Here are my choices for best jazz albums and experiences of 2012

Links are to blogs I posted about this artist or recording.

1. Ryan Truesdell/Gil Evans Project – Centennial (artistShare) https://kevernacular.com/?p=702
2. Sam  Rivers/Dave Holland/Barry Altschul – Reunion: Live in New York (Pi)
3. Amina Figarova – Twelve (In+Out)
4. Vijay Iyer Trio  — Accelerando (ACT)
5. Brad Mehldau Trio – Ode (ECM)
6. Joel Harrison 7 — Search (Sunnyside)
7. Henry Threadgill — Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry, Spp (Pi)
8. Luis Perdomo — Universal Mind (RKM)
9. Philip Dizack — End of an Era (Truth Revolution) https://kevernacular.com/?p=963
10. Torben Waldorff – Wah-Wah (artistShare)

Honorable mention: Hafez Modirzadeh — Post Chromodal Out! (Pi), Matt Ullery — By A Little Light (Greenleaf), David Virelles, Continuum (Pi).

Reading Tom Piazza — Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America — (A 2011 copyright but I read it in 2012 – recommended.)

Hearing the Jamie Breiwick Quintet doing two whole sets of Monk, include Bright Mississippi and Think of One. The Jazz Estate, Milwaukee.

Best Historical/Reissues

Charles Mingus — The Complete Columbia and RCA Albums Collection (Columbia Legacy)

Dave Brubeck —  The Complete Columbia Albums Collection (Columbia Legacy) https://kevernacular.com/?p=1194

Weather Report — The Columbia Albums 1971-1975 ( Columbia Legacy) * An in-depth blog on this set will be posted here shortly.

Stan Getz – The Clef & Norgran Studio Albums (Hip-O Select) (In memory of James Hazard, poet and cornetist)

Note: James Hazard was a very gifted writer and a dedicated jazz cornetist who died in 2012. (disclosure: he was a professor of mine in grad school, 22 years ago. He was a warm, funny, soulful and deeply supportive teacher, and continued to champion my career efforts over the years. He loved especially Chet Baker and Stan Getz, among many jazz musicians) 

Writer and cornetist Jim Hazard with his spouse of 38 years, poet Susan Firer.

Coincidentally or not, Hazard and I both wrote Stan Getz poems. Hazard’s, “A True Biography of Stan Getz,” is great modern poetry, from this 1985 collection New Year’s Eve in Whiting Indiana, a masterful book-length ode to his hometown, shedding light on myriad shards and stories of naked, radiantly quirky humanity obscured by grimy smokestacks.

Jim’s poem suggests how Getz’s inimitable saxophone style channeled the romantic impulse in the young Hazard. My Getz poem is based on an actual encounter with Stan Getz (1927-1991), and quotes from his hit song “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Here are excerpts from:

A True Biography of Stan Getz

By James Hazard

“When you change the modes of music, the society changes.” — Confucius, via Gary Snyder

“Place yourself in the background.”, rule one , “An Approach to Style” — Strunk and White

I. 2013 Davis Ave., Whiting, Indiana

The place of his first grade appearance, 1950 or 1951. I was doing the Forbidden in the bathroom: listening to the radio while I bathed, heedless of electrocution and hoping for a jazz record , on the rhythm-and-blues Gary radio station.

Stan Getz played “Strike Up the Band” and I was heart-struck. I was already a heart-wreck, having seen Gene Tierney, her face hitting the screen as a flash flood in LAURA…

(Hearing for the first time that sound, the long and many noted phrases of it, but the sound itself carrying those long phrases out to the ends of breath as if Stan Getz’s lungs and heart would fall in on themselves, wreckage. And Gene Tierney filled one entire wall of the Hoosier Theater and like the bathroom radio – electric, fatal — could not be touched.)…

______________________________________

Bossa Not So Nova

Fattening and 57, Stan Getz

sweats out a melody, red-faced

“Hey thanks for the article. Can you carry my horn?” he croaks.

The sax sings light blue

Small, and tan, and young and handsome, a boy comes walking for an autograph.

Stan stops, signs, walks and goes ”Ahhhh, I’m bee-et. Just go slo-ow.

Hey can you find a doctor?”

They all sleep or smoke butts in cold ward halls.

Stan Getz wonders where Mader’s is.

His round belly rumbles.

The sax sings effortlessly,

“Tall and tan, and young and handsome,”

the boy from Ipa-nema is wheezin’

looking for a doctor or sauerbraten

while a woman somewhere dreams…

to the scratched record,

the sax singing effortlessly.

— Kevin Lynch

The death of Dave Brubeck on Wednesday — Thursday was his 92^nd birthday — summons indelible anecdotal memories, though I can’t resist mentioning that my voice recognition software just dictated his name as “debris back.”

A random shred of dark humor from the netherworld of electronics is something I doubt Brubeck would object to, as a man who exuded prodigious creativity, industry and generous spirit over his long, deeply influential career.

The first adolescent memory is of my father’s almost incessant playing of the 1959 Time Out album. I’m sure most of my six sisters have that peculiarly perfect tune’s 5/4 vamp etched in permanent memory. Years later, all of Norm’s favorite albums were stolen and presenting him, on his 80^th birthday, Time Out on CD, gratified all of us. (It was also dad’s last birthday party, see photo at bottom, after notes).

Brubeck has said he had to cajole Columbia Records into releasing the album of odd-time signature tunes. It became the label’s biggest-selling jazz album of all time.*

Back when dad bought the Brubeck quartet’s LP Live at Carnegie Hall, he’d play all four sides on a Saturday morning during chores, and it’s surely the first concert-length live recording I ever experienced and absorbed. I recall especially the bounding, breathtaking 9/8 meter contractions of “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” Those two albums lit the fire for my lifelong passion for jazz.

Of course, as a baby boomer, I also quickly immersed in my own generation’s music and soon jumped to modern jazz as an essentially African-American art form. I came to understand that many white artists practiced this form on a par equal to anyone, but admit to becoming a bit of a Brubeck pooh-pooher. The rub was the seeming clunkiness of his attack on the piano (metronomic even, on “Take Five,” set against altoist Paul Desmond’s mellifluous swing, drummer Joe Morello’s deftly colored dynamics and the breathing pulse of the band’s black bassist, Eugene Wright.

Yet the tension created among these rhythmic and harmonic forces was palpable, and it was Brubeck who always pushed the edge of experimental time signatures that messed with conventional swing. Plus the often dense-voiced block chords he heaved from his piano gave a vibrance to dissonance, which often cast a forbidding aura in contemporary classical music.

I would later learn that the brilliant avant-garde jazz pianist-bandleader-composer Cecil Taylor counted Brubeck among his formative influences. At that point, I began to shed my bias about Brubeck’s alleged pianistic squareness.

Indeed my friend Frank Stemper, professor of composition at Southern Illinois University and a longtime jazz pianist, credits Brubeck with “the greatest (recorded) jazz piano solo ever,” on from that Carnegie Hall album, where on the seminal American standard “St. Louis Blues,”: “He’s soloing in four keys simultaneously — and swinging to boot.” Brubeck’s two-handed riot of sharp chordal counterpunching is stunning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFrnCnbEJMQ

Brubeck shouldn’t be remembered as just a mathematical-musical nerd; his beguilingly romantic melody “In Your Own Sweet Way” has become a jazz standard.

Such forces keep a fan-turn-journalist on the Brubeck trail, which leads to the ultimate comedy of errors of my professional career. In the late 1980s, Brubeck and his musical sons Chris and Dan played a concert in Milwaukee double-billed with in fellow pianist Ellis Marsalis and his celebrated sons, Wynton and Branford (with younger bro Jason on drums).

The rare event cried out for a feature on “fathers and sons in jazz.” I pitched the story idea to Down Beat magazine which gave me a green light. So I arranged for post-concert interviews with representatives of both families.

I was fortunate enough to snag patriarch Ellis Marsalis and the voluble and intelligently opinionated Branford. I clicked my recorder button and began asking questions, and they gave me fine, thoughtful answers and I thought “Man, this is a great story.” Then, right at the end of the interview, Branford peered down at my recorder and said “Is that thing going?”

I looked down — I had hit the “play” button on the soundless blank tape rather than “record,” and never stopped to double check while juggling my two interview subjects. Against habit, I’d also failed to take any written notes.

I was aghast, and yet I still had an interview with the two Brubeck sons arranged. They agreed to slide over to Dunkin’ Donuts on Wisconsin Ave. My spirit lay quietly crushed and yet I remember Chris Brubeck, the bassist-trombonist who physically resembles his father, offering an exuberantly genial chat about life with old man Dave. I never mentioned the god-awful blunder tormenting me. Without the Marsalis material, the Down Beat story never materialized.

It’s a good, hard lesson for journalists – to take care of your business but I also take from that memory the generosity of both the Marsalises and the Brubecks, the latter sons whom I’m sure inherited much of that spirit from their father.

I won’t chronicle Dave Brubeck’s long, auspicious career and refer you to Ben Ratliff’s excellent New York Times obit piece for that. 1 But do recall Brubeck’s ahead-of-his-time explorations of world music forms, his sacred music a la Ellington, and his large compositions for social justice. One Brubeck cantata “Truth is Fallen,” “lamented the killing of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970, with a score including orchestral, electric guitars and police sirens,” Ratliff writes.

Fast forward to the third anecdote, which occurred just a few weeks ago, at Milwaukee’s fall Gallery Night opening reception at the King Drive Gallery for the fascinating and moving show of Underground Railroad-inspired quilts “Hidden In Plain View” (which I blogged about recently). A highlight of the event was alto saxophonist Larry Moore’s trio doing a soulful rendition of “Take Five,” squeezing all the bluesiness imaginable from that oddly percolating meter. The mostly African-American crowd ate it up. As the tensile flow rose, drummer Kim Zick soloed — quoting from Morello’s famous recorded solo of stutter phrasing and silence. Meanwhile, the black woman next to me spent virtually the whole tune tracing the 5/4 tempo with her forefinger moving up and down, to and fro.

There’s something powerful, elemental and beautiful about that rhythmic connection, which is a significant part of Dave Brubeck’s culture gap-bridging legacy (and, of course, that of Desmond, who wrote “Take Five.”) As Brubeck said, “The oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart.”

Ratliff comments about how, with the wildly popular Time Out album, Brubeck “saved jazz” at a time when the quintessential American art form was seemingly disappearing under the unruly barrage of rock ’n’ roll and, soon, the psychedelic fireworks, illuminations and delusions of the counterculture. Through it all Time Out sold steadily and Brubeck’s presence persisted, the almost cavernously wide grin and his equally smiling, bespectacled eyes, and the zeal with which he attacked the piano and helped reinvigorate the art form.

Yes, he played categorically “cool jazz” but he had as much smart muscle in his own musical style as anyone.

The pleasure that Brubeck transmitted, the depth of expression and revelation of form that he mustered, make for a career that time brands deeply into human consciousness — the surprising zenith of popularity, the long productivity and his high, irrepressible human spirit.

___________

Special thanks to John Kurzawa and Frank Stemper

*Columbia/Legacy this year issued two Dave Brubeck Quartet recordings, Their Last Time Out, and The Columbia Studio Albums Collection: 1955-1966.

Perhaps the last recording of Brubeck at the moment is Chris Brubeck’s Triple Play Live at Arthur Zankel Music Center ( in June of 2011) on Blue Forest Records. Material ranges from the stalwart blues “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “St. Louis Blues,” to Dave Brubeck’s Japanese-influence “Koto Song” to “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo à la Turk.”

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/arts/music/dave-brubeck-jazz-musician-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1

photo (at top) of the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet (clockwise from bottom: Brubeck , Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright) courtesy www.bluenotemusicblog.com

portrait photo of Brubeck from www. independent.com.

(Below) Norm Lynch’s 80th birthday party, July 20, 2009. Norm (1929-2009) is seated at center with Brubeck’s Time Out CD ( a gift from Nancy Aldrich) on table to his immediate left. Dad had hoped for an 81st birthday party.

photo courtesy of Anne Lynch   

From Johnny Cash to contemporary chamber orchestra music. Go ahead, call me a culture vulture or an arts parasite, but please don’t call Culture Currents predictable.

Nor do I want to present this post under false pretenses, although I offer it with genuine enthusiasm for the music link here within.

 Frank Stemper is an old friend, whom I have blogged about before, and a highly gifted and skilled composer and head of the composition department at Southern Illinois University — Carbondale. His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe and in Mexico. 

 Composer Frank Stemper

He has long been known for an expressionistic and dramatic style with varying degrees of dissonance and shifting time signatures. He now offers The Persistence of Honor, a short piece of terse and restrained lyricism in a yearning and consonant mode, and inspired originally by Barack Obama’s first election. As his program notes below suggest, Persistence seems highly appropriate in reprised form as a meditation on the first African-American president’s re-election and the challenge and promise it offers. 

Here are Stemper’s program notes, followed by my response to the piece.

The Persistence of Honor was commissioned by the Dutch chamber orchestra, Het Wagenings Orkest ‘Sonante’, as part of their 25th anniversary celebration.  It was premiered in November 2009 by that orchestra in the Netherlands, directed by their dedicated and extremely talented conductor, Melvin Margolis.

In the music, you will probably notice a continuous, unrelenting – almost annoying – repetition of a rising pensive refrain.  Although this idea repeats “persistently,” it never repeats exactly.  Tiny musical changes create a continuous evolution of this refrain, with each statement delivering the same message in a slightly different way.

What follows is a slightly edited response I wrote directly to Stemper upon recently hearing the piece, performed here by The New Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

http://frankstemper.com/10ThePersistenceofHonor.mp3

Maestro Frank,

The descending “sigh” note at the end of the ascending phrase at 5:30 touched me as much as the much richer, fuller end that soon followed.

The motivic phrase obviously signifies the “persistence of honor,” and the rather rapturous variation around 8:30 feels like glorious vindication. (coincidentally the first piece of music I wrote is titled Vindication and dedicated to Jackie Robinson,* though it doesn’t sound anything like this.)

One might imagine the motif emerging from more dissonance but, as you wrote it, the presence seems almost untouchable and impregnable, which makes it feel somewhat idealistic. Even the most honorable of us have our moments of weakness, to say the least. I imagine Mother Teresa had her bitchy moments. I’m reading a book called President Lincoln: the Duty of a Statesman, about perhaps as fine an example of complex honor we’ve known among our leaders

Nevertheless, I enjoyed and appreciated your piece as it was.

I like that it began with the cello, with his deep-hum eloquence, and the persistence felt as sure as a wind — part temperate, part cool — rising to clear away fetid atmosphere. That’s how it seemed plausible; Nature passes eventually to uncanny redemptive light, even after its most destructive tempests. Human nature also retains that potential.

The music also conveys to me a sense of slow, sure human healing and, though you might shudder to think of your music in search terms, it has an almost therapeutic quality. I intend that as no mixed praise.

“Persistence” shows how deftly you can handle a consonant palette, though the chords at the end grew magnificent in their blend of light and shadow, with hints of the hoary weight the Persistence is doubtlessly bearing.

I will play this again. It graces my player.

Bravo!

Kevin

* Historically paralleling Barack Obama, Jackie Robinson was the first African-American to play major league baseball, in 1947 when he  debuted with Brooklyn Dodgers.

photo of Barack Obama courtesy: paydayadvanceUK.co.uk

We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash (LEGACY)

This Legacy CD/DVD set proves that The Man in Black “came around” consistently throughout his career. Now his fellow artists have, and on this night their collective chemistry was something to behold, perhaps a matter of professional pride in the face of peer competition. Time after time, they dug down to a deeper place than you’d imagine. It’s a moving testament to a great American life because Cash embodied integrity, suffering, perseverance, redemption, hard-won truth and generosity of spirit, especially for the downtrodden, the forsaken and the outlaw (which may encompass 98% of America today). He represented the American ideal of giving everyone a fair shot at the dream.

A Great Depression baby and son of a sharecropper, Cash’s big-armed embrace of this  nation’s vast human underside often felt personal and almost a mission, of sorts. Maybe that’s why he was such a rebel. After all, he may also be the only renowned person who’s also famous for a photograph of himself flipping the bird. This signifies the importance of defying conventions that calcify our sensitivity to truth and to the American ideals that are so easily buried beneath complacent consumerism and capitalism. I mean, it’s unlikely any major artist played at a prison until Cash did it, and he changed public awareness of the incarcerated.

Recorded at Austin City Limits’ Moody Theatre on April 20th, Cash’s 80th birthday, the show kicks off with Brandi Carlile’s rip-snorting rendition of his cold-blooded “Folsom Prison Blues.” In the moment, you feel that she too “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

Johnny Cash’s historic performance at Folsom Prison in 1968. Courtesy of iaanhighes.com

In his literally handwritten liner notes to the Folsom Prison album, Cash recalled: “You sit on your cold, steel mattressless bunk and watch a cockroach crawl out from under the filthy commode, and you don’t kill it. You envy the roach as you watch it crawl out under the cell door.”

Of course, the outlaw in Cash (he was a convicted for drug use, not murder) also had a heart as big as the sun and you felt that when he resurrected Hank Williams’ great song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to prove it, as Amy Lee (of Evanescence) does here, buoyed by Greg Leisz’s mournful pedal steel.

Among several inspired duets is Kris Kristofferson with Jamey Johnson doing Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert,” Kristofferson warbles, and you understand the essence of a down-and-out man, whom Cash knew as a shadow on his shoulder.

Among the forsaken he identified with were Native Americans, whom he addressed in his 1964 concept album Bitter Tears. It includes “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” recounting the tragic story of a young Marine who died pathetically after participating in the iconic raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and dealing with that event’s overwhelming publicity and symbolic fervor.

The quality of Cash’s character amid suffering is illustrated by his daughter Roseanne Cash, in her memoir Composed. She’s recounting a moment shortly before her father died of diabetes and neuropathy:

“Late in the afternoon of the day before I left to go back to New York, Dad stared out the window at the lake and said sadly ‘The gloaming of the day is the hardest part.’ I said I knew that it was. His head tilted down to his chest. ‘I feel so bad’ he said, and that was one of the only times in his life — maybe the only time — that I ever heard him complain about his ailments. It was extraordinary, and shocking, to see his stoic resolve crumble before my eyes. ‘I know Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’”

Roseanne honored her father’s legacy has a self-styled historian with her album “The List,” based on his determinations of the greatest country songs. Even as a gifted songwriter, Cash was humble enough to identify and record great songs by others. He also found material in younger generations, such as Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” a song of ringing majesty which Lucinda Williams delivers with a voice that sounds like a train of pain barreling right through her heart.

Similarly Kristofferson sings, “The tears I cried for that woman will flood you, big river. I’m gonna sit right down here till I die,” and his handsome but shrunken face makes you believe him.

One caveat concerns the show’s emcee, actor Matthew McConaugey. Though well spoken, he apparently got the gig for being Hollywood famous and a Southern good ol’ boy, but his laconic delivery is a snooze considering the consistent level of performer energy.  Things never grind to a full halt because there’s always the high-powered house band chomping at the bit.  Their supple and muscular propulsion includes arguably the best drummer in roots music, Kenny Aronoff; rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame pianist Ian McLagen, guitarist-singer Buddy Miller and string wizard Leisz.

Among other notable performers: Willie Nelson, Jamey Johnson, Shooter Jennings, Shelby Lynne, Iron & Wine, Sheryl Crow, Ronnie Dunn, Rhett Miller of The Old 97s, and The Carolina Chocolate Drops (who really tear it up on Cash’s famous duet vehicle with June Carter Cash, “Jackson.”).

The DVD includes a rehearsal of Nelson doing “I Still Miss Someone,” interviews and a “Making of the show” feature. Nelson’s phrasing remains peerless, able to convey nuances in the way he weaves his words.

The show ends gloriously, with raucous ensemble sing-along of “I Walk the Line.” But the real climax precedes that, when you sense Cash’s abiding spirit as two of the four original Highwaymen supergroup, Kristofferson and Nelson, sing Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman,” with its stunning final verse sung by Johnson, a new generation of singer-songwriter. It’s the verse that, on the original Highwayman recording, Cash sang:

I fly a starship across the Universe divide

And when I reach the other side

I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can

Perhaps I may become a highway man again

Or I may simply be a single drop of rain

But I will remain

And I’ll be back again, and again and again and again…  2

_____________

Show highlights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2t1f12yhao

1 Roseanne Cash,  Composed, Viking 2010, 181

2 Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Highwayman, Columbia 1985

“Coal kills.” Or can it possibly be “clean”?

The presidential candidates debated the issue because coal remains central to our traditional energy production, which now contributes greatly to pollution, damaging of the ozone layer, and the human toll on those who work in the industry.

We know continued reliance on such carbon-based energy will be environmentally devastating. You don’t need to be trapped in a suffocating coal mine to feel the heat. As the earth’s ozone layer erodes further, exposing us to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, we’ve just experienced the warmest 12 months — from July 2011 to July 2012 — in US history, the worst Midwest drought in decades, and an increasingly bizarre — but explainable — profusion of extreme weather events, like Hurricane Sandy.

Daughter of a miner family, Kathy Mattea took a big step toward raising awareness of  coal mining’s most pressing issues in her brilliantly provocative 2008 album Coal ( Captain Potato Records).

Her new CD, Calling Me Home, finds her back on a larger label (Sugar Hill) and perhaps expanding her audience reach, with more artful symbolism than death-rattle spookiness.

But she’s still fearless. “Maple’s Lament” has a dead tree as its narrator. “Hello, My Name is Coal” wittily encapsulates the industry’s political paradoxes. http H/www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrm1rPa3mLI “Black Water” depicts a mountain’s decapitation and living among coal-poisoned streams.

“‘Black Waters’ was written in 1970 or ’71, and it is so valid right now,” Mattea says. “I mean, people are living that story right now. I love that it clearly articulates that experience and also that, inadvertently, it articulates how little has changed.”

Since 1992, nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been filled by mining wastes at the rate 120 milies per year, according to the to Environmental Protection Agency.1

Mattea’s alto voice — a stalwart beauty — employs the witness of pioneering Appalachian songwriters like Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie, with luminous harmonizers like Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Patty Loveless.

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver who, like Mattea is Appalachian-born, provides finely tuned liner notes: “The particular genius of Kathy Mattea is to call up the touchstones of hope and heartbreak that we all carry their pockets even if these mountains are not yours, the fact is everybody has a homestretch, where you feel little torn up because no matter which way you’re headed, you’re going towards home and also leaving it behind,” she writes. “Believe me, this is the soundtrack for that journey.”

Kingsolver pinpoints the universal chord that Mattea has struck on this recording. Politically loaded as the topic of coal is, the experience of home is nonpartisan, so Mattea appeals to our sense of what is worth preserving because it is an essential part of us — the shoe mud on rainy-day walks, childhood sing-alongs, dinner aromas in the kitchen, cheating at game playing, fraught holiday gatherings, crazy laughter, petty jealousies, preciously shared memories, secrets and shame and intense pride and gratitude.
“I hope my relationship to the song and the story deepens,” Mattea says in a promotional video on our website. “(The album) Coal was like discovering the music I was meant to sing all my life but I had missed it.”

And she transports us to Appalachia and makes it feel an awful lot like our own home — even if you’ve never been there.

I finally drove into that near-mythical and misunderstood region in June, and its stately mountains and open-armed valleys infiltrated my being in a way I hadn’t expected.

So when I arrived with my sister Sheila at the Blue Plum Music and Arts Festival in Johnson City* at the eastern tip of Tennessee, I was primed for artists like Guy Clark, Darrell Scott and Malcolm Holcombe, with comparable ability to press on the pulse of the American home experience wherever it may lie (I’ve blogging on all three artists on this site).

“Appalachia is one of the last places in our country and maybe on the planet where people are this attached to where they live,” Mattea muses. “This is just our spot in the world. It’s one of the best places that has its own flavor. I think as I get older and as the culture changes, I realize how special it is.”

The centerfold photograph of the liner booklet for Calling Me Home, Mattea sits before a stunning backdrop: a river winding through golden-green mountainsides.

Kathy Mattea in Appalachia. Sugar Hill label CD photographs by David McLister 

Yet “Maple’s Lament,” a song by Laurie Lewis, zooms the focus down to a single tree, even if it is too late:

“When I was alive the birds would nest upon my boughs

 And all through long winter nights, the storms would ‘round me howl…

But now that I’m dead, birds no longer sing in me

and I feel no more the wind and rain, as when I was a tree.

But bound so tight with wire strings, I have no room to grow

And I am but the slave who sings, when master draws the bow…”

One wonders what today’s climate-change deniers think kills such maples. Other “trees and plants,” as Ronald Reagan infamously blamed for air pollution?

Many of Mattea’s male relatives labored for years in the coal mines and paid the price, with black lung disease, or far more sudden death.

An old friend lay on his dying bed

held my hand to his bony breast

And he whispered low as I bent my head

Oh, they’re calling me home

They’re calling me home

(from “Calling Me Home” by Alice Gerrard).

Here, as elsewhere, Mattea’s voice uncovers layers of emotional depth while always radiating a resolute fortitude that never succumbs to easy sentimentality.

And her focus on her home state of West Virginia underscores the economic reality people there live with — of losing jobs as well as their lives, and the fact that industry and political forces an Appalachia resist diversifying solutions to the inevitable decline of this non-renewable resource, which is coming closer to being tapped out in the region, according to Ken Ward Jr. in a recent article in The Nation.

The activist group coal River Mountain Watch and the consulting firm Downstream Strategies have suggested that building wind energy farms on some Appalachian peaks is the better long-term goal than “blowin’ ’em up real good” to get at the coal.  During my drive to Tennessee, I was captivated by a huge wind farm in Indiana with hundreds of turbines spinning beside the highway. How much more elegant and ecological would be one of these slender white turbines atop a blue ridge mountain, to make use of, and do justice to, its splendid height?

Throughout the album, Mattea and her guest harmonizers ride the supple, glimmering accompaniment of ace contemporary bluegrass musicians, including Stuart Duncan, Bryan Sutton and Bill Cooley, who penned “Requiem for a Mountain,” the instrumental which quietly closes the album with pure sonic vibrations rather than words, like whispering zephyrs and murmuring rivulets mourning the defiled majesty of yet another decapitated peak.

In this photo/graphic, a decapitated Appalachian mountain has produced a lake of toxic coal sludge which hovers over a precariously close elementary school. Courtesy of the blog After Gutenburg: Just Another Pretty Face.

So Mattea is growing more sophisticated in her rhetorical skills as an artist. Though she now lives in Nashville and is a two-time Grammy winner, she’s hardly a typical peroxided country star. Coal was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Traditional Folk category. Her cover of Nanci Griffith‘s “Love at the Five and Dime” was her first major hit in 1986, (and earned the just-emerging Texas alt-country Griffith notice as a songwriter). Unsurpisingly, Mattea’s an environmental activist. She currently travels the country presenting Al Gore‘s renowned and still provocative environmental film An Inconvenient Truth and speaking about the importance of fighting global warming and the environmental and physical devastation of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

What might be her political preferences? We know Mitt Romney “likes coal.”

Mattea clearly prefers whole, thriving Appalachian mountain ecosystems and humans.

____________

*Mattea’s next advocacy speaking apperance will be in Johnson City, TN on November 12 at “The Arts: Remembering Who We Are” Artists-In-Education conference at East Tennessee University-Millennium.

She has a Facebook page dedicated to her cause: https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/kathymattea.mycoaljourney?fref=ts

1 http://www.thenation.com/article/170484/myth-war-coal

2 http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=5278&cpage=1 

A shorter version of this review was published in The Shepherd Express on November 8

,

,

Rita Cox and her version of a monkey-wrench code quilt.

____________

If These Quilts Could Talk…African American Quilting Traditions. Quilts by Rita Cox and others. King Drive Commons Gallery and Studio, 2775 N. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Milwaukee – 414.704.9117.

Remaining exhibit hours with Rita Cox, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, November 10 and 17. 

In a wooded region just over the Kentucky border in Ohio, the black woman peered outside and saw no one around. She dragged out a large, richly patterned quilt and hung it out on the clothes line, even though the quilt was not wet. The wind caught the cloth and the fabric danced ponderously alone, waiting for the right set of eyes to arrive to appreciate it.

The day passed and the woman inside the small cabin grew anxious, but held out faith.

Dusk fell and a small group of armed white horsemen trundled up the heavily rutted road. They halted their horses and one man in a uniform dismounted and began patrolling the yard. He poked at the quilt with his rifle. Then he walked up to the door and kicked the door open and found the cabin empty.

The woman had heard the men coming and had gathered her children and hid behind bushes away from their shack, but with a view of the intruders. The sheriff with the rifle, slightly frustrated, walked back out and suddenly fired a shot straight at the hanging quilt. The smallest hiding child wailed and her mother stifled her — that quilt kept the child and two sisters warm at night.

The family huddled in horror, certain the men would find them.

But the sheriff spit on the doorstep and cursed under his breath, then remounted and the group rode away.

Overcome, the mother fell from her crouch down to her knees, in gratitude.

What had happened?

In the same instant her child wailed, a hawk had swooped down with a fierce cry from the opposite direction, distracting the men from the child’s utterance.

Only an hour later, three Africans, fleeing from plantation bondage, came up the very same pathway. The mother, back in her home with her children, saw the three people out front, through the window. One of them noticed the large gunshot hole torn in the quilt.

“Get down, be quiet!” he hissed.

He breathlessly scanned the terrain and heard nothing but the wind whistling through the trees. All of the refugees crept closer to examine the gently waving quilt and, in the early moonlight, spied an image sewn into the cloth pattern — in the shape of a monkey wrench.

This was all they needed to know, for now. It was time for them to return home, pull out a wrench to tighten up the wheels of their wagon and swiftly make all preparations for the hard and perilous flight north, to Canada.

A question remains. Did something like this quilt-signal scene ever take place?

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 decreed that any enslaved Africans who had escaped plantations must be returned to the owners. The woman hanging the coded quilt  violated the dubious federal law, risking recrimination as much as the fugitives. The law was stiflingly draconian: Any federal official who did not arrest – or any person aiding – slavery runaways were subject to six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Law-enforcement officials were required to arrest any runaway suspect on no more evidence than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. Officers capturing a “fugitive slave” * were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work. Suspected runaways could not ask for jury trial or testify on their own behalf. 1

Underground Railroad scene painted by Paul Collins. Avisca.com

The quilt codes were reportedly used during the period of the Underground Railroad (approximately 1780-1860), the escape-route system for slavery refugees to reach Canada, where the Fugitive Slave Act didn’t apply (Wisconsin was the only U.S. state that did not enforce the act). So brave women began hanging the  signal-laden quilts out right on Southern plantations. Yet the quilt code is hidden in the lore of the oral tradition as surely as the quilts themselves. To date, no coded-quilt artifacts from that era remain, says artist Rita Cox, whose quilts are on display.

Nevertheless, quilts were a central part of enslaved and African-American women’s culture, and continue to be, as evidenced by the fascinating traveling exhibit The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2003.

If These Quilts Could Talk…”, Cox’s evocative and provocative King Drive Gallery exhibit of Underground Railroad-inspired “code” quilts, documents what may have been a crucial aspect of communications among Africans attempting to escape bondage during the heyday of slavery and up to the Civil War.

A large crowd gathered for the exhibit opening recently during Gallery Night, a vibrant, multi-cultural event organized by gallery director Marquita Edwards, which included live jazz by the Larry Moore Trio, hot food, and performances by several members of the Hansberry-Sands Theater Company. Edwards sees the event as providing community healing though the arts, “a holistic, preventative approach to living.” She also operates a holistic fitness studio next door.

Photos of Rita Cox and pages of “Hidden in Plain View” by Richard Allen

Each of the large quilts by Cox is a down-home, New World symphony of vibrant colors, textures and patterns. By turns rough-hewn and elegant, the sewn cloth swatches nudge, elbow and commingle with each other. Yet Cox’s artful eye and mastery of both machine and hand stitching organizes each whole into visually pleasing rhythmic counterpoint.

On Gallery Night, the quilts’ visual musicality echoed the variations spun by saxophonist Moore, or drummer Kim Zick’s sharp partitions of sound and silence in her “Take Five” solo.

And within each quilt pattern lies a visual symbol that, according to the African-American oral tradition, signaled or instructed escaped black plantation laborers on how to reach freedom.

Although the story of “code quilts” has persisted in the black oral tradition at least since the 1800s, it gained little wider visibility or credence until the 1999 book Hidden In Plain View: A Secret Story Of Quilts And The Underground Railroad, which informed and inspired Cox’s quilts.

Pages from the book “Hidden in Plain View.” 

The book was written by art historian and Howard University professor, Raymond Dobard, Jr. and Jacqueline Tobin, a Colorado college instructor. Dobard based her interpretations of the quilt blocks on oral testimony of former attorney and quilt vendor Ozella McDaniel Williams, from her family’s oral lore. Williams recited a poem revealing the code to Tobin over a period of three years, (until the total “code” was revealed). Here’s an example of the covert information Tobin received from Williams:

“The monkey wrench (shifting spanner) turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear’s paw trail to the crossroads.”

“Once they got to the crossroads they dug a log cabin on the ground. (bypass) told them to dress up in cotton and satin bow ties and go to the cathedral church, to  get married, and exchange double wedding rings

Flying geese stay on the drunkard’s path and follow the stars.”

Each boldfaced term above was illustrated as a quilt-code symbol. After the monkey wrench signal, an important ensuing symbol was the “bears claw,” which directed fugitives to follow bear tracks to water, to sustain them along the exodus.

An accomplished seamstress from childhood, Cox studied fashion design and business at Mount Mary College and learned quilting at an adult enrichment class offered by Milwaukee Public Schools.

“I gravitated to many of these symbols because I liked them before I even knew they were Underground Railroad symbols,” Cox explains.

Underground Railroad Monument, Battle Creek, Michigan http://www.avisca.com/Html/Avisca_2028.htm

Some historians dispute the coded quilts as mere legend because there is no written record before Dobard and Tobin’s book and — following the code of secrecy — many of the stories remained untold.

Yet the dire circumstances of the enslaved Africans’ situation make the story of the coded quilts a plausible reality of necessity, the mother of invention. Southern chattel slavery’s hardships and cruelty stain America’s soul, and were famously dramatized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Cox reminds us that slave owners forbade Africans to keep many of their traditions, and functional literacy was outlawed for the enslaved.

But an ancient tradition persisted. “The African griot’s job in life was to memorize and pass on orally information to a whole village,” Cox says. “Because it’s not written down, Europeans don’t give it credence.”

“And some of the quilt symbols came from Africa. Unwittingly the slave holders allowed them make these quilt patterns. This gave you information on what to do and not do, without putting anyone in danger or tipping your hand. And they would not discuss the information among people they did not trust,” Cox added.

“How would they know where to go when they spent all their lives on a plantation? They needed a means of communication, because it was against the law for them to read and write.”

It’s rare that decorative art is so fraught with such dark and heroic history. Like a stroke of genius in an espionage caper, the secret symbols worked while hidden — in plain view. They say art imitates life but, in this case, cunning art helped liberate life.

________

The King Drive Gallery quilt exhibit is sponsored by The Martin Luther King Jr. Economic Development Corporation.

* Cox explains that the term “enslaved Africans” is preferred to “slave” because they did not simply “give up or give in to their oppressors; they resisted by every means possible.”

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850

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Duane Allman died 41 years ago today.  It reminds me of how long ago I heard something new rising from the South. I’d bought a new album by a group from Macon, Georgia simply titled The Allman Brothers Band.  I let the needle down into the vinyl grooves and my speakers burst with roaring blues-rock, vocals dripping with an earthy Southern growl, polyrhythmic drums (yep, two drummers) and searing double guitar work.

The album cover, a sepia-toned group portrait, exuded steamy old Savannah’s  “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” atmosphere.

Plus, they had the guts and talent to open their debut album with an instrumental (“Don’t Want You No More”) which blended blues, rock and some Jimmy Smith-style grits-groove organ.

I was already a pretty serious jazz fan as well as an admirer of such good improvising rock-blues bands like The Grateful Dead, Cream, Jefferson Airplane and The Butterfield Blues Band.

Next thing I knew, the Allmans hit Milwaukee on a northern tour. So I had to check them out. I walked into The Scene, a hip downtown music club (where Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis had played) and the band had just launched into something they called “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

It lasted about 12 minutes and didn’t contain a single word. By the end I was floored. 1

Not unlike the well-known version on The Fillmore Concerts, this  “Elizabeth Reed” opened with guitarist-composer Dickey Betts’ languid dynamic swells, like dragonflies hovering over a porch of faux-Roman pillars graced with bottles of Southern Comfort. Then the melody arose, a wisp of lyrical reverie, followed by a march-like bridge to the main body of the piece. Allman biographer Scott Freeman has compared Betts’ intro to Miles Davis’ trumpet. That wasn’t the only jazz connection, besides the ensuing improvs. As on the Fillmore recordings, the band was swinging as much as it was rocking – the double trap sets unfurled a splashing flow, then accelerated into a bustling Latin surge beneath the solos — with bassist Berry Oakley lubing the motion. Freeman compares Duane’s Fillmore “Elizabeth Reed” solo to John Coltrane, a bit grandly. 2  

For sure, guitarist Allman does fire up bursts of incendiary heat and builds his solo with a superb sense of dramatic form and climax. Brother Gregg’s organ flows like a deep rolling river.

Here’s the band in New York doing “Elizabeth Reed” a few weeks after I saw them in Milwaukee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UwkBmDMfR4

“Dickey Betts’ song, thank you,” Greg Allman calls out at end, at the Fillmore. I think he did the same in Milwaukee. This was a serious band. The tune’s lyrical ardor would emerge as one of the group’s strongest expressive strains in such hits as “Ramblin’ Man” and “Blue Sky”and the breathtaking instrumental “Jessica” – – music with gloriously dancing solos and counterpoint over a rhythm section that had grown telepathic. “Lord, you know it makes me high, when you turn your love my way.”

The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East in 1971 ( L-R Jaimoe – drums, congas and timbales; Duane Allman, guitar; Greg Allman, organ and vocals; Dickey Betts (foregound) guitar; Berry Oakley, bass guitar; Butch Trucks, drums and tympani. Photo by Jim Marshall.

The band had made a poor impression, however, in front of industry professionals in their debut Northern gig, in Boston in December of 1969. (Freeman 57) The agents, bookers and critics felt something was missing.

Right. There was no hammy lead singer out front, miming oral sex with a mike. The Allmans’ vocalist sat workmanlike behind a big Hammond B-3 organ and the rest of the band just stood and played, as they did in Milwaukee, with a magnificent fire. Duane Allman’s droopy walrus mustache lent him an almost comically dolorous expression.

But this was a great band to me, and soon to countless others. The Allmans served up a hot, fresh gumbo that sounded as deeply American, in its way, as The Band had, though in a more rock-blues-jazz modality that spoke, sonically and lyrically, of the modern Southern experience, yet haunted by its history. It sounded like the best new American music I had heard from my generation in a while. There are reasons why the Allman Brothers became the most popular touring band in America in the early 70s — even with all that long jamming. It said something for what people were open to absorbing in a live concert regarding creativity that might risk big, American-style gestures.

Even the largely self-contained genius composer-guitarist Frank Zappa honored the Allmans by recording a long rendition of their monster jam staple “Whipping Post.”

Zappa’s version has an element of parody to it, knowing well that “Whipping Post” has launched thousands of concert matches, as an Allmans encore request. The shout “WHIPPING POST!” is now an old joke in rock music lore, a fan request that many bands must endure.

A Southern writer, Mark Kemp, has delved into the complexities of the emotional experience the Allmans convey on a moody song from their debut album called “Dreams”: “I went up on the mountain/To see what I could see/ The whole world was falling/right down in front of me.”

Kemp felt he knew what Allman was talking about — the social chaos of Civil Rights era de-segregation  ironically produced new kinds segregation in the South before actual integration could occur. Integration among musicians had preceded the more agonizing integration of the larger Southern society, so now musicians found themselves caught in this new bind of social self-consciousness and political correctness. Suddenly everything in white-black relations was charged with the tension of liberation from the long white Southern social oppression.

The problems were understandable but things changed radically when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Kemp quotes ace white session musician Jimmy Johnson, from the legendary Muscle Shoals Studios, recalling that suddenly he and other white players, who’d backed great black artists like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, were no longer welcome on dates with black players.

“Wrong seemed right and right seemed wrong,” Kemp writes. (Kemp xii)

As a Northern fan of the Allmans, I’m fortunate to not have the Southerner’s experience as a burden, though I greatly appreciate Kemp’s insightful, candid testimony.

The second Allman Brothers album Idlewild South came out within a few months of the 1970 Milwaukee club date I witnessed, and it included Elizabeth Reed. But the album opened with an exhilarating gospel rave-up “Revival” and featured “Midnight Rider,”an evocative bit of myth-spinning: “I got one more silver dollar. But I’m not gonna let ‘em catch me, no, not gonna let em catch the midnight rider.” I played the heck out of the album, reliving The Scene gig.

Betts had taken the title to Elizabeth Reed from a gravestone he’d encountered along a river he often visited for solitude. Betts claims the tune was actually written for a girl of Italian descent, which is why it has a Latin feel to it (Freeman).

There was also something else in the band, especially going back to the song Dreams — in Duane Allman’s slide guitar, by turns caustic and bereaved — the melancholic remnants of a complex sense of loss, which perhaps all mindful Southerners live with in the long shadow of the Civil War, in their inchoate dreams, including the suppression, sublimatiion or shedding of racist impulses. That perceptual prejudice was merely more obvious and honest than in much covert Northern racism.

And the Allmans emerged from the South right when the music business began trusting a whole concert to a single group. Bill Graham had pioneered this with his famous Fillmore West and East venues. In the San Francisco space Graham would daringly pair one of the new rock groups with a big-name jazz band, eg. Led Zeppelin with Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd. Yet unknown names were also born there.

I once saw Carlos Santana help give a skinny, bushy-haired teenage guitarist a career break at the Fillmore West, by letting him come onstage and jam with Santana. The 16-year-old Neal Schon later gained fame in Santana’s band and as lead guitarist with Journey. The times they were a changin’.

Fortunately for the Allmans, Graham booked them unheard at Fillmore East in November of 1969 because their manager, Phil Walden, had managed Otis Redding (until the soul singer crashed into Madison’s frigid Lake Monona in December of 1967). That’s all Graham needed to know. (Freeman 59)

The next time I saw the Allman Brothers live they played in the Milwaukee Arena, the basketball Bucks home court. Their style hadn’t really changed much but they’d matured as a group and Dickey Betts’ gift for country-inflected lyricism had fully emerged. A superb pianist, Chuck Leavell, helped fill the gap after Duane Allman’s death (see 1 below).

They became the model for Southern rock bands to this day, from Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Charlie Daniels Band and Little Feat to Widespread Panic, Gov’t Mule, The Drive-By-Truckers, Kings of Leon and the Derek Trucks Band, led by the nephew of Allmans’ drummer Butch Trucks. Martin Scorsese would include an Allmans collection in the set of albums released in conjunction with his film series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which includes a 19-minute live version of You Don’t Love Me, to testify to the centrality of the band’s improvisational powers.

Of course, a career peak for Duane Allman was recording the album Layla with Eric Clapton under the guise of Derek and the Dominoes. The two guitarists challenged and inspired each other to extraordinary levels of passion singing, songwriting and interpretation, as well as blazing guitar work.

It marked an occasion when these two musicians seemed to break through to a new stratosphere, by plumbing and redefining the blues, as white musicians doing justice to this profoundly rooted African-American men cultural form, by going out on a limb and letting their hearts and souls hang naked, in the deep sway of mutual conviction, commitment and genius. Riding a pile-driving rhythm section, Allman and Clapton reminded us of the universality of the blues, as if searing a black “BLUES” brand on our collective consciousness.

The two-record set adds up to one of the greatest albums of any American vernacular music, at once sui generis and a portrait of an America of many familiar hues.

Among Layla’srough-and-ready jewels  are “Bell Bottom Blues, “Anyday,” “Key to the Highway, “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?” “Tell the Truth,” “Have You Ever Loved A Woman?”, Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” “Thorn Tree in the Garden” and the remarkable title song, a love ode thatl, in seven minutes achieves, a near-epic emotional sweep through the piano-led suite-like transition to a lyrical embracing of life’s vicissitudes, which releases the tension song’s central expression of abject romantic desperation: “Layla, you got me down on my knees!”

But the Allman Brothers story all began with troubled dreams, as do many creative ventures. Perhaps another way of imagining the dreams that Greg Allman grappled with is to consider the struggle toward resolution also expressed in a person’s dream by a great Northern writer, Herman Melville, in the final poem of Battle Pieces: Aspects of the War, his collection of Civil War poems. Melville abhorred slavery but by the war’s end was deeply sympathetic to the people of the South. At the time, his poems were criticized for their lack of patriotic Union fervor. Robert Penn Warren has noted how, in the last poem of Melville’s collection, titled America, “the contorted expression on the face of the sleeping woman as she dreams the foul dream of earth’s bared foundations, is replaced, when she rises by a ‘clear calm look’”:

…It spake of pain,

But such a purifier from stain –

Sharp pangs that never come again –

And triumph repressed by the knowledge meet…

And youth matured from age’s seat –

Law on her brow and empire in her eyes.

So she, with graver air and lifted flag;

While the shadow, chased by light,

Fled along the far-drawn height,

And left her on the crag.

Warren continues: “’Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny,’ Melville wrote in the prose Supplement to ‘Battle Pieces.’ For him, if history was fate (the ‘foulest crime’ was inherited and was fixed by geographical accident upon its perpetrators), it might also prove to be redemption.”  4

So time plays out its role in the South, foul crime an inheritance, as is its time and history. By 1969, Greg Allman’s dream of “falling down a mountain” may still be part of the long arduous historical process that began in 1866 with light chasing the shadow along the “far-drawn height,” and a woman “left on the crag.” Her dream may have begun a historical process, of multiple climbs and falls. So in 1969, the struggle to the mountaintop, a dream shared famously by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., began again. King was buried by then, killed the year before by a petty criminal/drifter. But others would get there, he believed.

The redemption of the Allman Brothers tradition emerged full-blown in 2011 with two extraordinary  albums Greg Allman’s low country blues and the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s album Revelator .

Actually the tradition needs no redemption and Revelator more precisely represents a fresh expansive evolution, the marvelous gumbo of country blues, Allman Brothers jam soul power, vocalist-guitarist Susan Tedeschi’s remarkable amalgam of influences as a powerhouse singer, and gospel-jazz-R&B horn riffs and texture, topped by Derek Trucks’ soul-searing guitar.

There’s a handful of songs on the album that are the best she’s ever recorded, says Trucks, the singer’s husband. Tedeschi comments that she tried to sing as appropriately as she could for each song, which did not mean choosing a generic interpretive approach. “I’m not sit down and thinking I’m going to belt. I’m going to be real gospel -ey here I’m gonna be real country-pretty here. I’m not really thinking that; I’m just thinking what’s going on here musically and how can I put my heart into it and be as honest as I can.”

“She doesn’t have to belt and do the thing that she does so well in all the tunes,” Trucks says. “She really got comfortable singing in the lower part of her register, the sweet part of her voice, which I really love.”

Tedeschi adds. “It’s part really pretty intimate storytelling, and then we have some songs that are soul-gospel so I think it’s a nice mix.” http://www.vevo.com/watch/tedeschi-trucks-band/susans-vocal-approach/USSM21100891?source=ap

____________________

 Caricature of Duane Allman courtesy of truefire.com. Artwork by: http://www.exaggerart.com/

1. The Allmans’ date at The Scene in Milwaukee was September 9, 1970. B bootleg recordings of the gig is available online: http://www.guitars101.com/forums/f90/allman-brothers-1970-09-04-milwaukee-wi-105755.html

I now realize, from the bootleg, that I missed half the set, including Dreams, but walking in as they launched into Elizabeth Reed was unforgettably worth the price of admission. This was a few weeks before their second gig at Fillmore East in New York, on September 23. Their acclaimed recordings at that venue would come in March and June of 1971. Duane Allman died in October, 1971, at age 24, on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, a death witnessed by two women friends driving behind him. Bassist Berry Oakley was driving behind the two women.( Freeman 109). Oakley would die almost exactly a year later — also at age 24, also in a motorcycle accident — on a Macon street about a thousand feet from where Allman died (141).

1. Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band Little Brown & Co. 1995
2. Mark Kemp, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South,  Free Press 2004
3. Robert Penn Warren, Melville the Poet, from New and Selected Essays, Random House, 1989 p 229
5. from a book in progress,  From the Silt to the Soul: The New Literature and Culture Of Roots Music.
6. Special thanks to Stuart Levitan.

A portrait of undecided American voters 2012 1

The Pew Research Group,* along with documentary artist B Kliban, have identified a small but crucial block of undecided voters. Their different stripes, flavors, talents, spinal densities and erase-ial makeup reflect a range of American diversity that social and political scientists have heretofore been unable to ascertain,” Pew’s Ralph Schmortz commented.

Interviews with the potential voting group confirmed that they remain uninfluenced by televised debates and the incessant hounding of campaign advertising, whether negative, slide, print or digital.

The Cowboy Food Ventriloquist  was quoted (through his pineapple), regarding President Obama, “Squish, squish.” As for Gov. Romney, he summed up his opinion accordingly, “Drip, drip.” Researchers confirmed that at no time during the interview did the lips of the Texas ventriloquist ever move.

Furthermore, in the following scene, Kliban documented the now-explicily negative effects of negative political advertising on television.

Warning: This strong image may be unsuitable viewing for television and smart phone addicts and habitual screen loiterers:

Portrait of one lost undecided voter. How many more like him are there? 2

“Both candidates need every voter they can muster,” Schmortz opined. “This is no laughing matter.”

All seriousness aside, both campaigns still have their work cut out for them, he added.

* Just as we should remain skeptical of allegedly factual statements of candidates and their campaigns, Pew advises voters, decided and undecided, to not believe everything they read in blogs.

1  Kliban, B, Advanced Cartooning and Other Drawings, Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, 1993, Library of Congress catalog card number 92 – 74805,  p. 130

2 Ibid, p. 60

Trumpeter-composer Philip Dizack will present an “End of an Era” CD release concert at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 24, with a jazz ensemble and string players, at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St. ($15). Then he will play with a jazz quartet Friday, Oct. 25 and Saturday, Oct. 26 at The Jazz Estate, 2423 N. Murray Ave., at 9:30 p.m. ($5).

Phillip Dizack is coming home, to Milwaukee for three October nights promoting his superb new CD End of an Era.  You might think of him in the dawn if a new era.

The Milwaukee native is one of the strong and diverse generation of younger jazz trumpeters who are post-bop, post-Miles, even post-Wynton Marsalis — who helped bring the trumpet back to the forefront of jazz, where it was when the music was born, in the era of Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong.

I hesitate to say this is post-modern trumpet because this music implicitly honors rather than deconstructs that continuum.

A player like Dizack explores the introspective depths of the horn and challenges the limits of the instrument’s eloquence.  His chops, especially his embouchure (mouth application), invariably flow straight to the service of musical ideas and thematic concepts.

There’s catchy, punchy playing here but overall new CD End of An Era * has some of the feel of an ECM session — plenty of spacious medium-to-slow tempos. Dizack incorporates chamber-style strings judiciously in a set that sometimes broods, while buoyed by many moments of lyricism, here tethered, there unbound and fiery.

Check out this clip from a recent New York performance with the full concert ensemble, with strings, as he’ll present at the Jazz Gallery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t71yTmUcEH0

The conceptual ambition and his trumpeter’s voice, warm but self-possessed, recalls the still under-recognized giant Tom Harrell.

And concepts dwell in most of these tunes. The title composition attempts to portray “the moment your world closes in around you, the time you’re forced to grow; the moment you realize that what you had, is no longer,” according to the trumpeter’s liner comments.

Other tunes range from an ode to tragedy and human tenacity “Yele” (Haitian for “Cry Freedom,”  regarding Haiti’s earthquake in 2010), to a cover of Coldplay’s “What If?” — with a gentle backbeat — and the original “Torch,” two probings of the complex shades of love and loss.

(Dizack, like many Generation X and Y jazz musicians – is highly conscious of contemporary pop music as distinctive cover material.)

With a variety of simpatico sidemen, notably saxophonist Jake Saslow and keyboardists Aaron Parks and Sam Harris, this recording feels like a highly personal yet quite accessible statement from a gifted and committed trumpeter-composer.

Few jazz musicians employ string ensembles on the road, so it will be very intriguing to see Philip Dizack making this much commitment to his art as live personal communication at the Jazz Gallery, in a Milwaukee Jazz Vision production.

The primary quartet will include pianist Stu Mindeman, drummer John Dietermeyer and Chicago bassist-composer Matt Ulery, who released his own ambitious, acclaimed album this year.

Dizack began playing the trumpet at age 10. While attending the Milwaukee High School of the Arts in 2003, he received a Clifford Brown/Stan Getz Fellowship from IAJE and NFAA, touring the United States, Canada and Japan. Later that year, he moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music on a full-tuition scholarship. In 2007, he received his Bachelor’s Degree from the Manhattan School of Music with honors.

Since his move to New York in 2003, Dizack was named third place winner of the International Trumpet Guild Jazz Competition in 2004, first place winner of the National Trumpet Competition in 2005 and at the Carmine Caruso International Solo Jazz Competition in 2007, and semi-finalist in the 2008 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition. His extensive press acclaim includes the 2007 Down Beat Magazine article, “25 [Trumpet Players] for the Future”. At the age of 22, he was the youngest member recognized.

* End of an Era is on Truth Revolution Records: http://truthrevolutionrecords.com/

Dizack portrait photo credit: Jeremy Hardy

– http://www.milwaukeejazzvision.org/

http://www.jazzestate.com/

To put the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in the proper prism of my personal historical perspective, I regret somewhat that this small tribute must dispense with a disclaimer. I intend not one iota of the disrespect and neglect that jazz still endures, symptomatic of America’s peculiar culture, and the plight of the African-American — who spawned this serious art form. I try to lessen the music’s cultural neglect; yet I can only be honest. Jazz is not me; but it floats my aesthetic boat more consistently than any other form, in pure musical terms. It also fires my blood more than any other.

However, for several decades, my own professional identity has involved a struggle to escape the pigeonhole of being a jazz writer, which I am and hope to always be. Don’t infer ingratitude, for I believe the music has as much to say to the human soul about democracy and creativity as any art form, wordless or not.

But one reason I’m more than a jazz head is that I’m fascinated by our incredibly fertile culture (I suspect many jazz fans are too) : You can find art under any given rock, regardless of the paucity of pedigree or pretense of whatever crawls out.

I took quite seriously my decade-long role as The Milwaukee Journal’s jazz critic and as a freelance writer for various publications. Covering the Jazz Gallery was a big part of my beat. Yet one of my most indelible memories was an in-person interview in 1981 backstage at Summerfest with Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass (which I will resurrect at the appropriate time). It felt like a coup; Monroe was a notoriously tough interview and I was a young-pup reporter in sneakers. I have always covered country artists as well as blues, rock, R&B, bluegrass, folk, and classical music, and served as backup art critic and wrote for the Lifestyle section.

I then covered all of the arts and books, as arts reporter for The Capital Times in Madison for 19 years.

That range of interest and experience is why this blog is called Culture Currents. And my insistence on the cultural vitality and importance of American vernacular music today is what the blog subtitle Vernaculars Speak is all about.

Nevertheless, jazz writing established me as a professional journalist, especially covering the improbable phenomenon of the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery during its prime in the late ’70s and early ’80s, as an ambitious venue for national and local acts. (I’ve  blogged previously about it and the venue’s new incarnation, the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, a very interesting and exciting multi-arts center.)

The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery’s founder and owner, Chuck LaPaglia, was recently in town from Oakland to hear David Hazeltine, the great Milwaukee-born pianist who is now New York-based and one of the top pianists in straght-ahead jazz. A bit of reminiscing led Chuck to recall an eccentric trait of the old Jazz Gallery grand piano, an 1888 Steinway owned by a concert pianist. It only had 85 keys, rather than the normal 88. I guess it befit a club somewhat cramped for space, though there are many smaller jazz clubs.

But Chuck recalled that one pianist would rehearse on the Jazz Gallery piano and — when leaning hard into a long, ascending arpeggio —  his right hand would fly off the “short” end of the keyboard and tumble down into space, a bit of Chaplinesque mime humor. I suspect the perpetually impish Milwaukee pianist Barry Velleman might’ve started the gag, and word got around about the digitally challenged piano.

Nevertheless, that old instrument was the heart, and a big part of the charm, of the club and invariably well-tuned.

In honor of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, I choose to share an unpublished poem unearthed from my body of work for my Master’s degree in English – creative writing, from UW Milwaukee in 1988. The club had closed by then, but not after significantly triggering a vibrant local jazz scene that included a handful of cozily funky inner-city clubs, a few steady lighthouses of radio programming (notably Ron Cuzner’s deeply nocturnal The Dark Side), and the flourishing of the award-winning Wisconsin Conservatory of Music jazz program.

The four persons alluded to by first name in the poem are pianist-vibist Buddy Montgomery, guitarist George Pritchett, clarinetist Chuck Hedges (three of Milwaukee’s jazz royalty) and finally LaPaglia, who made it all happen with rare dedication, impeccable taste and a deep sense of the music’s history. The magnificent jazz singer Betty Carter, who played there several times, should need no introduction.

I and this poem implicitly concur with singer-songwriter Mike Mattison, who asserted at the end of part two of my recent blog about the Tedeschi Trucks Band: The blues are the fount of American music.

I believe the poem’s shadow metaphor arose from The Dark Side’s melancholy soundtrack to my dreams and my appreciation for Ralph Ellison’s great essay collection Shadow and Act, which articulates the cultural centrality of the blues as well as any text I know. I think the depth and complexity of “the blues act,” haunted by the shadow of the black person’s experience and identity (with the “double consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois first described), is the subject of his monumental novel Invisible Man. I hope these revelations do not explain this brief poetic elegy completely away, into invisibility.

For A Jazz Gallery

As the cat goes chasing

shadows I wonder

if I’m chasing shadows,

the shadows of a lifetime

fed by

unraveling blues held tight

by a drum.

Are they really unraveling?

Is the shadow being

shut in a closet,

vanquished from the

light of collective rays

beaming all colors

contained in the

goodest blacknuss?

So many are unwanted

by the controlling few

yet wanted by the

caring few

needed by how many more.

Buddy George Chuck and Chuck

Where do we go

Where do we stay

when the places

are shadowboxes

wearing Betty Carter’s

old smile and a padlock?

 Photo at top: Vibist Milt Jackson performing at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in the late 70s. Photo by Tom Kaveny.