Here’s my two cents worth (and spare change) on the 2012 Grammy Awards. Nope I didn’t hear all the music nominated. How many people did?

But I heard enough to assert my bloggistic opinion, he replied. Here’s an eccentrically broad, personal and biased commentary.

I am glad that the Robert Glasper Experiment won for Best R&B Album. This man showed great creativity, daring, and smart taste. I wrote an article on him for Shepherd Express and as a blog post. The interesting angle was that he played in South Milwaukee, which would’ve been unthinkable for a black artist, borderline suicidal, before the civil rights era.

Here’s that whole story FYI: https://kevernacular.com/?p=844

What’d I liked about Glasper’s album “Black Radio”? The CD delivers not gangsta rapology, but rather a kind of immersion in supple R&B-groove, chill-out “experimentation for meditation.”

It challenged preconceptions. What can you presuppose about an album that seamlessly combines Erykah Badu singing Mongo Santamaria’s Afro-Latin jazz classic “Afro-Blue,” and  Lalah Hathaway recasting the cool ecstasy of Sade’s “Cherish the Day”? Add to that “The Consequences of Jealousy” by crossover jazz bassist Meshell Ndegeocello (who plays on the album), David Bowie’s “Letter to Hermione” and Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Glasper’s originals, aided by Mos Def, Musiq Soulchild and others, help it all meld. Unlike hardcore hip-hop, Black Radio brims with melodic and harmonic sophistication, more like the hybrids of fellow jazzer Jason Moran.

As for Album of the Year, The Black Keys’ El Camino is strong, scratch-your-grunge-itch stuff but a notch below their previous album Brothers. Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange was right there, but he’ll probably get his, in time (He deservedly won Best Contemporary Urban Album). So I’m not shocked that Mumford and Sons nabbed best album, and happy their Americana category won. It’s a breakthrough vernacular win, like jazzman Herbie Hancock’s best album win with River: The Joni Letters was a few years ago.

However, very good as M&S are, they still strike me as derivative of various American roots-rock bands. Could a bunch of Brits be outdoing all American groups at their own genre? Betraying a tinge of Americanism here, I think not, and might’ve awarded Old Crow Medicine Show’s Carry Me Back or The Avett Brothers’ The Carpenter instead. Or say, Chuck Prophet’s un-nominated Temple Beautiful, an unsentimental and lovingly loosey-goosey roots-rock ode to the seemingly perpetual cultural prism called San Francisco.

I’d love to hear from a Brit reader, or two (and Yanks always). I know, Britain has its own profound roots of traditional and eccentric folk music which contributed to America’s. And the Brits got the deepest grip on American blues in what became the Blues Revival of the ‘60s, though the integrated, Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band led the way.

However, today Americans are much more aware, appreciative of, and creatively responsive to, their cultural roots.

For example, my actual choice for album of the Year would be This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark, a nominee for Best Folk Album. It’s co-produced by Shawn Camp and Tamara Saviano, a Milwaukee native who previously blessed us with the Grammy-nominated Stephen Foster tribute album Beautiful Dreamer.*

Clark’s esteemed peers performed and helped reveal how his song writing has quietly carved a broad swath of insight, peculiarity, tragedy and comedy that epitomizes an essential strain of the American experience. He may be the dean of Texas songwriters, a sun-parched musical bard category that may outshine all others in America. “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,” “Dublin Blues,” “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” “Stuff that Works,”” The Last Gunfighter Ballad,” “Randall Knife” are among many superb Clark songs still underexposed, yet hidden right in the heart of America.  Listen here, to Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Roseanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, James McMurtry and others.

Along similar lines of preference and argument, the best country album should’ve been Jamey Johnson’s Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran, rather than Zac Brown’s Uncaged. Sure Brown’s doing mostly original stuff but he’s got a bit too much rock in his country. My bias is toward traditional or new-trad or alt-country, the latter which Brown is somewhat, but now mainstream country loves him, it seems, the way it now gluts on heavy guitar riffs. Johnson’s curatorial project shed light on one of the most incisively truth-telling songwriters in country history and, like the Clark tribute, had heavyweight acknowledging that with their interpretations, including Nelson, Kristofferson, E. Harris, Merle Haggard, Elvis Costello, Ray Price, Bobby Bare, Allison Krause, George Strait, and Lee Ann Womack etc.

That reminds me of another album, which probably wasn’t nominated because it was released as a combo DVD video as well. That’s We Walked the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash. I won’t list the all-star lineup but do check it out. It climaxed with, for this listener, perhaps the most moving performance of the year: “Highwayman” with Jamey Johnson singing the final verse — which the late Cash sang in the version of the song which The Highwaymen (Cash, Nelson, Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings) recorded in 1985. It’s one of Jimmy Webb’s most poetic, timeless, transcendent and rootsy songs.

Johnson first really got to me with his brief but powerful solo set at the 25^th Farm Aid in Milwaukee in October of 2010. He’s a slightly acquired taste, as is Guy Clark. But Johnson’s foghorn-of-the-soul voice and brave commitment to a tradition is as authentic as they come in country these days, among relatively new performers.

OK, radically shifting directions — Country to Classics — but you should never try to pin down Culture Currents. I like messing with your heads a bit. And vernaculars do speak, in many tongues.

Although I haven’t yet heard Michael Tilson Thomas’s recording of John Adams’ Harmonielehre and Short Ride In A Fast Machine, kudos to the Academy for honoring a living composer, if the most obvious one, for Best Classical Orchestral Recording. The former piece achieves the improbable: merging minimalism with its antithesis, Arnold Schoenberg, thus opening a deep throbbing vein that pulses with dark duende and humanity intensely magnified.

Yet the San Francisco Symphony program seems slight compared to Simon Rattle’s 1994 recording of these works, which also includes “The Chairman Dances” and other Adams pieces (full disclosure: a relative of mine is in the SF orchestra, so I’m avoiding favoritism here.).

And Thomas beat out a strong reading of Mahler’s First Symphony by Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Radio Orchestra. Hearing this ever-mighty Mahler – as he echoes through the vast and haunted crevasse between Romanticism and modernism — reminds one of how minimalism, liberating as it can be, so often is too much of not enough.

I say, Mahler! by a nose, famously aquiline. (Look for a brand-new recording of Mahler’s First by Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra music director Edo du Waart in the 2013 Grammy running, albeit with his other band, The Royal Flemish Philharmonic.)

In Best Opera Recording, James Levine and his Wagnerian horde predictably rolled over the competition with his Der Ring cycle, like the Third Reich steamrolling Poland (a strange role for Levine). But smashed in that blitzkrieg was Alban Berg’s Lulu, an unforgettably entrancing Lulu of a high-modernist opera, bravely led by Michael Boder, and Vladimir Jurowski’s take on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.

Best Jazz Vocal Album went to Esperanza Spalding’s Radio Music Society. I still think Ms. Spalding is a better musician and conceptualizer than a singer. She should not have beaten out Kurt Elling’s 619 Broadway: The Brills Building Project (tributing the Gershwins, Kerns, Porters, et al) or Luciana Souza’s The Book of Chet (as in Baker). But Spalding is ambitious and definitely the jazz flavor (dare I say sweetheart?) of the year. And she’s got game and I do love her world-class ‘fro.

I’d also say that Arturo Sandoval’s admirable For Diz: Every Day I Think of You won Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album with more flash than my choice. The Gil Evans Project proved that nothing can replace modern jazz’s greatest arranger, but leader Ryan Truesdell’s magnificent effort on Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans, unearthed glittering new treasures from the late Evans’ legacy. And although The Evans Project album’s How About You achieves a splendid swing, it hardly should’ve won Best Instrumental Arrangement over the same album’s endlessly beguiling Barbara Song or the transporting Pubjab, neither of which was nominated. A very retro — borderline moldy fig — choice for arrangement. I blogged on this album, too. https://kevernacular.com/?p=702

I also would have put vibes player Joe Locke and tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin right in the running for Best Improvised Jazz Solo on Centennial‘s “Waltz/Variation on the Misery/So Long.” Locke delivers gleaming substance on several of the album’s major pieces. Chick Corea and Gary Burton, who have closets full of awards and accolades, won for Hot House, vintage bebop updated. That’s perpetually hip, but also comparatively retro.

Somebody please swivel around the Academy jazz voters, so they face forward. Do you question that assertion, given my promoting of various tribute albums of, say, trad country?

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Well, Walt Whitman did. Culture Currents tries to. You go where the best music takes you.

Speaking of philosophical assertions, for a broad-brush but insightful commentary on the Grammys, I recommend NoDepression.com editor Kim Reuhl’s recent ruminations. Noting the Grammies are a sort of Music Industry/Recording Marketing love fest, she says that, even if they have no vote, the worldwide community of listeners is ultimately what counts. Listeners and the role music plays in life:

“Here’s the thing. Music is so important. Next to painting, storytelling, and dance, it’s one of the best vehicles we have for destroying fear, for confronting our best and worst selves, for letting love blow us wide open. At its best, music is where we interact with the most vulnerable bits of our humanity. It’s where we admit everything to each other, to strangers, to ourselves, in a way that is safe and embracing, and promising, and full of hope. At the end of a song, we can close the figurative container and go back to Life, renewed.”

Rave on, Kim Reuhl, rave on.
Here’s the URL to her whole piece:http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/art-the-artists-freedom-and-the-grammys

Marion Cotillard has proven her acting mettle many times over, and sounds like she’s still  forging a distinct destiny as one of the great actors of her generation, with this new performance. Just maybe she’s creating a new sort of anti-Ahab heroine. I look forward to this movie and maybe even to the rare occasion to applaud at the end. Genuine human courage has been forsaken too often in our times. Lance, are you listening?

Thanks for the critical tip-off from my former colleague at the Cap Times, Rob Thomas.

article_5b11cfe2-6033-11e2-87fd-001a4bcf887a.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN0yy3iokJ4&feature=share

I just added this to my Facebook page and then I thought, what the hell, this is too damn good not to share with everyone. So go on, dig Carlos Santana, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi… Have a happy new year and make somebody happy, make somebody strong.

Does rhetoric like this cut through any more? I hope so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN0yy3iokJ4&feature=share

“Portrait of the Artist” by Rembrandt ca. 1665. Image courtesy wikipaintings.org. 

Admission to the Milwaukee Art Museum is free today, January 3, as it is each first Thursday of the month. The museum is open until 8 PM today . but normally 10 AM to 5 PM, Tuesday through Sunday. Single admission is $15 for adults, $12 for students, seniors (65 and over), and military (with ID), and free to members and children 12 and under. Memberships for the MAM are available at the museum or by phone from the Membership Hotline,414-224-3284, or online at www.mammembership.org.

(This is the partial first draft of a blog review I will finish and post soon. I am posting it partially due to the urgency of this show’s closing date, of January 13.)

It is a face for the ages, humanity writ larger and deeper than is otherwise imaginable, painted by perhaps the one artist capable of such.

Because visual art is experienced in a single fell-swoop intake of the senses, mind and heart, “Portrait of the Artist” by Rembrandt van Rijn, currently at the Milwaukee Art Museum through January 13, represents an extraordinarily concentrated and rare opportunity for immediate cultural enrichment. Seeing it ought to be a New Year’s resolution.

Because the painting is by common critical consensus “the definitive self-portrait by any artist,” the viewer stands to gain the uncommon insight into humanity that only the best artists can provide.

Perhaps you’ve procrastinated in seeing this truly phenomenal work of art at, not uncoincidentally one of the great contemporary architectural cultural facilities in the world today, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Having just seen the Rembrandt portrait myself, I offer a fresh testimony to persuade any reader to make every attempt to see the painting, and the accompanying exhibit Rembrandt, VanDyke, Gainsborough: the Treasures of Kenwood house, London, before it leaves Milwaukee.

Perhaps your tastes are modernist and you resist much of this show’s Baroque-era artwork, wherein artists often depict the upper-class in deferential, indulgent manner as matter of practical employability.

But there’s more of strong interest to the exhibit than that, and even if there weren’t, the opportunity to see this great portrait in the flesh of its timeless oils makes it a worthy pilgrimage.

Seeing the late-life Rembrandt self-portrait in person can make all the difference, given that I have known it as a reproduction since I was a young man studying as an art major.

It is the only work in the exhibit behind glass and the only one with its own alcove and security guard, standing beside it during exhibition hours.

But here it is why it is worthy such special treatment. You see as precisely and as ambiguously what the man can embody — as a genius’s image of himself. The exhibit includes a small handout pamphlet which depicts all of Rembrandt’s painted self-portraits through his life, which allows you to see the man age and grow over his life — and thus visually contextualize this remarkable work.

Though the exhibit includes none of these seven reproduced renderings but the penultimate one, you can see immediately in the first one from 1629, a raffish bohemian with an unruly, tumbling mane. But there we see the artist’s already poised genius at using shadow to counter-intuitively infiltrate human character.

Nevertheless, not seeing the other works in person is hardly another excuse to not see the single work that virtually bespeaks that whole life.

Painted around 1665, this is not quite the artist as an old man but as an aging one probably around 58, who has yet to accept or shed many of life’s trials, burdens and illuminations.

Despite the unusual glass over oil, Rembrandt’s impasto highlights tenderly the offsetting mutations of chiaroscuro, or shading of shadows.

If one sees a certain wise serenity in his expression, there’s much more upon further in-person inspection.

One quickly senses that part of the genius lies in the looseness of brushstrokes that capture or interpret the details of a physical countenance. You sense the history of his life, in the face’s miniature valleys, peaks, pools and crevices — sculpted by 58 years, secrets of the soul that are partially and tantalizingly visible.

This is why you can’t look away immediately without sensing you’ve lost a precious thread to the inner self whom Rembrandt offered first to himself — the most crucial viewer — and then to posterity. It’s something to be cherished.

See the horizontal scar over his left brow, surely a story unto itself. Yet the slightly pursed lips demarcate measured and studied concentration and, yes, self-judgement. A somewhat pugnacious nose is marred on the left side with a creamy highlight which pushed the snout into an asymmetry that this self-defining classic modernist could appreciate, as self honesty. He had to go deeper than his contemporaries; he had no one to answer to but himself in this work unlike, say his famous group portrait of “Dutch Masters” which is actually titled “The Syndics of the Draper’s Guild,” from 1662.

Here his eyes appear as dark blotches, but their shadowed setting tells all: drooping eyelids, especially heavy under the left eye and their somewhat contained artistic focus, yet also his life burdens and, to me, a deep-seated insecurity, which many people of high accomplishment hide, yet face with. The brow casts his magical shadow on the eyes so this earthy-pigment sensuality and creamy highlights add dimension to the dark orifices of vision that seem bottomless even as they remain somewhat obscure.

For sure, precise technical delineation of eyeballs is hardly his concern. And so you can walk as close as the security guard will allow you — perhaps a couple of feet — and appreciate Rembrandt’s brushwork in its abstract luster, suppleness and sensitivity, and then step slowly back and allow the man to emerge with the weary history of a personal presence that may haunt you, like the mysterious yet beloved late uncle who never really went away.

His hair remains somewhat unruly though greatly grayed since the 1629 portrait. His contemporary academic observers must’ve shuddered at the jaunty carelessness of his hat’s tilt, and the slapdash depiction of it, the paint still seems to be drying, as an afterthought applied just five minutes ago.

If so transported, you might even whirl around to look for him at this moment, standing behind you.

The fact that the hat is barely rendered suggests Rembrandt’s lack of narcissistic regard for his own ornamentation (or scorn for such, for many its preening commission subjects) and a point of focus he doubtlessly observed to death in his  portrait-painting contemporaries.

There was far more important work to be done here, and a higher master to answer to than his physical self.

As he once said, in a statement balancing humility and highest ambition, “Choose only one master… Nature.”

So the murky earthen palette marks his fundamental yet complex relationship to Nature, just as it does evidently and most all humans captured by his palette. As he holds his actual palette and brushes, the famously sepia array of tones engulf his strong left artist’s fist with his financial and personal difficulties of the time, and profound nuances of a great artist’s still vital presence.

One can almost hear a heavy, faintly wheezing sigh seeping from his broad chest.

I feel like going out on a limb from which I might fall into a sea of rolling eyeballs among the perpetually hip.

But it’s interesting how Hope Springs has bubbled below the radar of most people’s year-end assessments of best movies. And with such superb but ponderously Oscar-seeking “masterpieces” like Lincoln and Argo, it’s no wonder that so many presume slightness to such an autumnal romance drama, even with the heavyweight star power of Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones.

The discriminating yet populist-measuring Rotten Tomatoes critical review site complied a a comparatively grudging 73 per centile ranking among critics for the flick, and only 61 per cent among its viewers. I sense RT readers may not want to be caught in a less-than-serious posture in a social-media arena where everyone’s a critic.

I think the movie suffers from typical critical biases against comedy-dramas geared toward domestic and relationship issues. And despite the trend to a “new sincerity,” the ironic viewpoints that have dominated cultural discourse since the post-WWII existentialists may prompt many to reflexively dismiss a video title like Hope Springs. I did too, until I need a pick-me-up movie after a stressful full week.

I watched the movie last night and felt plenty in my gut and my brain as I laughed through superbly nuanced moments of situation comedy and brilliant acting. And today it feels like something of substance, filled with delectable and uneasy moments that ring as true as an iron gavel pounded in the court of public consciousness, if not opinion.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers — the most nominally “hip” among high-profile critics and, yes, a Rex Reed-ish blurb machine — notes that the movie “has all the earmarks of a mawkish Lifetime movie.” And yet Travers concludes, “Hope Springs knows happy endings are provisional.’’ That’s a succinct measure of the story’s spectrum of expectation and realization.

Strung between these two storyline poles is a surprisingly tough-minded movie about hetero relationships and marriages. And yet, in a comic twist, the couple gets sex tips from a gay author’s book.

Both main characters wear spectacles throughout, signifying the self-imposed perceptual and psychic walls they’ve built up over 30-plus years. Yet Kay (Streep) yearns to rekindle the love and sexuality they once enjoyed. So she virtually blackmails hubby Arnold into a plane trip to see a renowned marriage counseling specialist.

As much as Streep sparkles and plucks heartstrings like a wounded angel, we can thank Jones for that the movie’s sinewy strength, because his repressed, stick-in-the-mud Arnold has a sharp mind and with pointed, if flawed, repostes to marriage counselor Steve Carrell’s probings. It’s true that Arnold and Kay’s characters don’t develop much but beyond typically wronged wife and insensitive husband. Within those limits these two give us as much laughs and gut twistings as one might hope for. Playing it completely straight, Carrell convinces as the therapist partly because of his usual persona’s tension of between goofy romanticism and mocking cynicism.

So his foil to Streep and Jones’ comic turns works with surprisingly consistent emotional plausibility and at times tense gravity. After all, Jones is essentially a dramatic actor and there a few craggy faces and manners that undercut creeping sentiment as well the man who tracked down the fiendish mass murderer in No Country for Old Men, among his many other gritty dramatic roles.

Full disclosure: Part of my response to the film derives from my personal experience with marriage counseling. Sadly my spouse and I were “fired” by the counselor who felt we weren’t on-task enough.

But that guy, a therapist with a somewhat successful book, was a little too self-servingly careerist to bother with our unsure missteps to the core of our issues (I never mustered Jones’ screw tightenings on the therapist’s presumptions, but I was in overwhelming  pain at the time.)

Yet Carrell’s counselor remains nonplussed with his eye calmly on the ball, and he cheerleads after the couple fails in their first full sexual re-encounter: “You guys fumbled the ball on the one-yard line and a few days ago you weren’t even in the stadium!”

Scenes from Hope Springs courtesy www.google,com

Hope Springs reaches way down in the flinty depths of Arnold’s long-dry well. A series of such determined probings by Kay and the therapist are painful and sometimes hilarious.

The couple experiences mortifying and heart-wringing setbacks in the series of “intimacy exercises” the counselor assigns them. AndArnold proves the most vulnerable, with unsurprising performance issues for a man who can’t remember the last time he had sex with his wife.

Their two actors’ largely physical comedy in an “exercise” in a movie theater at a French movie is as visually effective and touching as anything Chaplin could’ve mustered.

They finally open up directly to each other in one therapy session: “Watching the boring golf shows with you is like being married to ESPN,” Kay says, which leads to a classic male-female dichotomy:

“I didn’t complain because Kay didn’t want sex,” Arnold says.

“Love, that’s what I wanted,” she responds. “I wanted you.”

One of the film’s most powerful and poignant scenes occurs when the counselor cajoles from Arnold his best sex memory – – getting Kay on the kitchen floor when she was deeply pregnant, with surprising tenderness. “She had a little bitty apron that was getting too small because her round belly…”

So his sexual attraction seems also for the fecundity of motherhood and the incalculably powerful promise of a new family.

Yet this plays as strictly an empty empty-nesters story with their children, Brad and Molly, virtually invisible in the background, a large issue the movie probably should’ve addressed.

Nevertheless, this is a PG-13 yet “uncool” movie that parents might encourage their teens to see, to gain insight into relationship challenges that undo many marriages and send offspring into a wrenching tailspins. (Imagine inserting into this story a vividly depicted teen on such a precipice, like the gifted Morgan Saylor as brooding Dana Brody in the brilliant Showtime series Homeland.)

Baby boomers with empty-nest struggles are accumulating like cast offs in a massive junkyard of the lovelorn, so this movie does feel like a kind of Zeitgeist touchstone.

And within its genre limits, the steady counterpoint among the film’s three central characters sustains an emotional suspense that heightens the tension-releasing comedy.

Such storytelling quality in the hands of such masterful actors is something worth acknowledging and considering for the substantial relationship content this movie trafficks in.

There ought to be an Academy Award for Best Comic Dramas, or even for Best Romantic Comedy, instead of movies like this butting up against the granite long-shadow Lincolns of the world.

(Spoiler alert:)  The innate chemistry between these two tough-hearted spouses makes the final inevitable “feel good” payoff plausible and gratifying. Kay vows to watch more golf programs with him and Arnold vows to watch fewer. Between them, you sense they can aim at a par, with the steadying confidence of shared hope.

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1 http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/hope-springs-20120809#ixzz2GMh7sjfV
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I think this image beautifully captures the particular genius of the late Joe Zawinul of Weather Report, playing his two ARP 2600 synthesizers.

In a recent blog, I alluded to how advances in the ARP 2600 opened new creative vistas for the innovative jazz group. Then I happened to be perusing some old Down Beat magazines and came across this striking image from an advertisement for ARP Instruments Inc. from the June 1976 issue, shortly after the album Black Market had been released and at the dawn of of their biggest hit “Birdland” from Heavy Weather.

In the ad, Zawinul comments, “I have my own ‘magic book’ of sounds I’ve created on the 2600. Melody lines from Black Market, “Scarlet Woman ” lots of music and sound effects from other albums I’ve done. I tape some nice stuff just playing around. With the 2600, you never have to listen to the same sound twice, if you don’t want to.”

Musical technology has advanced exponentially since then, of course, but this is a wonderful portrait of a creative music pioneer frozen in time’s amber.

Down Beat magazine courtesy of Bill Schaefgen.

As a bonus, here’s an excellent interview with Zawinul at age 65 with Howard Mandel:

Joe Zawinul at 65, The Wire

Survivors of the Newtown massacre. Photo: policymic.com

Like so many, I’d love to change the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms,” but saving more innocent people from random gun violence will take more than that. Laws would not stop outlaws or disturbed people, although stricter gun registration would logically help restrict the odds of tragedies continuing.

But the problem is deep-rooted and our peculiar American culture must change because this is a self-perpetuating view of “reality,” in the sense that a certain percentage of people in America are still cultivated to our self-destructive Wild West mentality of protecting oneself and one’s property with a gun. The powerful NRA gun lobby has saturated much of our mainstream politics with its influence, and contorted, stuck-in-the-mud-with-my-gun rationalizations for “let ’em be” firearms laws. And gun sales have flourished, partly from reactive fear of whatever the future might bring.

That’s why Garry Wills’ essay is so insightful and I think important for everyone — and especially for conservatives of conscience — to read and consider, because much of their moral grounding is Bible based. Wills’ argument derives from the Bible as well, so it’s an argument that might speak to them and break the stasis of dialogue that we suffer from today, between secular liberal and evangelical conservative mindsets.

He speaks of the evil Old Testament god named Moloch and it’s important to understand our culture through such mythology which reveals truth and archetypes of the American sense of self, for better and worse.

Wills understands the American Christian mentality as well is anyone, as he demonstrated in his wonderful book Head and Heart: American Christianities. Among other things, it probed the oppressive darkness of America’s Puritan psyche, which retains a strong grip on our collective psychosis as a culture.

In that book, he notes America’s elevation of the value of “individualism” – a word our ancestors did not even possess, a term “which we have created for our own use.”

Wills quotes the first great observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville: “Egoism dries up the very seed of every virtue; individualism initially crushes only the impulses to public virtue, for over time it turns on and obliterates every other virtue and at last it disappears into egoism.”

Wills continues, this antisocial urge could be blunted by “the individual’s partial re-entry into society by way of voluntary associations, which served as buffers between the individual and the state” (Wills, Head and Heart, 79)

The problem is that we have turned the urge into a sunny virtue, erased the negative meaning and made “rugged individualism” more of an ideal principle of the American way of life.

The way we allow leeway for vigilante gunner rationalizations — like George Zimmerman’s about killing Trayvon Martin – is also symptomatic.

Another problem I see is the pervasiveness of broken families in America. It’s unclear whether the socially misfit Newtown mass murderer Adam Lanza had paternal guidance from his divorced father, or from his parents as a coherent and supportive familial unit. And his murdered mother’s Wild West zeal for guns surely facilitated the tragedy. She would have seemed to suffer from the Moloch mentality that Wills writes about in his New York Review of Books blog.

Wills’ other books include What Paul Meant and What Jesus Meant, which show his knowledge of biblical literature and its significance to us today. Then there’s his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, which reveals his insights into the wisdom, challenges and leadership of our greatest American president at the peak moment of our most violent historical crisis, which, of course, resonates to the present, as Stephen Spielberg’s new Lincoln film underscores.

Due to Wills’ deep historical erudition, the blog essay is somewhat high-toned and didactic, but as often it’s powerfully pointed. I think many of the people who have already commented on it do get it and have very good down-to-earth responses and ideas which show that Americans can address this profound and festering problem.

Here’s the link to Wills essay: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/15/our-moloch/

Note: Garry Wills, Head and Heart American Christianities Penguin Press 2007

Here’s my list of best albums of 2012 in roots-music vernaculars. This was also posted at NoDepression.com.

Field Report is the debut album of the Milwaukee folk-rock band Field Report (previously incarnated as Conrad Plymouth) which has received plenty of national press raves and provided the group with strong touring.

Best albums of 2012

1. Various Artists – This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark * (2 CD set) When writers as esteemed as John Prine, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, Robert Earl Keen, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kris Kristofferson, Darrell Scott and Ray Wylie Hubbard interpret a man’s songwriting, you know he’s a “songwriter’s songwriter.” But Clark’s no esoteric technician. He carves rough-hewn tales illuminated by glimmers of the heart, traced with bittersweet memory, toughness and love — battered and resilient, as in the insouciant hope-against- fate of the long-distance love ode, “Dublin Blues,” a smaller-canvas variation of Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Clark’s jaunty melodies invariably fit the lyric and sentiment like a Randall knife swinging in a perfectly woven sheath.
2. Various Artists — We Walk the Line: A Celebration of The Music Of Johnny Cash CD/DVD Note blog on this at http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/they-have-the-back-of-the-man-in-black-a-johnny-cash-celebration 
3. Jamey Johnson — Living For a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran. Like Guy Clark, Cochrane cut to the heart of the matter with uncanny precision and insight, Clark with perhaps a bit more color. But here’s poetry stripped to its essence (“I Go to Pieces” of course; the terse jukebox ode “A-11” replays insistently like any “our song”) Johnson, a wise young traditionalist, exquisitely complements another heavyweight lineup, including Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Elvis Costello, Ray Price, Bobby Bare, George Strait, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Cochran’s own voice, reciting a few lyrics.
4. Iris DeMent — I Sing the Delta. DeMent struggles with writer’s block, I suspect, because her creativity is so entwined with the nagging particulars of living (think of her classic “No Time to Cry”). Here she plumbs the depths of the Delta, allowing its soulfulness and mysteries to seep up through her singing and songs. Her clarion voice, for me, often catches healing sunlight to warm its hardest heartache. Her parallel struggle with faith abides with life as a wordless prayer to traditions that die off and rise again.
5. Tedeschi Trucks Band Live — Everybody’s Talkin.’ It’s a tossup between DeMent and Susan Tedeschi for my favorite contemporary roots singer, rating DeMent’s disc slightly higher as a stronger personal statement. But no woman interprets others with more soulful zeal and sensitivity than Tedeschi. A fine guitarist, she has a musician’s mastery of her vocal instrument. Add arguably the greatest living slide guitarist, Derek Trucks and, on this live set, a stone jammin’ horn band, and you’ve got roots music gumbo boiling to the heavens, “Bound for Glory.”
6. Kathy Mattea — Calling Me Home. Mattea’s disarmingly conceptual album calibrates the universal human longing for home as a timeless refuge. The dramatic and poetic friction arises as she deftly frames her Appalachian hills as threatened by the very industry — coal mining — that sustains it; one of contemporary America’s most pressing environmental/societal conundrums.
7. Dr. John – Locked Down. Black Key Dan Auerbach’s poised reins facilitated this outrageously shambling parade of lusty self-mythologizing swamp-and-gutter groove. Dr. John has lived the quintessential New Orleans street hustler-hipster life. The music’s chug-a-lug roiling and left-handed aphorisms excavate comedy, tragedy and human possibility. His exotic yet sly wit exudes empowerment, as if he’s tossing out fistfuls of mojo like Mardi Gras talismans.
8. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than The Driver of The Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. Yes, she’s a self-conscious artiste, yet Apple tells a musical tale as vividly as any vernacular folk artist, and with such idiosyncratic brilliance that it’s too this-that-‘n-the-other-way not to feel authentic. That’s how this artist manages the balance between her most arch conceit and the primal cries that sear a streak to the tip of her consciousness.Justin Townes Earle. Photo: blog.washingtonpost.com
9. Justin Townes Earle – Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel about Me Now. Earle’s double-dose of nominal paternal legacies (Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt) may help explain his personal struggles as he tries to be his own kind of singer-songwriter. He makes this warts-and-all confession-and-reflection work with slushy stylistic mélanges and a voice as palatable as tawny port, aged by time’s missteps and lessons. And he’s loosening up his style, which sweeps away any glimmers of preciousness.
10. Field Report – Field Report. Few recent songwriters have fingered the crusty surfaces of life’s pains, confusions and compromises with more openness, honesty or deftness. So depth arises, in breaking buds of poetry. Christopher Porterfield and band add just enough harmonized refrains and ratty-couched sonics to deliver songfulness as quietly wounding experience. He opens up key moments as if experiencing them for the first and fiftieth time.

Re-issue:

Howlin’ Wolf — Smokestack Lightning: The Complete Chess Masters, 1951-1960 He’s still baaaad! And eevilll!

* Released in December 2011, the Guy Clark tribute album missed most 2011 “best of” lists, but won the 2012 Americana Music Association album of the year award.

Weather Report The Columbia Albums 1971-1975

Albums included in this collection: Weather Report, I Sing the Body Electric, Live in Tokyo, Sweetnighter, Mysterious Traveller, Tale Spinnin’

Imagine recasting the musical Zeitgeist of the early 1970s as a weather report, with the music of the innovative jazz group Weather Report as the context and “soundtrack for your imagination and head.”

A weather report, of course, is a meteorological interpretation of how our planet’s natural atmospheric environment unfolds through our lives. We begin to see how aptly named this group was, a name both unassuming and yet deftly encompassing. It’s as quotidian as your dullest local drone before a daily weather map, and as an essential to one’s experience as the ceaselessly shifting winds and tides, of time and nature.

The band’s co-leader and dominant, if not necessarily best, composer Joe Zawinul, * knew what excitement lay in the shape-shifting winds. His big-idea conceptualism made Weather Report plausible as the heady soundtrack he characterized it as above, in describing the first eponymously titled album from 1971.

In the process they also opened the floodgates for jazz to expand creatively and commercially, like no group of the era. They helped usher in the jazz fusion era, but always did fusion on their own terms – and without ever using a guitar player.

Critics and music fans appreciated immediately the risks the band took, and the allure of this fresh and strange music, voting that debut Weather Report “Album of the Year” in the 1971 Down Beat magazine’s readers’ poll. That album and the last two of this collection — Mysterious Traveller and Tale Spinnin’ — also won Down Beat readers’ “Album of the Year” awards. The band would continue amassing an unprecedented consecutive run of four such awards, with the two albums following this collection’s time frame.

Let’s see how this jazz tsunami grew. A big part of their innovation was breaking free of mainstream jazz’s over-used head-solos-head format.

“We were talking about doing music that had mountains and streams and valleys and going over hill and dale,” the group’s co-founder and saxophonist Wayne Shorter recalled to his biographer. “We were trying to do music with another grammar, where you don’t resolve anything, like writing a letter where you don’t use capitals.”1.

You get a sense of the band’s openness to abstract possibility and beauty from the sinuously shifting winds suggested this stunning cover photo by Ed Freeman for their debut album.

I still don’t know what the hell he photographed — it sort of looks like a windblown clothesline strung with a few white sheets, shot in a time exposure, but I’m not sure because its beauty teases the imagination so far beyond that specific boring daily chore, like you’re hearing a weather report from Mars.

So the band concept was of a piece from the start, yet it wasn’t just about formal abstraction or innovation. The band persistently snared startling and gorgeous colors, textures, rhythms and voices. And by the time the first album’s “soundtrack” reaches the fourth tune, “Orange Lady” we plunge into human emotions. The title suggests a specific woman who possesses a quality of “orangeness,” – radiant yet tough on the outside, sweet and tart — as a human embodiment. As Zawinul’s synthesizer and Wayne Shorter soprano sax meld into a melody of tenderly keening remembrance, the experience becomes deeply grounded in the human heart, to the point of contrasting “despair and hope,” as trumpeter-composer Tom Harrell has noted of the tune.

Yet Zawinul is pushing this past the implications of a rainy, weepy Bridges of Madison County sentiment. So, while the next two tunes are titled “Tears” and “Eurydice” (named for Odysseus’s seemingly drowned lover, whom he dives to save), the music veers away from sentiment to the open air of shape-shifting Nature. “Tears” and “Eurydice” were written by Wayne Shorter, a very different but complementary sensibility to Zawinul, one that is emotionally true as it is elliptical.

This seemed like jazz impressionism, which wasn’t new but it had emerged usually in orchestral settings, like those of Gil Evans.

But Weather Report showed that a tight, sleek, grooving combo could muster transporting impressions as a new sonic magic, driven by sharp percussive textures. So contemporary music suddenly acquired some of the power of the visual and cinematic arts.

And yet, as with much modern art, the group managed a balance between a larger artful experience of exploration and basic human impulses.  The group’s latent funkiness is evident in the first album’s second tune “Umbrellas.”

The second Weather Report album, I Sing the Body Electric breaks through into a more conceptually ambitious evocative arena. I remember thinking; okay they’re starting to go for it, after first album which, for all its beauty and striking moments, was sometimes too studied in its artful spaciness.

The title is borrowed from a Ray Bradbury novel, which was borrowed in turn from a Walt Whitman poem, so it has deep lineage in American literary expression as perhaps signifying a strange celebration of the self, in concert with the force of electric power as a natural element that humans come to terms with in both harnessed and unfettered forms.

Listen to Whitman:

1

The passage is sort of the inverse of a spiritually and mentally dying King Lear, who raged at the lightning storm railing down upon him.

Whitman offers a kind of redemption for Lear and all kings who wield armies like corrupt playthings, while ignoring loving offspring in their hubristic shadow. Whitman says you love both armies and kindred as souls, electrified by your own.

We hear something like that redemptive yet unblinking generosity in the face of death, especially in “The Unknown Soldier,” the album’s opening piece. The work echoes with sepulchral voices, fallen warriors and angels. As the album’s original annotator Robert Hurwitz eloquently comments, “We are not told of the insanity of absurdity and horror of war in “The Unknown Soldier,” we already know that. Rather we’re guided through a tone picture. We share impressions. The mind wanders to the innocence of childhood, simple sweet joys to youthful mysteries, and silence and moments of wonder… To the moment of war, of tragic realization…”

From there we moved through equally evocative tours of “The Moors” and “Crystal” to “Second Sunday in August,” where we hear the majestic lyricism Zawinul is capable of, here in a celebratory mode which would become utterly festive in the group’s biggest hit “Birdland” (which immediately post-dates the spectrum of these albums).

By now the band had built up a strong following internationally, especially in Japan which seems to have cultivated a strong fixation on American culture. This is energetically evidenced by the two-CD set Live in Tokyo, recorded in January 1972, comprising interpretations from the first two albums.

Yet another breakthrough occurs with the following album Sweetnighter, where the band really gets its groove mojo. The opening tune is the 13-minute “Boogie-Woogie Waltz,” which began a bit like the sort of electric jungle music Miles Davis was exploring — a pulsing, humid atmosphere. Zawinul’s wha-wha synthesizer and Wayne Shorter’s head-snapping saxophone accents build tension. Underneath the percussion is utterly exotic: Dom Um Romao plays bell, tambourine and Chucalho; and Muruga plays Moroccan clay drums, along with Herschel Dwellingham on traps drums.

This was a new sort of world music in 1973, presaged partly by Shorter’s Super-Nova and Odyessey of Iska albums. The tune’s marvelously gyrating main riff theme doesn’t arrive until almost nine minutes in, although it’s been hinted at. The effect of the delayed payoff is a deep hook on the listener’s musical consciousness. “Boogie-Woogie Waltz” was too long to be a radio hit, as “Birdland” would become, but it proved how capably funky this band could be and (along with another new jam piece “125^th Street Congress”) helped turn their concerts into part electro-impressionistic tripping, and part pure get-down.

The band was evolving far from a jazz blowing band, even if it was heavily improvisational in an entirely new way.

The year 1974 brought yet another peak — for my money their artistic pinnacle — Mysterious Traveller. This advance occurred partly, as annotator Bill Milkowski points out, due to improvements in synthesizer technology, particularly the ARP 2600, which helped Zawinul produce a more musical line on the electronic instrument, amid its shifting sonic textures.

On Mysterious Traveller, the band pulled back somewhat from the crowd-pleasing funk-outs, nevertheless  infectious rhythms pull you in from the start — “Nubian Sundance” sounds like you’ve land smack in the middle of an African village amid a wondrously pagan celebration.

Then, “American Tango” zooms back across the Atlantic to a descending melody that lands as elegantly as a large sea bird, exalted by female voices and a supple backbeat, illuminated by a brief sunburst of the kind of emotionally engorged expressivity Shorter had developed on the soprano sax.

“Tango” segues to “Cucumber Slumber,” with a tempered funk groove dressed up with a sinuous bebop-ish line, which brings to my mind a soused Charlie Parker walking a sobriety test line — his stride is so stylish the officers stand back and clap, before arresting him.

But Weather Report by definition always reaches beyond terra firma, so we encounter the title tune “Mysterious Traveller,” reflecting especially Shorter’s fascination with metaphysics and science fiction.

But here the funk hook is another ingenious rhythmic configuration — one of the band’s consistent achievements was how it elevated the conventions of funk grooves to almost a Baroque intricacy. Nor does the tune’s mood try to scare you with this alien visitor as much as open your mind to the implications of its existence.  It’s more akin to spirit of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with the childlike sense of wonder having matured.

“Blackthorne Rose” is one of Shorter’s patented musical portraits of a female spirit and “Scarlet Woman” does much the same with Zawinul’s synth flair, again re-grounding us in humanity as “Orange Lady” had.

Mysterious Traveller concludes with “Jungle Book,” a tour de force of creativity and serendipity. A distant voice seems to be singing a folk song from deep in a valley. The melody and rhythmic backdrop include Indian tambura, tabla, ocarina, kalimba and, most ingeniously, a tac piano,3 which spins variations on the folk melody. Another low-tech circumstance is that Zawinul recorded the whole thing by himself overdubbing various instruments on a home cassette recorder. Zawinul’s children happened to run into his studio during this recording and their playful voices were left in — adding a real-life vibrance to this strangely enchanting creation.

Another increasingly evident Zawinul trick was singing wordlessly through a vocoder, which added a disembodied vocal aura to the wizardly mix.

Listening to the album Mysterious Traveller seems like a travel through light years, and yet it passes as quickly as a few blinks of an ear.

This re-issue version of the album includes two bonus live renditions, of “Cucumber Slumber” and “Nubian Sundance,” which prove that this ensemble was not a phenomenon of a recording studio, like many pop groups, although their style demanded and rewarded high production values.

Perhaps the driving force for the group’s imaginative elevating of coloristic detail and everyday energy is best expressed by Shorter in the liner notes of the debut album:

“Life to me is like an art. Because life has been created by an artist…some people can only relate their soul to God. They think that the soul in relation to the universe has to do with religion all the time. They can’t see any practical use in relating their soul to a table, to a bug on the windowsill, to musicians on a bandstand, or a picture hanging on the wall, or salt and pepper. You can say that’s going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but is it? It’s like saying, ‘a bird does not fly because it has wings. It has wings because it flies.’”

Weather Report has wings, concluded that first annotator, Don DeMichael.

They prove that again in the final album of this box set, which marks the approximate midpoint of the career of a band of extraordinary duration for a jazz group.

Tale Spinnin’ recasts the now maturing band concept in terms of storytelling, which has always been part of jazz’s African-American oral tradition, if not in quite so technically enhanced terms. One tune is called “Five Short Stories,” and the harmonizing Shorter and Zawinul exquisitely suggest related episodes.

But the group also tightens up their songs and percussive thrust. However, the album suffers a slight drop-off in overall imagination — compared to Mysterious Traveller. Still, Tale Spinnin’ opens with “Man in the Green Shirt,” a tune that rekindles Zawinul’s melodic knack for the celebratory buzz, which “Birdland” would soon top, in terms of mass audience connection (on 1976’s Heavy Weather, not part of this collection).

The enigmatic, green-garbed man evokes a more handsome and elegant melody than “Birdland,” evoking personal charisma, aspiration and affirmation. The stranger could be a disarmingly friendly Martian or a godlike figure, or just a colorful tourist which, of course, might be one interpretation of God, the sort of down-to-earth artist/spirit that Wayne Shorter was talking about.

______________

*Before joining Weather Report, Wayne Shorter had already established himself as arguably the greatest modern jazz composer since Charles Mingus, with his classic series of Blue Note albums and his contributions to the Miles Davis Quintet, in the 1960s.

The classically trained Austrian Zawinul had revealed compositional ambition in the 1967 album The Rise and Fall of the Third Stream and was a crucial aspect of Cannonball Adderley’s popularity. His tunes for Adderley included “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” which remarkably was a pop hit twice in 1967, first for Adderley, reaching Billboard’s No. 16 in February. Then The Buckinghams added lyrics and turned it into a No. 6 hit in August. His 1971 solo album Zawinul introduced his composition “In a Silent Way,” which would become a standard for Miles Davis.

1. Michelle Mercer, The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter, Tarcher/Penguin, 2004, 142
2. Walt Whitman, “I Sing the body electric,” from Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition, QPBC, 1992, 72
3. A tac piano is a piano prepared by attaching tacks to the key hammers, to obtain a metallic sound.

The remainder of the group’s Columbia albums were reissued in a 2011 box set as Weather Report: The Columbia Albums 1976-1982.