The Tedeschi-Trucks Band at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison Saturday night. Photo by Kevin Lynch

I promised myself I wouldn’t do a full review of this whole concert and I really won’t, because I’ve written about the consistently remarkable Tedeschi-Trucks Band extensively in the last couple years.

So, frequent readers of this blog, bear with these remarks.

But seeing the band last night much closer up than I did at Red Rocks Amphitheater the summer before last, I gotta say: Synergy, inspiration, surprise, telling detail, emotional truth and buckets of soul. Like the great sprawling Southern oak tree projected as the band‘s stage backdrop, they seem to replenish their freshness and power the older they get. Considering they’re still only a few years old as a unit, they convey a rare assimilation of the deep, entwining cultural roots that they draw from, which conveys a far greater age than their temporal years.

One of the most impressive aspects of this group is that — though it gains a big, enthusiastic audience, especially at live shows, from its power and skill with rave-up type numbers — it also possesses deep, thoughtful and lyrical dimensions.

And the way they often segue from a powerhouse tune directly to a quieter one like “Midnight in Harlem,” one of their trademark songs, suggests how they relate one sensibility to the other. After a loud rock-out, Trucks slid seamlessly into his slide guitar raga-esque improv introduction to “Midnight,” one of the more sublime songs in popular music today. Keyboardist-flutist Kofi Burbridge set another layer of the finely-sketched scene with his simmering organ, stoking a groove that ripples like wind through trees. Written by gifted backup singer-songwriter Mike Mattison, the song’s a concise, beautiful short story of diminished but dogged expectations,  partly a testament to America’s countless forsaken, “I saw old man’s shoes, I saw needles on the ground…” midnight in Harlem, midnight in Anywhere, USA.

Set in the context of a long subway ride, the narrator witnesses and deeply feels the exposed naked city yet somehow, in the face of windblown streets and the “subway closing down,” he remains steadfast, now walking, yet riding a metaphoric train of hope, a moonlit dream. Then Derek Trucks musically pinpoints the tragedy — and the dream’s inextinguishable flame — in his magnificently-built guitar solo, like a steady fire in America’s heart. Of course, having a woman singing a song penned by a man also gives “Midnight in Harlem” gender universality.

Another set highlight was “Idle Wind,” the most luminous song on their last album Made Up Mind.

It’s built around a fine oceanic image that recalls some of Ishmael’s lyrical reveries in Moby-Dick which is, of course, among many other things, a great coming-of-age story, as is “Idle Wind.” Hear Tedeschi sing these cross-currents of lyric, idea and musical radiance:

How I wish I could fly
Like a bird in the summer sky
Just a ship with a sail
In an idle wind, idle wind

Now I’ve got things to do and I’m telling you
And I don’t wanna stay anymore
And when I was a child I’d dream on high
Now I’m old and I don’t really care

I’m just trying to make somebody happy
I’m just trying to make somebody smile

In the middle of “Idle Wind” arose an extended duet by the band two drummers, JJ Johnson and Tyler Greenwell, that added a feisty dimension to the song, while remaining tasteful, musical and engaging.

My point is that such literary and dream-based songs serve to offset the predominant powerhouse blues, gospel and jazz gumbo that burbled throughout the concert with a rich dynamic range.

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi and their collective-style band consistently display a deep love and understanding of the roots of American vernacular musics. Courtesy isthmus.com

They closed the set with their surefire rave up, “Bound for Glory.” The groove’s heaving, funky sway and the call to shared spiritual ecstasy is nearly irresistible, especially when they reach the refrain’s climax, where Tedeschi again attained an almost outrageous level of soul-scorching exhortation, and Trucks unleashed one of his most incendiary guitar salvos.

A few words about presentation, regarding Susan Tedeschi. She knows how to display her earthy beauty with self-assurance, but without ever primping or strutting onstage, like most pop divas do today. Half the time she wears specs onstage, probably to see her guitar fret board on tunes she doesn’t have completely under her fingers. This is a serious musical artist, not a “chick singer.” Her every action and expression directly serve the music, which all authenticates her physical presence.

Late in the show, two brilliant covers proved telling, one preceding “Bound for Glory” and one after, the first encore. Two covers at such a juncture in the concert suggests a lack of new material that they feel is performance-ready, but also their superb skill in cherry-picking and re-invigorating strong material in the roots music canon.

The band tore into the former song, “I Pity the Fool (Who Falls in Love with You)” with lusty abandon. In1967, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band recorded ostensibly the definitive version of this old R&B song on their superb horn-powered album The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw. The irrepressible Tedeschi and her big, brawling band lifted Butterfield’s take to new heights (though I’d have loved to have heard Butterfield do it live.)  In the middle of “Fool,” Tedeschi ripped off the nastiest guitar solo I’ve ever heard her play, conveying the bruised defiance of the song’s jilted lover. Trucks followed with a cooler, mewling slide solo which evoked actual pity.

And then the encore: “I’ve Got a Feeling,” one of the ballsiest Beatles rock ‘n’ roll songs of their late period (from the Let It Be album). Here again, the band found the “feeling deep down inside” right in their wheelhouse and knocked it out of the park.

Speaking of sports references,  Wisconsin winning a huge NCAA basketball tournament game to advance to the “Final Four” — right before the concert started — hardly hurt the esprit de corps of the wildly enthusiastic, sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theater.

Susan Tedeschi’s parting words: “Good luck in the Final Four, I know you guys are gonna do great.” She’d begun the concert with a conspiratorial smirk, “Congratulations on winning …I know you won, because you’re in my bracket.”

I have no need to temper my previous assessment of this band as the best I’ve heard on tour (and on record) in today’s popular music — for their stylistic range, depth of talent and inspiration, which I’ve discussed previously in this blog. In fact, having just heard live the excellent Gregg Allman band about a week earlier, I realize how much TTB has also raised the bar for the great tradition of Southern blues-rock vernacular music, which the Allman Brothers Band once defined.

Enthusiasm for this band of old souls spans several generations. A twenty-something sitting next to this baby boomer often responded physically to the performance throughout the set. Early on, she exclaimed to me about Trucks’ brilliance.  At the end, she turned to me with her eyes aglow. I said, “I could’ve listened to two sets of that.”

“I could’ve listened to four sets of them,” she said.

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Special thanks to Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and his brother-in-law Tom Clark.

For those who care to see and hear just what I reviewed, here is a Yahoo live posting of the TTB’s March 28 Madison performance. https://screen.yahoo.com/live/event/tedeschi-trucks-band

Here’s an excellent radio interview with Derek Trucks before the band’s Orpheum Theater performance in Madison by Stuart Levitan, host of Books and Beats, on The Mic 92.1 in Madison: http://www.themic921.com/media/podcast-books-and-beats-with-stu-SundayJournal/books-and-beats-hr-1-032215-25920062/

Gregg Allman singing with guitar (at left) performed with his band, and guest guitarist Harvey Mandel (not pictured) at the Northern Lights Theater. Photo by “Quazar”

Gregg Allman — Potawatomi Casino, Northern Lights Theater, Milwaukee, March 24-25

Gregg Allman may still be playing cards with old man Fate and he opened Wednesday night’s concert by inviting those who may have lost money in the casino to come in and drown their sorrows in some blues.

But God knows Allman has drawn many bad cards in his life, and it’s nearly a miracle he survived this long, with an almost savior-like gift for rebirth and renewal. Especially in a life that’s been often gritty, unsavory and tragic, marked by the unforgettable deaths of his superlative guitarist brother Duane and Allman Brothers bassist Berry Oakley in a hauntingly similar motorcycle accident a year later, and going fatherless from age two. This Allman has borne the weight of drug addiction that very nearly killed him, and several trying marriages, including a disastrous one to pop diva Cher.

So the man who played the Northern Lights Theater still has the long, blonde hair, beard and tattoos of a spiritual renegade, and many in the enthusiastic crowd perhaps felt like fellow travelers as the 67-year-old singer-songwriter-organist and guitarist transformed some of his trademark songs and put an indelible stamp on a number of blues high water marks.

His unassumingly magnificent 2011 album Low Country Blues reasserted Allman’s profound commitment to the Southern blues idiom, deeply infused with gospel and strains of rock ‘n roll and jazz. The band’s consistently imaginative light show began with an extended slide and film clip tribute to classic bluesmen from Muddy Waters to Blind Lemon Jefferson to Robert Johnson.

So it was no surprise that Allman and his band really opened the floodgates of soulful passion with a stone classic T-Bone Walker song “Stormy Monday Blues,” which he recorded on the Allman Brothers’ great Live at the Fillmore East album from 1971. Allman has massaged and expanded the tune for all its worth and made it the occasion to introduce his surprise guest performer Harvey Mandel, one the most singular and compelling blues-rock guitar stylists of his generation.

Underappreciated Detroit-born guitar innovator Harvey Mandel performed as guest guitarist with the Gregg Allman Band Wednesday night. Photo courtesy chicagobluesguide.com

Though he played with Canned Heat and even the Rolling Stones, Mandel has the comparatively low profile career of a brilliant guitarist who doesn’t happen to sing. His guitar takes care of that, with one of the most thickly textural voices on the instrument. Looking gaunt and seated throughout his stint, 1 Mandel’s guitar at times it emitted curling fuzz, and diverged into searing trash-talk licks of his own sonic language, echoing thick, cavernous notes and sharp rhythmic arabesques.

By contrast, Allman’s music director and lead guitarist Scott Sharrard, is highly fluent, clean-toned and passionate but comparatively conventional. Of course, having more than one top-notch guitarist is a grand Allman Brothers tradition. Right about “Stormy Monday” Allman’s muscular horn section and rhythm section pumped the classic blues lament for all its worth.

A show rich in contrasts included an early song delving as deeply into Allman’s soul as he gets, but with fascinating lyrical restraint. Jackson Browne’s song “These Days” fits as a tender, bittersweet slice of autobiography for Allman as he struggled with grief in the early ‘70s.  The horns faded away and the song ruminates along gentle sing-song waves and Allman refashioned Browne’s more optimistic ending into a poignantly confessional closing line: “Don’t please don’t confront me with my failures/I’m aware of them.”

What’s great about Gregg Allman is that he builds on that sense of failure, like a prizefighter, or a lonely long-distance runner. Another Allman Brothers tradition has been to liberally re-work their material as jazz musicians do.

So some tunes powered-up fresh like “Midnight Rider” and the marvelous instrumental “Les Brers in A Minor” from Eat a Peach, which steamed and pulsed along like a soaring zephyr, though not quite as expansively as back in the double-dagger guitar days of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. Still, it ended with the sort of glowing fireball of resolution that made that band something to so often savor.

However at the gig’s end, the band’s trademark rave-up “Whipping Post” lost some of its intensity and extraordinary drama without Allman’s streaming organ (he played guitar on the song) and without the deliciously stunning paroxysm of the repeated, several-octave interval leap near the end that once electrified countless fans. Tell me I just want to re-live the good old days. It’s something all musicians who last this long must deal with.

And perhaps Gregg Allman prepared for that eventuality long ago when he composed the memorable phrase that comes after that climax “Good Lord, I feel like I’m dying!”

But in all, it was an excellent show with only a few technical blunders such as a bit too much bass on the acoustic tunes and, on a few songs, harsh, rhythmically flashing lights from two spots away from the stage which quickly irritated the eyes.

And let’s hope that this Allman brother returns often, before the good Lord feels like he’s dying.

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1 Harvey Mandel is reportedly battling cancer, and financially strapped. Here’s a link to a Facebook page dedicated to raising money for his medical expenses: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Harvey-Mandel/112897798778305

This review was originally published in onMilwaukee.com: http://onmilwaukee.com/myOMC/authors/onmilwaukeecomstaffwriters/greggallmanconcertreview.html

 Russ Johnson — Still Out to Lunch! (Enja)

Right from the open blast of horns and stealthy walking bass, this transports you to the album Out to Lunch!, modern jazz at a 1964 peak. The tune, “Hat and Beard,” a musical portrait of Thelonious Monk, stakes common ground in startling interval leaps that wind player Dolphy and pianist Monk shared.  Nationally-reputed Milwaukee  trumpeter Johnson dares to revisit the urbane lunch counter inhabited by Dolphy, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Tony Williams. 1

Quotidian-detailed and genius-infused, the original album merged astringent structure and sardonic expression. Johnson’s quintet, with pianist Myra Melford and saxophonist Roy Nathanson, forgoes reverent replication and goes for broke, the original material securely in their DNA, and freshly arranged. Johnson and Nathanson’s horn voices interplay like close  brothers sharing squabbling rivalry and terse love.

Russ Johnson (center) recently performed selections from “Still Out to Lunch!” with musicians from the recording. Courtesy corneliastreetcafé.com

Also find strange beauty, in “Something Sweet, Something Tender.” Melford recasts Hutcherson’s tart gleaming-sculpture vibes with her crisp attack and pungent voicings.

Several inventive extra tracks wisely enhance the original material Drummer George Schuller, is the son of pioneering “Third Stream”  arranger and composer Gunther Schuller.  “Little Blue Devil” from his father’s “Seven Studies on Themes by Paul Klee” open the door connecting modern art and modern music – and revealing the sense of subtle blues comedy that many people thought “serious” jazzers lacked in the ‘60s.1

The original album cover of the recording that inspired Russ Johnson’s new CD. Courtesy lectro.ws

Plus, their reviving of two obscure but worthy Dolphy compositions, “Intake” and “Song for the Ram’s Horn,” make this a work that expands on the historical context of Dolphy’s original masterpiece. This is the best kind of jazz repertory — pushing forward — as it expands our insights on how modern jazz greats did so, not so long ago.

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1 This is Johnson’s second excellent album within a year following Meeting Point, which I reviewed in the Shepherd Express, Culture Currents, and NoDepression.com.

2 Dolphy himself recorded several Schuller Third Stream pieces including “Variant on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (Criss Cross),” and another on a John Lewis theme, on the 1961 Atlantic album John Lewis presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions – – Compositions by Gunther Schuller  & Jim Hall. Those two pieces are available as part of the Ornette Coleman box set on Rhino Records, Beauty is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings. The complete album is available on a Rhino re-issue. “Third Stream” music strove to blend techniques and aesthetics of modern “classical” music and modern jazz.

This review was published in a slightly shorter form in the Shepherd Express:

https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-25207.html

Book cover image courtesy www.kansascity.com

The three-foot-long rectangular box holding the fugitive slave rattled along the railway toward New Bedford, Henry Brown enduring a torment of his own devise. Who’d suspect a grown man hidden in such small crate? He made it, more than 250 miles in 24 hours. “Nothing saved him from suffocating but the free use of water…and the constant fanning of himself with his hat,” recounted his rescuer. Two dumps of the crate on his head nearly killed him.

Henry “Box” Brown exemplifies the resourcefulness and courage of fleeing slaves, a theme of Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. The book demonstrates that the “railroad” — a loose system of slave fugitive liberation — had a grassroots interracial genesis, and spread primarily through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Delaware, though it extended all the way to Canada.

An artist’s depiction of fugitive slaves on the so-called underground railroad. Courtesy discoversalemcounty.com

At the author’s best, the sheer number of escapes, heroes and villains carry the reader along, as if galloping through a valley of subterfuge and salvation that might also doom freedom at any time. One fugitive’s betrayal pivots on both a southbound carrier pigeon and a “stool pigeon.” The stories convey the sometimes breathtaking effect of the spontaneously growing collaboration between whites and blacks.

The Underground Railroad Monument, in Battle Creek, Michigan, memorializes the heroism of fugitive slaves who escaped to freedom via the covert communication and transportation system in the antebellum era. Courtesy afriendlyletter.com

Foner corrects the historical extolling of white abolitionists as the slave’s primary liberators. After a four-chapter chronological backdrop, he takes us to the dawn of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which federally mandated the return of fugitive “property” — Foner delves into the black community’s complex response to the crisis generated, amid increasing freedom flights. Abolitionist “vigilance committees” arose along border states. African-American William Still proved a one-man liberation force, and free blacks did most of the dangerous hiding and assisting of fugitives, and public protesting of their “renditions” to re-enslavement. 1

Abolitionist factions squabbled. Pacifist William Lloyd Garrison disparaged the role of the black church in the effort. However, Foner illustrates the crucial sanctuary and deliverance the black church and community provided. Many newspaper ads described fugitives in possessive detail: one slave “wears a truss for hernia…” The great black orator and journalist Frederick Douglass emerges as a precursor of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, for espousing violent resistance, if necessary. Yet evidently few bloody confrontations ensued — the Fugitive Slave Act proved difficult to enforce, as was the Constitutional language that dictates the return of runaway human “property.”

Foner’s mother lode source was New Yorker Sydney Gay’s meticulously documented “Record of Fugitives,” more than 200 runaways he aided, including Harriet Tubman, the era’s most fearless angel of mercy. Gateway’s cumulative power sometimes clots with repetition of similar anecdotes, but one learns vividly the dogged persistence of America’s ugliest reality and the complicated passion shared by abolitionists and slaves for freedom, if not equality.

Harriett Tubman courtesy

To further understand how America came to war with itself, one might try Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 literary sensation Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a virtuoso feat of imaginative agitprop that helped transform American sentiment on slavery.

Or read the finest slave narratives, of Douglass or Henry Bibb — authentic, moving and eloquent testimonies regarding the cold-blooded lash, the brutal convoluting of “Christian” values.

Courtesy oaklandmcc-store.com

Foner crucially delineates the profound challenge and existential risk that engulfed an inter-racial generation as the nation thundered toward dissolution, or Civil War.

Today myriad African-Americans struggle mightily, as much of the world embraces the black cultural and social genius that emerged from slavery. Meanwhile, the Dixie-publican Tea Party — inflamed by a black president from Illinois, as was the slave-holding South by a heroic white one — burns with ancient contempt, as our political discourse and democracy suffer.

Our heightening community-vs.-institution racial tragedies might also gain illumination from perhaps America’s true “Greatest Generation.”

Foner touches on the role that so-called “radical Wisconsin” played in the abolitionist movement, becoming the only state to declare slavery unconstitutional. Despite highlighting all the slave roles in self-liberation, Foner curiously neglects naming Joshua Glover, the slave who was rescued by a Milwaukee mob led by Sherman Booth. There are several memorials to this liberation effort including this mural on the Interstate 43 overpass in Milwaukee (above) and a sign at the place on Booth Street and Glover Street in Riverwest where Booth provided a safe house for Glover.

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1. Joshua Glover was a runaway slave from St. Louis, Missouri who sought asylum in Racine, Wisconsin in 1852. Upon learning his whereabouts in 1854, slave owner Bennami Garland attempted to use the Fugitive Slave Act to recover him. Glover was captured and taken to a Milwaukee jail. A mob led by Sherman Booth broke into the jail and rescued Glover, who then escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The rescue of Glover and the federal government’s subsequent attempt to prosecute Booth helped to galvanize the abolitionist movement in the state that eventually led to Wisconsin becoming the only state to declare the Act unconstitutional.” https://www.flickr.com/photos/auvet/5919752521/

2 One fascinating aspect of the underground railroad strategies that Foner does not touch on was the creation and use of quilts by sympathetic African-American women, as documented in a remarkable art exhibit in Milwaukee several years ago. The women employed a series of symbols sewn into the quilts that acted as covert signals to slaves when the collaborators would hang the quilts out for fugitives to see. Read about this in my Culture Currents feature review of the show “If these quilts could talk: signals along the Underground Railroad.” https://kevernacular.com/?p=1063

This book review was first published in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel taps section, Sunday March 15, 2015http://m.jsonline.com/entertainment/books/eric-foner-highlights-black-communitys-role-in-underground-railroad-b99458445z1-296218481.html

AFL-CIO union president Phil Neuenfeldt speaks at a rally Wednesday at the Wisconsin state Capitol, the second day of protests against the Republican-led legislature effort to fast-track a controversial “right to work” bill in Wisconsin. NOTE: Another protest rally at the Capitol building is scheduled for noon, Saturday, Feb. 28., as is public testimony to the labor committee. Photo by Mike DeVries, courtesy of The Capital Times. Here’ s a link with a photo essay on the protest:http://host.madison.com/gallery/news/local/govt-and-politics/photos-wednesday-s-right-to-work-rally-at-capitol/collection_1476aa0a-bd31-11e4-8575-5fe1191072e7.html#0

The subject of this blog is power. But the first thing to understand about the protest rally I attended on Tuesday at Wisconsin’s State Capitol in Madison — against the fast-tracking of a “right to work” bill for Wisconsin law — is that this was no gathering of leftist agitators.

The day before the rally, Milwaukee ultra-conservative radio talk show host Charlie Sykes referred to the people he imagined assembling as “Unionistas,” implying militant Communist plotting, a typical and dated political fear-mongering.

I must comment on Sykes because he is so influential among Wisconsin conservatives and “Tea Party” members and anyone who feeds off his highly rated WTMJ program.

Talk about power. He broadcasts on the most powerful radio station in the state, by far. Fully aware that right-wing politics feeds off talk radio, radical Governor Scott Walker has a constant direct line to Sykes’ program.

Popular ultra-conservative Milwaukee radio talk show host Charlie Sykes also gets his share of speaking engagements. Photo courtesy courtesy bizjournal.com

I recall the governor’s current radio mouthpiece when I worked with him for The Milwaukee Journal  in the 1980s. Then a cityside reporter, Charlie Sykes would walk around the newsroom with a curiously remote air. He never spoke to me, or to very many fellow reporters that I ever noticed. He just seemed a little odd to me, and this was before I had any notion of his political views.

Now I interpret his newsroom manner as an imperious sense of superiority, and perhaps a sense of political alienation because — although professional print journalists work hard to be objective reporters — most reporters’ personal politics tend to be centrist or liberal leaning.

However, another former Journal colleague who knows Sykes and claims to be friends with him is Joel McNally, the affable and left-leaning writer with the infectious giggle. Back then, Joel was a newsroom star, writing a popular satirical column for The Journal, often about political matters. 2.

McNally commented a few years ago about his friend Sykes, regarding one of his programs that seemed to promote racial hatred:

“There’s nothing satirical about promoting racial hatred,” McNally wrote in The Shepherd Express for which he now does a weekly column. “I’ve written a lot of satire. You create satire by pretending to adopt a point of view you disagree with and promoting it with such exaggerated, ridiculous arguments that the whole idea is exposed as absurd.

“Sykes and his mean-spirited audience do not think the idea of poor inner city blacks living it up while ripping off taxpayers is absurd. That’s actually one of the basic premises of his show.” 3.

Sykes claims that covering some of the urban problems in Milwaukee changed his own politics because he perceived that liberal “welfare state” solutions were untenable. He apparently did a black-and-white ideological flip-flop —  if he was ever a liberal at all. Before too long, he left the newspaper.

It’s been a long time since he’s been a legitimate journalist, in the traditional sense, of serving the public interest with information they can use to make up their minds about a news story or a political development. His program thrives on his right-wing assumptions and biases, just as liberal talk programs do on theirs, to some degree. But none of those are really heard in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, Sykes’ morning show is so often sadly under-informed and under-reported, or selectively informed at best. He operates in relationship to a reality that’s not much more connected than Rush Limbaugh’s to that of an ordinary working or working-poor Milwaukeean, or American. Unless most of their information comes from such radio talk.

The crowd gathered at the Wisconsin Capitol Tuesday to protest the fast-tracking of a “right to work” bill. Another protest was held Wednesday.

Now, to the “right to work” bill protest I witnessed Tuesday. Contrary to Sykes’ glib characterization, the spirit of this event was as patriotic and American as God and country, mother and Apple Pie. Laborers of many different trade unions, some in hard hats, filled the crowd. A group of machinists did their own march around the capital to protest the right-to-work bill (see photo).

The program began with emcee Phil Neuenfeldt, Wisconsin’s AFL-CIO president, leading the crowd in The Pledge of Allegiance. Then the Solidarity Singers sang “The Star-Spangled Banner. “ our national anthem. Neuenfeldt then asked a priest, Father Jim Murphy, to give an invocation, which was a prayer for the gathering.

Several big American flags flapped in the icy wind, along with various union flags, amid the thicket of protest signs. People in the Tea Party, and politicians who cater to them, like to wrap themselves in the American flag and think their extreme aversion and often paranoia about government is what America is about.

This gathering at our state capital was what America is about. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters Association of Wisconsin, reprised a refrain he used several years ago for the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered here in the summer of 2011 for protests of Gov. Walker’s Act 10 destruction of public sector union bargaining rights.

“We know what democracy looks like, right?” Mitchell called out to the crowd.

“ Democracy looks like this!” the multitude roared in massive and hearty unison on this cold but sunny and crystal-clear February afternoon.

Mitchell was one of a number of eloquent speakers, all associated with Wisconsin unions.

But Neuenfeldt summed the situation up quite well in his opening remarks:

“Right to work in Wisconsin is not the Wisconsin way. This bill is an attack on all Wisconsin families, an attack on our paychecks. It’s an attack on our ability to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. And it’s an attack on our rights as workers.”

“We know it’s out of state special interests pushing this bill.  They want power.

“They don’t care if you had a good job or decent benefits or can afford to spend your kids to college. What they want is more profits and they want to do it on the backs of workers.

“We know, and history teaches us, that a strong union movement builds the middle class and raises all boats. There is nothing more American than workers coming together, through their unions, to stick together. That’s what we’re doing here today, coming together to have each other’s backs, right?

“Unions lead to better trained workers, a safer workplace, and a strong stable middle-class.”

The word that sticks with me amid all this well-put, all-American common sense is the word power.

Neuenfeldt addressed the Republican power issue: “We didn’t send our elected officials to Madison to rush through a bill, to limit the public debates, in an extraordinary way, on important economic issues. We sent them to Madison to make sure every person in Wisconsin has a chance at the American Dream. Not to rush through a bill in an undemocratic way. Right-to-work will put downward pressure on our entire economy.”

The fast tracking of the bill, employs the same strategy used in at least two neighboring Midwestern states which are now “right to work.” The governor’s stated philosophy is “divide and conquer” – build resentment in non-union workers against union workers. Since making that statement to a rich donor,  Walker has deftly played “rope a dope” with the press and the public on the issue during his last term and last election, saying “right to work” was a distraction” and that he would “do everything in his power” to prevent such a bill from reaching his desk.

Now Walker has safely gained re-election for a second term, and is gallivanting around the country to try for presidential bid, and he has changed his tune. His Republican cronies in the legislature worked up this bill, which he now says he will sign when it gets to his desk.

This is yet another oppressive power grab by this gubernatorial administration.

Walker, son of up Baptist preacher, talks about God giving him the blessing to pursue his ongoing quest for more power. Yet, there’s something to learn from a philosopher who studied power. I speak of Frederick Nietzsche, the existentialist thinker and writer but especially as contextualized by the great American philosopher William Barrett, a great interpreter of existential philosophy, especially in his classic book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.

“Irrational Man” book cover courtesy Wikipedia.org

Understand, I don’t consider myself an existentialist, per se. But the philosophy substantially informs my thinking. I was raised a Catholic and today informally call myself a Unitarian agnostic, who still prays in my own ways, just like Father Jim Murphy does, publicly and privately.

Any reflective person cannot ignore modern history which includes the existentialist philosophical movement. It grew out of the experience of World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust, which drove many people to question whether God was still alive.

Though many people think of existentialism as European, the philosophy profoundly informs the American experience, with our history of The Civil War, The Gilded Age, and especially since The Great Depression and the post-war experience.

That dark “Twilight Zone” sense of dread that life’s uncertainties, unfairness and pitfalls can impose on the celebrated American individual is perhaps an “irrational” fear, but a very real one. Didn’t most of us feel it on 9/11, and perhaps the 99 per cent of us during our Great Recession? Existential dread permeates most classic American crime fiction and the great American tradition of film noir cinema.

But my subject is political power, in this instance. Nietzsche, as interpreted by William Barrett, has plenty to say: “Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself. The will to power begets the problem of nihilism.”

Barrett writes that Nietzsche prophesized remarkably that “nihilism would be the shadow, in many guises and forms, that would haunt the 20th century. Supposing man does not blow himself and his earth to bits,  and that he really becomes the master of this planet. What then? (Barrett’s book was published in 1958 and the paperback edition in 1962 through the height of the Cold War, an even larger existential treat).

Note how relevant Barrett is to today: “Power for power’s sake, the matter of how far powers extended, leads always to the dread of the void beyond. The attempts to stand face-to-face with that void is the problem of nihilism. For the existentialists who felt that the other higher eternal realm (of religious belief) is gone, Nietzsche declared, man’s highest values lose their value. The only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power.

“To the degree that modern life has become secularized these highest values anchored in the eternal, have already lost their value. So long as people are blissfully unaware of this, they of course did not sink into any despondency and nihilism; they may even be steady churchgoers.

“Nihilism, in fact is the one subject on which we speak today with the self-complacency of commencement-date orators. We are always ready to invoke the term against a new book on new play that has anything ‘negative’ to say, as if nihilism is always to be found in the other persons, never in ourselves.”

Nihilism never goes away. Now the gruesome brutality of the Middle Eastern radical terrorist group ISIS seems as nihilistic as anything. Will we start another ground war again? Walker would, he says.

Barrett continues to nail us: “And yet despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refrigerators, American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. It’s final quote ‘what for?’ Is not even asked, let alone answered.”

It’s uncanny that he wrote this in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, but it is also the era of the TV show “Mad Men” as well.

“Unless our Faustian civilization can relax its frantic dynamism at some point it might very well go psychotic,” he concludes. “To primitives and Orientals, we Western men already seem half-crazy. We need to know what in our fundamental way of thinking needs to be changed so that the frantic will to power will not appear is the only meaning we can give to human life.”  4

At the pro-union rally protest I attended, clearly the head of the AFL-CIO and all the other speakers had plenty to say about thinking that needs to be changed, and about giving meaning to human life.

But what do Scott Walker and the Republicans — by rushing this bill through — have to say other than talking about “freedom.” The freedom, that is,  to work without paying dues, and yet receiving all the benefits and pay rates that a union works hard for all the company’s workers to enjoy? Walker and the Republicans want to outlaw union fees that people who prefer not to join a union might pay for the benefits, the better training, the workplace safety, and wages union provides them.

It’s “peddling a double standard” as Democratic State Senator Robert Wirch said, because Wisconsin chambers of commerce require all businesses to pay fees to them so that the powerful commerce chambers will protect them when they need legal or funding help or otherwise.

But the Republicans want to legally strip workers of that protection. The subject of this sort of government intrusion on private business affairs is worthy of a full public debate and discussion.

Scott Walker has been a career politician since he since he was in college at Marquette University. He allegedly played dirty tricks in running for a school office by removing from on campus news boxes all the newspapers that endorsed his opponent, among other questionable tactics. A short while later he dropped out, far short of his degree. Shortly after that he began the full quest, a will to power that has been driving his life ever since.

Do you have much sense that he cares about Wisconsin today, as he traipses around the country trying to get billionaires and to give him money for his presidential run?

For his occasional son-of-a-preacher pieties, one senses he is walking through a nihilistic void of pure power seeking, with political caginess but heedless hubris, over which even some conservatives shake their heads in dismay. “I wouldn’t bet against me on anything,” he recently boasted to a reporter. 5.

His grandiosity grows. When asked recently how he’d take on the ISIS terrorists he made a distasteful association with Wisconsin protesters: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do that across the world.” 6.

Who does he speak for other than his vainglorious self, in disarming platitudinous rhetoric, except to the extreme right political base, and Republican Party establishment looking for an electable candidate, and most of all to the richest one percent in America. Who else is he really working for?

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Photos by Kevin Lynch, unless otherwise noted.

1. The remarkable story of that huge event, which helped to inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement is documented in the book Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street  by John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, and another former colleague of this writer.
2. McNally was also the union steward of the first newsroom union to ever grace The Milwaukee Journal in the mid-1980s. I happened to be the first personnel case that the new union stood up for. I was laid off from my job as a part-time staffer in the features section in what amounted to a power move by an editor vying for a high position and trying to show he could tighten up a budget.  The lay-off had nothing to do with my performance.

An independent arbitrator decided that the newspaper had unfairly laid me off without offering to relocate me to another position, although I did apply unsuccessfully for a couple of other positions. Thanks to the new union’s president Jack Norman, steward McNally and others, I got my part-time staff position back, along with nine months back pay.

3. https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-20907.html
4.  William Barrett, Irrational Man: A study in Existential Philosophy, Anchor Books, 1962, 203-205.
5.  Here’s the video of Walker’s comment: http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/01/scott-walker-wouldnt-bet-anything/
6. https://us-mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.partner=sbc&.rand=acrals92f0pdh#mail

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Bill Camplin – Understory (self-released)

Bill Camplin observes and invokes life with unblinking candor on his inspired new recording. This crystal-clear Nashville-recorded session stands as Camplin’s strongest-ever album of original work. Peerless in its naked, high-baritone beauty, his voice employs Dylanesque duskiness and deftly doled drama, often wrapped in rueful irony.

Camplin testifies to human foibles and futility, as personal confession and for those underfoot, suffering exploitation. Therein lie his “understories,” insightful, humane and possessing a perfect pitch of indignance.

“Old Man Sleep” requires little reflection, yet begs for it. Camplin witnesses a street-wandering soul, addressing the elder beyond earshot with extraordinary tenderness. Haunting falsetto phrases recall the great jazz singer Andy Bey. Camplin, a master of linguistic quirk, notes: “in the alley of existence your slur lives on.”

“Seems I’ve Seen This Night Before” attests to Everyman’s flounderings: I’m losing all concept of what I intend/playing the victim and stumbling away.

By contrast, “Fatcats,” is a romping blues-funk protest – with streaming organ backdrop — against the (Wall Street) “fatcats who want it all.”

“Rage Against the Night,” stands as Understory’s masterpiece, high, street-corner poetry worthy of the best Dylan or Townes Van Zandt, whispering Lear-like existential pathos. Sostenuto cello and majestically descending guitar chords soon recall John Cale-Lou Reed scenarios. Camplin’s voice unleashes a sort of threepenny-opera passion. “Rage” summons hearts and minds with time-borne challenges and no easy answers, only faith in perseverance and, in its affirmative key of C, will for justice:

The flood of history as it advances forth among us/

and the drained potentials that the deluge washes from us/

Between our future and our past, let us rage against the night.

Out on a thunderclap, oh, the light is breaking/

children’s voices calling as they are waking/

Spring erupts again to put forth the final fight

Bill Camplin performing with violinist Randy Sabien and guitarist Satchel Paige Welch. Courtesy dwightfpl.wordpress.com

The album bristles with musical variety as Camplin’s son and album producer Satchel Paige interjects pithy, conversational guitar fills and hand-in-glove gestures, especially on the brilliantly arranged “All in the Name of You.” Trumpet, cello, organ and pedal steel help till Understory with spades of fresh vigor. We should hear more from the talented Mister Paige before long.

Yet Understory’s flat-earth CD cover abstraction might also suggest voices rising from graves, and the veteran songwriter addresses, amid our gadget-clogged distraction, the eternal question of finally relinquishing the temporal spirit, “Where Do We Surrender?”

“Take your souls, take them out on the highway…release yourself to a deadly extreme… ….where do we confess we can on longer try?” Here’s Camplin performing the song, at an Earthkeepers Mississippi River Sacred Sites Benefit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mOf7cZ4j5M

But Camplin, the 68-year-old co-owner of Fort Atkinson’s roots music mecca Café Carpe, ain’t going nowhere soon, one hopes. 1 He’ll release a live recording of a renunion of the Cardboard Box band, named for his 1975 album. He plans two more volumes of his masterful Dylan interpretations, documented first in Dylan Project One from 2003, along with another album of originals still unfolding down the dusty roads of his mind, and a “country” album.

Don’t wait for those to catch up with Camplin. Here’s an Understory: One day, he suddenly disappears, like many a mythical or forgotten troubadour-poet eccentric. They bury him in an ungainly cardboard box in a modestly marked grave on the banks of the Rock River. Then his remains wash away in the streams of time. Which, as we know, waits for no one.

Understory is available at Cafe Carpe, 18 S. Water Street West, Fort Atkinson, and at  cdbaby.com: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/billcamplin3

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1. Cafe Carpe, also a fine eatery, has a long history as a Midwest crossroads for great and obscure singer-songwriters and vernacular groups. The Carpe also provided the artistic sowing ground of Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault and the collaborative group Redbird, among others. Among recent acts I’ve seen there include Redbird (Mulvey, Foucault, Kris Delmhorst and David Goodrich) at their holiday season concert series and, last month, Steve Forbert, another baby boomer rudely defying the ravages of age.

For information, visit: http://cafecarpe.com/listening/

This review was originally published in a shorter form in The Shepherd Express: https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-25043.html

New York Times Magazine photo illustration by Andrew B Myers.

As I read the sad and disturbing article “Feed Frenzy” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, something stirred in the belly of my dismay. The story’s subtitle is “the unique 21^st-century misery of the online shaming victim.”

Online, one reads a more blunt headline: “How one stupid tweet blew up Justine Socco’s life.” 1

No, I’ve never been victimized yet, as have the article’s subjects. But I’m interested in finally starting my own Twitter account. As I read, I began to again reconsider plunging myself into the shoot-from-the-hip mentality that dominates this social media.

At least on Facebook, you can contextualize your comments more thoroughly, so that misinterpretations like those that ruined a number of people’s lives don’t explode in their faces, often before for they realize the reactions have spread like a monstrous global cancer.

On Dec. 20, 2014, Justine Socco — in flight on a plane trip from London to South Africa before she discovered she was being globally pilloried — insensitively joked on Twitter: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She preceeded that with sassy tweets about a “weird German” with body odor, and “bad teeth” Brits. And before snaggle-toothed Austin Powers could say “Oh, behave!” countless quickly intrepreted that, being white, Socco thought herself above AIDS — too privileged — to get it in Africa.

The author of the article, Jon Ronson, admits to his own share of online tweet shaming, and I have done some of my own but never on Twitter, and only of persons fair game as a public figures, ie. politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  The odd defiance and hubris of someone like Walker, which even some conservatives admit about him, virtually begs for online reproach. 2

But swift judgment is contagious on social media and especially on the forced glibness of Twitter’s 144-character virtual reality. That virtual quality insulates the Tweeter who lashes out. Readers viciously pecked Socco’s personhood and her career to death (flashes of Hitchcock’s The Birds, but such tweeters displayed the crows’ same pack-attack mentality). The pain and damage to a person’s psyche and a life are quite real. Justine remains, a year later, still “wracked by PTSD, depression and insomnia,” after she lost her job as a senior director of communications at IAC (a leading online consumer service company).

Ronson recounts a few other “tweet frenzy” victims’ sad stories, and then something clicked with me when he started digging into the history of public shaming in America. He found, on microfilm in the Massachusetts Archives in Boston, an article about how, on July 15, 1742, “a woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found  ‘naked in bed with one John Russell .’ They were both to be ‘ whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.’ Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke.  ‘If Your Honor pleases,’‘ she wrote, ‘ take some pity on me for my dear children cannot help her unfortunate mother’s failings.”

At the time, crowds of people flocked to public shamings and continued berating with relish, just as they did in 1692-3 at the notorious witch trials and hangings in Salem, Mass. 3

A dramatization of a Salem witch trial. Courtesy www.thehorrorzine.com

Right then, it struck me again, why I had been so fascinated by the Italian painter Titian’s painting “Christ and the Adulteress,” which I had seen in person recently at the Milwaukee Art Museum and which now I have as my computer screen saver.

The painting was a centerpiece of Heaven and Earth: 500 years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums, now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, through May 3 under a somewhat more secular title: Botticelli, Titian and Beyond: Italian Masterpieces from the Glasgow Museums.

“Christ and the Adulteress” by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 1508-10. Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum

The brilliance of Titian’s daring and evocative formal handling of his subject matter fascinated me, as I discussed in a previous Culture Currents post:https://kevernacular.com/?p=5704

Justine’s and Abigail’s stories helped me understand that this painting’s alluring and sculptural tangle of figures says even more about social matters than I had first inferred. Like Abigail, the woman in the famous Bible story appeared guilty of adultery and, with a swift judgment, the Pharisee drags her to Christ, actually with the duplicitous intention of trapping him into defying established Roman law by defending her. Working in suspicious shadows, the self-styled messiah does just that, helping seal his own fate as a dissident radical.

But the artist Titian has societal fish to fry with all those busybodies crammed into this compositional pan. You can count five other people standing nearby as the Pharisee baits Christ to become the sixth, or become a criminal himself. On the left, the man with his foot on a tree stump addressing another woman on his left while aiming the proverbial pointed finger of blame at the poor woman. The woman listening, as a credit to her gender, looks on balefully, as if questioning the quick condemnation. Titian also inserts two men in the background, explicitly to show two smirking men gabbing, clearly indulging their own clucking opinions of the woman.

The original painting actually had another man on the far right, whose knee remains still visible against the accused woman’s white skirt.

Look at the copy of the original uncut painting below. Titian probably cut the canvas because his better sense decided this large figure made the composition too busy. The self-consciously dandy he eliminated seems more interested in posing than in the dramatic moment. Nevertheless the figure further underscores Titian’s original point of how public the woman’s shaming felt to her.

Copy after Titian, “Christ and the Adulteress,” Accademia, Carrara, Bergamo. Photo of catalog reproduction by Ann Peterson.

Further most of the people don’t seem to hear Christ’s response to the Pharisee which, of course, became historic wisdom: “Let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone.”

The man on Christ’s left shoulder, perhaps the disciple Peter, seems the only one paying attention to Christ. Yet the elder man puts his hand to his chest as if taken aback by Christ’s bold defiance of the Pharisee, and of conventional moralism.

So Christ is essentially alone in this crowd taking the stance. Yet, of course, even though he speaks to defend her from a stoning, the woman must feel more alone than anyone, as her abject countenance makes utterly clear. Her head, legs and feet still recoil and resist her apparent fate while the Pharisee drags her arm and upper torso forward.

So the painting brims with politics at several different levels — the “gotcha” entrapment of Christ himself in defying the law, and of the caught-in-the-act woman. And Titian highlights the naked self-righteousness of political correctness even as he hides the hero’s face in the shadows. Christ clearly dwells in a different realm of spirit, understanding and insight.

Now Titian’s painting and Christ’s message seem more timely than ever. We see a mere handful of people indulging in the latest gossip. On Twitter, literally millions can quickly pounce on such an admittedly insensitive tweeter like Justine. Her life quickly crumbles into a shambles.

Sam Biddle, then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog, re-tweeted Socco’s post to his 15,000 followers and posted on Valleywag. He says he would do it again and that ”she’d be fine eventually, if not already.”

Socco is far from “fine.” Most of us know at least something about depression, insomnia and unemployment. Poorer understood is post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s far more common than people think. We hear a lot about soldiers suffering from it, but I know at least one friend who has suffered with the diagnosis for years after her boss repeatedly abused her. She eventually lost her job, in a staff downsizing.

Ronson’s article and this painting help me to understand my friend’s situation, even though she was hardly guilty of anything — rather she courageously stood up repeatedly to a bully boss.

So I think I’ll probably think once yet again about whether I’ll enter the still-strange-to-me-me Twitter world even though — as the insightful, recently deceased New York Times media writer David Carr noted — Twitter is good discipline for a writer to boil down his statements. But I strive to do that on Facebook because I know most people scroll and read quickly.

And as the article points out ironically, Sacco’s “tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took (her) down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own– a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow (Airport), hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.”

In the article, Justine argues that her joke didn’t signify her reveling in white privilege. Rather she was making fun of how “living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble.”

Biddle eventually apologized to Socco. Her story, and the story Titian tell us in his painting, show how we still have much to learn from very old history, and from old art, and from both great leaders and the anonymous players — like the unnamed adulteress woman — who suffer in their tortured symbolism. Today “smart” phone photo images of her might saturate the Internet, smeared in electronic shame.

Would that the “fallen” Biblical woman, like Justine Socco, live on as a symbol of a flawed person whom the great humanist Christ valued — beyond her real or perceived “sins” — for struggling along life’s up-and-down path. Most wise storytellers or artists give their protagonist a fighting chance at redemption, before a mob-rule sentence is passed. Why not tweeters, too?

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1 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0

2. The nation’s most polarizing state governor continues to get mostly roses thrown at his feet by national and even local media, surprised by the Teflon quality he shares — so far — with his innocuous rhetorical role model Ronald Reagan. Yet Walker continues frequent ideological overstepping, trampling not only on the roses but the pursuit of education and knowledge and social equality, among other worthy goals.

3. No women were burned at the stake in Salem. They were hanged or jailed. The myth derives likely from European witch trials, where execution by fire was disturbingly common. The Holy Roman Empire’s medieval code “Constitutio Criminalis Carolina” stipulated that witchcraft should be punished by fire, and church leaders and local governments oversaw the burning of witches in parts of modern day Germany, Italy, Scotland, France and Scandinavia. Historians estimate that the witch-hunt hysteria that peaked between the 15th and 18th centuries saw some 50,000 people executed as witches in Europe. http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/were-witches-burned-at-the-stake-during-the-salem-witch-trials

The image of the larger uncut version of the Titian painting is actually a painting done “after Titian” by staff Academia Carrara, in Bergamo, Italy.

Oh, what I would’ve given to have stood this close to the volcano Cotopaxi, as did my sister-in-law Kris Verdin.

The hydrologist — with the US Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado — took a wedding anniversary trip to Ecuador with her husband Jim last summer. I was so struck by her photographs that I invited her to be a guest photography blogger for Culture Currents.

The shot above, of a shepherd with her flock in a field, beneath the great volcano Cotopaxi, has been my computer desktop screensaver for the last several months. As I’m a sucker for landscapes and cityscapes, I love the undulating even sensual form and depth-of-field in these marvelous views.

Notice the sumptuous natural beauties of this land, as well as the ways the local architecture configures with the landscape.

The native inhabitants appear colorful, friendly and rich with family tradition. The final photo is of Kris herself, taken by Jim Verdin. Here are Kris’s comments on some of her photographs.

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Quito, Ecuador.

Hats for all these residents in Ecuador, in August? This must be in a high mountainous altitude.

These Ecuador families came down to wave to the train carrying Americans Kris and Jim Verdin. Kris also saw women pressing juice from the sugar cane stacked in the back ground.

A striking view of Basílica del Voto Nacional or ‘basilica of the national vow,’ which lords over Ecuador’s capital city of Quito. “The vista with the basilica in the back is of Quito, taken from a restaurant that had great views of the city,” Verdin commented.

A detail of armadillo gargoyles on the façade of Basilica Del Voto Nacional. The armored, ant-eating mammals, indigenous to the Americas, still live in the wilds of South America.

Kris photographed this beautiful young native woman with her stunning garb exiting the basilica, after she performed at a service or celebration in the church.

Kris Verdin (foreground), making friends with a llama, took all the photographs reproduced above. This photo is by Jim Verdin.

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“Cotopaxi,” Frederick Church, oil on canvas, 1862 (I recommend zooming onto this image to get a better sense of this huge painting. Notice details such as the birds flying in the lower right corner and, in the lower right, a native with a llama, which seems to  peer at the birds far across the abyss.)  

Review of art show including Frederick Church’s epic painting of Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador: https://kevernacular.com/?p=5459

part 2 of review jpg.:

part 3:

Trumpeter, bandleader and Monkophile Jamie Breiwick will lead Dreamland in a concert of Thelonious Monk music at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts at 8 PM Friday, January 23.

Dreamland will perform at 8 p.m. January 23 in The Dawes Studio Theater of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, 19805 W. Capitol Dr., Brookfield. For information and to purchase tickets, call 262-781-9520 or visit Wilson-Center.com.

Was it all just a dream? Mystery still shrouds “Dreamland,” but Racine trumpeter Jamie Breiwick is convinced it’s a Thelonious Monk composition, though its provenance remains hazy. Monk is a closely-examined jazz composer, by musicians, writers and scholars. In his exhaustive 2009 biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin DG Kelley calls the tune “a bit of a mystery,” as an “old-fashioned ballad that sounds as though it could’ve been written in the 1920s. Monk never copyrighted it, rarely performed it, and only recorded it once…he never spoke about it or explained whether it was just an old song or his old composition.” 1

Thelonious Monk, early in his career, when he composed many of his most fascinating and enduring compositions. Courtesy allaboutjazz.com

Unsatisfied with the recording, Monk refused to release it. Monk’s 1971 live solo piano version is listed as “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” a 1904 song by Leo Friedman and Beth Slater Wilson, which doesn’t resemble what Monk plays. “Perhaps it is a sketch for a song he never quite finished,” Kelley speculates. 2

The intrigue led to immersive investigation by Breiwick, one of the Milwaukee area’s most intelligent, gifted and resourceful musicians. The trumpeter’s Dreamland group — pianist Mark Davis, bassist John Price, and drummer Devin Drobka — plays mostly Monk, and hopes to make a live recording later, at Milwaukee’s intimate Jazz Estate.

“I realized there is something deeper to Monk and I had to study him further,” said Breiwick.  “Dreamland” is uncharacteristic Monk. Not that the pianist — deemed a radical and atypical bebopper in his early years — was incapable of reaching into the past or romance. His most famous composition, “’Round Midnight,” broods deeply in romantic loss. His playing draws on stride piano, an anachronism to boppers.

“Almost any musician who has depth in their playing has investigated Monk,” asserts Breiwick, also a talented educator. He teaches at Maple Dale School and UW-Milwaukee, and was a semi-finalist for the first-ever Grammy Music Educator Award in 2013. He also co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, which advances and promotes jazz and creative music. Among, those directly fueling Breiwick’s Monk obsession were drummer Drobka, who deftly executes Monk’s hole-in-the staircase rhythms; former Milwaukee pianist Barry Velleman, and former Monk sideman Steve Lacy.

Breiwick also gigs regularly at the Mason Street Grill with Mark Davis, who studied with pianist Barry Harris, who lived with Monk toward the end of the reclusive musician’s life.

“Then, I found in the bowels of the Internet, 20 pages deep into Google, a discussion in which someone said they saw Paul Motian play it at The Village Vanguard,” Breiwick relates. “The chart just said ‘Dreamland.’ Then it said ‘Monk played this.’” Motian recorded “Dreamland” with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano on the album I Have the Room Above Her.

Paul Motian recorded one of the few known covers of “Dreamland” on this album.

“I was drawn to (Monk’s music) because of how it made me play,” Breiwick says. “It takes you out of your comfort zone in dealing with the harmonies. But the tunes are timeless and modern. I can’t imagine what people thought about them back in the ‘40s.”

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy understood them, by the 1950s. Breiwick also delved into Steve Lacy: Conversations, a book of interviews with the musician who — after learning, performing, and recording with Monk — dedicated much of his career to the man’s music, starting by making the first recording of it by anyone besides Monk, the album 1959 Reflections.

A crucial recording for trumpeter Breiwick was Lacy’s 1962 album Evidence with trumpeter Don Cherry and the marvelously musical drummer Billy Higgins. Breiwick feels that Cherry had as good a grip on Monk’s slippery rhythmic and harmonic turns as any brass player. This is partly because Cherry, who came to fame with Ornette Coleman, is amongst the freest of jazz trumpeters, so he’s not hidebound by the fast, linear bop conventions that Monk’s sly, mad-scientist structures tend to undermine.

Like Cherry, Breiwick’s thinking and improvising in Monk’s music works more off of motives — or melody fragments — rather than the chord changes, he says.

But conceptually many of his cues come from Lacy, one of the most interesting and allusive thinkers in jazz, who often collaborated with poets and painters.

 Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy made this recording with Monk, and became one of the most probing investigators and interpreters of the man’s sometimes mysterious music. 

In a sense, a typical Monk composition seems dreamlike. It consistently takes odd, seemingly illogical turns, and often uses shadows of silence. Yet it invariably coheres, and sometimes haunts the listener, as a captivating — if strange and often humorous – tale of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic intrigue.  One tune is called “Misterioso.” Another,  “Evidence,” with more silence than notes, sounds like a zombie skeleton, slowly gaining speed. Though reflective-sounding, “Dreamland” obliquely fits the Monk scenario.

When Breiwick refers to “any musician of depth,” I think he has foremost in his mind saxophonist Steve Lacy, whose incisive, spatial horn approach to Monk he is studying intensively.
Lacy was a student of jazz, of the arts, of philosophy and most especially of Monk’s music. During a short stint with Monk in 1960 he became a functional acolyte, and used a ring-bound notebook which he filled up with Monk’s wise, sometimes pragmatic and sometimes enigmatic utterances.
Departed Pianist Barry Velleman, the best Monk interpreter I’ve ever heard among Milwaukee musicians, not only influenced Breiwick but gave him a copy of Lacy’s Monk gleanings, which are now widespread on the Internet. (see Lacy’s hand-written page below).

Before even joining Monk, Lacy recorded two challenging Monk pieces on his own album The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy. He followed that with the all-Monk album Reflections: Steve Lacy plays Thelonious Monk In 1958. That album includes Mal Waldron on piano, whose sensibility and mentality hewed as close to Monk’s flinty sort of rhythmic cubism as any of that generation of pianists. 3

Evidently, Reflections impressed Monk enough that he hired Lacy, who had previously played with the extremely challenging and liberating avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Taylor once took his entire band, including Lacy, to see Monk group perform, according to Monk biographer Kelley.

By the time Lacy went in to the studio to record Reflections, “he had learned about 30 monk tunes and listened to Monk records hundreds of times.'” 4 

Lacy continued investigating, playing and knowing Monk’s music in so many ways, throughout his career including several striking recordings with a piano-less quartet with the great trombonist Roswell Rudd, notably School Days, which Breiwick has discovered and examined.

Lacy seemed to pursue a studied inference, suggesting that you can never fully master the music, just get closer to it, to approach Monk’s almost Buddah-like presence as part of your body, hands and spirit. Lacy also intensively studied the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, and the philosophic process of the Tao, which is “an active and holistic conception of Nature, rather than a static, atomistic one.” 5 The Tao or “The Way” is circular in its formal sense, best signified by the frequently reproduced symbol, called Taijitu:

As Lacy said to interviewer in April 1965: “I’m a big one for words. I’ve read a lot, especially by and about artists. So I have a head full of notions, and that isn’t always good, you know. The instinctive silent life is beautiful too. It has advantages that the other doesn’t.”

Interviewer : Is this Monk’s life?

It’s funny that you should say that, because I was thinking about Monk, although he’s more articulate to himself than most people realize. He doesn’t feel it’s necessary to verbalize, and he’s right. If you got him at the right time, you’d get a lot of meaningful words with a lot of silence around them. You’d have to leave the silence around them, or you would spoil the proportions.” 6

So Lacy understood that the pursuit it is both a formal study, and an intuitive one. Breiwick, who listens to a wide range of creative and popular music, seems to understand that balance as well.

In fact, Lacy’s pan-cultural study, at one point, turned on Monk himself.
During a big-band rehearsal of Monk’s music, Lacy once informed him “that he was listening to ‘Eskimo music … the wildest African shit you’ve ever heard, Chinese music… even the music of porpoises.”
Monk then explained to the group, “They say if you can ever make a tape of a porpoise and played it back, down slow enough, it is the same as the human voice. They are so close to the human species. Because they had the same box here (pointing to his throat).”

Monk then continued to expound about how porpoises have the rare sonar ability “to sense everything around them,” biographer Kelley writes. 7

One of Monk’s koan-like utterances was “always know,” a play on words which you can read as “all ways know.” That notion opens one’s mind up to new angles and, it would seem, all the spaces and silences between them.

In his under-appreciated 1997 biography of Monk, Laurent de Wilde wrote:
“Monk is everywhere at the same time. His mastery of time is such that he seems to be emancipated from it. And the silence that he uses with such finesse is not really the suspension of time, as it is for that other master of understatement, Ahmad Jamal, nor the supreme and minimal form of elegance it is for Basie. On the contrary, it is a necessity which dazzles the ear. No, the silence is only a portion of his total music, all the more striking because it is unique. It is a creative tool, sort of audible and quantifiable phenomenon which is assigned a much rarer riskier enterprise: that of inventing time.” 8 

Is Monk’s saying “all ways know” merely the kernel of a bud of circular reasoning, or something else, that reason knows not of? Like the Tao? Or the sonar mind of porpoises?

Or did he set out to reinvent time? Just maybe, Dreamland will reveal some answers. Welcome to the waking dreams of Thelonious Monk and Jamie Breiwick.

Steve Lacy’s written notes documenting Monk’s advice, courtesy Jamie Breiwick and 1heckuvaguy.com

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Photos of trumpeter Jamie Breiwick (top and bottom) by Bryan Mir, courtesy of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts.

Image of The Tao or Taijitu courtesy chriscorrigan.com.

1 Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Free Press, 2009, 243

2 Ibid. 515

3. Lacy’s first Monk album, Reflections, is now available on a two-fer CD titled The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy, coupled with Lacy’s third album as a leader, on Solar Records. Among other Lacy recordings that investigated Monk are: Evidence with Don Cherry on Fantasy/New Jazz; School Days, with Roswell Rudd on Emanem; Monk’s Dream, a  2000 quartet recording with Rudd; Only Monk and More Monk, all on Soul Note; and We See: Thelonious Monk Songbook on HatOLOGY; and a live 1962 duet album I Remember Thelonious on Nel Jazz, with Mal Waldron (who’s stuck with a bad piano).

4. Kelley, 291

5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao In 2004, Lacy’s group recorded a two-CD “free jazz” interpretation of The Tao called The Way, on HatOLOGY.

6..Jason Weiss, ed., Steve Lacy: Conversations, Duke University Press, 2006, 30

7. Kelley, xvi

8. Laurent de Wilde, Monk, translated by Jonathan Dickinson, Marlowe & Company, 1997, 212

A shorter version of this article was published in Shepherd Express at https://expressmilwaukee.com/mobile/articles/articleView/id:24755