Hi CC visitors,

If you like Culture Currents you might check out our new Facebook Page, with some postings you won’t find on my personal FB page, including some of Kevernacular’s favorite art work : https://www.facebook.com/culturecurrents

On both pages, you’ll find a cool new post (5/10/14) — a video of a soulful duet between my friend, pianist Frank Stemper and “Brother” Mehldau the singing dog.

All photos by Kevin Lynch, except as noted.

“He rises!” — Gregory Peck as Ahab, in John Huston’s film Moby-Dick (1957)

The above line is not in Melville’s great novel, but part of the inevitable liberties with the text taken by the screenplay of Huston and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. But I defer to popular culture this time.

Finally, Moby Dick rises on my dining room wall. I’d been saving my nickels to purchase the wood wall sculpture of the great literary creature at a remarkable shop called Cottage House Primitives, 120 S. Main St., in Lodi, Wisconsin. http://www.cottagehouseprimitives.com/. Created on the East Coast by Peter DiScalia, my new Moby Dick is four-feet-three inches long, and readers of this blog will know that Herman Melville’s legendary white whale carries great significance for me — as it does for countless other fans of The Great American Novel.

Part of the book’s legacy is how much it has impacted modern and popular culture and now, aside from several pastel paintings with Moby Dick/Melville themes that I have done myself, I own one such cultural artifact. 1 So this is one of my more personal postings, but as a professional journalist I hope you indulge me because many bloggers are far more personal than me on a very regular basis. I offer this little photo essay of the whale in his new setting, mounted in breaching posture, on my dining room wall — in increasing closeup. In the detail above, the Sperm whale teeth are nails inserted in a way I have yet to ascertain (not pounded through the bottom of the whale jaw). The eye is a door knob collar, the fin is a cut piece of soft metal, perhaps tin or aluminum. DiScalia apparently cut the sculpture from a slab of barn wood, and then whitewashed it. The way the whitewash has worn away seems like natural aging and exposure, because the two eye loops on which I attached the wall hooks are heavily rusted.

One can imagine the whale swaying and creaking in the fierce Atlantic wind over an establishment like The Spouter-Inn of New Bedford, which Ishmael encounters in the beginning of his great white whale adventure. This weathered effect also persuasively conveys the craggy age of the legendary whale that refuses to die. Only sailors attempting to kill him die, like crazy Ahab and the courageous-if-foolhardy crew of the Pequod…”all save one” — Ishmael, who lives to tell the story. Remember, the crew was coerced into the insane and fatal chase by a brilliant demagogue.

This piece of art is an excellent example of the type of merchandise offered by Cottage House Primitives, the store in Lodi situated a few steps away from fast-flowing Spring Creek, which runs right under Main Street. Owner Carol Naab specializes in early American and 19th-century originals or reproductions in various arts, crafts and household goods, and sells a number of evocative items created by Moby-maker DiScalia, she says. It is a historically transporting experience to walk into the shop and browse around. (Full disclosure: Naab is a sister-in-law, by way of my first wife, the late Kathleen Naab Lynch. Carol also happens to have been born on the exact same day I was.)  Upon mounting Moby in my dining room, I thought I would also share a few photos of his new environment, which includes several other art pieces. On the wall adjacent to Moby Dick is a pure kindred to him (see photo above). It is a reproduction of Sam Francis’s wondrous 1957 abstract painting “The Whiteness of the Whale” which resides in the collection of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. It is the first work of art (reproduction of) that I ever had framed, many years ago.

The painting’s title borrows directly from the great, same-titled philosophical chapter in Moby-Dick, which reverses semantic convention by contemplating the perceived evil in the symbolic presence of white, as opposed to black.

In the nearby living room hangs “Ishmael Intuits the End from the Crows Nest” (below), my own 2009 pastel painting of a scene in Moby-Dick. The connections to the wall sculpture should be self-evident. But aside from Ishmael’s vertigo perspective atop the ship, the painting also illustrates Melville’s remarkable description in Chapter 133 “The Chase – First Day” of  “one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering”  which is “silently perched and rocking on this pole (the harpoon in the whale’s back), the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.”

Finally, I return to the closest companion to the wooden Moby wall sculpture, right below him — one of my personal favorites among the sculptures I have done. It is an abstract bronze casting titled “Free Space Relief.” Note also to the left, a black-and-white reproduction on glass of a toreador with bull, by Picasso. In this close-up of the bronze sculpture, I hope you see the expressive energy, form and texture I was exploring in the work. I thought the piece was evocative enough without giving it a more poetical or imagistic title.

To satisfy anyone curious (or to perhaps overshare), to the right of the CDs is a mug adorned with a reproduction of a photograph of my father returning a kickoff in 1947 for Washington High School in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. This is a memorable newspaper photo because it was a team that went undefeated that year, including a 41-0 rout of Pius XI High School, a much bigger school in Milwaukee.*

One more item: The framed photograph directly underneath the bronze sculpture is of a reception for the great jazz pianist Cecil Taylor in the mid ’80s (See detail below). Taylor is in the middle in the purple jacket, shaking hands with a well wisher, Karen Keene, a flutist who married Victor De Lorenzo, drummer for The Violent Femmes. To the left of Taylor is my dear friend Jim Glynn, a well-known Milwaukee musician, disc jockey (for WMSE), and culture vulture. And on Taylor’s other shoulder is his old friend, as well is mine, Ken Miller, a dancer and arts programmer.

Cecil Taylor reception at The Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, mid-80s. Sorry about the damaged photo. 

Sadly, both Glynn and Miller are now dead.   I don’t know what it means that this blog posting has summoned the memory of three contemporaries of mine (including my former spouse) who have died. They were three remarkable people, each in their own way. But for me, the photograph, and now my new Moby Dick, serve somewhat as precious evocations to their memories. I suppose, this cultural act works not too unlike how Ishmael’s grand story preserves his memory of his best friend Queequeg and other memorable characters among the Pequod crew, such as Pip, Starbuck, Stubb, Tashtego, Daggoo, Fedallah, and of course, Ahab. In the end, only the white whale glides on, in “the great shroud of the sea” that “rolled as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) with his new Moby Dick wall sculpture. The small wooden jig-saw sculpture beneath the lamp is by Kevin. Photo by Ann K. Peterson.

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* the mug with my father’s football photo was the gift of a thoughtful friend, Mary Ann Nicoud, on the occasion of Norm Lynch’s death on November 22, 2009.

Dick Cheney with George W. Bush in The Oval Office, June 2007. Photo courtesy Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

“If you’re a man of principle, compromise is a bit of a dirty word.” — Dick Cheney, 2013

I’ve been contemplating the word “honor” since hearing a live performance in early April of composer Frank Stemper’s work for cello and chamber orchestra, “The Persistence of Honor.”

The skeptical reader might think I am reading too much politics into a largely abstract work of music; that is not my point. I’ve written about the music’s particulars and significance in a previous blog on CC, and you can hear it at this link: https://kevernacular.com/?p=3477

I will acknowledge, however, the role of “Persistence” in inspiring this posting. That curious power comes in the 2009 work’s ability to nag at one’s consciousness, especially with its oddly rising and repeating — and ever-slightly changing — main theme. It’s like a voice in your head changing its tone slightly each time it repeats a rhetorical question, to imprint it deeper on your mind. And Stemper emphasized that his titular concept had to do with America’s geopolitical presence before Barack Obama was elected. Thus, as I understand it, the title stands as an ironic rebuke of the George W. Bush administration.

My real point about the music is that it made me think about the idea of honor and why it’s persistence is worth something — or anything — in today’s cynical world.
I was rudely reawakened into such wonder when I re-read Mark Danner’s deeply troubling essay, “The Darkness of Dick Cheney,”  in the March 6, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books.1

Some might think it’s past time being troubled by Dick Cheney. After all, he is out of power. After I spoke of this article, a well-meaning liberal friend of mine tried to quell my sense of Cheney’s ongoing “evil.” She pointed out that there must be “some good in the man,” considering how he still evidently loves and perhaps honors his lesbian daughter Mary, and even supports same-sex marriage.

Fair enough, but we are talking about Dick Cheney, the vice president who clearly asserted more power than anyone in the George W. Bush administration, including perhaps the president.

One of Danner’s sharpest points is that we live today with the consequences of Cheney’s power, or his profligate and peculiarly amoral abuse of it: “In Fallujah, Iraq, where Al Qaeda-allied jihadists were nowhere to be found in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq have just again seized control; Syria, where Iraqi jihadists play a prominent part in the rebellion against the Assad regime; in Afghanistan, the Taliban, largely ignored after 2002 in the rush to turn American attention to Saddam Hussein, are resurgent.”

And then there’s the other side of the war on terror, the secret documents that, as CIA counsel John Rizzo remarks, “remain in effect to this day which authorizes the capture and detention of Al Qaeda created terrorists,” and another which “authorized taking lethal action against them. The language was simple and stark… We had filled the entire covert-action toolkit, including tools we never before used.” 2

Rizzo is talking about torture, such as the infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks. Those techniques include prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, forced nudity, “walling,” cold water immersions and waterboarding, which procedure he endured no less than 183 times.” 3

Dick Cheney. Courtesy telegraph.com

Danner explains: “The ‘black sites’—the network of secret prisons the CIA set up around the world, from Thailand and Afghanistan to Romania and Poland and Morocco—were ordered shut down by President Obama, but despite his executive order on his second day in office, Guantánamo Bay, the ‘public black site,’ remains open, its 155 detainees, but for a handful, uncharged and untried. Among that number live “high-value detainees” who were once secretly imprisoned at the black sites, where many were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Asked whether he considers “a prolonged period of creating the sensation of drowning”—waterboarding—to be torture, Cheney’s response comes fast and certain:

I don’t. Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, (my boldface) or are you going to do your job, do what’s required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens. Now given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying, “We know you know their next attack against the United States but we’re not gonna force you to tell us what it is because it might create a bad image for us.” That’s not a close call for me.

“Quite apart from the large factual questions blithely begged, there is a kind of stark amoral grandeur to this answer that takes one’s breath away,” Danner continues. “Just as he was likely the most important and influential American official in making the decision to withhold the protection of the Geneva Conventions from detainees, Cheney was likely the most important and influential American when it came to imposing an official government policy of torture. It is quite clear he simply cannot, or will not, acknowledge that such a policy raises any serious moral or legal questions at all.

“Those who do acknowledge such questions, he appears to believe, are poseurs, acting out some highfalutin and affected pretense based on—there is a barely suppressed sneer here— ‘preserving your honor.’ (Danner’s italics) What does he think of those—and their number includes the current attorney general of the United States and the president himself—who believe and have declared publicly that waterboarding is torture and thus plainly illegal? For Cheney, the question is not only ‘not a close call.’ It is not even a question.” 4

And yet, as a nation, we have addressed torture as a serious internal moral issue at least since the 1850s when White-Jacket, Herman Melville’s novelistic expose of the U.S. Navy, helped spur Congress to ban flogging in that branch of the military. Look at the photograph of Cheney at top, in conference with Bush and you almost palpably feel Cheney’s sneer, hardly suppressed. When he addresses the term “honor,” he actually stumbles over it in the quote above, as if recoiling at the notion of integrity or honesty. Like Danner, I felt a chill when I read the cold, imperious tone of that extended quote.

Now, note the epigraph quote at top; Cheney’s notion of “honor” transmutes into the steely-hard notion of “principle,” which also serves him as anodyne to the “bit of the dirty word” — compromise.

Webster’s defines honor as “adherence to principles considered right; integrity,” and also as “honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions: a code of honor.” Also the related synonym “integrity” (listed in the same definition of honor) seems germane here, defined as “indicates a soundness of moral principle that no power or influence can impair.” 5

Power and influence are the operative words here, and then we might consider how the notions of honor, honesty, fairness or integrity apply in shaping an unimpaired moral principle. There’s Cheney’s word “principle.” So, to be fair, go back and look at his quote at the top and judge for yourself how he applies the qualities of honor or morality to the notion of principle. For me, Cheney’s long, dark, bloody arm still extends into the unfolding present and future.

I’m struck in that top quote by Cheney’s use of the word “man” — rather than “person” — as embodying the quality of “principle.”
He is categorically excluding women and implicitly suggesting that “principle” is a quality inherent in his type of man, rather than woman.

What does this evidently macho posture say about his judgment of what, say, a woman vice president might do under the same circumstantial exercise of power? Would a hypothetical woman vice president indulge in “dirty” compromise regarding torture as policy?  Where might she have led us, during the Bush administration?

More pressingly, where might the high-stakes, high-power exercise of compromise now take such a leader, in the face of all the Cheney-wrought consequences before us?

The Democrats’ lead presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, is a woman, of course, as is oft-mentioned Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a primary challenger to Clinton. Given that women politicians may be more receptive to compromise than the neo-conservative boys club of Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld, et al., one might envision Warren accepting Clinton’s offer to become her vice-presidential running mate. If they won in 2016, Dick Cheney might still sneer, but our torture policies and national fate in the volatile Middle East may begin to change, with powerful women rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

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1 Danner’s essay is an extended review of RJ Cutler and Greg Finton’s film The World According to Dick Cheney, and two books: In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir by Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, and Heart: An American Medical Odyssey by Dick Cheney and Jonathan Reiner M.D. with Liz Cheney. And what of his co-author, his “straight” daughter, Liz? A New York Times reporter summed her up recently. In an abort bid for a Senate seat in Wyoming, “she carried the banner of a hawkish foreign policy at a moment when a more restrained approach to national security is ascendant in the Republican Party. Further, she prompted an ugly and public split with her lesbian sister, Mary, by declaring her opposition to same-sex marriage — and was nevertheless attacked with television ads by a third-party conservative group over gay rights.”

2 “The Darkness of Dick Cheney” by Mark Danner, 52.

3 Ibid, 53

4 Ibid, 53

5 Webster’s New Compact Dictionary, Wiley Publishing, 2003, 310; Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, Random House, 1995, 644

Cover art for “Searching for Sal” by Mark Giaimo

In the spirit of searching for a season — specifically the backlogged and waterlogged golf season — I suggest you fill your rainy, chilly wait with Searching for Sal by Rob Zaleski.

The novel was published in 2012, but should serve the annual hope that springs eternal for the elusive hole-in-one. And for the hole in the sky that lets us see what might be beyond this life. The novel takes a light and deft touch with expansive, weighty matters and, for that, brings to mind Julian Barnes. Though she’s hardly a light-touch writer, Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Living with a Wild God explores similar thematic territory.

You see, in Zaleski’s tale, a hole in one does seem to open up that bigger, mysterious ontological hole in the sky. It starts with a pact, between a fiercely faith-bolstered Catholic named Sal Magestro, who often debates the existence of an afterlife with his steady-plodding, agnostic golf pal, Nate Zavoral.*

(Full disclosure: I am a longtime friend and former colleague of Zaleski, at The Capital Times in Madison, and played a golf with him, and with few other men who seem thinly disguised as characters in this book.)

Zavoral’s personality, quirks, physical build and golf game closely resemble Zaleski’s. Like  protagonist  Z, author Z’s swing is “too wristy,” a flaw “he attributed to his baseball days.” Another of Nate’s golf buddies says he’s “ the world’s most pathetic head case” regarding “the yips” while putting (Ah, if only I was nearly as good a golfer as Rob.).

Author Rob Zaleski at Vitense driving range in Madison, WI, with his grandchildren Yani (from Sierra Leone) and Zale.

So Nate’s a good test case for the mind-bending that ensues. In their quest towards the unanswerable question, Nate and Sal dream up a sacred pact: The first of them to die will assist the other in a hole-in-one…and thus signal existence of life after death — or not.

Like many Catholic priests, middle-aged, pasta-fortified restaurateur Sal is as lusty as he is holy. So he drops dead of a coronary while fornicating with Connie Frataro, a young waitress from his Italian eatery, who resembles Marissa Tomei.

Sure enough, Nate has barely wiped the tears off his driver when he knocks a ball off a wizened oak tree, which seemingly delivers it into the par-3 hole, for his first-ever ace.

Holy pepperoni Batman! Is this really Sal, signaling from the Pebble Beach beyond? The rest of the novel becomes an allegorical search for the lost golf partner, and Zaleski plays a fun-house-mirror fantasy golf-course with it, but also sends poor Nate through the gauntlet.

The metaphysical implications — and the public debate over them and the pact’s plausibility — swiftly gain the momentum of a Tiger Woods (in his prime) tee shot. Yet the pact’s story seems as dogged and as questionable as Woods’ own future.

Nate, a modest high school English teacher, has to explain things on national TV to Jay Leno, now slack-jawed by more than bone mass. The tale swirls into virtual spoof territory by the time Nate is invited to a Peace Council gathering of international religious and spiritual leaders in Seattle, bejeweled with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama — and a video hookup with Pope John Paul II.

Zaleski is a superb, award-winning journalist who always went the extra mile for a great story or profile, but also knew where to pull up and honor truth as much as possibility. He doesn’t overplay the potential farce in his hand, and he builds suspense with deftly rendered details. Here’s Nate nervously standing at a microphone to address the august gathering of religious leaders:  “He reached inside his suit coat and retrieved a small cellophane baggie that contained one of the two copies of the pact — slightly crumpled and bent at the corners– that he and Sal had signed the summer of 1999. The Peace Council members all broke into wide smiles.”

The virtual Pope offers sage commentary on Nate’s prejudices against the Catholic Church but also treads lightly regarding grand spiritual claims for the golfer’s experience. Best of all, the Pontiff notes that, though he’d done “some kayaking and skiing” in Poland when he was younger, he understands that golf “is a very humbling game.”

That actually sounds like something the current Pope Francis would say. But that kernel of truth may underlie some of the more high-flown issues of this story.

The empirical mystery appears solved with a twist of an ending, which contains genuine emotional  power, and political resonance, especially for the situation of the young character introduced in the plot-turn. But are the bigger questions really answered?

Throughout this quickly unfolding odyssey, Nate’s existential queasiness is steadied by his wife  Brigitte — as rock-solid as the author’s real-life counterpart, Cindy — and by Rev. Mitch Crandall, who becomes his spiritual and political advisor, and is clearly based on the remarkable Rev. David Couper, a liberal former Madison police chief-turned-pastor.

Author Rob Zaleski with Episcopalian Minister David Couper, a former Madison police chief who appears to be the model for the Rev. Mitch Crandall in “Searching for Sal.” Photo by Cynthia Zaleski

I came away from the book reflecting that once you think your tee shot has taken angelic wigs to the perfectly manicured promised land, something happens to shatter your sense of orderly and rational  existence, and situational odds.

The end may be no more conclusive than the image of Nate gazing at the sun-drenched sky, which adorns the book cover.

And yet, he might as well be staring down into that little four-and-a-quarter-inch hole of darkness on the green, which New York Times contributing writer Charles McGrath contemplated in an op-ed column Sunday on the golf hole and “the future of golf.” 1

There’s certainly a mystique to Nate’s shadowy little hole, and perhaps to the one all golfers aim for.

McGrath writes: “The origin of the hole is a burrow, presumably, discovered by some Scottish shepherd knocking pebbles with his crook, and even today the golf hole retains some of that burrow-like quality: It’s a refuge, a temporary lair into which your ball sinks out of sight and where you have to reach down and extracted it, as if it were hiding”… “like a mouse.”

Golfing metaphors can be as big as the ocean, and the life beyond, or as seemingly modest as something hiding in that small black hole, something with a life of its own. What we find might tell us a little bit about who we are for what we choose to chase in this life, and about what we might do once we discover what dwells in that hole, in the ground, and in the sky.

As Grace Slick once sang about the proverbial rabbit’s hole, “Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.”

Or try Searching for Sal. It carries your imaginary tee shot a long ways, into the sky and the shadows.

The book is available on Amazon.com

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* I describe myself as an agnostic, but I’m an occasional attender of Unitarian meetings, and quite open to human experience. I have had two strange occurrences in the last year that might, at some point, be explained empirically. Yet the notion that these events were “signs from a departed loved one” fits perfectly, just as each ghost might have it. Perhaps I will write about this some day.

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/sunday-review/a-birdbath-size-hole-and-the-future-of-golf.html?_r=0

Jason Moran and the Fats Waller Dance Party, South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, 901 15th Ave., South Milwaukee  414-766-5049, 7:30 p.m. April 26. $45-$20 adults, $39-$18 Seniors (60+), $20-$12 students

So, who is Jason Moran, really? Well, seems he took his MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and began messin’ with folks, in his latest musical project.  For part of the show, he transforms into the Harlem Renaissance pianist-singer-songwriter Fats Waller, wearing a giant caricature head.

If you go, and shout out something about his head getting too big, he’ll be asking for it, with that get-up. But he might just grin and say “Yo’ feets’ too big!” as Fats would have, in one of his most famous songs.

There’s actually a modest yet purposeful tone to his reflections on the touring project, which reportedly supports an upcoming CD of the show’s take on Waller. “It’s not really jazz, per se,” Moran said of the music, in an NPR interview with Janaya Williams. “It’s dance music. It’s club dance music. If you go to a club in the Village or Tribeca (in New York) or somewhere, this might be what you hear in the club pumping over a sound system. So it’s not jazz.”

Moran points out that Waller was a regular in clubs and speakeasies back in his day, and that some of his lyrics fit right in with today’s club music. “Fats Waller has his really crazy things that he says in his lyrics, too, about thugs being in the crowd, you know, ‘Put that gun away’; he says stuff like that,” Moran says. “It’s almost like those clubs that he was in were as roguish as some of the clubs today.” 1

Courtesy www.etsy.com

That sounds like Moran, who’s also The Kennedy Center director and advisor for jazz, and will host a big multi-artist event at the Washington venue from May 4-11. * He’s also among the first jazz musicians to incorporate hip-hop into their music, notably on his excellent 2005 Blue Note album Same Mother, which thematically contemplated “Gangsterism on the rise.”

He’s also worked in multi-arts contexts, and is a collaborator. The giant papier-mache Waller head was designed for the show by Haitian artist Didier Civil. Moran conceived and first produced the Waller show in Harlem in collaboration with noted genre-bending bassist/singer Meshell Ndegeocello, who unfortunately will not be part of the South Milwaukee performance. There will be trained local dancers onstage for the show, though not those depicted in top photo, courtesy chicagotribune.com. Singer Lisa E. Harris will handle the vocals here, accompanied by Moran and his band.

Milwaukee-area trumpeter Jamie Breiwick will open the show with a group of Milwaukee and Chicago musicians playing all original material. 2

But the party’s designed to get people up off their feet, so bring your shoes for dancing in the aisles. In a 2011 NPR interview Moran spoke of the germination of the project to arrange Waller’s music for a dance party. It was “just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music,” Moran says. “For me, it’s the recontextualization; what is the functionality of the music anymore? In music, where does [the emotion] lie? Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? “Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context,” Moran says. “So I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.”

Jason Moran. Courtesy blogs.ottowacitizen.com

One senses the earnestly penetrating thought behind this interesting career turn, which skeptics might presume as little more than commercially motivated. Moran is one of the most impressive, ingenious and culturally-attuned musicians in jazz today, qualities which have earned him widespread acclaim including a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. The pianist-composer’s jazz influences include Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Andrew Hill, and now clearly, Waller.

Moran’s last two CDs, TEN and the soulful duo album Hagar’s Daughter with saxophonist-flutist Charles Lloyd, were among the best jazz recordings of their respective years. Moran’s current show evokes the great stride pianist-entertainer in his prime era, the 1920s and early ’30s. And yet, this show is Waller updated with “rhythms coming out of 1960s-and-beyond dance music: Motown, house, hip-hop,” according to New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff.

The Harlem Renaissance allowed urbane African American arts to flourish, and nobody did it with more flair, wit and virtuosity than Fats Waller. So party-goers might find themselves stepping into an easy speakin’ and jivin’ past, but find it all striding and hip-hopping to the present.

Here’s a teaser video for the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aEnjom1R84

* Moran’s Waller Dance Party is also scheduled for 7:30 p.m. May 3, at Miner Auditorium in the SF JAZZ Center in San Francisco, with Nedegeocello. https://www.sfjazz.org/events/season1/fats-waller-dance-party

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1 http://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136274480/jason-moran-takes-fats-waller-back-to-the-club

2 In South Milwaukee, besides Moran on piano and Harris on vocal, Moran’s band includes Leron Thomas on trumpet, Tarus Mateen on bass and Charles Haynes on drums.

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick’s show-opening group will include Neil Davis on guitar, Dustin Laurenzi on tenor saxophone, Isaiah Joshua on Fender Rhodes electric piano, Mike Harmon on bass and Devin Drobka on drums.

Here is a photo of the premiere performance of Frank Stemper’s “The Persistence of Honor,” in the Netherlands in 2009.

Here is a link to what composer Frank Stemper believes is the best recorded performance to date of  “The Persistence of Honor,” his piece for cello and chamber orchestra. This performance was by The New Chicago Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Edward Benyas, Music Director, with Eric Lenz on cello, on October 28, 2012 at Preston Bradley Hall in The Chicago Cultural Center: http://www.frankstemper.com/10ThePersistenceofHonor_000.mp3

I reviewed this composition in a recent Culture Currents blog https://kevernacular.com/?p=3450 based on a live rehearsal performance conducted also by Benyas, with a student of Lenz’s, Richard Davis, on cello on April 7 in Carbondale. I also referred to the score and this recording which is audible by clicking the “LISTEN” tab on Stemper’s website at http://www.frankstemper.com/STEMPER-COMPOSITIONS.htm

There are three more of Frank Stemper’s works upcoming:

APRIL 12, 3 PM Unitarian Church, Carbondale, String Trio (2008), Southern Illinois Chamber Music Society. 

JUNE 4, 4 PM Colorado State University, So It Goes (1999), Ensemble Pastiche

JUNE 22, 9 AM Zipper Hall at the Colburn School – Los Angeles, Isolated Criterion No. 2 (2008) Jacob Tews, violist

Go to Stemper’s site (above) for more information.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of him, but Frank Stemper has built an auspicious career as a composer over his 30-year residency as director of the composition program at Southern Illinois University. He dwells beyond the fashionable circles of contemporary classical music which may catch periodic attention on NPR, or the rare forays of mainstream classical ensembles into contemporary repertoire.

Well, listen up (and below), judge for yourself. Stemper carries a strong reputation in many parts of the world as well as the U.S. by following his own vision, one that’s not easily pigeonholed or even marketed.

He is good enough to have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award, and to receive an N.E.A. Fellowship. 1 He’s received enough honors and commissions to sustain a global reputation. And yet, the annual Outside the Box Festival of New Music he has long co-directed at SIU somehow reflects his own peculiar comfort area — out on the windswept fringes, perhaps not far from the precipice lurking over the tumble into obscurity. More specifically, Stemper has worked for many years exploring the formal and sonic possibilities of through-composed music in an expressionistic post-Schoenberg/Sessions/Carter mode and sometimes with strong jazz undercurrents (He began as a jazz pianist).

Some of Stemper’s most striking and indelible music has been driven by his social and political awareness — for example, “Secrets of War,” the vividly executed George W. Bush -era piece for orchestra and voices, and the 2007 chamber orchestra work “Global Warming,” stormy, fulminating musical statement on this vast geo-political issue. This was a point when climate change had reached a crisis mode — from the melting polar caps on down — in terms of human response to this creeping, increasingly devastating phenomena. And some of his most affecting and personal works are with texts, such as “A Love Imagined” — verse written shortly after poet Herbert Scott learned of the leukemia that eventually killed him — and “The Sensation of Waking,” with an autobiographical text by the composer. Stemper started early with text setting; his PhD dissertation work was Seamaster, a cantata for soprano and chamber orchestra, for which I provided a libretto. 2

Yet nothing has move me in Stemper’s oeuvre more than the “Persistence of Honor.” Though nominally programmatic, its emotional and dramatic power derives from pure orchestral music. The 10-minute work was commissioned and premiered by Het Wagenings Orkest ‘Sonante” in The Netherlands in 2009.

I had my first opportunity to hear it performed live at a dress rehearsal for the climaxing concert of SIU’s 2014 Outside the Box Festival, which centered on a retrospective of Stemper’s music, in honor of his retiring this year from his faculty position, though he will continue to compose, as he put it “without a net.”

Stemper marks the score of The Persistence of Honor with the instruction: “Mysterious, hazy.” And his metronome marking instructs that a quarter note be played at a fairly languorous 60 per minute tempo. (See link to page one of the score:)

HONORBEGINNING (1)

A mysterious legato tonality creeps in with violins sustaining a high B, against which first the oboe interposes four notes a whole step higher, and the flute inserts a B flat, then two As and two more B flats, for a distinctly warped dissonance. This icy legato glaze is immediately “out there,” recalling Gyorgy Ligeti’s space music for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Then the solo cello enters to somewhat ground the music, with a mordant descending theme starting with a high flatted C (or B) 32^nd note sliding into several B flats. So with the bitonal seconds (B against B flat) Stemper immediately creates a conflicted, ambiguous tonality that — by the time the cello completes its submerging line — begins to get under your skin.

And then the primary rising melody arrives, a steadily repeated motif that you seem to get to know even as it changes slightly each time it is re-articulated. The motif illustrates Stemper’s composing process because, compared to many of his scores for larger ensembles, this score is relatively simple. “Composing for me is a process of drawing out the consequences (as I perceive them) of an initial idea … Once the idea has become specific enough, it begins to generate its own continuation…The sense of the large structure becomes increasingly clear as the work progresses.” This is actually a quote Stemper has appropriated from his mentor, the late composer Andrew Imbrie, who had a philosophy “in complete parallel to my own,” Stemper has said.

But beyond the way the motif formally generates the music, you hear the melodic theme reaching, yearning, and pressing beyond itself to an outer edge that has a magnetic draw for the listener. The effect is like pulling you to an edge that may seem dangerous or uncertain as the pathway lengthens and blends into shadow.

Considered in the political context the composer wrote it, a historical framework is evident. That is, the will for freedom by America’s body politic as a whole. A sense of Jesse Jackson’s idealized “rainbow coalition” quietly animates this music. It moves persistently, though not without struggle, and its foreboding sense of both past and the future harkens to Civil War-era leader Frederick Douglass’ great declaration, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” That combination of humility and willfulness — the persistence of honor — permeates this music and drives it forward into the imagination of the listener, and ideally the greater American public. The cello’s lower theme, a descending, querulous line fighting the tonality, signifies the undercurrent of struggle, the consciousness of darker forces, and the persistent challenge of the Obama era.

President Barack Obama in a photo portrait by Pete Souza

At the six-and-a-half minute mark, “Persistence” wills itself to a new depth and breadth of intensity, and then retreats again to self-questioning.  Here one senses it’s parallel to political reality in a polarized America. Troubled interior dialogue ensues, then the rising theme retraces its steps yet again in a lower, more oblique tonality leading finally to the work’s highest pitch at the end, like a signal to the future, or to a dream deferred now come to fruition, or failure. To the crux of the matter.

Stemper’s “Persistence of Honor” will measure and stand the test of time.

____________

1 I nominated Stemper for the Pulitzer as a music critic for The Capital Times.

2 Given that collaboration and a lifelong friendship with the composer, I provide full disclosure of my connections to Stemper.

Addendum/correction: Although he was quite appreciative of my review, composer Frank Stemper wrote to make a couple of clarifications. Two of the compositions I referred to have broader thematic connotations than those I ascribed to them. Stemper notes that the correct title to his solo piano composition is “Global Warning” not “Global Warming” and that he was alluding to the pervasiveness of poverty, racism and international conflicts, as well as the human species’ selfishness and greed. He does lay great importance on the role of leaders. His program notes for the piece conclude: “Although this seems hopeless, there is at least one ideology that might lead to better conclusion for us: Art.”

“Global Warning” was written for the extraordinary Korean pianist Junghwa Lee, who performed it in Carbondale in April with electrifying power and precision.

Secondly, Stemper notes that “The Persistence of Honor” was composed before Barack Obama was elected, so the piece strives to pose musically the rhetorical question articulated by Charles Darwin: “Will honor rise above human evil, simply because it must in order for humans to continue?” Stemper is, however, profoundly impressed by what Obama has accomplished and stood for. He adds his piece does address “how our country became a complete country with his election — finally.” As such, he expresses a remarkable and rare optimism, though he says he’s cognizant of the current Republican Party’s lack of articulated ideals and obstructionism.

Ron Cuzner (left), an active champion of the local jazz scene, greets saxophonist Frank Morgan, who spent much of his early performing years in Milwaukee and returned to play at the original Milwaukee jazz gallery and other area venues. Photo  (ca. 1990s) courtesy Pat Robinson.

My recent remembrance of beloved and peripatetic Milwaukee jazz radio programmer Ron Cuzner prompted appreciative responses from various musicians and fans. However, Cuzner’s presence was too strong and distinctive to prompt simply benign recollections.

Although most people appreciated the high and discerning quality of the straight-ahead jazz he played — except perhaps some advocating for more avant-garde music — there was a distinct difference of opinion on his one-of-a-kind announcing style.

I wanted to reproduce at least two of these comments along with my responses to them because they are from two people whom respect. The first, a recent e-mail exchange which combines intimations of dissent with humor, is from Mitar Covic, who was better known as Mitch Covic when he played bass for a number of Milwaukee-area jazz groups and bandleaders in the 1970s, including Buddy Montgomery, Berkeley Fudge and What on Earth?
Covic relocated to Chicago shortly after this collaborative efforts with Chuck LaPaglia at the Jazz Gallery when it opened in the late 1970s .

The second message was taken from the comments section of my Culture Currents blog, and written by Mike Drew, a long-time Milwaukee journalist. Drew covered jazz for The Milwaukee Journal in the 1970s and perhaps the 1960s. In the late 1970s, the Milwaukee television and radio beat became large enough that Drew took it over as a full-time job. This left the responsibilities of covering the revitalized Milwaukee jazz scene to first, Bill Milkowski (a noted jazz journalist and author now based in New York), and then myself. Drew still writes about jazz as a freelancer.

Former Milwaukee bassist, composer and poet Mitar Mitch Covic. Photo courtesy Ron Seymour photography

From Mitar Covic:

Kevster,

Thanks for the Cuzner reminder. Of course I was a listener if not always a fan of his style.

And we had a volatile contretemps over my relationship with Chuck and the Jazz Gallery (I remind you that I lived in the upstairs apartment and shared the kitchen table with the likes of Barry Harris, Nat Adderley, Lee Konitz, and even a “bath” w. Sonny Stitt when he thought he had opened the door down to the club but fell into the tub with me……(we had to dry him out in both senses of the term). — Mitar

Here’s the second exchange of comments.

Mike Drew:

Michelle just sent me this. Lovely, thoughtful, kind and knowing.

Makes me want to read more of you. Where can I find your stuff? Good to catch a glimpse of you the other night at Wilson Center.
Is there a review available? Your thoughts?
BTW. I was never big Cuzner fan. The music was usually fine and it was
great to have it there. I liked his taste but the style was too self-reverential and affected for me. I won lots of CDs on his name-the-artist contest, which kept me up to 1:30, but not as many as the Sentinel’s Keith Spore.
I worshipped Dave Garroway, WMAQ Chicago, for about six years in the mid and late ’40s at midnight to 1:30 a.m. I listened to most of his 1160 Club jazz too many nights in my mid to late teens. Also a stylist, but a genius. Hooked me on Sarah, Ella, Woody, etc. whom he played and then replayed, pointing out things he loved the second time around.
I wrote him once asking the value of my 78 of Bob Crosby’s The Big Noise from Winnetka.
Here was his reply to an enchanted 15 year old: “Dear Old Delicate Mike. Your precious platter is worth two lonely dollars. Oversized Alohas for those incandescent phrases. Peace, Dave.”
No wonder he made it to the “Today Show,” where he was its first, and best,
anchor.”
Peace,
MD
________

My reply:

Been out of town, Mike, but thanks for reading and responding. I can’t comment on Garroway’s musical tastes having heard him only as a television personality on Today. He sounds like he was his own sort of national treasure. Giving you some wide berth to hold up Garroway as a standard, I would acknowledge Cuzner as being perhaps a peculiarly Midwestern oddity, as a personality. But he was also very good and thoughtful man with a strong vision which usually requires a certain ego, both of which were generously evident on his program.

As I grew to know the music with this great assistance, I accepted the oddities of his manner like those of a jazz soloist with an indelibly personal voice. Yes, he was self-conscious at times, perhaps proud, but I found him self-parodying as much as self-aggrandizing, because of his remarkably dry sense of humor, and the odd catch phrases, and personal anecdotes that made him into a someone you could understand and somewhat relate to — as in the anecdote about his aunt who called him “Butchie.” I related to his loneliness.

I think his style was partly his way of taking a stand for the sake of the music, of saying this is worth your attention. After all, if “Solitude” isn’t, what is? So his pregnant pauses were meant for you to open your mind up, to honor this music as you experience it as the most vital and mature indigenous art form of our own nation and people. Perhaps that sounds a little highfalutin’, but in my mind Cuzner — and especially what he contributed to Milwaukee’s culture — like a nocturnal Robin Hood of jazz, grows in stature over time rather than the reverse. — Kevin (Kevernacular)

I believe Cuzner’s rhythmically nuanced announcing style brought people back to the music, which was an art of rhythm more than anything. Many listeners may recall his opinion on “my very favorite drummer, Billy Higgins.”

Here listen to Higgins, who played with a variety of straight-ahead and more cutting-edge performers over his long career. In this live festival recording listen to Billy flesh out the dep pocket of his groove with bassist Ron Carter. Higgins did it in and in obtrusive but quite infectious style. Ron would’ve loved this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaWW6XzZq2Q

The Ukrainian opposition leader Vitali Klitschko attending a protest rally in Maidan square , Kiev, December 16, 2013. Courtesy New York Review of Books

Culture intersects naturally if uneasily with politics, which is why I’m compelled to note a few important readings I’ve done in news and cultural journals in the last few days because they resonate across our cultural spectrum.

First, the seemingly indispensable New York Review of Books, offers up the most troubling and compelling single piece of contemporary geopolitical and historical journalism I’ve encountered in quite some time. The operative word of the title is fascism as in “Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine” by noted Yale history professor Timothy Snyder. He zeros in on the current geopolitical crisis in Crimean Ukraine with chilling insight into how Russia (read powermonger Putin) and the Ukrainian government have conspired in asserting a far-right policy of so-called Eurasianism, as a serious and seemingly far-reaching political saber rattle with the European Union.

Snyder describes insidious creeping racist fascism in the mounting movement, including fairly virulent anti-Semitism and other racial hatred including advertisements showing “dark skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the ground,” and calls for gays who die in car crashes “to have their hearts cut out.”

He also explains the complexities of these ideological deceptions wherein we find the new and politically savvy fascists labelling their protesting and opposing contingencies as so many Nazis.

“What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf?” Snyder asks rhetorically. “Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools – which by many indications is quite justified.”

One of his concluding points: “The current Russian attempt to manipulate the memory of the Holocaust is so blatant and cynical that those who were so foolish to fall for it will one day have to ask themselves just how, in the service of what, they have been taken in?”

It brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s still-controversial and yet seemingly provocative comments about “the banality of evil.” Evil seems less banal today yet still conspires, in its new ways, to politically anesthetize us.

I urge you to read Snyder’s piece, contemplate it, and act as you see fit.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/

Also, in the latest Sunday Review of The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has an interesting quiz called “Do You Speak Dictator?”
It parallels Snyder’s concerns that international geopolitics are so chaotic and rife with corruption and moral compromise that we need maintain our guard more than ever. It’s a sad commentary that Kristof’s number two question — which leader has the higher domestic approval rating, Putin or Obama? — will reveal that Putin, after stealing Crimea rates higher with his public than Obama, after achieving quasi universal healthcare.

The quiz is an engaging work of cultural-political byplay, rife with urgent meaning:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/my-quiz-on-dictators/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Milwaukee jazz DJ Ron Cuzner died in March 2003. Courtesy Ron Cuzner.com 

I received a number of appreciative comments and memories from musicians who read my remembrance piece on Ron Cuzner for the anniversary of his death on March 29. The response indicates how much he meant to Milwaukee-area musicians, because for over three decades Cuzner promoted and played local artists as much as could be reasonably expected of a radio host trying to present the spectrum of straight ahead jazz. And he helped promote them in a concerts on his program and record store. So here are several intriguing, wistful and amusing recollections of Cuzner.

Perhaps my favorite is this remarkable anecdote by Daron Hagen, a renowned Milwaukee composer and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow who is known especially for his operas, such as “Shining Brow,” based on the most dramatic and tragic period of innovative architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s life. More recently, Daron gained widespread acclaim for his opera “Amelia,” the epic story of a pregnant young woman who In barks on an odyssey to gain understanding about her relationship to Navy pilot father who died in the Vietnam war.

Here is Hagen’s story:

“Cuzner was my partner in insomnia for years growing up in Milwaukee. Will never forget that soothing, knowledgeable voice, or his eclectic, always-superb taste in music. One night, working the register in an all-night “White Hen Pantry” convenience store in Brookfield, I remember, all alone, around four in the morning, freaking out when a crazy-looking dude walked in and began pulling stuff randomly off the shelves. I was playing WFMR. On came Cuzner’s soothing voice. I swear, the guy just dropped everything, sat down in the aisle, and began listening to him. A half hour later, when the police came by for donuts and coffee, he was still there. They asked him to get up and go. He left, peaceably, and smiled at me on the way out.”

Evidently the serenity and sublime energy of “The Dark Side” spoke mysteriously to the potentially dangerous stranger. Back then, and increasingly in retrospect, Cuzner’s somber opening theme song, “Solitude” by Duke Ellington, was a profound and timeless expression of humanity for the forsaken, the troubled or the lonely sorts of people haunting “Nighthawks,” Edward Hopper’s famous painting of sleepless city dwellers in an all-night coffee shop. I believe Cuzner understood all this as well as Ellington or Hopper.

Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting “Nighthawks,” from in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. Courtesy shadeone.com.

And yet, several musicians also cherish Cuzner’s dry and eccentric wit. Although the Racine-born Cuzner was a devoted Chicago Cubs fan, he had slyly subversive attitude towards sports. This emerged in his peculiar way of announcing baseball scores during his required news reports.

He would often say something like, “In sports today, Milwaukee defeated Toronto, New York defeated Boston, St. Louis defeated Cincinnati, Los Angeles defeated San Francisco… and my beloved Chicago Cubs lost to Pittsburgh. The scores were five to one, seven to six, three to two, eight to four and nine to six.” It was up to the listener to figure out the precise connections between the teams and in the scores.

Acclaimed jazz guitarist-educator Jack Grassel, like Hagen, once held a dreary late-night service job that Cuzner helped him endure. Grassel recalls:

“When Cuzner was on the air at WZMF, I had a got a third-shift job as a desk clerk at a sleazy motel on Fond du Lac Avenue.  My job coincidentally had me work every hour that Cuz was on the air. I purchased an FM radio to take to work. So I heard every minute of every show for the entire year that I worked there. That must have been around 1960 or 68.  I had nobody to talk to because I worked alone. So did Ron, so I’d call him up and we’d talk almost every night.  Cuz was into Charles Lloyd that year and played the live Forest Flower album and Planet Earth by Cannonball Adderley often.  Some nights it was funky organ players all night.”

Cuzner was also eager to share his passion and knowledge of jazz with any fan who was interested. On the Ron Cuzner Facebook Page, John Doerge recalls “When Ron ran his jazz store in the early 1990s he gave me this list of basic jazz recordings that everyone should know.”

Doerge poasted a scan of the list Cuzner gave him, with the DJ’s markings on it. It would appear Cuzner used the libray as a set ‘s checklist for his show.

Courtesy John Derge, Facebook page.

There are many other recollections and artifacts about Cuzner on the Facebook page as well as podcasts of his radio broadcasts, organized by Al Jewer. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ron-Cuzner/97979281464

i Ron Cuzner signed his name to as many of his thousands of LPs and CDs as possible, Here’s his signature on the Phil Woods album “Roundup.” Courtesy Steve Cohen 

Blues harmonica player, guitarist, singer and scholar Steve Cohen also buys and sells vintage, collectible long-playing albums. “A batch that I recently bought had Ron’s name on the back of the jacket of one of them,” Cohen says. “That was inspiring.” The LP, by alto saxophonist Phil Woods titled “Roundup” (see photo detail), includes Cuzner’s signature on both the front and the back of the album, illustrating his almost obsessive concern with putting his name on as many of his thousands of albums and CDs as possible, perhaps fearing a robbery during the long, nighttime hours of his program “The Dark Side.”

“Also I was on the WAMI ((Wisconsin Area Music Industry) Board of Directors a few years back,” Cohen says. “Through the efforts of the board, we were able to give Ron a Hall of Fame award, just shortly before he passed away. It was very gratifying to see him get some recognition. He was so important to so many of us.”