Category Archives: Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak)

Brad Mehldau: The Fifth Beatle? “Your Mother Should Know.”

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Who was the fifth Beatle? Discarded drummer Pete Best? Pianist Billy Preston? On this album, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau makes a case as the keyboardist they might’ve hired full-time. He plays Beatles songs as if he owns them, maybe even wrote them. That we experientially know he didn’t deeply enhances his accomplishment. After all, your mother should know.

As a topper, he closes with David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” as tuneful and high-spirited as a vintage Beatles song. Doubters note: on, “I Saw Her Standing There” he lays serious rock‘n’roll chops out front. Otherwise, it’s jazzy investigations and re-imaginings, which the “late Beatles” would’ve dug. “Baby’s in Black” travels way around the bend, and “Golden Slumbers” goes further, an elaborate dream mustered with Keith Jarrett-ish gospel romping.

Brad Mehldau 

Tauter, but no less intriguing, are “For No One,” capturing the song’s stark poignance, and “She Said She Said,” the gorgeous Lennon tune that deserved such sophisticated ravishment.

The album opens with “I Am the Walrus” the surreal psychedelic trip that is as harmonically bent as most any Beatles song. Mehldau revels in its little musical perversities. Mehldau Plays further demonstrates the vast yet seemingly familiar Beatles world still spins out further possibilities of wonder.

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This review was first published in The Shepherd Express: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles (Nonesuch) by Brad Mehdau – Shepherd Express

Novelist Russell Banks strove to write smarter than himself. He succeeded, humbly, wisely and heart-wrenchingly.

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Russell Banks. Pinterest

In a nearly post-literary world it’s important, for the sake of our culture and society, to grab onto a great literary talent like a lifeline, like Queequeg’s wooden coffin rising from the whirlpool of death to save Ishmael. To ride the waves that “rolled for five thousand years,” to roll ever still, open to such wisdom and truth as Moby-Dick bequeathed us during the height of the American Renaissance in literature in the mid-1800s.

I’m writing with a certain urgency of spirit because Russell Banks died on January 3rd. He was, in my opinion and that of many others, arguably America’s greatest living fiction writer. Greatest living creative writer, period. Of course, such things are always arguable. But Banks is right at the crest of the mountaintop. Consider esteemed opinions:

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” – Cornel West

“if the United States were to adopt Japan’s admirable policy designating a few extraordinary individuals as living national treasures, Russell Banks would be my first nomination.” – Michael Cunningham

“Russell Banks is a writer in the grand tradition.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“Russell Banks as a novelist has always geared to illuminate the larger issues of human interaction society that too often dishonors human rights… Like John Brown, the protagonist of one of his novels, he rages against the curse of our time, not slavery now, but a violent nationalism which diminishes our humanity. He should be heeded, or whatever noble dream we had will be lost forever.” – Howard Zinn

Note the urgency of American historian Howard Zinn’s comment, how he speaks to Banks as a prophet and truth-teller for our times and the way we live, or ought to. But Banks is not a preacher. He allows us to see ourselves and our nation in all its complexity so we many judge for ourselves in the light of creative illumination, the kind that shows a way forward through the self-made brambles of our times.

That’s why it’s important to understand as Dr. West, the literary and social critic, commented again, that Banks is “not only one of our great novelists, but also a courageous and visionary citizen.” 1

I’d like to consider him both as a writer and an exemplary citizen and to first allow him to speak forthrightly. In his underappreciated nonfiction book-length essay Dreaming Up America. Banks proved deeply aware of how to “achieve our country,” as philosopher Richard Rorty put it, within reach of the ideals of our dream, such as it may be. But Banks is unflinching in his honest dissent, he hearkens to the provocative idea he once stated: “We became a nation of homicidal dreamers, murderous dreamers.”

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He continues: “I was trying to point indirectly to that age-old conflict between our material goals and the spiritual justifications that lie at the heart of the American dream, and also now at the heart of American history. That conflict has made us murderers, over and over again. Thus, the true American is a killer. The true American is a cynical, materialistic grabber on the one hand reaching for gold, yet he has an idealistic, even religious, sense of mission. When you tell yourself that big a lie, and you call it a dream, you’re going to end up committing acts of violence. It’s the nature of human psychology… And we have historically done exactly that, beginning in the 16th century when the Europeans first arrived off the coast of Florida…we were killing people and saying that we were doing it for some higher good. Not only that we also said we were doing it for their own good!” 2

He then speaks of nationalism as a kind of “secular religion, a substitute religion.”

“One of the healthiest and most important aspects of our American system of government is the separation of religion and state, the sharp distinction between our legal and political system on the one hand and her religious ideas and institutions on the other. One of the things this allows is great religious tolerance; but another thing it does is demystify national identity, to secularize it. This is a very good idea, something much to be desired, that the framers thoughtfully included international idea from the beginning.” 3

Then he addresses the nature and makeup of our beginning: “We began as an invention. We began as emerging, as emerged people. We’re essentially a Creole nation, a mixture, we have been that way since our very conception.” 4 Our democracy has continued by “embodying a conflict that is so destructive – and it is truly destructive – and also so creative.”

The creativity drove “the search for gold, the materialist impulse, and the search for freedom of religion.”  5

But it is our native inhabitants and our most forsaken inhabitants who have shown us the way, and suffered our folly. “The Native Americans were here before us…greeted us and taught us necessary skills for living in this new world.

“And the Africans, who were brought into this new world as the first immigrants that came after, but of the very seed of us that was and has always been in the mixture.” Without both groups we would be more like the Europeans, he says. Both groups give us much of the heft and texture of authentic identity that distinguishes America from the oppressive Old World it fled from.

“But ours has always been a racial obsession, since in my view the seed inside us has always been closer to the complex brew than it ever was to the picture we had of ourselves as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant northern Europeans…” 6

“I recognize that the way this country had was formed, and the way is still coming into being, is a powerful, combustible combination of energies. We would do well to recognize that we haven’t yet finished making ourselves, and that we can still take mindful control of that process. Our American history is taking us somewhere. We just don’t know where yet.” 7

This is a kind of thoughtful, tough-minded exhortation, but hardly leftist fire and brimstone. It points us toward hope, the refurbishing of our somewhat-tattered but rippling dream.

I first became aware of Banks somewhat belatedly as a graduate student in English, some years into my journalism career. So he struck me as not just a firebrand of my youthful ardor, but as a writer of innate and deeply honed wisdom regarding the human condition. The first book of his I read was Continental Drift, an exemplary story of the complexities of American immigration and identity. It proves to me today how timely his vision has always been, capturing the humanity behind our most vexing domestic policy today, besides gun control. Then came Affliction, a story of an ordinary American, a working-class man who seems to be losing his way, blighted by alcohol, almost shattering his existence, and yet who may have the dogged persistence of character that has helped define the best of America. Except this man slip-slides away, being too afflicted by the stuff that freedom-loving America enables. Your heart may bleed for Wade Whitehouse, with the pain of shared societal shame.

James Coburn (left) won an Academy award for best supporting actor as the tortured, abusive father of Nick Nolte in the film version of Russell Banks’s “Affliction.” Scribed

Then, though heart-breaking, came perhaps the book easiest to swallow because of its tender spiritual affirmation, as embodied in its title, The Sweet Hereafter. It universalized the individual American character, in the deeply symbolic children and in the suffering bus driver.

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Rule of the Bone followed, updating in the grand picaresque tradition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, with a brash youth as an American scalawag, yet intuitively connected to honesty and goodness, seemingly rare commodities in his defiant view, and utterly truth-dealing as Banks’s story reveals.

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What ensued was Cloudsplitter, most likely his greatest and most provocative reach for the bending arc of justice, which Martin Luther King articulated as a vision we aspire to but reach all too infrequently.

This was a profound, historically-informed reimagining of the legacy of radical abolitionist John Brown, perhaps the most controversial American patriot in our history. If you want to begin to understand the subject’s craggy mountaintop of complexity, I recommend this book (along with the biography of Brown that ensued some years later, John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds).

Written imaginatively from the point of view of Brown’s sympathetic but spiritually torn son Owen, Cloudsplitter allows us to follow the raging and curving depths of Brown’s river-running compulsion – visionary, deeply humane, yet just zealous enough for some to call him crazy and criminal, certainly in the times he lived and died. Not so coincidentally, Banks lived for decades just down the road from John Brown’s grave, in upper New York, along with those of 13 of the other men who were killed at the Harpers Ferry raid or executed afterwards.

Yes, Brown can be called a terrorist, and a “postmodern” writer, Bruce Olds, perhaps captured that aura more melodramatically than Banks. Alas, even most of the Black slaves Brown tried to liberate and marshal to his cause slunk away in fear of the nation’s mounting racial acrimony and desecration. But Brown was perhaps the most high-minded radical this country has ever known. Even in our day, it took Banks, a writer of uncommon courage and wisdom, to grapple this deeply with Brown’s bloody and sacred legacy.

As I commented in a review of the book: “One arrives as if waking from a long dream of America, risen from the nation’s subconscious. Owen and John Brown are archetypal men one may grow to love and perhaps fear, as does a son for a great, dominant father. As one grows to love and perhaps fear America itself, with its astonishing freedoms, its shifting moral ground and this devastating power.” 8

As Herman Melville wrote of Brown at the gallows, in the opening poem of his book of Civil War poems, he was “the meteor of the war… Hidden in the cap/ Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah!”

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Banks followed by bringing the American concept of radicalism up to date in The Darling, to that of one defying the nation’s great moral quandary of the 1960s, The Vietnam War. And he did so with a brilliant stroke, with a woman as heroine, giving us a new way for America to see itself, a forsaken Joan of Arc leading us not to victory but to shadowed righteousness, in a manner of character perhaps akin to Ralph Ellison’s social era-defining book Invisible Man.

Among Banks’s other daring and remarkable books was Lost Memory of Skin, about another kind of outcast, a young homeless man who’s an ex-convict, but may or may not be a guilty sex offender.

In his latest and apparently last novel, The Magic Kingdom from 2022, Banks explores the idealism of American society through a son-like observer not too unlike Owen Brown. Based on a much more obscure historical figure living in an early 20th century Shaker community, it probes the fraught ways that even our most self-exalted traditional communities deal with human power, frailty, mendacity, and love. Margaret Atwood aptly characterized it as confronting “our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.”

So, with Banks dead of cancer at 82, I yearn to hear from him, on his art form. Such a novelist of stature has come to understand the personal and human value of his preferred form, as Banks articulates in an insightful and humbled interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in 2011:

“Novels seem to create, for me—or allow the possibility of creating for me—an alternative universe that’s comprehensive and large enough to let me think in ways I can’t think otherwise. The tradition of the novel and, I think, the rigor and the discipline of the art force me to be smarter than I am any other time and force me to be more honest than I am at any other time and force me to be more attentive than I am at any other time. So in some ways, a novel allows me to be better than I am the rest of the time in my life, and I think that’s why I prefer to work in that large fictional form.” 8

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And yet, even in his short stories, continuing throughout his career, one senses how Banks’s fiction might transcend its teller, by distilling his characters’ lives through their incongruous acts, often of a person on the edge. The stories are “very telling of humanity’s crooked path, following perhaps the instinct to find succor or salvation in the past,” I wrote in reviewing his last collection A Permanent Member of the Family.

This instinct arose in “their yearning and risk, suffering and loss,” and the author’s “sage understanding of the deep corners of human nature.” 9

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1 Among Mr. Banks’s literary honors and awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, The John Dos Passo Award, O’Henry and Best American Short Story Awards; the inaugural Thornton Wilder Prize, The American Book Award; and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a Pulitzer-finalist twice, for Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift.  He was President of the International Parliament of Writers, and the founding past-President of Cities of Refuge North America.

2 Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America, Seven Stories Press, 2008, 116

3 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 116-117

4 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 121

5 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

6 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

7 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 127

8 Kevin Lynch “Abolitionist’s Story is as Dangerous as America,” The Capital Times. May 1, 1998, 13

9 Kevin Lynch, The Shepherd Express, Feb. 2, 2014, https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/books/family-stories/

 

Is the now-closed Jazz Estate about to become a “high-end” cocktail bar? The owner is making changes.

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The bandstand at the Jazz Estate is the centerpiece if the club’s unusual layout. Courtesy Milwaukee Visitors Bureau

Jazz can be as intimate as any chamber music, or poetry reading, or any brooding songwriter softly strumming a small acoustic guitar. The performance space itself can make a huge difference.

If you wanted to literally feel a grand piano’s tickling upper registers, sharpest voicings or resounding percussive harmonics, or an upright bass’s straight-up-your-backbone thrum, or a drummer’s sparkle, dash and punchy paradiddle, the Jazz Estate may have rewarded music travelers as well as any jazz venue in America. And being that close, the improvising dynamics of jazz often kept you on the edge of a co-pilot’s seat for the swinging ascent of a combo reaching full flight.

I begin in the past tense because the uniquely famous venue stands in icy limbo, for at least January, to develop a “refreshed and expanded cocktail program that is the jewel of Milwaukee’s East side.”

This is the symbolic image accompanying Jazz Estate owner John Dye’s Facebook announcement that the revered jazz venue would close in Jaqnuary, then reopen wsome time in February as a “high-end” cocktail bar with, at some point, “limited music.” Courtesy Jazz Estate Facebook page

That’s owner John Dye’s Facebook explanation for canceling the six-days-a-week performance calendar, and he’s sticking to it.

Renowned Milwaukee native Lynne Arriale’s trio on November 20th may have provided the last glimmer of international jazz glory the Estate would host.

However, “We definitely aren’t done with live jazz.” Dye says. “We will be bringing limited live music back when the time is right, and it will be with a modified business model that is more sustainable.”

Yet it seems financially counterintuitive when he says, “We want people to feel comfortable coming by any time without the commitment of a reservation or cover charge.”

Isn’t it foremost the music they’re willing to pay for that draws people there, a model that has sustained the place for 40 years? And doesn’t Dye’s desired aesthetic of “high-end” cocktails – vs. Milwaukee’s “beer city” stereotype – cohere implicitly with the soulful sophistication of jazz, more than any other music genre?

Dye replies, “Through four decades and eight owners the space has always been, above all else, a beloved eastside bar.” That seems to minimize the reality that, in 1973, then-owner Sal Monreal made the central space into a jazz bandstand, as the venue’s name indicates. Ever since, it’s been consistently acclaimed by local and national press, especially by Down Beat magazine, as the best jazz club in Milwaukee, a strong, undeniable identity.

This artistic photograph conveys the Jazz Estate experience: live jazz by the Anthony Deutsch Trio blended with high-quality drinks and atmosphere. Courtesy foursquare.com

As to how reducing six weekly nights of varying cover charge for popular local and touring jazz acts would make for a more financially viable business, Dye says, “Drinks have always paid the bills.” As he sees it, “cover charges and ticket reservations can deter potential customers, so that is why we are moving in a more accessible direction without those added costs and logistics.” Drastically simplifying his business model, perhaps, but that also means losing substantial admission business, from the attraction of live, advertised music, for the uncertainty of casual bar traffic. As for what percentage of the door he divides between himself and musicians, or how much they are paid otherwise, he is vague: “Over the years we have paid musicians with guarantees, door deals and bar percentages. We have used various models.”

So, in the cold darkness of uncertainty, the jazz community now wonders how the Estate’s will spotlight their art form again.

Why has this place been so special? The unusual layout allows those lucky enough to share with the musicians a central small living-room size space with a single front seating row, with only a single standing-room “row” behind that one, with a narrow ledge for drinks on the north wall. The venue’s two long wings – the bar itself and a larger seating area – extend out from this Bird-like breast of a modern-jazz bastion. It’s not a perfect listening space, as the extension of the wings encourages chatter. But that acoustic layout also can help musicians focus on their intimate dynamics.

Bottom line: It’s been the most consistent home for jazz, and related music, in Milwaukee for 40 years. There’s even a Facebook page devoted to “Jazz Estate musicians.” What’s curious is that Dye is moving forward by going backwards or retreating, in effect, which he essentially admits. There’s been three phases of the Estate’s music booking policy over the years. He wants to return to the previous policy of limited music, a few nights a week.

To be sure, on the Jazz Estate website, the booking form for bands remains in place. But the prospect of jazz being seriously cut back spurs the mind to reflect backwards.

What did the late saxophone giant Joe Henderson think of this Bird’s-breast of a room when played it? What about trumpet master Tom Harrell, who struggles to manage his schizophrenia with anti-psychotic drugs but is a supremely attuned musician. What did feel in that space? Legendary bassist Eddie Gomez led a piano trio here, he a veteran of the most sublimely intimate jazz trio ever, that of Bill Evans.

Acclaimed trumpeter Tom Harrell performs at the Jazz Estate in October of 2017. Harrell is Grammy-nominated and has won multiple Trumpeter of the Year awards from Down Beat magazine. Photo by Leiko Napoli

Those are only a few of the big names the Estate hosted though, for the most part, it has served the ebb and flow of Milwaukee’s jazz community. Some musicians now fear for the place’s vaunted jazz tradition. Yet they also retain hope.

Trumpeter Eric Jacobson’s opinion holds extra weight, as he explains: “I was upset to hear about the Jazz Estate not having live music, especially after I had booked music there for four years. I felt like I created some amazing nights at the Jazz Estate with incredible local and national musicians. Having worked with the Jazz Estate, I did see the difficulties to sustain a business. I trust that John Dye is doing this, so he can stay open and hopefully get back to having live music.”

Jazz singer Jerry Grillo, who has performed there numerous times over 30 years and attended hundreds of Estate shows, says, “A jazz club needs special care from a community and its musicians. The cash register needs to ring. Covid is the real culprit. Many clubs and restaurants have had to close, but the doors will not be shuttered this time. Please support The Jazz Estate when it reopens.”

Then there’s the thoughtful guitarist Steve Peplin:

“We came to play, you came to drink and listen. But it isn’t called the Booze Estate. The drinks are great…but people would still show up even if the drinks were unsophisticated. The amount of time a jazz musician has invested in the art is vast. We used to play four-hour gigs for fifty bucks because we could relax into it and do it for the music.

“The Jazz Estate has always been my very favorite jazz club in all the world. I remember when I first sat in eons ago with Berkeley Fudge. I didn’t care about New York, L.A. or Paris. I only wanted to play at the Jazz Estate. It was an intimate, extra-dimensional portal, a testing ground, a laboratory and, later, a sanctuary.

“The place is tiny, but I would not change that. It sounds great. I don’t know how many hundreds of gigs I’ve played there with so many bands and artists, but everyone was about the music. People came to listen, trusting us to fly the spaceship.

I’m not worried about the Estate. The ship is strong and will, no doubt, be back. You can’t sink her.”

Happier times at The Jazz Estate: a promotional poster for an album recorded live at the jazz club. Courtesy kevernacular.com

Finally, pianist Mark Davis – who now directs the Milwaukee Jazz Institute, a major force as a performance and education operation – says, “I first started playing there in 1985 and, over the years, played a lot of gigs with local legends like Hattush Alexander and Berkeley Fudge and visiting stars like Charles McPherson and Tom Harrell. I also heard performances there by some all-time greats like Cedar Walton and Joe Henderson. But the thing is, the music is bigger than any one place. Jazz will continue in this city even if a venue closes. Other spots will spring up.

“The jazz scene is strong in Milwaukee. We have incredible established players as well as lots of young players just starting to come on the scene. I recently made a list of venues in our area that feature jazz and came up with over 30 clubs. We also have festivals and organizations that feature performances.

“Jazz isn’t going away. The Milwaukee Jazz Institute was formed to preserve this music and pass it along for future generations to develop.”

The cover of a notable album recorded live at the Jazz Estate. Courtesy Hollistic Music Works

Several excellent recordings, one by Jacobson and saxophonist Eric Schoor with Grammy-winning Milwaukee-raised trumpeter Brian Lynch, and two by trumpeter Nate Weiss, and a luminous one by the Jamie Breiwick Quartet, will help to preserve the memory and experience of live jazz at the Estate, regardless of what will remain when the doors open again.

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This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express in a slightly different form: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/what%E2%80%99s-next-for-the-jazz-estate/

  1. The “live at the Jazz Estate” recording I know best is the marvelous music that the Jamie Breiwick Quartet recorded there. I annotated their 2013 album Spirits: Live at the Jazz Estate. My notes opening lines read:

“Open the door on the album cover and you enter the Jazz Estate, a Milwaukee club that exemplifies a venue that nurtures modern straight-ahead jazz and makes money at it.”

To what degree that last statement remains true, only owner John Dye know for sure.

Image result for Spirits by Jamie Breiwick Quartet

The original cover to “Spirits” depicts the front door of the Jazz Estate. Courtesy allmusicguide.com

Here’s the current cover of “Spirits” as redesigned by Jamie Breiwick of B-Side Graphics. Courtesy B-Side Graphics.

 

 

 

 

 

A light snow finally descends, transforming the river

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Hubbard Park tunnels in a light snow.

Snow is the greatest signifier of the winter season, the blessing (and, for some, the curse) from the heavens that dramatically transforms our landscape as suddenly as any natural phenomena. It’s mid-January and I have still had no good opportunity to pull out my cross-country skis. The land and vegetation still thirst for the long, slow drink a deep blanket of exquisitely crystallized white provides. Such are the strange and quietly ominous environmental conditions that climate change has afflicted us with. Attention must be paid to the alarming evidence right before us.

The light snowfall over the weekend finally offered a moderate transformation, painting the trees and foliage with immaculate highlighting. The weather was alluringly mild and almost windless. This prompted me to take my favorite River West walk, along our neighborhood’s greatest natural resource, for which it is named, the Milwaukee River. 

Here is a short photo essay of what I encountered Sunday. My new Culture Currents header photo “A Fallen Giant in Light Snow,” is from this essay.

All photos by Kevin Lynch

Branches reaching into long view.

Duck couple in light snow.

River bed study.

River bed study II

River angler.

A fallen giant in light snow.

A fallen giant in light snow II.

A great house overlooking the river.

A great riverside house II

Riverside lefty’s bumper.

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Culture Currents results for the new incarnation of the NPR jazz poll, the 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll for 2022

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Down Beat cover from Dec. 31, 1952, noting the magazine’s first critics poll and Louis  Armstrong entering the DB Hall of Fame. Pinterest

Jazz critics polls go back at least 70 years, to the start of the Down Beat magazine jazz critics poll (magazine cover pictured above), in 1952, though the DB reader’s poll began in 1949, and the magazine dates back to 1934. I contributed to that poll in the 1980s.

But here we present (not the annual Down Beat poll nor the Village Voice‘s Pazz and Jop poll) The 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll which began modeled after the whimsically-named but otherwise-serious Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll of jazz and pop (see a vintage Voice issue below from 1984), begun by esteemed music critic Robert Christgau and continued for some years in Jazz and Pop Magazine, and to the present in The Voice, the New York weekly newspaper.

This poll is a different beast than the Down Beat poll, which solicits rankings for the best specific musicians on each instrument associated with the jazz idiom. That publication has long oriented itself to musicians, with technical “workshops,” transcriptions of solos, and “Pro Shop” — short features on instruments & gear. By contrast, this poll weighs opinions on the top ten best jazz albums of the year, and in miscellaneous categories, more geared to jazz aficionados and consumers.

The Francis Davis jazz poll was launched as a Village Voice poll, by the Grammy-Award-winning jazz writer Francis Davis. He is best known as the jazz critic for The Village Voice, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly, and was the long-time jazz critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s the author of a number of books including The History of the Blues, Jazz and its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader, and Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists and Singers. I contributed to The Village Voice jazz poll while at The Capital Times, in Madison, and later when it became the NPR Jazz Poll, by then the largest annual jazz poll in the world, last year compiled from “156 distinguished journalists and critics.”

Last year, the poll’s sponsorship shifted to The Arts Fuse, a curated, independent online arts magazine. Davis’s poll assistant, Tom Hull (who formerly wrote The Village Voice‘s Jazz Consumer Guide,) took over the main poll reigns this year (A link to the poll is at the bottom of this blog post).

Below are my poll choices from the list of results. You can also access my choices (and all critics choices) on the poll site two ways, but most easily by scrolling to the poll introduction page’s bottom (but just above the “methodology.”) to the link to the complete list of critics, alphabetically listed in the link.

Kevin Lynch (The Shepherd Express, Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak))

NEW RELEASES

  1. Ethan Philion, Meditations on Mingus (Sunnyside) (See cover above)
  2. Mary LaRose, Out Here [Music of Eric Dolphy] (Little (i) Music)
  3. Marquis Hill, New Gospel Revisited (Edition)
  4. Brian Lynch and Spheres of Influence, Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To (Holistic MusicWorks)
  5. Harry Skoler, Living in Sound: The Music of Charles Mingus (Sunnyside)
  6. Johannes Wallmann, Precarious Towers (Shifting Paradigm)
  7. James Francies, Purest Form (Blue Note ’21)
  8. Roberto Magris, Duo & Trio: Featuring Mark Colby (JMood)
  9. Black Lives: From Generation to Generation (Jammin’ Colors)
  10. Kase + Klassik, Live at the Opera House (B Side)

RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)

  1. Ornette Coleman, Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums (1958-59, Craft)
  2. Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964 and 1965-1966 (Jazz Detective/Elemental)
  3. Ray Charles, Genius + Soul = Jazz (Analog Productions Originals)

VOCAL

  • Chicago Soul Jazz Collective Meets Dee Alexander, On the Way to Be Free (JMarq)

DEBUT

  • Chase Elodia, Portrait Imperfect (Biophilia)

LATIN

  • Miguel Zenón, Música De Las Américas (Miel Music)
  • The poll invited brief comments from participating critics, which might appear on the poll site in the future in some context.
  • But here’s what I wrote:
  • Hear ye, this is a year of Charles Mingus re-emerging as a godfather of modern jazz, for artistic and honorary reasons. 2022 was the great bassist-bandleader-composer’s birth centennial, and his music speaks more pointedly than ever in our turbulent times.There’s no coincidence my top album choice of the year is Ethan Philion’s brilliant and impassioned Meditations on Mingus, Here’s link to my review. https://kevernacular.com/?p=14938 . A second top-ten album, Harry Skoler’s — Living in Sound: The Music of Charles Mingus, was a warmly incantatory concerto-like setting for clarinetist virtuoso Skloer and orchestra, with a stellar lineup that included Christian McBride, Kenny Barron, Nicholas Payton, and Jonathan Blake, with arrangements by Ambrose Akinmusire and Darcy James Argue.
  • There was another worthy top-tenner, but I didn’t want this too-short list Mingus-clogged. The longtime Mingus Big Band sumptuously produced The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions, with vocals and narrations by Charles’s son Eric Mingus. The big band also highlighted a PBS special titled Let My Children Hear Mingus: https://www.charlesmingus.com/events/pbsmingusspecial
  • The ever-amazing “jazz detective” label Resonance unearthed The Lost Album at Ronnie Scott’s, a blazing Mingus sextet date driven by the underappreciated Detroit drummer Roy Brooks.
  • More, All About Jazz offered an excellent essay and critical round-up of 10 of Mingus’s greatest albums: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/charles-mingus-an-essential-top-ten-albums-charles-mingus
  • Plus, last year, singer-songwriter-pianist Stephanie Nilles produced a powerful, provocative and fascinating album. I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag – The White Flag was its ironic title. It may not be a jazz album by many measures, but it captures much of Mingus’s loving and raging spirit. — Kevin Lynch
  • I wrote about most of these albums in various contexts with in-depth reviews of my top six choices (searchable on my blog’s search bar) and my No. album 10 choice: KASE + Klassik Live at The Opera House. Among my other category choices, I reviewed Ornette Coleman’s Genesis of Genius box set.
  • Here’s a link to my review of my top album choice Meditations on Mingus by Ethan Philion:

    A jazz giant speaks to our times on Ethan Philion’s “Meditations on Mingus”

Finally, here’s the link to the jazz poll’s first page, where you’ll find one essay by Francis Davis, two by Hull and a photo essay by Hull on “Jazz Notables We Lost in 2022”:

The 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll

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There’s still time (until Feb. 19) to catch the Ashcan School art show in Milwaukee

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Happy New Year, Culture Currents readers!

Notice: I’m reposting this review because I chose a favorite John Sloan painting of mine for my new Culture Currents blog theme image, the night-time image (at top). This Sloan painting “Six-O’Clock, Winter,” (1912) is not in the Milwaukee Art Museum show. But imagine it’s rush hour in early January in 1912: You enter a marvelous (if somewhat romanticized) evocation of the dynamic, roaring, rattling vitality of New York City’s El system, dominating mass transit (having begun in 1868), as the city grew exponentially into what we now call The Big Apple. 

However, the great painting by George Bellows (above) “The Sawdust Trail,” (above) is in the show, part of the museum’s permanent collection (detailed in the review linked below). All works are from the MAM’s still-growing permanent collection of the Ash Can School. Especially rewarding are the many John Sloan graphic art prints. There’s more than enough that’s well worth seeing.

Try a New Year’s resolution, to get down to this magnificent cultural facility and see some of Milwaukee’s artistic riches.

It’s also easy to let an art show run slip by:

THIS EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH FERUARY 19. It’s a great tribute to the artwork in the MAM’s permanent collection, and superbly curated. Speaking of visual art, The Ashcan School was “the first American art form.”

Here’s the link to my in-depth (illustrated) review:

“The Ashcan School” reveals America’s underbelly and many shades of its character | Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak) (kevernacular.com)

Melville and Mumford: Two great writers and Jeremiahs for our times

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Courtesy Princeton University Press

 

Book Review: Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, by Aaron Sachs, Princeton University Press, 2022

Herman Melville’s fingers gripped tightly on the cold metal bar keeping him from plummeting deep into the sea. His lookout perch, high atop a whaling ship, provided a perspective on the earth’s watery curvature and much more, into fathoms below and upon the earth’s surface, reflected mysteriously in the glistening waves. His first biographer asserted that the “mariner and mystic” (and the literary renegade) in Melville allowed him to perceive so much that few could understand what he strove for in writing his strange, sea-soaked masterpiece Moby-Dick or, The Whale, in 1851.

The book opened arms to embrace all that a horizon-chasing lookout could see, and beyond. Yet, as time passed, along with the era of wind-propelled whaling, people forgot about Melville despite the mighty, fulminous wake he’d left behind. Until, that is, Raymond Weaver’s 1921 biography of the writer and a fresh dawning upon the profundity, the darkest realities, and beauties the former sailor had wrought.

After a century of more scholarship on Melville than any American writer, Aaron Sachs has found a fresh inlet into his seemingly bottomless depths as an intellectual diver, as a prophet of modern times.

He has done so by reviving a strikingly comparable figure, who helped project Melville’s genius into the 20th century. Lewis Mumford had a view perhaps as high and far as Melville’s, but not as a ship’s lookout. If anything, Mumford’s perspective was urban, say, from the heights of a skyscraper, even if he loved Nature with a passion. He was an urban planner, literary critic, historian, and a social philosopher. The two writers’ intellectual and spiritual connection blossomed in Mumford’s 1929 biography Herman Melville: A Study of his Life and Vision.

A handsome French edition of Mumford’s biography of Melville. Courtesy librarieforumdulivre.fr

As a Melvillian working on a novel about the man, I have read profusely about him, including a good handful of biographies, most of greater length. But to this day, I can’t say I’ve read one more finely and beautifully attuned to the man and the creative artist than Mumford’s.

In Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, Aaron Sachs places the two writers in high biographical counterpoint, in sunlit radiance that illuminates both and, regarding Melville, can stand alongside the brilliant and vast critical and biographical work of F.O. Matthiessen, D.H. Lawrence, Harold Bloom, Sterling Stuckey, Carolyn Karcher, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Wynn Kelly, C.L.R. James, Leslie Fiedler, Andrew Delbanco, Newton Arvin, Hershel Parker, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, and others.

Even aside from his prodigious scholarship and insight, Sachs stands upon painfully familiar grounds. So, we are blessed with fresh historical perspective on two writers courageous and gifted enough to enter the vagaries of American societal quicksand and remain aloft, aside from their periodic neglect.

Sachs alludes to today’s “dark times” when the greatest democracy in history is, as others already have, gravely threatened by an infecting fascist political impulse, that would drag us into the depths of authoritarianism, the opposite of each citizen’s active voice in a diverse society reflecting a global interconnection.

Melville fashioned a microcosm of the United States in the hearty, colorful crew of The Pequod, with the strength in its diversity, yet dared to show how readily they could be swept up in the bloodthirsty madness of eloquently transfixing Captain Ahab, a monomaniac who seized their collective spirit with his demagoguery of a whale, which sent all, save one, to their doom.

An 1870 portrait of Herman Melville by Joseph Eaton. Courtesy Towleroad Gay News

Whaling was a crucial global industry in mid-19th century, but Melville also deep probed America’s inland by illuminating the social impact of industrialization in the diptych-type short story, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” from 1855.

“Melville depicted a luxurious gentleman’s club in London and a Berkshire paper factory in which women did all the coarsest jobs,” Sachs writes. “Here, Melville was not only indicting the sacrifice of American manhood to all industrialism, but also echoing one of the themes he developed in (the autobiographical novel) Redburn, about the unconscious dependence of the leisure class on the skilled, competent labor of the scraping-by classes.” 1

Although Melville too-self-critically considered the book a knockoff job, Redburn provides rich ground for Sachs comparative analysis.

“Just as Mumford would several decades later, Melville reconnoitered here what modern cities he had access to, curious about how they shape people’s lives and how they compared to each other. In many ways, they seemed a lot like ships: sites of everyday trauma, often the result of brutally hierarchical relationships – but also sites of cosmopolitan fellowship, where eventually the sustain engagement with difference might help people rediscover a sense of commonality.” 2

Sachs continues, “Melville witnessed the worst kinds of degradation, viciousness, and apathy… people with different backgrounds and cultures…People of different classes and races would almost always be suspicious of each other. But he also saw, in every major city, the concrete possibilities of the great American experiment. At the Liverpool dock, he imagined what each ship might contribute to the United States. Such a vision, he thought, should be enough, ‘in the noble breast,’ to ‘forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…Our blood is the blood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one.’” 3

Such humane and exalted thought renders Melville historically timeless and gives our nation words to live by, even words to love by, the latter a theme Mumford explored deeply.

Some people these days deride such utterances as “nationalism.” That is myopic, ungenerous thinking, especially given Melville’s cosmopolitan worldliness. He maintained a belief in a nation that embraces the world and asserts that the nobility of America’s Democratic experiment has a place in every country and in every heart. Shouldn’t there be reason to at least hope for that? Democracy may not always succeed, perhaps by its nature, but is always there for the offing: “of the people, for the people, and by the people.”

Sachs also does justice to one of Melville’s most underappreciated works, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. The collection of often-beautiful, vivid and tough-minded poems assesses and evokes the Civil War experience, from the starkly indelible moment of John Brown’s hanging in “The Portent,” to a long “you-are-there” shadowing of the guerrilla exploits of a renegade Confederate officer in “The Scout Toward Aldie,” to the sublime reverie over a graveyard of fallen soldiers in “Shiloh.” Another, “Ball’s Bluff,” contrasts a town’s patriotic fervor, for its young men marching off to war, against the cold reality: How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime/ Would come to thin their shining throng?/ Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.

Melville then added a substantial prose “Supplement” which was intended to soften the poems’ “bitterness.” And, despite Melville’s celebration of American democracy elsewhere in his work, the supplement also looks hard at post-war America.

“Again and again, Melville acknowledged that America had never been Great, that the revolution had produced not a promising democratic republic but rather ‘an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.’
“And he emphasized that ‘those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistic iniquity, gladly we join the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.’ ”

“The problem was that some exultant Northerners seemed to take their victory as a sign of moral perfection. To Melville, the fight against slavery was a righteous one but it was ‘superior resources and crushing numbers,’ rather than righteousness, that determined the outcome. Indeed, Northerners had been complicit in the slave system from the beginning, both morally and economically.” 4

“The outcome of the war, Melville realized, had only intensified the scorn and suspicion between whites and Blacks in the South, so if white Northerners were to heap additional scorn and suspicion on white Southerners, the Black Southerners would probably pay the dearest price.”

Melville wrote: “Abstinence (from racial hypocrisy) is as obligatory as considerate care for our unfortunate fellow-men late in bonds.” 5

Melville’s unflinching wisdom foreshadows how Reconstruction would fall apart and lead to Jim Crow, lynching, The KKK, and the ongoing degradation of Black Americans, which continues to this day.

So where do we go from here? As Mumford wrote, and demonstrated through a long, prolific career, only “the perpetual rediscovery and reinterpretation of history” makes true progress possible; when we are actively “rethinking it, reevaluating it, reliving it in the mind,” the past stops controlling us and, in fact, becomes her best tool for “the creation and selection of new potentialities.” 6

Lewis Mumford made the cover of TIME magazine in April of 1938. Courtesy TIME.

This recalls one of my favorite quotes of the great 19th century American abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

In 2008, Douglass became another major historical figure deeply compared to Melville in: Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Potter. This worthy comparison traverses themes of “literary and cultural geographies,” “manhood and sexuality,” and “civil wars.” Richly recommended, yet far ranging as that book is, Sachs’ is a more enjoyable overall read, given that one author weaves the two writers’ contrapuntal historical dialog into a single narrative, a reading experience enhanced by Sachs’ fluent, often-lyrical writing skills while mining such profound wellsprings of American literature and thought.

One feels it a deeply inspired work in daring to contemplate two great writers a century apart from each other.

One of Mumford’s finest themes draws from Moby-Dick. In the 1950s he was writing in the context of the dangers of the atomic bomb, but the broader resonance remains true.

“The danger we face today was prophetically interpreted a century ago by Herman Melville…Captain Ahab drives the ship’s crew to destruction in a satanic effort to conquer the white whale. Toward that end, as his mad purpose approaches its climax, Ahab has a sudden moment of illumination and says to himself: ‘all my means are sane; my motives and object mad. ’ In some such terms, one may characterize the irrational application of science and technology today. But we have yet to find our moment of self-confrontation and illumination.” 7

What could be truer, when we still struggle to face how much human self-indulgence in science and technology overwhelmingly contributes to climate change, and the precipice we teeter upon, risking Earth’s survival as a livable planet?

Both Melville and Mumford were Jeremiahs in the best sense. Indeed, Sachs ends his book in their righteous spirit, exhorting readers beyond mere contemplation of all that these great writers presented.

“Can democracy offset the looming trauma of climate change, with its inherent threat to our sense of continuity?” Sachs asks. “Only, Mumford would say, if it’s a fully inclusive democracy that fosters gratitude and sacrifice, only if democratic participation involves embracing all ‘the small life-promoting occasions for love,’ as Mumford put it in 1951, after two decades of work on The Renewal of Life.

“We need to make lifebuoys for each other, whether in the form of international treaties, or social welfare programs, or offers of shelter, or poems for our children. We need to reach across every form of difference: only a less-traumatized, less-divided citizenry will be able to replace carboniferous capitalism.” 8

Up from the depths, the bloodshot eyes of Melville and Mumford would see no less.

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1 Aaron Sachs, Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, Princeton, 2022, 145

2 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 147

3 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 153

4 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 24

5 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 25

6 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 222

7 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 295

8 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 360

 

 

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“The Ashcan School” reveals America’s underbelly and many shades of character

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A prize possession of The Milwaukee Art Museum’s “Ashcan School” collection is the large painting “The Sawdust Trail,” from 1916 by George Bellows. Milwaukee Art Museum

Happy New Year Culture Currents readers!

Notice: I’m reposting this review because I chose a favorite John Sloan painting for my new Culture Currents blog theme, the night-time image (at top). This painting “Six-O’Clock, Winter,” (1912) is not in the Milwaukee show but there’s more than enough that’s well worth seeing.

Also, it’s easy to let an art show run slip by: THIS EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH FERUARY 19. It’s a great tribute to the artwork in the MAM’s permanent collection. Speaking of visual art, The Ashcan School was “the first American art form.”

Art Review:

The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art. The Milwaukee Art Museum, through February 19, 2023. Bradley Family Gallery

For information and tickets: https://mam.org/exhibitions/details/ashcan-and-the-eight.php

To see a world in a grain of sand” poet William Blake once put it. Later, American poet Walt Whitman would see “a grain of sand” as no less perfect than a leaf of grass.”

These great modernist poets saw things profoundly magnified in the humblest of earthly entities, light years from most of the art and music that for centuries courted royalty. So perhaps it was inevitable that the nation built on the anti-regal and messy moorings of democracy foster an art movement antithetical to royalty-schmoozing. Rather, one of the commonfolk, at least in its ideals. This American motherlode would bear the nation’s first “national art.”

Known as The Ashcan School, its name derived from a pejorative critical comment that the art was as good as “a can of ashes.” But in that comment’s snoot the artists saw soot, as in a poetical paradox. The ashes contained dirt, enough to allow seedlings to grow and tilt toward social justice, found in artistic truth.  That is, a great, if profoundly flawed nation’s life and essence might be extrapolated from something as slight as a cigarette butt’s droppings.

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art allows Americans to see themselves in the early 20th century, a time of great cultural upheaval, a nation shapeshifting in its peculiar genius — troubled, compulsively creative, proud, and quotidian. It was also struggling through the first World War with the Great Depression around the corner. Yet immigrants poured in, adding diversity, labor energy, and societal tension.  Perhaps more than anything, modernism’s post-industrial revolution had shackled and driven America.

How did the Ashcan School capture all this? First, they objected to exhibition practices that they considered restrictive and conservative. They often employed an expressionistic, painterly style to portray gritty and downtrodden subjects previously deemed inappropriate for high art and museums, the stuff of “ashcans.”

Accordingly, the museum’s curators and guest show catalog essayists draw parallels to cultural and social issues still relevant today.

The Art Museum owns one of the nation’s largest collections of works by the Ashcan School, and this is the first exhibit to include nearly the entire 150-object collection, says curator Brandon Ruud. Prints, drawings, paintings, and pastels represent artists of the so-called “The Eight,” who largely produced the Ashcan style and sensibility: Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Arthur Bowen Davies, Maurice Prendergast. Several affiliated artists like Stuart Davis reveal the full range of the group’s subjects and artistic practices.

One’s eye might easily gravitate to a large painting in the show, Bellows’ “The Sawdust Trail,” by traditional measures of scale and complexity a “masterpiece,” even though the group’s aesthetics strove to burrow beneath grand art conventions that may obscure the truth as they saw it. The painting earns its renown, an epic canvas with a cinematic view of a religious revival meeting.

It tells a rich and sardonic story of post-Puritan American impulses that continue to this day in evangelic churches. The charismatic preacher, named for a real historical figure, Billy Sunday, would solicit salvation while typically delivering a thunder-and-lightning sermon to spook believers out of their savings. The air above his big tent virtually billows with a dense cloud of sun-lit smoke that might easily exalt the illusion of the divine.

Billy Sunday himself glad-hands one convert. Is he still a man of the people or is this just the old quotidian poseur, compulsively pressing flesh, greasing it to open the wallet? Meanwhile, several women faint (from the fumes of divine inspiration?) amid the dense, motley crowd. Exaltation, or delusion, or some other strange strain of behavior is distinctly American as it is universal, to see the “MAGA” power deluding today, and the global trend to political authoritarianism.

A man with that kind of power might be a Republican presidential candidate — if he can beat out Donald Trump who, heathen though he may be, knows most of the preacher’s hidden gifts for dark persuasion and personality-cult politics.

An even more insidious example of how compromised holiness undermines the truth is Mike Pence, who has said he will not testify to Congress about the January 6 insurrection, even though he was a primary execution target. He’s played it politically all the way, claiming a dubious “separation of powers” privilege — only because he survived.

So, these Ashcan diggers uncovered America haunted by cycles of power as old and foreshadowing as the first conquests of Native Americans and slavery.

Yet one might better experience this exhibit on a smaller scale, as a kind of forensic mystery, investigating the human figures that tell personal stories of lives possibly forsaken or transgressed.

John Sloan The Barbershop, etching and aquatint, 1915, MutualArt.com

Zoom down from, say, the atmospheric expanse of “The Sawdust Trail” to individual figures in intimately revealing scenes. No one surpassed painter-printmaker John Sloan at carving out these small-window revelations of what would become known as Americana, in a land still grappling with its identity.

The class-laden print The Barbershop animates to the point of satirical comedy. A crowded barbershop is recast as a tableau of sublimated class-warfare. The two men being serviced clearly reign. One seems to eye, with lust or disdain, a young lower-class woman manicuring him. Seated in waiting, a middle-class man reads the satirical Puck magazine, and beside him lies a subversive Marxist magazine called The Masses, for which Sloan served as art editor. The complex, beautiful composition (less than 10 by 12 inches) is riddled with America’s contradictions of social indulgence and defiance.

Among Sloan’s numerously displayed gritty parables of the underclass is Night Windows. A Peeping Tom husband spies on a bathing neighbor in a nearby window, while his wife hangs out his family’s laundry amid squalling children. In Sloan’s world, God may or may not have been invited for dinner. They are too busy trying to put bread on the table for the brood.

Robert Henri, Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), oil (24 by 20 inches), 1910, Pinterest 

Robert Henri, who was the movement’s leader, had the portraiture skill to humanize the mother, the man, or boy, in the brood.

Witness his marvelous portrait of a street urchin named Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), from 1910. In this bundle of mischief, you sense potential, yet risk. “The disparity between the innocence of the hero and the destructive character of his experience defines his concrete, or existential, situation.” That’s how American literary critic Ihab Hassan characterized what he called America’s “radical innocence.” 2 It entailed the possibility that, in his scruffy vigor, brash will and ingenuity, Joe might get ahead in the world, or be swallowed up in it.

This show is populated with a fascinating array of colorful actors, many of problematic agency.

John Sloan, Reading in a Subway, etching, 1926. Pinterest

Everett Shinn, The Nightclub Scene, oil, (36 by 34 inches) 1934

From Shinn’s iridescent Nightclub Scene to Sloan’s bundled-from-the-cold flapper in Reading in a Subway, or the vibrant gaggle of 9-to-5 women in Return from the Toil, these artists encounter a diverse populous and gives lie to the contemporary criticism (on an exhibit wall commentary) that these artists diminished women and minorities in the class-struggle tableaux. They were doubtless men of their time, subject to certain biases, but by this evidence they strove for greater understanding and truth of how we live together, and in isolation, in America, to envision a real yet better way, one quotidian day at a time.

In other words, they often told a small “d” democratic story, creating heroes among quietly courageous women and other folks hidden in the cracks of society.

And the men depicted are often satirical subjects of classism and sexism, as in preacher Billy Sunday and Sloan’s “Barbershop” scene.

George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, lithograph, 1923-24, (18 by 22 1/4 inches), Pinterest 

Perhaps the most famous image in the show is Dempsey and Firpo, the lithograph print that led to George Bellows’ explosive painting of a big-time heavyweight boxing match, a literal witnessing of the brutal sport that came of age in this era. “When Dempsey was knocked through the ropes he fell in my lap,” Bellows explained to Henri. “I cursed him a bit and placed him carefully back in the ring.” So, Bellows justifiably includes himself in the painting’s corner, a bit like director Alfred Hitchcock’s impish cameo appearances.

Bellows had studied art under Henri. John Fagg’s superb catalog essay describes how “Henri encouraged his students both to scour city streets for inspiration and to read widely and embrace culture in all its forms.” This sounds like the best kind of voraciousness that would exemplify the American striving these artists documented and interpreted, warts and all.

“Henri talked not only about the students’ paintings but also about music, literature, and life in general, and in a very stimulating manner, and his lectures constituted a liberal education,” recalled Stuart Davis. 3

This exhibit constitutes such an education, as rare as it is valuable, at a time when it feels sorely needed. If you want to learn about confounding America, of both yesterday and today, in the Faulknerian sense that the past is never dead, this Ashcan art provides you, in immersive depth, yet free of academic pretenses, though the catalogue essays are welcome. It is an experience of vast pleasures amid what Duke Ellington called murmuring “Harlem airshafts,” and Hitchcock’s rear windows, and pregnant, grimy shadows of night. 4

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This review was originally published in a slightly shorter form in The Shepherd Express: here: https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/visual-art/america-unvarnished-in-mams-ash-can-school-exhibit/

1 The exhibit also includes a lithograph version of The Sawdust Trail, which shows more of the fine details in the dense composition.

2 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel, Princeton, 1961, 7

3 John Fagg, “The Unseen City: The Ashcan School’s New York,” The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art, show catalog, The Milwaukee Art Museum 2022, 78

4 A reflection of this collection’s ongoing contemporary relevance and vitality is that it is still growing even after decades. A primary curator of the show, Brandon Rudd explained to me: “One of the truly amazing things about the Ashcan School collection is that it is both such an integral part of the Museum’s rich history and is also active and growing: This exhibition features new acquisitions and never-before-seen donations, as well as loans from private collections in the Milwaukee community and works rarely displayed or seen by the public because of their fragility.”

 

Dennis Mitcheltree: A long-lost Milwaukee jazz saxophonist returns home with a “Golden” new album

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ALBUM REVIEW: Dennis Mitcheltree – Golden Rule (Dengor)

Add Los Angleian Dennis Mitcheltree to an impressive list of intelligently creative Wisconsin jazz musicians with strong roots, or still residing here. His prime collaborator of 25 years, Madison-based piano virtuoso Johannes Wallmann, dazzles throughout with power, deftness, and artful ingenuity. Mitcheltree’s sixth album Golden Rule, is titled not for Jesus Christ’s famous dictum, but philosopher Immanuel Kant’s version, extolling equitable human relations, which he called “the categorical imperative.”

 That’s not to suggest the saxophonist-composer’s music is didactic or stern, only to underscore depth of thought behind it. As his quartet recently demonstrated at Riverwest’s Bar Centro, his music delights and amuses while keeping the mind fueled and geared up.

Saxophonist Dennis Mitcheltree recently led a quartet in a live date at Bar Centro, not unlike this live date from Europe. Photo Courtesy Jazz in Europe

On “Genghis Kant” Mitcheltree’s hard swing heartily honors the great philosopher’s fearless blend of empiricism and transcendentalism. The musician’s penchant for heady wordplay translates into a musical wit by turns pithy and intricate. Try on “Pacifisticuffs,” for example. “Bling Tone,” is a ring-a-ding echo of an early Miles Davis trademark, “If I Were a Bell,” (slyly implied in the title). “Gingerfoot” is a sharp, snappy theme with slightly Monkish angularity.

Mitcheltree’s tenor sax tone is warm, rounded and Sonny Rollins-like, but adorning a slightly trickier mind.

We need music like this, as diverting philosophical salve in dire times.

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This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here: 

Golden Rule by Dennis Mitcheltree – Shepherd Express