Associated Press

Dawn BarbouRoske (second from left) of Iowa City, leans towards her partner, Jen BarbouRoske, after learning of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling in favor of legalizing gay marriage on April 3, 2009. Between them is their daughter Bree, 6. Their other daughter, McKinley, 11, reacts to the ruling at left.

Milwaukee-born author Tom Witosky will appear tonight at 7 p.m. at Boswell Books in Milwaukee to promote is new book.

The human story played out like a hotly contested gridiron drama, which is partly why two longtime sports reporters, Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen, took on a book-length story about a tale of “underdogs and victors.”

And the story’s conflict and heartbreak reverberated all across the nation.1

Yet the star of “Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality” would probably drown in a pair of football shoulder pads. McKinley BarbouRoske was the daughter of two plaintiff mothers fighting for their right to marry In Iowa. She was “the heart and soul of the case,” said Camilla Taylor, a plaintiff attorney.

“It was ultimately a story about family,” Witosky explains in a phone interview. (At Marquette University High School, I graduated with Tom, an all-conference football guard, as smart as he was tough.) He began covering politics as a Milwaukee Sentinel stringer in Madison, later covered state legislature and federal courts for The Chicago Tribune’s suburban section and then in Iowa before forging new ground as a sports reporter, investigating the politics and corruption of college athletics.

His book’s lucid narrative spotlights the human players and streamlines the legal complexities of a case that boils down to this: What should disqualify a same-sex Iowa couple from legally forming a family?

Nothing, the courts finally ruled. And a child played a crucial role in legal proceedings that had never before considered the most vulnerable. One day young McKinley heard about her parents’ situation, asked “Why aren’t you married?” and burst into tears.

“Her situation changed the entire dynamics of the case,” Witosky says. Artificially inseminated Jen BarbouRoske and her baby had almost died in childbirth. Then they endured elaborate adoption procedures requiring McKinley’s other mother, Dawn, to establish legal parenthood, “which no parent should have to go through,” Witosky said.

McKinley also suffered from harsh bullying in school due to her parents’ situation — a child clearly harmed. Another couple’s child, college student Zack Wahl, offered eloquent testimony about “the love that binds us.”

An old Wisconsin case also figured prominently in deliberations, Zablocki vs. Redhail (1978), when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a state law denying so-called deadbeat dads the “fundamental right” to marry.

“The Iowa court was doing its job: to look at a law and see if it is constitutional,” Witosky said. “To say that is wrong is the dictation of majority rule, a corruption of our governmental process.”

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A portion of the complex mast rigging of the 19th century whaling ship The Charles W. Morgan. Note the semi-circular lookout spots where sailors searched the horizon for whales. Photo by Katrin Talbot.

Katrin Talbot at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, Pittsfield, Mass. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Partly because my little poem in honor of Katrin Talbot’s birthday Tuesday July 21 was so well received on Facebook, I’ve decided to post it on my blog, along with a few more comments. But I’m doing this mostly because Katrin Talbot is an extraordinary cultural figure who contributes so much to our enrichment.
So I will also offer a small medley of photographs she took during our 2008 research trip out East in pursuit of Herman Melville.
Katrin is collaborating with me by providing her stunning photographs for my forthcoming novel about Herman Melville, with the working title Melville’s Trace or, The Jackal.

Katrin is extraordinarily gifted as not only a photographer, but as a poet and as a musician. She is assistant principal violist with the Madison Symphony Orchestra. It is hard to say in which of her chosen media she is best. Suffice it to say she is the most talented person I know. And as an arts journalist for well over 30 years I have gotten to know and befriended many gifted artists in all media and art forms. I first admired her viola playing when I moved to Madison to cover the arts in 1989 — she was playing with the Madison Symphony and with the Karp Family in their annual fall chamber music concerts (She is married to the brilliant cellist Parry Karp, of the Pro Arte String Quartet).

Then, as I recall, I did a feature story on a fascinating inter-disciplinary performance event she was involved in. It piqued my interest because it incorporated quotes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and was profoundly inspired by the book and author whom I had by then become obsessed with.
So Katrin’s interest in the so-called American Renaissance of literature was a natural entrée for our budding friendship.
When I got the idea of doing a research trip out East for my novel, part of my thought was to find a talented photographer to provide images to complement the story.
I asked Katrin and her enthusiasm and talent immediately lit up my hopes for the book .
We made plans and, in the final scheme, her daughter Arianna was free and interested, so the three of us made the trip together, of which these superb photos will give you a taste.
(Katrin and I also joined a very stimulating collaborative interdisciplinary group of artists called Arts Immersion, formed by Madison artist and psychiatrist Russell Gardner.  Later she and I collaborated on a paper I presented on Melville to the Madison Literary Club.)

I know, when my novel is finally published, the photos of Katrin’s in it will not do justice to the full array of wonderful images she captured on that glorious trip. So here is a sampling of her photos, along with my birthday poem for her, “And the Sun Smiled”

And the Sun Smiled

Years ago, the seed emerged as a Katrin blossom on this day, and lifted into the wind and rode the rhythms of poetry that would circle under a tree, and the vibrations that became a viola’s song.

Many years later, on a Melvillian trail, I was lucky her poetry and music filtered through a camera lense, from her poised and snaring eye, like a reflection in the eddying river that turns each glimmer into another piece of Nature’s ongoing masterpiece, sometimes as fleeting as a squirrel’s breath, other times as broad-shouldered as a cloud-burnished sunset.

She grew nearly as tall and as lovely as the tree she once composed poetry beneath. And the sun smiled, dappling through the leaves, pleased to know it warmed the place she grew.
— Kevin Lynch

In Pursuit of Herman Melville: a medley of photographs by Katrin Talbot, taken for illustrations for my forthcoming novel on Melville.

Kevin Lynch reads Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” at Melville’s tomb, Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York, summer 2008. Photo: Katrin Talbot

Kevin places a pen amid the many writing tools left atop the grave of Herman Melville. 

Gravestone of Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville

Bottom of Melville’s gravestone.

Gravestone of famed jazz trumpeter Miles Davis near Melville’s gravestone and beside that of Duke Ellington in Woodlawn Cemetery in N.Y.

Twin angels atop gravestones at Woodlawn

A schooner mast during a tour of “Melville’s New York,” hosted by Melville “doppelganger” Jack Putnam

Rigging of the N. Y. schooner reflected in the sunglasses of photographer Katrin’s daughter Ariana.

The Statue of Liberty from the schooner as we passed by the iconic monument.

A reflection of the old and new New York, juxtaposed.

Melville “doppelganger” Jack Putnam, 72, historian at the South Seaport Maritime Museum in Manhattan. For years, Putnam has done memorized recitations of whole chapters of “Moby-Dick” as part of his tours.

Photograph of Herman Melville in late 1860s, from Pittsfield Anthenaeum. He died in 1891 at 72, the same age as his current “doppelganger,” maritime historian Jack Putnam, when Katrin photographed him in New York. 

Detail of the large chimney that dominates the Melville home at Arrowhead, and the subject of Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney.”

A lithograph print by J.M.W. Turner from Herman Melville’s personal collection. Melville was an avid collector of art prints.

This appears to be a travel visa that Melville obtained for his trip to Europe and the Holy Land.

The piazza that Melville added to his house at Arrowhead. It provided the title for his acclaimed story collection “The Piazza Tales,” which includes such great works as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.”  

A peek into Melville’s study and writing desk at Arrowhead, where he wrote “Moby-Dick,” and other works. Imagine, a masterpiece written with nothing but quills, ink fountains and sheets of paper!

Herman Melville (left) and a visitor surveying in the fields at Arrowhead, photo from Pittsfield Anthenaeum.

Melville’s Arrowhead, with the famous piazza he added. The home is well preserved by The Berkshire County Historical Society.

Whale harpoon rack from The Charles W. Morgan, moored in Mystic. Conn., the last extant whaling ship from the mid-1800s, Melville’s era.

Porthole from below deck on the whaler The Charles W. Morgan

Harpoon rope for  whaling boat. The rope and boat would often be pulled by a harpooned whale on a “Nantucket sleigh ride” until the mighty beast weakened. Then the sailors grabbed the rope and hauled their prey in for the final kill.

Diagram for the cutting of a captured Sperm Whale by a whaling crew.

Forked spears, on the Charles W. Morgan, for hoisting whale blubber slabs into the tryworks for melting into oil.

A “widow’s walk” built atop a roof in the harbor at Mystic, Conn., where wives of whalers would watch the sea in hopes of seeing their husbands returning.

The masthead on the tip of the prow of the 19th-century whaler The Charles W. Morgan.

A jellyfish swims past the Charles W. Morgan in the bay of Mystic, Conn.A spectral reflection of the whaling ship in the water below its mooring place.

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Meanwhile, yours truly tries to continue spreading the word of Melville — here prostelytizing with my “Call Me Ishmael” T-shirt from Arrowhead — with the Italian sausage of the famous Milwaukee Brewers sausage race.  I explained to him how much the Moby-Dick man loved Italy’s art. One of Melville’s traveling lectures was on “The Statues of Rome.” Photo by Ann K. Peterson.

Townes van Zandt with “Amigo,” Colorado, 1976

And lay me down easy where the cool rivers run/
With only my mountains ‘tween me and the sun — Townes Van Zandt, “My Proud Mountains”

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal 

I recently drove back out to Colorado which is not my home. But something draws me back, which feels as primal and perhaps as personal as it was for the late great Townes Van Zandt when he pondered, wrote and sang “My Proud Mountains.”

OK, part of it is my love for experiencing music in an extraordinary outdoor setting, so I head for the improbable mountainous concert venue of Red Rocks Amphitheater, outside Morrison,  Colorado. Here you drive up to caverns where you lose cell phone reception. You my need to climb a ways up rock and root-thicketed pathways, and then steep concrete staircases to get to your seat.

But there’s something more personal about the mountain thing for me. As my girlfriend Ann Peterson and I drove through Iowa on our way out last week, I popped in Van Zandt’s album The Highway Kind, which includes “My Proud Mountains.”

But first, there’s another song, utterly haunting, the title song, which I think is the only way I can get to “My Proud Mountains.” I had to re-listen to “The Highway Kind” several times (once while Ann was in a gas station restroom).  For me it feels like a sort of strange, disembodied rite, about a man who has to keep rolling his tumbleweed soul down the highway, drifting in and out of relationships, in search of a woman whom he loves and yet has never met. That sounds like the stuff of pure, goofball romance but Townes makes clear in the song that chances are that he will never meet this woman, which is a different kind of longing, the stuff of pure idealism.

Yet Townes has a gift for the twist — there is no simmering sense of “just maybe,” only a forsaken dream that a darkly blessed poet could envision.

The essentially modal song putters and drones along in D minor, like a car with a hole in each tire hissing out air, till you’re sitting pancake-flat on the highway in the middle of nowhere. Pour the sun upon the ground, stand to throw a shadow. Watch it grow into the night/ Feel the spinning sky. It was the perfect song for a drive from Milwaukee to Boulder in two days, because Iowa and Nebraska seem forever (I wish I’d brought the CD last fall, when I madly drove from Milwaukee to Boulder in one day.)

Ultimately Townes has to keep moving because he’s the highway kind, the restless soul who “only comes to leave.” And then he sings: “But the leavin’ I don’t mind, it’s the comin’ that I crave.” Enough to drive a woman crazy, so none could ever stay with him, although more than a few fell in love.

Nevertheless, Townes had a devoted, long-suffering wife, Jeanene, whom I suspect might concede that this is one of the songs closest to who he really was.

Here is a striking and under-heard version of “The Highway Kind”:

It was this sort of poetic storytelling that caught me almost unawares when I turned to Townes Van Zandt’s music after my second marriage failed. Many years earlier, his baroquely overproduced first album For the Sake of the Song had kept me from investigating his later output. Now I discovered I needed his mournful yet persistently outward bound and slightly cock-eyed imagination, one that dreamed up the mini- epic “Pancho and Lefty,” which Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard turned into a huge hit. Townes also led me to rediscover so-called roots music and the many newer singer-songwriters applying extraordinary levels of literary effort to song craft, a quiet sort of American cultural renaissance.

Anyways, I don’t really consider myself “The Highway Kind.” Being a Cancer, I’m even something of a homebody. Still, as the son of a traveling salesman, I do love the road — driving across the Spartan, mute, muscular and magnificent expanses of America.

I’m fascinated by such a quietly bedeviled creature as “The Highway Kind” and yet I respond with more of an open soul to a song like “My Proud Mountains.”

Colorado was the Texas singer-songwriter’s adopted state.

He lived there in some of the happiest times of his life as well as some of the most desolate. You can read one of the two biographies of his life, though I prefer John Kruth’s To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of the Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Despite its slightly hagiographic undertones, Kruth doesn’t flinch from the truth about a man who was a genius, and often a funny sweetheart and sometimes a cold jerk, especially when alcohol took hold of him. That demon ultimately killed him on January 1, 1997, at age of 52 — exactly 40 years to the day after his hero, Hank Williams, died, also from drink.

Kruth’s book title draws from the title of perhaps my favorite Van Zandt song, “To Live’s to Fly” a more sunlit variation on “The Highway Kind” theme. “To Live” examines the profound impulse to keep moving on, which the true troubadour lives for, because he or she simply cannot rest, with a soul as unsettled as the wind that sighs and howls almost ceaselessly through Townes’ proud Colorado mountains.
Despite the kinship between the two songs, I won’t peruse “To Live’s to Fly” in detail because it’s so well known among Townes fans.

“My Proud Mountains,” however, sounds like he wrote it in Texas or somewhere else far from Colorado, and invokes the deep-in-the-bone desire for the peak experience in piercingly eloquent terms. I may never live in Colorado; as a downsized staff newspaperman I lack the financial resources to move to Boulder, the splendid city I have visited most often.
So last week, my sister-in-law Kris Verdin  — who has hosted my visits every time I have seen and climbed in Van Zandt’s proud peaks — encouraged my girlfriend and I to scope out for-sale condominiums a few blocks away from her home in south Boulder, not far from the foothills of the Rockies. But those go for about 500 grand, which is way beyond me.

And yet, I return to Colorado because of the mountains, my love of which goes back in some primal way to early instincts, even though I am a lifelong Wisconsinite. I was always drawn to the mountains and when I finally got out west in 1971, a magnetic force seemed to pull me to a headlong climb up the vast, grand face of Teewinot Mountain, in the Tetons of Wyoming, a mountain often mistaken for the nearby Grand Teton.

Inexperienced and without any equipment, I didn’t actually climb the rock face. But the long trek and scramble to the base of the face and the way back, with my friend Frank Stemper, led us into a mountain cloud, hovering halfway down the mountainside, at dusk. Then rainfall began and the engulfing cloud cover forced us to simply lie down on the edge of the cliff, because we couldn’t see far enough to safely traverse either direction away from the precipice.

So Frank and I huddled in cloth sleeping bags, in the rain, pondering the sky and perhaps the fate toying with our unfolding lives, just into college. The rain fell constantly and the temperature dipped into the upper thirties. We lay with knees hunched up to protect our crotches and soon they were the only parts of us still dry. We hardly slept but Frank says he dreamed that our travel buddy John Kurzawa drove my mother’s trusty station wagon up the mountain to rescue us.
Frank shared with me the fourth and last cigarette I have ever smoked in my life, which proved somewhat comforting, amid the daunting heights of our situation. When the cloud cleared in the morning we found our way down with comparatively little difficulty.

Townes Van Zandt doubtlessly had similar feelings and probably with far deeper anxiety during the time he lived alone in a cabin in Colorado, with nobody but his dog and his horse Amigo. At that point, in his life he was so destitute and perhaps mentally destabilized that he ate dog food for his sustenance for a period of time, according to biographer Kruth.

My own life went to through a debilitating transformation when I, along with 26 other veteran journalists, was downsized out of my long-time job at The Capital Times in Madison in 2008. Shortly before that my wife divorced me. I had also contracted a rare, autoimmune nerve disease that rendered my  left hand partially paralyzed and both my arms and hands in chronic pain, which continues to this day.

So needless to say, I was distraught and at times bereft at this point in my life.
That is when I rediscovered Townes Van Zandt, like an unholy angel of deliverance.

His mountain song resonates like the tale of a mythical character, but Townes sings it with such abject honesty and honor for the spiritual wonder of the mountains that you can almost taste his wanderlust, his spiritual displacement. You can imagine yourself pulling on his dusty boots, and heading west for that big, brawny horizon, long down the road.

And yet, his song is about leaving the mountains behind:

My Proud Mountains, by Townes Van Zandt

My home is Colorado with their proud mountains tall
Where the rivers like gypsies down her black canyons fall
I’m a long, long way from Denver with a long way to go
So lend an ear to my singing ’cause I’ll be back no more

I left as a young man not full seventeen
With nothin’ for company but the wind and a dream
‘Bout all the fast ladies and livin’ I’d find
When I left my proud mountains and rivers behind

So I rolled and a-rambled like a leaf in the wind
Well, I found my fast ladies and some hard livin’ men
Well, I sometimes went hungry with my pockets all bare
Lord, I sometimes had good luck with money to spare

I made me some friends, Lord, that I won’t soon forget
Some are down under and some are rambling yet
But as for me I’m headed for home
Back to high Colorado never more for to roam

So friends, when my time comes as surely it will
You just carry my body out to some lonesome hill
And lay me down easy where the cool rivers run
With only my mountains ‘tween me and the sun

My home is Colorado.

_______________

1 http://www.metrolyrics.com/my-proud-mountains-lyrics-townes-van-zandt.html

Richard Deibenkorn, “A Day at the Races,” 1953. Courtesy the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

“Summertime was a time/ of lush and glaring riches/ you wanted all of.” I once began a poem that way, back in the 1980s, before I had really discovered the art of Richard Deibenkorn.

But I might have written it about his work, which is the West Coast art that, for me, has epitomized the depth and spiritual liberation of the summer experience, more than that of the more popular David Hockney, though I like his fancy-free pictorial art.

Deibenkorn, however, possesses lush, lyrical riches and his art glares luminously with its layers of verdant, golden, sun-drenched colors. I was spurred to this post (as well as to a recent FB post) by the Deibenkorn painting Berkeley # 54, which is a highlight of the superb exhibit Modern Rebels: Van Gogh to Pollock — Masterpieces from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. running currently at the Milwaukee Art Museum through September 20 (For a preview of the show see my article here: https://kevernacular.com/?p=6371 Richard Deibenkorn “Berkeley # 54.” This image doesn’t do justice to the scale of this painting (61 by 59 inches) currently on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum, through September 20. Courtesy albright-knox.com

I’ve always wanted to go to the Buffalo gallery, ever since the 1970s, when I fell hard for Sam Francis’s painting “The Whiteness of the Whale,” an allusion to the profound essay on “whiteness” in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Like that chapter, the Francis painting is a gorgeous and, I daresay, profound work of art itself. And it was the first art print I ever had framed.

For my money, Francis was Deibenkorn’s only competitor for “best California modern painter.”

My only real disappointment with the MAM show is that the Francis painting was not part of this exhibit. So don’t look for it in Milwaukee. However, a few years back MAM received Francis’s complete oeuvre of prints for its collection (unlike many abstract expressionists Francis was a prolific print-maker) and will present an exhibit of those in the fall.

4 R

Sam Francis, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” 1957. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery 

Ah, but the current show has so much to recommend, like Deibenkorn’s marvelous “Berkeley” series painting.

Deibenkorn is not only a pure abstractionist — he can tell vivid, witty visual stories as in “A Day at the Races” (at top), as well render ingeniously stylish landscapes and figurative portraits.

The figurative images (such as Sleeping Woman, not in the MAM show) readily show his debt to Edward Hopper, which suggests the Californian’s art entails fair more than sensory self-indulgence. “I embraced Hopper completely…It was his use of light and shade and the atmosphere…kind of drenched, saturated with mood, and it’s kind of austerity…it was the kind of work that just seemed made for me. I looked at it and it was mine,” Deibenkorn related, in a quote from an essay by Jane Livingston in a University of California Press catalogue of his work.

Richard Deibenkorn, “Sleeping Woman,” 1961 Courtesy irequireart.com

I believe I saw some Deibenkorn paintings at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison and then, in 1997, The Art of Richard Deibenkorn, the sumptuous catalog for a traveling exhibit  was published. The show never came to Wisconsin but, with the catalog, I felt really hard for his abstract expressionist/colorist revelations. He was a sterling first-generation abstract expressionist, but they never talked about him much when I was studying as an art major at UW-Milwaukee in the 1970s. Common consensus held New York the cultural Gotham City, the kingdom of the art world, in that era.

Richard Deibenkorn. Courtesy brainpickings.org. 

I would probably write more in depth about Deibenkorn, but I am about to embark on a road trip. So I am delving into my own journalistic archives (which I occasionally do, as with an unforgettable interview with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe). I wrote a review of the Deibenkorn catalog itself for The Capital Times which I present here, as a celebration of his art and a celebration of summer. Get a taste, and you want all of Deibenkorn you can get. Enjoy and seek out this book (from The U-Cal Press) and this man’s art, wherever you may find it:

The Maria Schneider Orchestra’s ravishing new recording, The Thompson Fields, demonstrates her evolving vision for the evocative and deep nuances of sonic beauty that her music now radiates. But there’s a concept at work as well. She’s investigating the hidden realms of life — the flora and fauna, and the ever-evanescent weather dynamics — of her native rural Minnesota.

With Schneider’s extraordinary skills composing for a gifted array of musicians, she makes this almost secret world come alive in the music. And she makes a persuasive case that humans should cultivate a stronger ties to that world. The title refers to the Thompson family, which has kept a native prairie alive for generations.

The sumptuously packaged CD includes Schneider’s intimate liner notes, color images of birds from the Audubon society collection, and several fold-out photographs including a fairly breathtaking shot of a storm brewing over the Minnesota countryside.

It’s also fascinating to see where such sensitive and sophisticated music came from. That’s why Schneider is the perfect person to provide inquisitive listeners with a guide to the music of her greatest influence, Gil Evans.

Gil Evans conducting his orchestra during recordings with Miles Davis. photo by Don Hunstein.

Perhaps nobody is more qualified to assess the best of Gil Evans. She served as the great composer and arranger’s musical assistant from 1985 to his death in 1988. We’re fortunate that she put on her critic’s hat for this column enumerating in detail “the dozens,” or the 12 best recorded Gil Evans pieces. I encountered the column, put together by Ted Panken for jazz.com, on the website of Ryan Truesdell, director of The Gil Evans Project orchestra:http://www.jazz.com/dozens/maria-schneider-selective-gil-evans

“The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,” oil on canvas, Arshile Gorky, 1944

Van Gogh to Pollock: Modern Rebels – Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Gallery, through September 20. Milwaukee Art Museum

If actor James Dean ever picked up a paintbrush, the result might’ve looked something like a Jackson Pollock, but without the artistic skill for orchestrating controlled abandon. What amounts to an art rebellion? If you can go back to a key moment, a kind of rebellion sometimes occurs when an artist makes an extraordinary, radical move.

Imagine watching Pollock when he “broke the ice” as his contemporary Willem DeKooning said. Pollock broke most of the rules of painting, pacing panther-like around huge canvases stretched out on the floor. His paint dripped, swirled and splattered — and blew the concept of depiction to smithereens.

“Modernism is about rebels who look at convention, and say, ‘I’m gonna stand that on its head,’” says Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator Brady Roberts.

That’s a key aspect of the excitement and resonance of “Van Gogh to Pollock: Modern Rebels.” The exhibit of major works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

Pollock’s engulfing “Convergence” from 1952 will show how differently art could express and, even more radically, do. The so-called “action painting” will also be represented by DeKooning’s tension-filled “Gotham News” from 1955, among others. They’re two prime “rebel” examples from Albright-Knox which has “the best collection of abstract expressionism in the world,” says Roberts.

“Convergence,” oil on canvas, Jackson Pollock, 1952

The mid-20^th century movement that made New York the “art world capital” will be offered in its “the historical context” — “post-impressionism, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, surrealism, Joan Miro and more,” Roberts says.

Not all art rebels are “irascibles” as the action painters were once called. The show will include Miro’s “best painting,” the thickly-populated “Carnival of Harlequin,” a major statement of surrealist sensibility at its most playful. Also, there’s Henri Matisse’s gorgeously idiosyncratic sense of line and color in “La Musique,” depicting two seated women, one playing a guitar. Another way of understanding Matisse’s disarming music-lovers as rebellion is to consider it was painted in France in 1939 — with Hitler’s Nazi invasion looming. Such embracing of unfettered beauty becomes an act of joyous defiance, especially as the Nazis would deem most modern art as “degenerate.”

Which brings me back to Pollock. My composer friend Frank Stemper commented on Facebook that Pollock helped inspire his own music-creation because the painter “is so musical.” Then Frank asked, why is this so? My answer:  He’s musical partly because, unlike most painters, Pollock virtually danced while he created his drip paintings, because he used the rhythm and pulse — and the lyrical feel — of that whole bodily gesture, to paint. Or more precisely, to make the paint dance, and fly! Pollock understood the liberating qualities and power of the inner musicality of dance.

“La Musique” oil on canvas, Henri Matisse, 1939

And this also helped Pollock process his demons. Much earlier the anguished genius Vincent Van Gogh found his own way, on the front end of the show’s historical spectrum. Before him, artists rarely attacked the canvas with such raw gusto or expressive directness, so the emotion in the brush gestures communicated as much as the depiction of the scene, as in “The Old Mill” from 1888. “Modernism is also the invention of style as personal expression.” Roberts says.

“The Old Mill,” oil on canvas, Vincent van Gogh, 1888

Modernism’s roots rise from 19^th century Romanticism, Roberts notes, but it’s also a response to the industrial revolution. An explicit example referencing that revolution in the show will be Robert Delauney’s 1913 “Sun, Tower, Airplane,” a cubist evocation of The Eiffel Tower, a Ferris wheel and an airplane, “three modern inventions that defied gravity,” Roberts explains.

“So, in 1913, there’s a sense of a sort of utopian future, and that artists are leading the way. Kandinsky, who’s is also in the show, was writing about this, saying the best artists, like Picasso, were seers and prophets who understand that the world was going to change, and it’s going to be this glorious new thing.

“Of course, World War I happened, and that ended the utopian euphoria for industrial vanity.”

“Soliel, Tour, Aeroplane (Sun, Tower, Airplane),” oil on canvas, Robert” Delauney, 1913 

Nevertheless, modern artists continued as seers and rebels, even against the recent standard of rebellion, as 1960s pop art rejected abstract expressionism.

Among the still-underappreciated great modernists in the show is the Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a key link from surrealism to abstract expressionism. Visitors will see arguably Gorky’s greatest work, “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb” from 1944 (pictured at top), “a big, luscious, beautiful painting,” Brady says. I can vouch first hand for Brady’s characterization of the Gorky, having seen it in a Gorky retrospective in New York.

***

Brady also sees striking parallels between the Albright-Knox and MAM – including visionary collectors. The core of Milwaukee’s permanent holdings is the Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley collection. In the early part of the 20^th century, Albright-Knox had a trustee named Conger Goodyear who sensed modernism’s growing dynamism and started bullishly collecting. He began by acquiring a “classical” blue-period Picasso, “La Toilette” from 1906. The painting faced controversy upfront from conservative board members for displaying a female nude so forthrightly. Later, the generous donor Seymour Knox would crucially help the gallery gain its world-class modernist heft.

Also, the Buffalo facility is presently, like Milwaukee’s, building a major addition to house and present its expanding collection. The construction shut-down of the Buffalo galleries is why their collection is touring, Roberts says.

The show will also include major works by Marc Chagall, Paul Gauguin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frieda Kahlo, Robert Motherwell, Marko Rothko, Salvador Dali, Richard Deibenkorn, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Alberto Giacometti and others.

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All images courtesy The Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

This article was originally published in a slightly shorter version in The Shepherd Express.

Verona native Ryan Truesdell, who began jazz study at Verona High School, now leads The Gil Evans Project during a recent live recording at The Jazz Standard in New York.

All the brass horns gleam, whisper and shout. Tonal colors multiply, merge and melt, without digital trickery.  Today’s jazz orchestra composer-arranger’s pen conjures sumptuous landscapes for the soloist’s ramble.

Impressive recordings of them proliferate lately, some winning best-of-the-year polls and wide acclaim. But aren’t big bands a creaking dinosaur of the swing era? Something is afoot, a reborn beast with a huge sonic footprint.

The creature may herald a new golden age of the jazz orchestra. Consider, the most expansive jazz form remains historically important and globally influential.

Two of the best last two rock concerts I attended both included a horn section: Greg Allman’s band in Milwaukee, and the 11-piece Tedeschi-Trucks Band in Madison, a jazzy blues-rock group that many critics, including myself, consider the best band in popular music today. Lyle Lovett’s Large Band (essentially a Texas-swing jazz orchestra) has revitalized that country singer-songwriter’s career.

Then pop superstar Lady Gaga recorded with timeless Tony Bennett — their acclaimed, hit album Cheek to Cheek impressed even picky jazz critics with repertoire from the first golden age of big bands. They recorded and are touring with a full jazz orchestra, with two dates at Ravinia Festival in Highland Park Friday and Saturday June 26-27.

In Milwaukee, The All-Star Superband has played weekly almost steadily throughout the 21st century, performing a challenging and diverse repertoire. They will play a benefit concert at 5 p.m. Wednesday (ed.: June 24) at the Briggs & Stratton Big Backyard at the Zoo Terrace for Easter Seal of Southeastern Wisconsin, preceding the charity’s annual Walk With Me fund-raiser at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Here’s the big band’s website: http://www.allstarsuperband.com/home.html

Led by bassist Gary Christensen, the orchestra highlights renowned saxophonist-flutist Warren Weigratz, widely-traveled alto saxist-clarinetist Tim Bell, trumpeter Kaye Berigan (whose uncle Bunny starred in the first golden age) and other top-flight area pros who relish the band’s power and palette. The Superband’s cover charge every week goes to charitable benefits. This is high-calorie music played for the love of it, and shouldn’t be missed.

To the west, The Madison Jazz Orchestra, formed in 1986, performs monthly and with comparable ambitious quality to Milwaukee’s big band: http://www.madisonjazzorchestra.com/The_Madison_Jazz_Orchestra/Home.html

A “battle of the bands” between these Milwaukee and Madison orchestras would be epic.

Also, The Large Unit, an avant-garde nonet of European musicians will perform Wednesday (ed.: June 24) at 8 p.m. in Milwaukee at Sugar Maple, 441 E. Lincoln Ave., as part of the annual Okka Fest.

A critical measure of the golden age of any medium is the level and range of artistry at work among a wide array of serious practitioners, without obvious commercial hooks. Still, I’m defining jazz orchestra broadly (see discography) to include rock- or blues-oriented groups with at least three horn players who improvise, to show the large form’s ongoing influence.

Two auspicious and related examples of full jazz orchestras with brand-new recordings are The Thompson Fields by the Maria Schneider Orchestra and Lines of Color by The Gil Evans Project, formed and led by Verona WI native Ryan Truesdell. Truesdell also produced Sky Blue, Schneider’s previous double-Grammy-nominated orchestra album, and the orchestras share a handful of musicians. Last year’s most conceptually ambitious, if not best, jazz recording was Identities are Changeable by Miguel Zenon and his “Identities” Big Band.

But the Evans influence seems ascendant, in Schneider, Truesdell and the brilliant Canadian composer-orchestra leader Christine Jensen, among others. The primary influence of Schneider, the premiere orchestra leader in jazz today, is Evans, the impressionistic sorcerer who conjured palpably evocative backdrops for Miles Davis’ classic albums, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain. Schneider served as Evans’ musical assistant for three years before his 1988 death.

“The Thompson Fields” reveals Maria Schneider as an uncommonly gifted composer and arranger whose poetic, nature-evoking Midwestern sensibility radiates though her orchestra. Courtesy artisthouse.com

Equally taken by Evans, Truesdell befriended the late bandleader’s family who eventually allowed him to investigate Evans’ unpublished, unrecorded scores. The first result was the sensational Gil Evans Project album Centennial: Newly Discovered Works by Gil Evans, arguably the jazz event of 2012. Now comes Lines of Color, a vibrant, witty, swinging live-at-the-Jazz Standard follow-up.

Here The Gil Evans Project, live at the Jazz Standard, records a portion of Evans’ “The Time of the Barracudas”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG_-ffjASIc

Numerous recent orchestra recordings defy the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, and jazz’s small presence in corporate-controlled, bottom-line radio and music industries. Try maintaining a 16-to-18 musician ensemble that requires extensive rehearsal, a collective response to one leader’s creative whim and will, in an art dominated by the “rugged-individual” instrumentalist.

“Shocking” is what Truesdell calls all the recording and activity (see below and discography). “But people are getting grant money and finding ways,” he said in a phone interview. “And it is so much cheaper to make a recording now. You can you record them on your own. Or they do live recordings which are so much easier to do. There is a cost-effective ways of making a big-band work.

“I don’t know if it’s a new golden age, but people are trying to do something different. Everybody’s got a quartet or trio, so people are searching for something kind of different and some musicians think their voice will be different if they go larger.”

Gil Evans, extending Duke Ellington’s innovations, actually opened the door in the late ‘50s for a modern jazz orchestra concept. That continued in ensembles led by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Oliver Nelson, Gary McFarland, Gerald Wilson, Chico O’ Farrell and Toshiko Akiyoshi. Composer-arranger Claus Ogerman’s 1989 collaboration with Miles Davis Aura reimagined the trumpeter’s glory days with Evans. This all persisted despite the peaks and valleys of jazz popularity. However, jazz fusion spawned a period where big bands and brass-heavy rock bands embraced electricity and rock beats, including The Don Ellis Orchestra; The Buddy Rich Big Band; Woody Herman with star blues-rock guitarist Michael Bloomfield; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Bloomfield’s Electric Flag, and the most commercially successful, Chicago.

The hard-swinging and rocking Don Ellis Orchestra with soloist John Klemmer performing “Indian Lady.” from Electric Bath. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQk-jFjeACw&feature=em-subs_digest

Nevertheless, today most jazz orchestras use the pure acoustic power, color and range inherent to a sonic palette that Gil Evans expanded by employing all the wind instruments of a classical music orchestra, in ingenious voicings and settings.

“I think it’s a combination of people for whom the jazz orchestra is their voice, and of leaders in small ensembles finding their voices in larger ensembles,” Truesdell says. “And how they’re doing it, I guess they don’t pay people very much, just like everybody else,” he laughs. He adds that all the recording groups aren’t touring nearly as much as big bands did in the swing era.

However both his and Schneider’s orchestra owe much of their financial viability to the highly sophisticated artists-run ArtistShare label, which draws on individual “crowd-funding” sponsors, facilitated by the networking the Internet has provided DIY efforts. Formed in 2003, ArtistShare has produced nine Grammy awards and 18 Grammy nominations with a roster including Pulitzer-prize and Oscar-nominated writers, Guggenheim fellowship recipients and NEA Jazz Masters. 1

Among other important current recorded ensembles are The Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra, the Vanguard Orchestra, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, The SFJazz Collective, The Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra, The John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Quiet Pride: Elizabeth Catlett Project led by Rufus Reid, The Chris Potter Underground Orchestra, The Archie Shepp Attica Blues Orchestra, and 2015 Grammy album winners, Arturo O’Farrell and the Latin Jazz Orchestra for The Offense of the Drum and Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, for Life in the Bubble.

Composer-arrangers like Quincy Jones — best known for work with Michael Jackson and Miles Davis — and Vince Mendoza freelance with numerous jazz and symphony orchestras. Mendoza’s widest exposure came with his sumptuously simpatico enhancements of Joni Mitchell on her double Grammy-winning “standards” album Both Sides Now, including a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist.

Another excellent recent recording was Fly! By Mitch Shiner and the Blooming Tones Big Band, led by a graduate of Mequon High School. Last winter, Milwaukee saw The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by composer-trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in a superlative holiday concert featuring today’s hottest jazz singer, Cecile McLorin Salvant.

Perhaps the seeds for a new golden age of orchestra were sown in 1997 when Marsalis and his orchestra bested all “legit” composers for the Pulitzer for Best Musical Composition, for the soulfully solemn orchestral oratorio Blood on the Fields. It has spurred other ambitious jazz orchestral inquiries into African-America history.

Schneider strengthened the legitimacy of a new jazz composer era by winning three Grammy awards for classical music in 2014 including best Best Contemporary Composition for her first classical orchestral recording Winter Morning Walks, two song cycles of poetry with soprano Dawn Upshaw and two chamber orchestras.

Many classic big bands from the swing era still remain intact and tour under new leadership. Milwaukee just heard The Woody Herman Orchestra recently at UWM for Jazz Appreciation Month in April. Herman, famous for his always forward-thinking Thundering Herd, was a Milwaukee native.

Another powerful heartland ensemble is the 13-member Chicago Yestet, which injects political awareness into modern big band style with hip-hop, R&B and pop strains. Led by Madison native Joel Adams — a Woody Herman band alumnus — the mini-big band features acclaimed Milwaukee trumpeter Russ Johnson, and Madison rapper/hip-hop historian Rob Dz (CD reviewed here recently. The Chicago Yestet will play at the Brink Lounge in Madison Sept. 5, amid a spate of Chicago and Wisconsin dates: http://www.chicagoyestet.com/)

And speaking of universities, speaking of universities, the persistence of the jazz orchestra goes back to education. Despite the ever-present lure of small-combo guitar rock-pop, countless young musicians dedicate themselves to orchestra instruments and to rigorous, competitive high school and college ensemble programs, as a cursory survey of Down Beat magazine’s large annual education section proves.

The highly accomplished and dynamic All-Star Superband has played weekly for most of the 21 century throughout Milwaukee. All their performances proceeds go to local charities. Courtesy All-Star superband.

“There are 2,318 rehearsal big bands on the planet,” asserts Gary Christensen, leader of the All-Star Big Band. “On YouTube I came across a young people’s big band in Japan really nailing this high-level jazz piece. So it’s like, wow, they really are everywhere!”

The UWM Jazz Ensemble and The Marquette University Jazz Band, of varying sizes, function alongside the school’s traditional classical music instruction. Most jazz orchestras require strong reading ability of sometimes devilishly complex charts, the disciplined ear for harmonizing, counterpoint and tricky time signatures, as well as individual imagination and virtuosity for soloing.

A gifted composer-arranger like Schneider, Marsalis, Argue or Jensen — or the SFJazz Collective’s multiple composer-arrangers, including the brilliant Miguel Zenon — can make musical magic with such forces. And magic, that transports the imagination and spirit, never goes out of style.

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See sidebar post on CC for a Selected Discography of the Modern Jazz Orchestra: https://kevernacular.com/?p=6335 

1. Among the notable artists and recordings underscoring the importance of the ArtistShare brand and kick-starter funding concept are Pulitzer-nominated composer Patrick Williams, The Clayton Brothers, Milwaukee-raised trumpeter Brian Lynch for the Grammy-winning large-ensemble Eddie Palmieri Project’s Simpatico, Bob Brookmeyer, Danilo Perez, Jim Hall, SFJazz Collective’s Robin Eubanks, Ingrid Jensen, Donny McCaslin, Jane Ira Bloom, Torben Waldorff, Geoff Keezer and Alex Sipiagin.

Coming soon, a more in-depth interview with Ryan Truesdell, creator and music director of The Gil Evans Project.

This article was originally published in OnMilwaukee.com:http://onmilwaukee.com/music/articles/jazzgoldenage.html

This article is dedicated to the memory of my father, Norman Lynch, who introduced me at a young age to the power and possibility of the jazz orchestra. He especially loved Stan Kenton and often said, “My dream always was to play trombone in the Kenton Orchestra.”

Norm and Kevin Lynch, beside a Stan Kenton poster, The Jazz Estate, Milwaukee, 1983.

During research for my jazz orchestra article, I put together this discography, which attempts to trace the recorded development of modern jazz orchestra in roughly chronological order. It begins at the transition point from bebop, represented by Dizzy Gillespie, who often thought of the bop combo concept in larger terms. The key breakthrough is Birth of the Cool, the album by Miles Davis which introduced most listeners to the arranging talents of Gil Evans, though Stan Kenton more widely turned a new college generation onto the jazz orchestra’s excitement and possibilities. But Evans had an important developing ground. One can hope that, in the future, appreciable CD recordings emerge by The Claude Thornhill’s orchestra from the 1940s-50s. Evans began his ambitious and fast-forming apprenticeship with the Thornhill orchestra. Those early recordings, not listed here, are contemporary to some of the rough-cut gems of brilliance that Ryan Truesdell has uncovered and polished up for the Gil Evans Project. The reassertion of Evans’ centrality is one of the most significant developments in what may be a new golden age of jazz orchestra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoU1drxfdYM

Here’s a selected discography of the modern jazz orchestra (Roughly in chronological order from first noteworthy recording. Subsequent recordings listed for single bands may be quite a few years later, eg. first Liberation Music Orchestra is 1969 and the third listed, Not in Our Name is 2006, during The Iraq War):

Live at Newport Dizzy Gillespie (with Mary Lou Williams performing from her “Zodiac Suite.”)

Birth of the Cool Miles Davis with Gil Evans

Live at Newport, His Mother Called Him Bill, Far East Suite and Digital Duke Duke Ellington Orchestra

Space is the Place, Live at Montreux   Sun Ra Myth-Science Arkestra Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, Miles Ahead and Miles Davis/ Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings (all with Miles Davis),The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions, Out of the Cool and The Individualism of Gil Evans Gil Evans Orchestra

The Magic Touch Tadd Dameron and his Orchestra West Side Story and Adventures in Jazz Stan Kenton Orchestra

Africa/Brass and Ascension John Coltrane

Thelonious Monk Big Band and Quartet in Concert Thelonious Monk with Oliver Nelson

Continuum and Live at The Village Vanguard  Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra

Big Swing Face, Mercy Mercy and Live at Buddy’s Place ‘76 The Buddy Rich Big Band

A Long Time Comin’  The Electric Flag

Electric Bath Don Ellis Orchestra

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, Dreamkeeper, and Not in Our Name, Liberation Music Orchestra

Brand New  (with Michael Bloomfield), and Giant Steps Woody Herman

Blood, Sweat and Tears  Blood, Sweat and Tears

The Resurrection of Pig Boy Crabshaw and In My Own Dream Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Chicago Transit Authority and Chicago II  Chicago

Walking in Space and Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux Quincy Jones

Escalator Over the Hill Carla Bley Orchestra

Back to Oakland  Tower of Power

Let My Children Hear Music Charles Mingus

Creative Music Orchestra 1976 and Creative Orchestra 1978 (Koln) Anthony Braxton

Mingus Big Band 93: Nostalgia in Times Square and Live in Tokyo at the Blue Note Mingus Big Band

eil.com

 Tales of a Courtesan, Insights and Carnegie Hall Concert (with Freddie Hubbard a/o) Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band/Orchestra

In Case You Missed It Charli Persip Superband II

Fly with the Wind and Song for My Lady McCoy Tyner

Winged Serpents (Sliding Quadrants) Cecil Taylor Orchestra of Two Continents

David Murray Big Band conducted by Lawrence“Butch”Morris David Murray Big Band

Joe Henderson Big Band Joe Henderson Big Band

With All the Bells and Whistles and Live at Concerts by the Sea Bob Florence Big Band

1997: The new golden age begins?:

youtube.com

Blood on the Fields (Pulitzer Prize winner) and A Love Supreme Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra

Monterey Moods Gerald Wilson Orchestra

Overtime Dave Holland Big Band

Time’s Mirror Tom Harrell Jazz Pana Vince Mendoza w/ Arif Mardin, Epiphany w/ London Symphony Orchestra, and Both Sides Now w/ Joni Mitchell

New Works Celebration and Music for String Quartet and Orchestra Bob Brookmeyer New Art Orchestra

Live at the Miramar Gary Christensen’s All-Star Superband

Habitat and Treelines Christine Jensen Orchestra Produced by Ryan Truesdell, “Sky Blue” by Maria Schneider was nominated for two 2008 Grammy Awards for “Best Large Jazz Ensemble” and “Best Instrumental Composition” (for ‘Cerulean Skies’).

Concert in the Garden, Sky Blue and The Thompson Fields Maria Schneider Orchestra

Centennial and Lines of Color:Live at the Jazz Standard Ryan Truesdell presents The Gil Evans Project

Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola  Joe Chambers Moving Pictures Orchestra

Infernal Machines, and Brooklyn Babylon Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society

Revelator, Everybody’s Talkin’ (live) and Made-Up Mind Tedeschi-Trucks Band

Jazz is Politics? and Just Say Yes, Chicago Yestet.

amazon.com

Identities are Changeable Miguel Zenon Quartet and “Identities” Big Band

Fly!  Mitch Shiner and the Blooming Tones Big Band

The L.A. Treasures Project Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra

Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project Rufus Reid

Live: I Hear The Sound Archie Shepp Attica Blues Orchestra

The Offense Of The Drum Arturo O’Farrell & The Latin Jazz Orchestra

Overtime: Music of Bob Brookmeyer The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra

Imaginary Cities Chris Potter Underground Orchestra

Inside Voices Kenosha Kid

East of the Sun ICP Orchestra

The Blessing, The Eternal Interlude and Songs We Like A Lot (to be released June 23) John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble

Here’s a postlude to the recent Culture Currents review of There’s a Place: Photographs by J. Shimon & J. Lindemann, the marvelous retrospective of the Wisconsin-based photography couple’s work, which recently closed at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend.

The newspaper piece linked to below was written for Roughneck Grace, a column in The Wisconsin State Journal by noted Wisconsin author, humorist, musician and intermittent pig farmer Michael Perry, best known for his funny and perceptive books Population 485; Truck: A Love Story; and Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting.  He’s also the leader of Michael Perry and the Long Beds, a quite respectable a roots music group, whose last recording was Tiny Pilot.

Yep, Perry — pictured here with his amigos — is perfect material for Shimon and Lindemann, though this photo, courtesy of Perry, may or may not be by them.

“Self-portrait in the Garden at Dusk, Whitelaw, WI,” 1998, Palladium Print, by J. Shimon & J. Lindemann.

In his column, Perry reflects on the gratitude he feels in his experience of his friendship with John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. I met the couple some years ago while they mounted a photo show, and they struck me as affable, interesting, vital and wholly dedicated to their life, their art and its unusual photographic standards and modus operandi.

Lindemann, as readers may know, suffers from a terminal cancer.

Here is Perry’s column, “Gratitude sometimes paid in tears”:http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/columnists/michael-perry/michael-perry-gratitude-sometimes-is-paid-in-tears/article_2ed7bb34-a66e-5e7c-a27e-3634ea506b73.html

Thanks to my Madison friends Ann and Richard Meyer for alerting me to Perry’s column, which arrived as a clipping in snail-mail today.

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