom, among societies close to the earth.

I’m happy Drobka still feels a real book is the source of such knowledge rather any of today’s more facile electronic media. So he finds a large book that might be a Bible, but more likely something environmentally substantial, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Thoreau’s Walden, or a book of Wendell Berry poems, even if those are shorter works. Or an authoritative anthology of environmental writing such as American Earth edited by writer-activist Bill McKibben. Or the latest scientific research on global warming.

Or something was more pagan or zen,  given the shaman implications. And its reasonable to ultimately see the mystery shaman as Motian, the defier of rhythmic convention, but the true conjurer of creative possibility.

Ultimately what counts is how well “Ishan” works as music, clearly with evocative inspiration, and this piece, like most of them, conveys a storytelling quality that gets the imagination asking questions of itself.

These are superb ambitions and accomplishments for composition and improvisation, and often well-realized on this record. It’s also a brilliantly indirect way of conveying a holistic environmental ethos. The album cover photo beautifully depicts a vulnerable rain forest. And bell dances suggest a ritual type of act, generating vibrations connecting with the mystical “music of the spheres.” Who can’t feel at least sympathy for such a world view? Drobka might suggest more than sympathy is needed for the planet’s survival.

My only caveat for this album is that, without Drobka’s diverting and guide-posting anecdotes (good material for missing liner notes), a fairly swinging or funky tune would have complemented and eased the insistently heady interplay. The band played an infectious funk tune at the Estate. Despite their tropes, swing and funk can still generate avenues of fresh ingenuity.

Bell Dance Songs conveys a tersely ardent energy that asks the listener to meet it half way. If you enjoy conceptual open air shifting under your feet, where structures turn into startling and lyrically probing shapes, if you like music to chew on, this is your record.

Bell Dance Songs is currently available online for only $5 at http://cargocollective.com/devindrobka

The Devin Drobka Quartet will perform at The Bay View Jazz Festival at 9 p.m. Friday June 6, at Studio Lounge, 2246 S. Kinnickinnick Ave.

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Album cover photo courtesy bsidegraphics.com

The Bad Plus: The Rite of Spring (Masterworks)

The propulsive “Augurs of Spring” rhythms and the contorted “Ritual of Abduction” must’ve called out to Minneapolis’ muscular alt-jazz trio. They bravely delve into Stravinsky’s transformative epic The Rite of Spring. Yes they boil down the orchestra; yet Ethan Iverson brilliantly funnels Stravinsky’s glittering, dissonant orchestration through his keyboard.

Bass and drums stoke the suspense and ecstasy, the thunderous drama, the sense of wonder at life and the planet’s riches, strangeness, madness and beauty. Thius amounts to one of the most seamlessly successful jazz fusions of classical material, And that’s partly because the group has a strong rock sensibility, and if The Rite isn’t classical rock music in its essence, I don’t know what is. It may not be metal, but it sure is stone. The Bad Plus perform “The Rite of Spring” live in Boston. From left, pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, drummer Dave King. Courtesy bostonglobe.com.

And a good bad plus, you gotta like Iverson’s tongue-in-cheek unpretentiousness when recently identifying the piece after they had performed the 45-minute work live in Boston. “That was a tune by Igor Stravinsky called The Rite of Spring,” he deadpanned.

As a paean to paganism that spurred a riot at its May, 1913 premiere, The Rite still casts naked light on its world, and never grows any older than springtime.

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

Russ Johnson — Meeting Point (Relay Recordings) CD review The Russ Johnson Quartet will perform at a CD release party for “Meeting Point” on Saturday, May 24 at 9 p.m. at Sugar Maple, 441 E. Lincoln Ave, Milwaukee (414-481-2393) Cover $10

It’s no secret that the bass gives the gas to funk, as the pulse and the sinewy drive. Among wind instruments, the honking sax has mostly led the charge since the blues and R&B blasts of Illinois Jacquet, Maceo Parker, Stanley Turrentine and David Sanborn.

Then Bennie Maupin added a twist to the equation when his guttural bass clarinet slinked out of the ether to grab the music world by the throat in the intro-groove of Herbie Hancock’s genre-shattering jam “Chameleon” in 1973.

On this CD, Jason Stein reminds us of the sexy, sultry grit of that resonant instrument on “Lithosphere,” the back-beat bouncer that opens “Meeting Point.” As the album title implies, it might have been dubbed “Conversation,” also the title of three tracks of trumpeter Johnson in duet with his bandmates, not to mention the trumpeter-composer’s three-part “Confluence.”

But the talking Johnson does on “Lithosphere” sounds like sassy old Lee Morgan working the club. Which reminds me, I once wrote a short story about a working-stiff trumpeter who one day relieves his road-weary malaise by declaring, “Sometimes all I want to do listen to Lee Morgan play trumpet.” When a musician recalls that for me, he’s doing something.

Something else Johnson is doing is nibbling at new parameters for muted-trumpet playing. Specifically he’s pushing beyond the mood-enhancement aspects into the phrasing implicit in the mute’s sound, as the player transitions from note to note. So Sometimes Johnson sounds like he’s literally talking a new language. More to come from him on this for sure.

The piano-less two-horn quartet extends the freedom of the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, with a collective sound that derives its ingenuity, power and most of its harmonic implications from the interactive voices of two liberated brass instruments, often in seeming free-fall, like hungry raptors.

Still, its commonplace today to observe that such sonic cries derive roundaboutly from the blues, the basis of much of Coleman’s pioneering work. This proved that Coleman’s plastic alto sax and Don Cherry’s battered pocket trumpet could get the blues as well as Robert Johnson and his bedeviled guitar, hamolodically speaking, as Coleman would spend decades trying to explain.

Suffice to say, for this listener Johnson’s quartet finds the wind that’s always at the back of any good jazz group on “Clothesline.” I’m talking about tough-nosed swing. Anton Hatwich’s propulsive walking bass carries the day but, again, Stein gives his bass clarinet a gutsy whirl to remember, until Johnson flies in for some counterpoint — like two shirt sleeves dancing on the clothesline.

Remember that it was Eric Dolphy, not Maupin, who actually liberated the bass clarinet, as an interval-hopscotching free-bopper, and Stein would’ve likely never ventured into “Chaos Theory” without Dolphy’s beacon.   Johnson has done as much as any recent musician to keep Dolphy’s legacy alive, having performed the music from Dolphy’s classic Out to Lunch album at a special event honoring Dolphy, which included the unveiling of a bronze statue of the great jazz wind player at LeMoyne College in 2010 (Most of Johnson’s Dolphy interpretations are readily available on YouTube).

On “Chaos” Johnson’s own scrambles are tethered to sharp-yet-pungent accents. His mute playing emerges even stronger in his “Conversation” with drummer Tim Daisy, whose mallets simmer in a free tempo for the trumpeter to dive into. Johnson’s mute blowing wrenches a burning breath from his lungs, a virtual evocation of artfully desperate drowning.

Bassist Hatwich solemnly introduces “Half Full,” the album’s most impressive exposition of a theme, built on a mere pair of rise-and-fall intervals, but the melodic and rhythmic tension creates a plangent poignancy that suggests “Half Full” might as well be half empty.

Nevertheless, this piece and this album are no half-measures, rather a trumpeter-composer and his telepathic group in full-blown synchronicity.

Johnson’s quartet will also perform at 9 p.m. Friday, May 23 at Constellation in Chicago.

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Album cover photo by Jamie Breiwick.

Jackie Allen — My Favorite Color (Avant Bass) CD review

Milwaukee-born singer Jackie Allen brings to mind a bramble bush in autumn. You hear a delicate balance of songs imbued with painful confession, as if her voice carries the slight tinge of spiritual bloodletting. It’s probably her best album to date.

She has ripened into a mature artistic interpreter, without losing the youthful elan that always gave her a special power. Circumstances compelled her to give this record a full six years in the making. Time was on her side.

The core of the album is a sequence of three extraordinary songs, beginning with the George Gershwin masterpiece “My Man’s Gone Now” from Porgy & Bess.

Allen dips into mournful minor-key mode like a woman bereft. Her notes seem to melt in abject sorrow, at once strange and gorgeous. This emotional gravity allows her to ride the difficult tonality, a classic case of form following function, ably framed by bassist Hans Sturm’s arco solo, which recalls the magnificence of Richard Davis. “Gone” feels like  spiritual desolation and yet it holds out for “the journey to the promised land.”

Then Allen begins to reflect, in the ensuing “Blame it on My Youth,” an ode to the reckless heart and to growth that life might afford.

Here, and elsewhere, Allen’s elastic phrasing and warm texture compares to Tony Bennett at his best. She plumbs whole notes like someone slowly discovering the inside of her soul. Therein lies plenty: the sense of lost innocence, bruised hope, confusion, redemption: “I was like a broken toy, you preferred to throw away… So don’t blame it on my heart, blame it on my youth.”

The third of this stunning threesome is the most improbable and startling and perhaps the crux of the matter, for the risks taken, the human courage found in facing life’s worst. This is Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic cauldron “Manic-Depression.”

Allen turns the vintage electronica into a plugged-in Miles Davis aura, but retains her own sense of psychological colors and fragmentation. Guitarist John Moulder puts his own twist on the Hendrix legacy which is a brand of jazz on his own terms, finding its own truths. Throughout the record, the accompanists play as one, and as originals. Pianist Ben Lewis uses sonic space like a wizard on “Youth” and does a slow-motion sashay on “Sleepin’ Bee” like a droll comic.

Allen’s favorite color seems to be blue yet this is a multi-hued recording and hardly devoid of verve or fun. Her sensibility is obvious in “Born to be Blue” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” but never pushy. Doing a sparkling Burt Bacharach song like “A House is not a Home” is another stroke of brilliance. For all its tenderness her interpretation brims with the power of art and, in this recording, the power of the blues. That humble genre is often underestimated, but Allen proves that the power of the blues comes in many of her favorite hues.

Here’s Allen’s upcoming tour schedule and a video of Allen teaching NPR’s Garrison Keillor how to sing a torch song: http://www.jackieallen.com/

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John Sloan, Cornelia Street, oil on canvas 1920, private collection

A friend of mine was recently pondering the peculiar aesthetics of the flat -iron style Trocadero building, visible as you begin the picturesque ascent the Holton Street bridge Milwaukee. I told her I’d share with her a painting the famous flatiron building New York with John Sloan captured in his famous “A view of the city from Greenwich Village” (recently featured here an viewable in the Fave Art archives, and an in this more contemplative sunset scene of the building.

You can see the odd triangular shape is dictated by the urban infrastructure of city streets and intersecting L train. Lands the cityscape a stately air of solitude and isolation. However, birds like most of nature, seem to enjoy the setting with unaffected playfulness, a kind of consolation for the lonely urban dweller.

Sloan’s vivid observation of urban life included his magical evocation of that great working-class entertainment, in “Five-Cent Movie” an oil from 1907.

Edward S. Curtis “Winter Apsaroke from the MWA exhibit reviewed in the award-winning “Edward Curtis preserved America’s vanishing race for posterity.”

Photograph by Edward S Curtis.

Good news. The nation’s oldest state journalist organization, The Milwaukee Press Club, has awarded its 2013 gold prize to Kevernacular and the Culture Currents blog for “Best Critical Review of the Arts.” We received the honor for the blog “Edward Curtis preserved America’s vanishing race for posterity.” It is a review of the remarkable exhibit of Wisconsin-born photographer and anthropologist Edward S. Curtis, who documented with a heroic obsession the gradual death of our Native American culture and lifestyle in the early 20th-century. The exhibit ran at the Wisconsin Museum of Art in West Bend last fall and winter.

The awards are judged by a panel of out-of-state journalism professionals.The silver award in the criticism category went to Erik Gunn for “The New Old Guard,” in Milwaukee Magazine, and the bronze went to my friend Michael Muckian for “Beethoven goes Bollywood” in Wisconsin Gazette. The awards dinner, at the Intercontinental Hotel, was a lively occasion to celebrate and see plenty of my fellow journalists.

I also met some I haven’t until now, including personable Milwaukee historian and table mate John Gurda, who regaled my date and I with arcane historical tidbits, and who won a Gold Award for “best column” for his Crossroads history column in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. 

The Curtis review appeared originally in The Shepherd Express on August 19, and then in expanded form in Culture Currents. Here’s the link to it: https://kevernacular.com/?p=2133 Muckian also writes for Shepherd Express. I want to thank all Culture Currents readers for your support and interest. Without you, the this blog wouldn’t mean much at all. Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) received a “gold award” plaque for the Culture Currents blog Friday at the Milwaukee Press Club awards dinner. To quote Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “I never dreamed I would be a blond.” Photo by Ann K. Peterson

Noted author, pundit and journalist Jonathan Alter was the Sacred Cat Award winner and spoke to the crowd about the schizophrenic quality of Wisconsin politics. He also reiterated the fundamental values of journalism in an era in which blogging can lead to facile posturing and information.

That means actual research and reporting, “which means getting on the phone and talking to people, not just e-mailing,” said Alter, who is also currently an executive producer of “Alpha House,” a political comedy created by Gary Trudeau and starring John Goodman. In an era of chaotic upheaval in the profession, journalism must continue to strive for balanced representation, but not simply to balance out perceive polarities, rather to strive for the truth, Alter said.

He also predicted that Scott Walker would not get Republican nomination for president, because he doesn’t seem to have the right stuff, even though Republicans are longing for a governor as a presidential nominee.

Alter, who has covered the last nine presidential elections, also predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency in 2016. However he said, as many have predicted, Republicans should make big gains in 2014 midterm elections, largely because base and widespead Democratic constituencies still fail to get out to vote enough in non-presidential elections.

Kevin Lynch has received Milwaukee Press Club awards in the “best critical arts review” category twice before, while writing for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.

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We want Culture Currents to flow though your eyes like a river through a waterfall, easy yet strong, full of energy and momentum, vivid with color and striking form. That’s why we’ve started the Culture Currents fave art gallery.

The CCFA is a feature recently debuted on our new Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/culturecurrents.

Please visit and bookmark that page, because that’s where you’ll find regular updates on the most recent art work hung on our FB page and in the galley here, at the blog site. As some of you may know, I am a practicing artist with a BFA in art, and I’ve written about art through my long career as an arts journalist. It’s an ongoing passion of mine and I strive as often as possible to use it to illustrate cultural points and contexts, and to let it speak on its own terms, which are sometimes abstract, sometimes story-telling.

So without further ado, let’s let the art do most of the walking and talking (with a bit of my own commentary thrown in from time to time). Arshile Gorky “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,” oil on canvas 1944.  These two paintings are superb examples of Gorky’s great skill at hanging a composition along the formal  undergrid of The Golden Mean. The proportional ideal allowed Gorky guidance as he explored the boundaries of surrealism and abstraction. Much of this best work derives from his intensely close observations of nature. In one famous instance, Gorky laid face-down in a garden, opened his eyes and took in the visual sensation of this extreme perspective. In this manner, one can begin to understand the relationship between acquired impressions and an artist’s abstractions.

So, look at the intense, lyrical sensuality of “Water of the Flowery Mill” (below) from 1944. And yet, we see Gorky, a self-styled art-historian as well, still abides by the compositional grid of The Golden Mean, a formal standard which dates to antiquity. Horizontal compositions but can work with vertical pieces as well.

Honore Daumier, “Third-Class Carriage,” watercolor and ink, 1864  

You can also detect the mean in Daumier’s painting above, “Third-class Carriage.” Within a composition, the Golden Mean employs proportions that involve segmenting the internal form by two thirds, both horizontally and vertically. Here, the top third horizontally runs clearly along the back shoulders valve the carriage seat (dividing the classes of riders). The vertical proportion is more subtle — the left third runs up and down the face and hands of the elderly woman, who is the work’s focal point.

Next, I offer images by three different artists, which I have blogged about previously.
Edward S. Curtis. “Mosa – Mojave” 1903. This is the extraordinary portrait by Curtis that so enchanted millionaire J.P. Morgan that he became a crucial patron of The photographer’s Curtis’ pioneering anthropological effort to document the death of Native American culture and life in its original forms.   Rembrandt van Rijn “Self Portrait,” oil on canvas 1661, This late-life masterpiece was on display last year at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Rita Cox with one of her “underground railroad” quilts, from the book “Hidden in Plain View.” Photo by Richard Allen.

Finally, a sequence of works by the great American “Ash Can School” artist John Sloan.   John Sloan “View of the City from Greenwich Village,” oil on canvas 1922
John Sloan. “Roofs, Summer Night” etching 1906  

John Sloan, “A Woman’s Work,” oil on canvas 1912.

This painting makes for a lovely storytelling diptych with “A Woman’s Work.” In this second scene, our working woman seems overcome by the sudden beauty of a New York dusk. Sloan  titled this oil from 1906  “Sunset, West Twenty-third Street (23rd Street, Roofs, Sunset).” 

Sloan was a political artist as well as an acute social observer. Here’s a provocative cover illustration for the left-leaning periodical “The Masses.” It depicts a scene from the notorious Ludlow massacre. The tragedy involved an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people, including women and children, were killed.

The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident. The massacre echoes to today’s challenges between the powerful (The “one percent”) and “the rest of us,” as well as to environmental issues regarding the ongoing exploitation of coal resources.

Finally, day is done for all first-shift workers and rush-hour arises in Sloan’s bustling and quintessentially urban oil painting, “Six O’ Clock.” The mad rush to get home was evidently ingrained in the American psyche by 1912.

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Look for more postings of Culture Currents Fave Art Gallery both here and on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/culturecurrents .