Hillary Clinton recently visited car wash workers in Queens, New York, who are represented by the RWDSU (Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union). Courtesy rwdsu.info

Note: Culture Currents normally does not get quite this specifically political. But this is a very important election year, especially if we are to realize change in our government, our economic system and our way of life, for the better. So, in this post, CC is testing the culture currents of change.

Understand first of all, I am thrilled at the powerful movement that Bernie Sanders has spearheaded, and I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time, as a spokesman for the majority of Americans’ financial interest, and a critic of Wall Street and the corporate world’s domination of American economy.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding at the Surf Ballroom Friday, Aug. 14, 2015, in Clear Lake, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Having said that, it appears certain that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination, though Sanders should continue as long as he has a mathematical chance to win the popular and delegate vote.

But if Sanders is aiming for a brokered convention, it will fracture and divide a potential consensus of supporters and voters who should be aligning to vote for the Democratic nominee to beat Trump.

President Donald Trump. Wrap your head around that. Yes, Bernie ranks ahead of Hillary vs. Trump in most polls. But he’s still not likely the nominee. If somehow he wins the nomination, then I feel confident he will beat Trump. Of course, that is a massively unlikely “if” at this point. And Hillary will win in November too, especially if disenfranchised workers and young people feel that she’s on their side, and understand that she must also work with at least a modicum of negotiation and compromise, which most successful politics entails (Republicans will never flop over and play dead to leftist demands.)

This leads me to a fairly historically informed argument by the noted liberal writer Thomas Frank in an interview with Financial Times. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/watch-hillary-clinton-revolt-brewing-101500894.html

Frank recounts how the Democratic Party has shifted its constituency response from its previous working-class base to that of middle-class liberals since the 1960s, and more recently, towards entrepreneurial power and the so-called “creative class.” This seems historically accurate in that young liberals sparked the leftward revolution of the ’60s and have driven much of Democratic Party direction of the  since.
And certainly Bill Clinton’s administration shifted gears toward the middle, and triangulated away from the poor and the working class, especially with his reform of welfare and tough-on-crime bills which resulted in our horrible black incarceration rates, a development he now admittedly regrets.

President Obama hasn’t done enough for the working poor and the dispossessed as one would’ve hoped, but he’s been fighting uphill against an obstructionist Congress his whole two terms. Chances are the Dems will take back the Senate and gain in the House, which will make things better for a Democratic president. And Hillary Clinton is a tough, smart and reasonable negotiator.
The problem I see now, however, with critics of Hillary Clinton is that they, including Frank, to often tend to conflate her with her husband in their arguments against her.

Thus, a significant amount of union people perceive her as anti-union, even though this is not the case. And many non-union workers assume she is against them and tend to support Trump, who feeds off their understandable feeling that nobody backs their interests. These contingents comprise much of the frustrated people creating the “revolt” the article refers too, a split between ardent Sanders and Trump supporters.

This is one reason why we need to work to bring the union movement back to something close to its former strength and respectability. I believe this intellectually but also because I have a lot to be thankful for from union membership. And I also know first-hand how vulnerable a worker, including journalists like myself, can be without union representation.

Like Clinton, some unions have hardly been paragons of virtue. Being comprised of humans, some have been subject to excess internal power-brokering, greed and self-interest. But they suffer, like Clinton does, from a very besmirched reputation from decades of right-wing and pro-corporate disinformation.

To the point of this election, let’s look at Hillary Clinton’s Senate voting record on jobs, the category in this comprehensive policy survey most relevant to working people.  http://www.ontheissues.org/Hillary_Clinton.htm#Jobs

For the most part, it shows how strong her support has been for issues that concern workers, both blue and white collar. Note also her high approval rating by the AFL-CIO and, in this election, the endorsement of her by a majority of labor unions.

Those who think that Hillary will preside like Bill Clinton did may presume that she’s stuck back in that era. She learned lessons from it, no doubt. But the truth is, she’s been extremely attuned to the present, which is why she has embraced her progressive ideals, even though she remained largely supportive of her husband as First Lady. Yet, unlike Bill Clinton, she would not compromise on the pioneering Clinton health bill, the prototype for the Affordable Care Act. The Clinton bill failed because she remained principled, she cared too much about the uninsured — mostly the working poor, minorities and the disenfranchised.

I think it is a perhaps-unconscious but sexist reflex to presume that Hillary is going to be Bill Clinton redux. She has always been her own woman, and obviously her relationship to women, and their issues, is probably 180° different than her husband’s, or at least 120°. So it makes a lot of sense that she will work hard to correct many of the excesses of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, which has harmed poor black men and single women and their families for the most part. It figures she will do more to change the situation than any current candidate. Most African-Americans with a sense of history appear to know this, judging by their strong support of her.

Courtesy edition.com

So if that’s not fighting for working people, I don’t know what is. We used to associate the image of workers predominantly with men, who used to most typically be the primary Income provider of families. We know how much that has changed, but most pointedly by seeing how bad things remain for poor and working-poor women in forced (or misguided) single motherhood.

Remember, Hillary famously said, “It takes a village to raise a child.” She clearly wants to create an administration that fosters just such a village, metaphorically and literally.

And for those who still profoundly distrust her, due to some past associations and decisions, I remain among you, especially in foreign affairs, where she’s very experienced, but, I fear, still too hawkish. Prove us wrong on that, Madame Secretary. This era cries out for American prudence and restraint overseas, as Obama has largely exhibited.

Nevertheless, I’ve gained trust in Hillary Clinton partly because she is a calculating politician, and she hears and understands the angry winds of change, for which Bernie Sanders has spoken most powerfully and persistently. Regarding Hillary’s relative dishonesty, consider the recent comment of Nicolas Kristof, arguable America’s most respected journalist, though an avowed liberal:

When Gallup asks Americans to say the first word that comes to mind when they hear “Hillary Clinton,” the most common response can be summed up as “dishonest/liar/don’t trust her/poor character.” Another common category is “criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail.”

“All this is, I think, a mistaken narrative.

“One of the perils of journalism is the human brain’s penchant for sorting information into narratives. Even false narratives can take on a life of their own because there is always information arriving that can confirm a narrative.” Here’s Kristof’s column: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/is-hillary-clinton-dishonest.html

Given that tendency of journalism and the human mind, it’s unwise to ignore the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politico.com‘s recent fact-checking assessment of the truthfulness of statements by all the current presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton comes out as the most truthful, with Bernie Sanders a close second. http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/fact-checkers-confirm-hillary-clinton-is-more-honest-than-any-of-her-2016-opponents/24196/

As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews commented Sunday, it’s up to Hillary to win the hearts of Americans. Against Trump, I’ll bet she succeeds.

And given the polarization between the two major parties, Hillary Clinton seems much better positioned and experienced to do something about positive change for the 99% as president. Assuming she’s the candidate, the Dems will need Sanders supporting her, along with great voices like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to continue to fight for everyone who works for a living, or tries to, or hopes to.

And by that, I don’t mean people who play morally-decrepit games with numbers on Wall Street.

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Bernie Sanders photo courtesy salon.com

Music director John DeMain conducts the Madison Symphony Orchestra in the stunning setting of Overture Hall in Madison. Courtesy isthmus.com

Rain…Rain…I don’t mind. Shine, the weather’s fine. I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s the same, I can show you, I can show you… It’s just a state of mind, can you hear me, can you hear me? — “Rain” by Lennon and McCartney

What a pleasure to be reminded how fortune smiles on Wisconsin with the blessing of two great symphony orchestras. There’s nothing like an orchestra working its big-canvas magic in person. In recent years I’ve reacquainted myself with the glories of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

On a rain-soaked day, sheets of rain, billows of rain, Ann Peterson and I drove to Madison to hear that city’s superb orchestra, but not before what has become a ritual, a stop at the Pine Cone Inn halfway between the cities in Johnsonville, to pick up a gluten-free monster cookie.
With slightly soggy crumbs nestled in laps, we rolled into Mad Town and stopped first at The Harlem Renaissance Museum on East Washington.

This place is  worth your time although, on a Sunday afternoon, also consider that a religious service is held in the back room, which is the way to enter. So if you make your way quietly to the front galley, you now see an exhibit of Cubist jazz art by the museum’s artist-in-residence Martel Chapman. The exhibit also includes a tribute to the great Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, a Wisconsin resident and one-time faculty member at the UW-Madison. On display were a selection of Toomer’s letters hand-written and typed to various people during important years of his career and they are illuminating and a bit historically transporting, although I wasn’t taking notes (apologies), so I can’t go into detail.

But Chapman’s art is a marvel. He has an uncanny ability to do conventional oil portraiture with great insight and style. But most of the pieces display his own trademark Cubist characterization of jazz and African-American cultural figures. Despite the almost futuristic stylization he’s capable of capturing the deep character of someone as profound as John Coltrane as he does in a portrait titled “Late Coltrane.” I  believe this is actually an interpretation of the famous black-and-white photograph of Coltrane for the album A Love Supreme.

“Late Coltrane,” John Coltrane as interpreted by Madison cubist artist Martel Chapman. Courtesy Martel Chapman

He does the same for white-haired sax icon Sonny Rollins and even superstar Black studies scholar-minister Cornel West. It’s almost as if the artist is torching a living person out of tubes of metal. Chapman’s not going for realism here, rather the essence of the artist, a remarkable achievement somewhat akin to a jazz player’s act of getting to the truth of the matter through a musical stylized abstraction.

Some of Chapman’s pieces comprise complete scenes more akin to Georges Braque’s early, somewhat painterly ” analytic cubism” such as the utterly delightful “Quartet ’58.” This painting interprets the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane performing at The Five Spot Nightclub in New York in 1958. The luxuriously-faceted piece is a virtual whirlygig of animated expression spinning out from the fabulous figure of Monk himself whose splayed arms and legs hover around the keyboard like a hipster Gumby. 1

Martel Chapman’s “Quartet 58,” and interpretation of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane on saxophone. Courtesy Martel Chapman. 

For all these fine artistic moments, the afternoon’s main event was the Madison Symphony Orchestra. They rolled up their sleeves with a taste-whetting performance of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Op. 62.
Then Emanuel Ax ambled on. The veteran, gray-maned and portly pianist has acquired a decidedly avuncular demeanor by now. But he sat down and showed that any uncle who can play a Beethoven concerto (No. 4) like this is worthy of inviting to dinner any old time. His playing absolutely sparkled and finely mirrored the orchestra’s rhythmic dancing through the melodies and sonic gusts rippling through deep meadows of sound.
Ax encored with an unannounced Debussy prelude, I believe, which unwound with strangely complex colors and arabesques.

Soon it was time for the centerpiece of the concert, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony 4 in G Major, one of the majestic pinnacles in the standard repertoire, and of late Romanticism.
I’ve always loved this work, as have many.  But it had been so long since I heard this orchestra after covering it for nearly 20 years. I somewhat forgot how fine and firm a grip DeMain has on such myriad details, dynamics and tempo, etc. and how superbly responsive the orchestra is.

They showed us what a ravishingly immersive creation the Mahler is, once again. It must be a supreme pleasure sit in the middle of that and participating in it. I’m still sappy enough of an Irishman to be moved to tears by it.

Composer Gustav Mahler outside the Grand Hotel Toblach in the Alps. Courtesy grandhoteltoblach.com

So thank you for moving me, my old friends. It’s in the way that all the strange and wondrous colors and rhythms engulf the listener, like a fully-evoked world or lifetime of memories, and then the finely-wrought melodies and fanfares that swell up like water-drenched sirens. This all leads to that late, luminous cathedral-like chord rising to forever, not long before the soprano enters.

This is DeMain the Grammy-winning, Leonard Bernstein-mentored opera conductor synthesizing those skills into the orchestral domain for a rare sort of larger-than-the-moon musicality. He’s clearly spent all the time necessary for a reach for transcendence, having performed the whole Mahler symphonic cycle during the years pI lived in Madison. I would love to hear this band record a Mahler symphony.

A protege of Leonard Bernstein, DeMain has led the Madison orchestra for 22 years.

And such a celestial song in the finale, though guest soloist Alisa Jordheim, still doesn’t compare to the warm magnificence of Judith Raskin with George Szell and the old Cleveland recording. Ms. Jordheim had confessed to DeMain that she was suffering from a cold, which did not seem to affect her voice’s lovely timbre. But at moments she seemed to strain to project over the orchestra.

Still, it came to a marvelous end, like a winding scenic journey to a high vista.

And finally DeMain nudged the unaccompanied basses along to extend the symphony’s last very note, like an earth-whispering Ommmm.

Sublime. I could go on, but it would be just the German side of me getting a little oom-pah pushy.

So we headed home. And the rains came, again, stronger than ever.

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1. For news on the museum’s first year anniversary and future plans, check out Pat Simm’s Wisconsin State Journal article:http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/madison-s-harlem-renaissance-museum-celebrates-first-year-plans-for/article_a1f73372-1a82-52bc-b0dd-4f9caaee33dd.html

Jazz pianist and author Mark Davis practicing at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music where he directs the Jazz Institute. Photo by Kevin Lynch

In person, Mark Davis exudes warm, affable intelligence. At the piano he translates his personality, knowledge and talent into penetrating, fluent and swinging music. He’s the city’s premiere jazz pianist, director of the Wisconsin Conservatory’s Jazz Institute, and pianist with the school’s faculty jazz ensemble We Six, which can be heard on the recording Bird Say. He’s performed with jazz greats Jimmy Heath, Charles McPherson, Slide Hampton, and Frank Morgan, among others.

And now Davis is the author of Jazz Piano Method , published by Hal Leonard , which may become one of the most effective and efficient ways to learn jazz piano, short of taking lessons with a gifted musician and teacher like Davis. The book includes online access to 180 recorded examples of its practice exercises, each introduced and performed by Davis himself.

Courtesy halleonard.com

What’s the genesis and motivation for this book?

I’d thought about this for years working with students of all different backgrounds and levels. There wasn’t  a perfect book to recommend my students that fit my way of teaching. So why not write my own book? In 2008, I began recording for Hal Leonard (the world’s largest music publisher) accompaniment tracks for various books including The Real Book (a primary jazz repertory book) with bassist Jeff Hamman and drummer Dave Bayless. But I really wanted to write the jazz piano method. Everybody teaches jazz differently. From pianist Barry Harris, I learned how interconnected teaching and playing are. I hope the book allows students a method to find their own way.

There is an inherent mystery to jazz in that it seems created out of the ether. But you give each note a purpose and get into why the music sounds and feels this way . For example, you point out that diatonic chords are ones that contain the same notes as other chords– which helps a student move through progressions musically and easily.

Jazz is not easy music play. You can get very comfortable with certain chord progressions and I hope the book gives people the fundamentals to give them a certain kind of freedom, so they can really take off.

Another example of useful theory you address are “shell voicings” and extensions.

My home base as a musician comes from the bebop approach, so shell voicings is a left-hand technique that bop pianist plays. But they also use, say, a tenth  interval (extension) but I show them how to get around that by breaking the chord up, as well as things like rootless voicings. Also, you can’t be jazz musician without understanding what came before. I’m using the bebop era as the starting point, rather than Herbie Hancock or Keith Jarrett.

But this can get them to Hancock or Jarrett. You emphasize learning directly from recordings. Also you address the idea of tension and release in the basic II-V-I chord progression. Doesn’t this help a student make an aesthetic choice, to make these decisions for expressive, dramatic or sonic effect?

Tension and release is an important factor in so much music, or even in movies or drama. If you just give a student a scale to improvise with you can point out the tools to see how tension and release occurs, which is the drama music. Otherwise it’s like going to a movie where nothing really happens.

In Chapter 5, you make a strong point that the rhythmic feel and the blues feel are the most important things, even more than the correct note or chord. Why is that so important?

Learning to play jazz is similar to learning a language. When a baby is learning to speak, before words they get the rhythm of language,  it sounds like talking but you don’t hear the words. Then the meaning starts to be filled in. Same in jazz, the more we learn, the more we can fill in, like language, the specific thoughts or ideas.

At the end, why do you characterize jazz piano as a never-ending journey and a quest?

In his 90s, Hank Jones said, you never fully master it. I find that students with careers outside of music can find a way to escape the day-to-day grind and of our own personal lives — escape inside music to a place where nothing really else matters. Charlie Parker didn’t want to go back to that other place. Maybe that’s why he was such a genius player. It’s the beauty you can find within music.

What I hope is that teachers will use this with students and now have the background using as a guide to teach jazz and they can pick up on these pocket topics and run with it in their own way. For example Brian Lynch is really excited about what his students are doing with it at the Frost School of music in Miami. I want to get this book into schools.

Among other jazz piano books, Davis notes, Jazz Piano by Mark Levine is an excellent book which I recommend. But it’s more of a reference loaded with information, where my book is a method, a pathway hopefully to come away with a much deeper understanding of music and approach for how they can continue to play it.

I don’t want to give them too much information because people can become overwhelmed by this music. I want them to enjoy learning how to play jazz.

Mark Davis and We Six will perform at 7:30 p.m. March 18 with guest artists Brian Lynch, a Grammy-winning trumpeter originally from Milwaukee, and Benny Golson, a renowned jazz saxophonist and composer, at Marquette University’s Weasler Auditorium, 1506 W. Wisconsin Ave.  Over a distinguished career, Golson has worked with, among others, Tadd Dameron, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. Golson has written a number of jazz standards including “I Remember Clifford,” “Killer Joe” and “Whisper Not.” He’s also composed for TV shows including Ironside, M.A.S.H., and Mission Impossible. For information, visit www.wcmusic.org.

Benny Golson. Courtesy jazzpages.com

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This interview was originally published in The Shepherd Express in a slightly different form.

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“Catskill Lake, N.Y.” By Thomas Cole, one of the co-founders of the Hudson River School.

Here’s my review of the extraordinary Milwaukee Art Museum exhibit Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School  in OnMilwaukee.com:http://onmilwaukee.com/ent/articles/mamhudsonriverschool.html

Here are a few extra images from the show that I comment on in the review, plus a few notes at the bottom.

Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830-1902)Donner Lake from the Summit, 1873Oil on canvas: 72 1/8 x 120 3/16 in. (183.2 x 305.3 cm)Gift of Archer Milton Huntington, 1909.16

Here’s a photo of the still-imposing Donner Pass today, above Donner Lake, which I drove through in 2014. It is the highest point in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

This painting is not from the Milwaukee Art Museum’s “American Vision” exhibit. It is an artist’s rendering of 1846 Donner party battling the the blizzard they encountered in the rugged mountain pass that would be named for them. 

I

“Niagara Falls” (1818) by Louisa Davis Minot is the earliest Hudson River School painting in the exhibit.

Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire — The Savage State.” 

Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire — Destruction.”

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This review was originally published in OnMilwaukee.com

Here are a few notes about a somewhat comparable show you may have seen at MAM, Masterpieces of American Art, 1770-1920, work from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

1. That 2005 show was more diverse and diffuse but slightly less impressive over all than the Hudson River School show, especially with the new show’s celebrated “The Course of Empire” series by Thomas Cole. However, Masterpieces included two works that would enhance this show. There’s nothing quite as spectacular in this show as Hudson River School member Frederic Church’s “Cotopaxi” from that show. But then, there are no active volcanoes to render in North America (another brilliant South American mountain painting by Church, “Cayambe” (1858) is in the new show).

2. Also, Church’s “Niagara,” in that earlier show, is perhaps the most accomplished and definitive painting of the falls, as impressive as Louisa Davis Minot’s Niagara painting is in the new show.

3. Cole’s 1836 “Destruction” may have been a model for English Romantic painter John Martin’s 1851 “Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” as the two painting compositions are remarkably similar:

Reproduction of Albert Bierstadt’s “Donner Lake from Summit” is courtesy www.hawthornehotelblog.com  All other images courtesy The Milwaukee Art Museum and The New York Historical Society, unless otherwise noted.

The Ches Smith Trio: Craig Taborn, piano; Mat Maneri, viola; Ches Smith, percussion. hallwalls.org.

Ches Smith The Bell (ECM)

Music of The Bell seems about the interplay of the subtlest of overtones, not unlike the layered harmonic convergences of multiple bells when played on a steeple. That’s a way of imaging and accessing this chamber jazz, which sometimes elides listener engagement with minimalist vamps and fragmented indirection. Underlying, more promisingly, is a sense of internal three-way dialogue.

The title piece opens, casting a suspenseful aura. Vivid scenarios unfold — Mat Maneri’s musky viola often serpentine and mysterioso — and arrestingly on “I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Earth.” A songful purposefulness arises in the latter part of “I Think.” That vigorously fraternal sparring leads to “Whacken Open Air” with a funky, push-pull tension that fully employs some of pianist Craig Taborn’s powers of dynamic attack and improvisational resource. “It’s Always Winter (Sometimes)” seems to tell an under-heated but sympathetic winter’s tale, with each player allowed enough to play to presume a character’s presence. In all, Taborn’s performance skills feel underused, but this is spatial art music. (Kevin Lynch)

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The Ches Smith ECM Trio performed on Feb. 23 at Bay View United Methodist Church, 2772 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., Milwaukee. 

This review was originally published in slightly modified form in The Shepherd Express.