http://www.artistshare.com/v4/Home/News/1316/3-Grammy-Nominations-for-Winter-Morning-Walks

Maria Schneider won 3 Grammy awards in 2014: best classical composition, arrangements and song. Did she deserve all three, in her first recorded outing in the purely classical category?

“Winter Morning Walks” (ArtistShare) is no one-woman show by the slightest stretch of the imagination. At her service is the great American soprano and American music specialist Dawn Upshaw, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and two of our finest poets, Ted Kooser and Carlos Drummond De Andrade.

First the album is unapologetically and almost effortlessly beautiful in its impressionism and spirit, a combination quite rare to achieve In this postmodern age. in the opening piece, uncovers the world of a “perfectly still the solstice morning” and then quickly shifts to a scene of spectral dramatic discovery: “When I switched on a light.” No worry. “Walking by Flashlight” lures us, step by crunching step, back into the sense of ecstatic wonder because we are entering big skies of the American Heartland, the Minnesota-raised composer’s home stomping grounds, frozen in solstice glory.

Littered like fresh-fallen leaves along the walk is the text by former American poet-laureate Ted Kooser, which adds another strata of artful substance that reflects back to the music and beyond it.
Yeah, Schneider’s gone and done it again, but this on a bigger palette than ever. And then “I saw a dust devil this morning” is like getting a gust of icy wind rushing into your mouth and down into your lungs – It’s a thrill but a private shock in the same instant.
Perhaps nothing is more austerely beautiful than “My wife and I walk the cold road,” because it compresses — in four minutes — the autumnal weight of great memory, longing and supplication for hope and life to carry on.

Exquisite string writing here shows that Schneider is more than just a jazz orchestra writer and arranger. I’ll let you discover more of it for yourself but she never lowers the bar for herself even as she lowers the boughs for us to more easily see the wonders of winter morning walk as she does with her expansive musical vision , which looks down into the moisture the ground with a sharp eye for mystery and mischief as much as she gazes into the heavens.

Having making made all these somewhat presumptuous pronouncements I will immediately admit that I did not hear her competition. But it seems to me, if she won his awards I can understand how she set a strong standard.

   “Hot Shot Eastbound,” Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956. All photos © W. Conway Link

Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link, running through April 27 at the Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway, The Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Thomas Garver understands O. Winston Link as a kind of genius who “seduced” viewers with the romance of billowing smoke, thundering pistons, and clattering train tracks. The analogy is apt given Link’s background as a commercial photographer, says the curator of the new exhibit, Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link, which runs through April 27 at the Grohmann Museum, which collects and exhibits “industrial art.”

The museum’s holdings are built around its Man at Work collection of depictions of human labor and industry, in primarily paintings, mosaics, stained glass and large-scale bronze figure sculptures, some of which adorn the museum’s roof  like heroic, larger-than-life gargoyles or, if you prefer, cathedral saints. Museum director James Keiselberg welcomes the Link photography as a complement to the museum’s more traditional media.

Link dealt with a historic American subject in new technological means, for the 1950s. He also instinctively plumbed the dark side of the American experience by taking the radical step of shooting most of his train photos at night. These 36 black-and-white prints — documenting the final days of the steam-powered railroad on the Norfolk & Western Railway — evoke film noir. He used large, cumbersome tripod cameras with flashbulbs, and developed his exquisitely detailed images as gelatin silver prints in dark rooms, using beds of liquid developing solution for the exposed print, a “stop bath,” a fixer bath, etc. and mechanical enlargers. In an era of instant digital photography with “smart phones,” all these arcane techniques seem to risk extinction, like the steam locomotive, Garver notes.

Link also recorded locomotive sound effects and filmed this passing railroad environment — part of a documentary film for British television. Garver describes Link’s actual footage as “very atmospheric and romantic.”

So Link’s advertising-style “seduction,” brings the viewer “into the scene which includes the trains, but only as part of the total ensemble.”

Or think of a director’s seduction, in a classic American noir film like Double Indemnity. Here, the murderous threat seems submerged — but not a sense of something dying. What’s passing is the locomotive Iron Horse, and the way of life it helped build across America.

Link’s “ensemble” involved locals as closely directed players, in elaborate setups and lighting, and exquisite timing. His famous 1956 photo “Hot Shot Eastbound,” (top) blends mediums of transport and entertainment, life and death, romance and tragedy — muffled by the train powering by, as an airplane screams across a movie-screen sky. A young couple in a convertible enjoys a drive-in movie as a train hurtles past into darkness.

Link seductively downplays tragedy, complicit with the enjoyment amid such “passages.” In “Hawksbill Creek Swimming Home” (above) river bathers frolic with a rather American disregard of fatefulness. Link creates a zig-zag interplay of angles — the current’s ominously black flow, the starkly backlit hill, the skeletal causeway and — in that instant — the train above, like a hell-bound or heaven-sent messenger, depending on your viewpoint.

Included are some daylight train photographs, with their own visual poetry. Link’s magic invariably seems to emanate from the smokestack’s cloud dance. And in one of the daylight photos he manages to capture the passage of an even older means of transportation. What is most striking about “Maud Bows to the Virginia Creeper” (1956, below)  is the horse-drawn carriage waiting in the foreground, beside a small train station in Green Cove, Virginia.

Because the rail traversed 55 mountainous and treacherous miles from southwestern Virginia into western North Carolina, the train only ran during daylight hours. However, the head of the elegantly powerful white Maud is bowed, as if she is acquiescing to the propulsive black power of the Iron Horse, surging into the same foreground. The animal instinctively conveys a delicate poignance in the historical moment, intensified by the depth of field, which the train is quickly consuming.

Link was an American original, striving to capture something that was disappearing from the vast panorama that formed the indigenous identity of America. In this sense, he is a kindred spirit to Edward Curtis, who also went to extraordinary lengths, to photographically document the American Indian and the passing of his way of life in his native habitat — during the transformative and often tragic advent of the white man. The Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend recently closed an exhibit of Curtis’ work (which this blog covered extensively, starting with this review at:https://kevernacular.com/?p=2133).

As Curtis did commercial portraiture to survive, Link did advertising photography for The Saturday Evening Post and various technical publications, but trains were his passion, as a subject.

“This was created as a work of passion and belief; that he set out to help in the preservation of a vanishing technology, in the manner he understood best, which was photography,” Garver says.

Link helps us to understand that with fresh eyes, to peer into the captured night, into the steam railroad’s fast-changing times and implicitly into ours.

The Grohmann Museum hours are 9 AM to 5 PM Monday- Friday, Noon-6 PM Saturday, 1-4 PM Sunday. Parking is available east of the Museum at the corner of Milwaukee and State streets. 414-277-2300 Website: www.msoe.edu/museum

A shorter version of this review was published in The Shepherd Express.

_______________________________

Pioneering black music critic, playwright, essayist, and former Poet Laureate of New Jersey Amiri Baraka died at 79 on Jan. 9 in a Newark hospital. I thank jazz critic, author and educator Howard Mandel for posting a tribute to Baraka on his Facebook page, which prompted this blog post.

Part of Baraka’s rhetorical gift was his way of offering incisive insight while often pushing to the edge of provocative (and sometimes offensive) polemics that could undermine his posture as “civil discourse.”

Baraka often felt we need to break past civil discourse that perpetuated the status quo. Because Mandel uses “Blues People” in his jazz class at New York University I thought I’d add this Baraka quote about education from the 2009 anthology of his work Digging: the Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music: “On the one hand, if we use Afro-American improvised music (American classical music) in the classroom, we would see big changes. Likewise if we began to use all the arts to teach, because there is no depth to education without art. But the constant presence of the music in the classroom hallway cafeteria etc.. would help toward providing that”true self-consciousness” Du Bois spoke of as opposed to the double consciousness these schools try to mash on our children now where they are forced to look at the world through the eyes of people that hate them (even if they are white working-class children).” 1

The educational canon has gotten a lot hipper since he wrote “Blues People” in 1963 but the Tea Party-driven culture wars often feel like barely hidden hate aflame again. “Mr. Baraka’s forthright use of black vernacular, slang and profanity in an improvisatory style became an influence on later writers, hip-hop musicians and playwrights, noted In Matt Schude in an obit for The Washington Post, a publication hardly expected to embrace his legacy. “Arnold Rampersad, the biographer and literary critic, once wrote that Mr. Baraka’s bold writings, coupled with his vibrant social activism, made him one of the most historically significant figures in African American life, alongside Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

“‘More than any other black poet,’ Rampersad wrote, ‘he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own.’ “Mr. Baraka’s detractors considered him a reckless agitator whose inflammatory rhetoric contained elements of anti-Semitism and misogyny and constituted a reverse form of hate speech.

“In 2002, (conservative) cultural critic Stanley Crouch ridiculed Mr. Baraka’s writing as ‘an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks relying on comic book and horror film characters and images that he has used over and over and over.'”

Others seemed to find pressing and lasting value in Baraka’s work. One can sense filmmaker Spike Lee trafficking in Baraka’s cultural thinking in Lee’s tragic and still provocative film about racial conflict and misunderstanding Do the Right Thing. But Baraka’s painful themes and riffs, which seemed obsessive and agit-prop at times, were something he came to uneasy terms with in slowly evolving from his separatist Black Nationalist stance to coming to understand America’s intertwining roots.

Schudel concludes: “Mr. Baraka’s writings became more fragmented over the years, but he earned good reviews with his collected poems, “Transbluency,” in 1995 and with his 1984 autobiography.

In that book, he described his early life in his native Newark and seemed to come to reluctant terms with the world around him. “‘I realized,’ he wrote, ‘that the U.S. was my home. As painful and complicated as that was.’” 2

I last saw Baraka in a celebratory mode, at the 2009 Chicago Jazz Festival, doing his own brilliant version of a hip-hop rap — as only he could as one of the original hip-hip precursors — to honor the legacy of R&B singer-songwriter Curtis Mayfield.

More will be written, thought and felt about Baraka’s body of work, and about how he helped articulate the black man’s deep-rooted anguish, which seems as pertinent as ever today in a society still stacked against him. Consider Trayvon Martin’s unjust fate and that of the millions of incarcerated black men in America, a disproportionate travesty maintained by a complex political and economic system. And yet Baraka, who understood the America cultural tradition in historical and poetic terms, gradually honored the difficult truth of America as his home.

At times America is a horror movie, filled with ruthless characters, playing over and over. Would that America honor Baraka as a Native Son whom we needed — to feel the racial horror of America and its heart of darkness, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad, in some of our most troubled times. Remember, the horror deep in the Congo jungle of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was an insane white man. Baraka understood that the African-rooted music of the Blues People told an American story, in bellowing Abstract expressionist cries and gritty, parable-like stories, that trace common ground from coal-stained, seemingly black-face miners in Appalachia to the boys hangin’ in the ‘hood.

_____________

1 Amiri Baraka, The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, University of California Press 2009, p. 108

2 http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/amiri-baraka-poet-and-firebrand-dies-at-79/2014/01/09/930897d2-796e-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f

This is a scene from Serge Roullet’s 1967 film adaptation of “Benito Cereno,” Melville’s novella about an actual slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship.

Toni Morrison’s essay “Melville and the Language of Denial” in the most recent issue of The Nation shows us how Herman Melville, time and again, instinctively positioned himself on the fault lines of American society, politics and culture. In Benito Cereno, (which she discusses), Moby-Dick, The Confidence Man, “Bartleby the Scrivener” and other works, Melville conveyed an Ishmael-like sense of being an outsider/outcast even though the author was born into upper middle-class with a patriotically American heritage of Revolutionary War hero ancestors. Yet, his father died a ruined man when Melville was young, leaving his family in poverty.

Thus, Melville often worked themes about the agitations between the powerful and the powerless. Benito Cereno is so shockingly striking in that Melville slyly exposed the potential within the seemingly powerless, that of Babo’s radically covert rebellion, which Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, aptly characterizes as a rational, if enraged, human unwillingness “to be kidnapped for.”

Melville based his story on a true event that occurred in 1799. 1  What unfolds is a strange tale of stifled horror that might be reminiscent of Poe, while casting a wider net of anguish across the political spectrum than the horror-and-detective tale master seemed capable of.  The captains signify two men dwelling in intermingling mindsets fed by types of language of racial denial. Spanish Don Benito Cereno praises and condescends to his seemingly domicile black servant, Babo. He tries to hide from his American guest, Capt. Amaso Delano, the fact that the slaves have taken over his ship. So he builds a smokescreen over the reversing power dynamics afoot, so that the unwitting Delano can do little more than a proceed in passive manner of empowered compliance and complicity.

Meanwhile, Babo’s slithering unctuousness intensifies the scenario’s almost absurdist manner, presaging a Hitchcockian black humor, especially in a harrowing scene where the servant — who’s the revolt ringleader — shaves his “master’s” beard. The story ends with a horrifying image that signifies a form of ultimate retribution. Melville clearly suggests that the slave’s extreme response may be the only way to cut the problem off at its roots. Of course, we know it was never as simple as that, as Melville surely knew, and yet the simmering intensity of his tale exhorts us to stay the course to a greater truth and candor in our race relations, and to possible ways of healing.

Here’s the cover to a downloadable e-book version of the novella “Benito Cereno” courtesy of readfwd.com

Further proof of the novella’s seemingly perpetual provocative edge is how Morrison can write up a few paragraphs of response to it in January of 2014 and provoke such a wide ranging flurry of pointed — if sometimes ignorantly informed — commentary on the festering fissures in America’s complex racial divides.

It is interesting that one of the most ostensibly shrewd online comments to her essay comes from chris8lee, someone who exposes himself for apparently not even knowing who the author is and the context of her comments, as perhaps our greatest contemporary literary chronicler of the slave experience (best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel Beloved.)  Yet that commentator totters along the edge of the racial chasm with a characteristically white sense of entitlement and self-satisfaction that “washes his hands” because he postures himself as above the fray.

The Nation reader chris8lee also oversimplifies a Higher Power’s “moral grip” on fate, saying that life is always “just.”  Tell that to thousands of slaves who suffered and died under the South’s chattel slave system, indeed, millions of slaves who suffered worldwide in Arabian slave systems, as other comments point out.

1 Melville imaginatively based Benito Cereno on Chapter 18 of Capt. Amaso Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, from either the 1817 or 1818 edition.

Thanks to Ed Valent for pointing out the Morrison essay to me.

Oscar Isaac as struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis is a flawed and sometimes irritating character with redeeming qualities, like his befriending of a runaway cat. Courtesy eonline.com

Joel and Ethan Coen do a fine job of making us feel the experience of a fictional Greenwich Village folk singer in their new film Inside Llewyn Davis. We feel sorry for this poor schlub who can barely score a bed to sleep in, much as much less a gig for a meal or two. This is the way it was for Dave Van Ronk and probably many other striving troubadours who believed in the need to get out there and sing something with their guitar in front of a bunch of people who seemed to care about something happening in the smoky air, and in the music.

That something was happening slowly, but right then it was more like people priming things, tending to the fire until a great talent came along to crash in, to stir the fire into something extraordinary. So the Coens opt for a curious indirection in this movie. The pathos laid on the doorstep of this folksinger is a spot-on critique of the problems of the scene, but also does a disservice to real-life talent like Dave Van Ronk. I never saw him live, but just listen to his recordings. He was never ever a pouty, pity-pot musical moaner like Llewyn Davis and the other self-absorbed young people who provide fodder for legitimate criticism of the era’s white folkies.

The brother-directors also make clear another variation of the problem: all the crew-cut, knit-sweater wearing collegian folk-star wanna-bes who have no real sense of tradition or suffering, or of the true American story that would generate over decades what we know as roots music today.

So at one point, Llewyn, played by Oscar Isaac, sneers at a wholesome foursome cooing quartile harmony: “Nice sweaters.”

He nails ‘em. And yet, if Joe Blow sees this movie with no awareness of what’s happening in roots music today he might shrug it off and go back to listening to his Top 40, or whatever he listens to, none the wiser. I’m somewhat less impressed than others with the music here, despite the redoubtable presence of music producer T-Bone Burnett’s guiding hand. Perhaps he and the Coens felt it was impossible to directly evoke Davis’ model, Dave Van Ronk, who was priming the times with a deeply knowing and passionate exposition of the  roots music tradition, less understood then as it is today thanks to passing time, increased scrutiny and a remarkable cultural flourishing.

But listen, for example, to the real-life folk-blues-jazz singer doing the song “River Come Down” on Dave Van Ronk The Folkway Years 1959-61.

He heartily evokes a river as a kind of siren spirit, calling to him when it seems to be his home across the river calling to him, and a woman named Anna. Or is Anna the river, the dangerous siren temptress? We all know the sorts of temptations that led archetypal and ordinary Americans, as well as their institutions,  astray.

Van Ronk’s rendering of the song is a powerful bit of national myth making, and yet it’s as bare bones in its storytelling tone as taking a “stick of bamboo” and throwing it in the water to see how it flows.

Van Ronk had an irrepressible spirit and a bearish voice, miles beyond the simpering, if-at-times-soulful  musings of our fictional Mr. Davis, who is supposedly based on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Van Ronk’s autobiography of his years of struggling to make it as a folksinger in early 60s Greenwich village.

There’s plenty of wonderful atmosphere in the movie, which lends a romantic patina to the story. And yet the directors succeed in not over-romanticizing either, despite their questionable choice of a lead actor-singer, and character type.

I mean, this dude is also sort of a nasty personality, resentful of others’ success and often unappreciative of generosity. Were folk singers back then like this? Doubtlessly some of them were, as flawed human beings like most all of us. So the movie renders a delicate balance to convey sympathy and antipathy for this character.

And there are enough vintage, cock-eyed Coen Brothers sub-plots and detail twists — the forlorn cat Llewyn adopts, a pregnant and bitchy ex-girlfriend, the drug-addict jazz snob played by the great John Goodman…

John Goodman (foreground), as a drug addicted jazz musician is one of the trademark Coen Brothers characters that add color and grit to “Inside Llewyn Davis.” 

Lord knows the Coen Brothers have great affection for these American folk vernaculars, as they demonstrated in their marvelous bluegrass-drenched movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? So, in a sense, this whole story hinges on a subtle but almost miraculously striking and vivid moment of magic near the end of the movie. Llewyn Davis has had another shot at the nightclub mike and seems to be wandering off to the next thing that happens in his life. The next act gets up naturally to sing some songs.

We just see this figure’s shadowy silhouette but the high, reedy voice is unmistakable. Time seems to stand still, and start up completely new. The hairs on the back of your neck rise: You realize this is the moment that Bob Dylan arrives in Greenwich Village to become the musical messiah who would lead us to the great counter-cultural odyssey and to a certain enlightenment, and surely to the vast realm of teeming culture we know as roots music today.

I think the movie works finally because of this deft H-hour gambit, less of a Hail Mary pass than something that just happens like combustible energy, like maybe an improbable last-minute interception, to push the sports metaphor. Dylan disrupts all the era’s water-treading self-consciousness and silliness.

Most of us know the strange, incantatory effect of early Bob Dylan. The voice wasn’t impressive in purely musical terms, but it was honest, wheedling and bracing. He’s rummaging through the some of the old blues repertoire that Van Ronk was mining but what sets Dylan apart are his original lyrics, unfurling from a faintly arrogant sense of purpose and truth in his young, brackish voice. Nobody completely understands the bramble bush of lyrics, perhaps not even Dylan himself.

But the new songs are transformative because they capture the spirit of the time, at first by becoming very political and then pulling back, knowing how much the personal is also political. Dylan was an authentic dissenter, a self-styled pseudo-cynic and a hopeless romantic all in one. Perhaps that was what the better angels of the national spirit understood as the authentic American, in that peculiar Cold War era that prompted Dylan’s Talkin’ World War III Blues. The national spirit was also curdled with ugly, festering racism, which was about to bust wide open as a raging wound of American conscience, with the help of Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and many, many more. What a time. What a country.

As the camera pans straight onto Llewyn Davis walking down this Greenwich street, a flash of recognition may arise for many viewers…Courtesy the filmstage.com

That story is pretty well known, so the way that the Coen Brothers underplay Dylan by not even identifying him seems perfectly parsed and placed. So if it takes you back to Dave Van Ronk records and to your early Dylan records, the movie has succeeded. As soon as my Van Ronk side finishes I’m probably headed for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. One of the other deftly inserted scenes is of Llewyn Davis toting his guitar down the middle of a Greenwich Village street. You recognize the camera angle and setting: It is the same chilly street that Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo promenaded down through the winter slush, arm in arm, when somebody captured them in a photo that would become the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

…It’s the same street depicted on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com

Or maybe I’ll pull out Bringing It All Back Home. I hear an impatiently insistent, driving guitar drone:

...While them that defend what they cannot see/with the killers pride, security/close their minds most bitterly/for them that think death’s honesty/Won’t fall upon them naturally/life sometimes must get lonely…

And if my thought-dreams could be seen/they’d probably put my head in a guillotine/but it’s all right, Ma, it’s life, and life only!

The times they were a changin’. And this movie gets the particular time freeze-frame right, just about. But it’s all right ma, it’s only the movies. There’s always the music.

______________________

Laura Marling’s ambitious musical journey “I Once was an Eagle,” earned a Top Ten Culture Currents ranking for 2013. Courtesy theguardian.com

The Best Roots Music Albums of 2013

I continued to be amazed by the strong quality and artfulness in vernaculars presumed to be mere “folk” musics.

These rankings make some fine distinctions between albums but the points stick, for me. Tedeschi-Trucks’ extraordinary blues-R&B-jazz-rock collective tops the list for all its musical artistry and exuberance, to bolster the high level of lyric writing one expects of today’s roots purveyors. Vocalist Susan Tedeschi’s clarion calls to the spirit and Derek Trucks’ charged guitar emissions send them driving past safety and sometimes high to the sky.

By contrast, among the honorable mentions, Jason’s Isbell’s widely and justly admired Southeastern, for all its painful poetry, felt too claustrophobic and personal to be universal.

Actually, well-known troubadour Steve Earle deserves a Top Ten slot. He’s the Russell Banks of roots music, a storyteller of dispossessed, working class, suicidal, even homicidal lost souls — and The Low Highway stands as an indictment of our economic and political system.

And John Mellencamp and Stephen King’s Southern Gothic melodrama Ghost Brothers of Darkland County worked brilliantly onstage, and is well worth the star-studded recording.

But for the final Top Ten, I opted for a few still-underappreciated veterans like Rory Block, Mary Gauthier and Robbie Fulks, and to acknowledge the extraordinarily realized promise of Holly Williams and the 23-year-old Laura Marling.

The mighty Tedeschi-Trucks Band live at the Highline Ballroom in New York.

1. Made Up Mind – Tedeschi-Trucks Band (Sony Masterworks) This naturally great live band became savvier in their second studio recording. Does it meet the song and musical peaks of Revelator? The lyric content and musical arrangements seem better contrasted and more deftly woven, no more so than in the dizzying neo-Motown chorus of “Part of Me.” This, razor-sharp, vocals-and-horns wiggle is The Musical Buzz of the Year. Yet in “Sweet and Low” Susan Tedeschi’s agonizingly tender testimony of a naked heart almost dares not disturb its intensifying poignancy, yet it feels exquisitely and piercingly true. The whole album’s top notch, but on “The Storm,” the heart on the song’s sleeve never gets blown off of this Florida hurricane evocation. Rather, the driving Allmans-meet-Hendrix ride-out jam only steels spiritual resolve. In sum, well-crafted songs – including guest co-writers Doyle Bramlett II, Gary Louris and Eric Krasno — adorn a musical monster digesting the souls of eight multi-hued folk, an astounding guitarist and a gifted, heart-busting woman. Hear them roar, and whisper.

2. The Highway — Holly Williams (Georgiana) Is she the best singer in the storied Williams clan? That’s heresy to Hank Williams Sr. lovers. But Holly’s so good a singer because she never bends her powerful pipes beyond the emotional/storytelling point. She’s learned from grandpa Hank and probably Emmylou and Lucinda, but she’s her own dang songwriter: She can push a country trope hard while easing the reins with a taut, heart-lacerating lyric. There’s vocal harmony help from Jakob Dylan, Jackson Browne, a slightly sweet Gwyneth Paltrow and perfect-match Dierks Bentley.

3. My Favorite Picture of You — Guy Clark (Duotone) It’s hard to imagine another performer handling the death of his longtime spouse with more gritty grace than Guy Clark has. He took his favorite snapshot of Susanna and wove a hallowed musical grave for her in the form of melancholy memories with a small flickering light, reflecting the color of her eyes. More than deep sentiments on this date, there’s also shrewd political comment in the immigrant saga “El Coyote.”

4. Honky Tonk — Son Volt (Rounder) Jay Farrar’s singing carries a heft that sometimes feels like a tragic lifetime, but it still strives for the sunlight hiding just outside his soul. Oft-played on my box, this CD personalizes a tribute to Bakersfield honky-tonk, with Son Volt nailing the style’s deft curves and tart accents. Yet forlorn Farrar lures you to follow him, like a beleaguered scout who’s lost his way, but not your faith.

5. Live At Blue Rock – Mary Gauthier (In the Black) Hearing this woman live (which I have) is like experiencing a woman rip off the hinges of the doorway with the force of her storytelling. And when she gets into the room she can lay all the chatter still with the well struck metaphor and guitar chord, plumbing the pain caught out in the rain.

6. Gone Away Backward – Robbie Fulks (Bloodshot). Fulks displays unprecedented musical and emotional range, even given the ironic fatefulness that seems to pervade, from the album’s title to the lyric:It’s a short life and a long time underground, I’ll trade you money for wine. Fulks’ bracing voice, by turns tough and tender, rides music by ace string players like Jenny Scheinman and Robbie Gjersoe. Neo-traditional bluegrass at its best.

Former Hot Band mate Rodney Crowell reunited with Emmylou Harris for an album and a tour including this gig at Atone’s at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Courtesy artistspicturesblog.com

7. Old Yellow Moon — Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell (Nonesuch) This musical match made just west of heaven pairs two voices that entwine and blend gloriously, exposing the wounds of love and life, but with a salve of humor in some extraordinarily rich storytelling, such as Crowell’s masterful “Open Season on my Heart.”

8. Memories And Moments – Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott (Full Skies) This sounds like the year’s best Appalachian-style front-porch pickin’ and singin’. But there’s no homey self-satisfaction — from the yearning three-part harmony with John Prine on “Paradise” to the restless wayfarer refrain of O’Brien’s “Brother Wind”:He knows me, my brother wind/he’s lonely too/and he takes me away. And you know brother wind’s path is to hell and back; to hear their version of Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken,” worth comparing to Townes Van Zandt’s harrowing live version (from In Pain). But then, hear “Free Again” and “it’s a brand new day.”

9. Once I was an Eagle — Laura Marling (Ribbon Music) British-born Marling channels Joni Mitchell and Pentangle while dwelling deep in her own hypnotic vision. She can imagine being an eagle, while capturing life’s vagaries and specific scenes with that creature’s sharp eye: “Thank you naiveté for failing me again.” From the stunning five-part opening suite onward, the listener moves in and out of simmering eddies. Yet her resourceful band provides vivid contrasts of color and mood that never upend the delicate balance of her ethereal pursuit.

Rory Block added to her impressive series of recorded tributes to country blues greats with “Avalon.” Courtesy musicradar.com

10. Avalon: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hurt — Rory Block (Stony Plain) Part of her country blues masters series, few albums begin with such glowing and heartfelt ode to an inspiring giant. And just as few find pathways to truth like those forged by Mississippi John Hurt.  Ms. Block delivers the thrumming bounce of his guitar and his spirit, thumbing a ride on down the road.

Honorable Mention: The Low Highway — Steve Earle, The Worst Things Get…The More I Love You — Neko Case, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County – John Mellencamp, Stephen King, T-Bone Burnett and others, Southeastern — Jason Isbell, Big Sur — Bill Frisell, The Fall And Further Decline Of The Mighty King Of Love — Phil Lee, Ride – Wayne Hancock

_________________

Milwaukee guitarist Manty Ellis, Arts Midwest Jazz Master and founder of the new Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee, will lead his quintet at the Jazz Gallery on Dec. 14.  Courtesy vimeo.com

If there’s a hunk of granite — a man who embodies the foundation of jazz in Milwaukee — it’s guitarist-bandleader-educator Manty Ellis. He’s payed a lifetime’s dues and earned vast respect from, influenced and taught several generations of musicians. His style is deeply grounded in Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane, yet his muscular, rhythmically charged inventiveness draws parallels to James “Blood” Ulmer and  legendary Canadian guitarist Sonny Greenwich.

He co-founded the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music’s renowned jazz program with Tony King and has performed with numerous jazz greats, including Sonny Stitt, Eddie Harris, Stanley Turrentine, Frank Morgan and Richard Davis and taught such celebrated Milwaukee natives as Brian Lynch, Carl Allen, Sonya Robinson and Jeff Chambers. He’s been a recipient of Arts Midwest’s jazz master award and, at 80, remains very active on the local scene.

So it makes sense to see Ellis trying to lay groundwork for the Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee. The fledgling organization will debut with a fund-raising concert by his quintet at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, the community-oriented non-profit arts facility at 932 E. Center St. at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 14. Admission is free with a $5 suggested donation. The foundation and the Jazz Gallery are functioning in close symbiosis, with proceeds going to the non-profit Riverwest Artists Association, which operates the arts center. This too, seems a good fit, being a multi-arts venue that has evolved into a serious listening space without a bar and with the addition of a baby grand piano. Plus, the venue’s visual arts exhibits might help contribute to fundraising efforts.

Grammy-winning trumpeter  Brian Lynch (left) led this quartet featuring his former teacher Manty Ellis (center, lower) bassist Jeff Hamann (right) and drummer Sam Belton.

Ellis hopes to draw on the deep historical cachet of this venue’s previous musical incarnation as the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, a nightclub which presented a galaxy of national and local talent in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Vintage photographs of famous musicians who performed at the original Jazz Gallery will be on display for the JFM concert. Yet Ellis values the fact that liquor is no longer served here.

“We wanted a place that provides serious listening rather than a bar because we’re dealing with a musical art,” Ellis says. “These are artists we’re talking about, artists worthy of support as well as attention. This group could play at any festival, with any other group.”

Ellis’ quintet blends established and fast-rising talent, including trumpeter-flugelhornist Jamie Breiwick, bassist Jeff Hamann, pianist Ken Kosut, saxophonist Sam Fettig and drummer Romarcus Jones.

Hamann, a musician possessing impeccable swing and technique, is perhaps the city’s pre-eminent jazz bassist, an in-demand clinician and a judge at numerous jazz competitions. He’s has worked with Frank Morgan, Eric Alexander, Marlena Shaw and Steve Allen and in the Wisconsin Conservatory faculty ensemble We Six. He may be best known as the bassist on Michael Feldman’s popular NPR program Whad y’ Know?

The Manty Ellis Quintet at the Jazz Gallery on Dec. 14 will include in-demand bassist Jeff Hamann (far right), here accompanying vocalist Cassandra McShepard at the Blu nightclub in Milwaukee. Courtesy youtube.com.

Breiwick is one of the most gifted and ambitious young musicians on the scene, as leader of several groups, including the jazz/alt-rock band Choir Fight, a Thelonious Monk repertoire band called Dreamland, and the more exploratory Lower Lakes Trio. The Jamie Breiwick Quartet’s critically acclaimed recent Blujazz label CD Spirits was recorded live at the Jazz Estate. He’s also a co-founder of Milwaukee Jazz Vision, the musicians’ organization which promotes jazz citywide with concerts and a sophisticated website.

Trumpeter-flugelhornist and Blujazz recording artist Jamie Breiwick will be featured in the Manty Ellis Quintet at the Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee concert on Dec. 14 at the Jazz Gallery in Milwaukee. Courtesy onmilwaukee.com

Fettig is a middle-school band director in Fort Atkinson, and a UW-Whitewater alumnus who’s worked with Gerald Clayton, Roy Hargrove, Steve Einerson and at the Thelonious Monk Institute. Kosut is the other longtime veteran in the group, and currently plays piano for the All-Star Superband, Milwaukee’s leading big band. Drummer Jones is an up-and-comer who gigs frequently at The Jazz Estate and The Highlander with Breiwick, Russ Johnson, Neil Davis and others.

Ellis envisions foundation performances extending into nursing homes and schools through the Jazz in the Schools program and drawing from the city’s burgeoning young youth talent, particularly from Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra jazz program.

Ellis has been literally instrumental in the development of the Jazz Gallery by overseeing the Tuesday night jam sessions which are built round musicians in the WYSO program and which steadily has gained artistic and popular momentum.

“Last night we had about 40 people there for the jam session and we had several artists doing drawings of the musicians,” says Jazz Gallery director Mark Lawson, who curates the center’s monthly art exhibits and is also gallery curator at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

The Ellis-led jam sessions have begun to foster professional  advancement, Lawson says. “Some of the young players we’ve had here now have regular gigs, such as guitarist Cody Steinman, who is now performing Thursday nights at the Riverwest Filling Station.”

“If Manty gets this foundation off the ground it will help to facilitate a lot of what we’re try to do, including designating portions of our schedule to particular regular performers,” Lawson says. “We’re ranging from music that is loosely call jazz to a group called Three. Stacks. Eliot, which is a live hip-hop-related jazz band, or experimental improv groups like the Once Now Ensemble, led by Hal Rammel.”

The successful model for the foundation is the The Jazz Foundation of America. Incorporated in 1990, the organization formed due to address the urgency of helping elder jazz musicians in need. This is pertinent in light of our troubled economy and the fact that most jazz musicians go without adequate health insurance or job security through most of their careers. The art form exists in a sort of economic limbo between the far more subsidized classical performing arts and more commercially viable pop musics.

Time-honored jazz musicians have been dying off increasingly in recent years, and the need for support persists in a city like Milwaukee, where most jazz veterans have served as valuable educators to new generations of musicians capable in varying genres of music. The east-coast based JFA has given Ellis, one of its few Midwest representatives, the project of helping revive the Jazz Gallery.

What’s still missing from the hybrid of the new JFM and the Jazz Gallery is sustainable funding.  Lawson knows there are financial “angels” in the community. “It’s a matter of gaining visibility,” he says. “But I’m confident we’ll get this happening.”  He’s encouraged by recent gigs like singer Jackie Allen’s SRO crowd and trumpeter Philip Dizack.

A Jazz Gallery Christmas show featuring singer Donna Woodall, The Jeno Somali Quartet and guest performers from 2 to 5 p.m. on Dec. 21 should help the cause. “Still, it’s a challenge financially without paid staff and when you don’t serve alcohol,” Lawson says. “We haven’t found the economic formula yet.”

_________________

The title of this photo essay quotes the chanting of the three witches in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their incantations seem uncannily prescient of our times, of our topsy-turvy cultural and political conundrums and especially our overwhelmingly inexorable environmental malaise which, when you think about it, is a very creepy poisoning of the living planet we live on.

It’s the ultimate end game of the Moby-Dick metaphor. The great white whale is Gaia (the planet Earth). As he/she suffers ever more slings and arrows of outrageous man-made fortune gashing her body he/she recoils and lashes back — with gargantuan hurricanes, tsunamis and firestorms. Now it’s a monster typhoon in the Philippines. For me, the horrible/wonderful whale also emerged in the woods — in the photo of the fallen tree I present upside down as a formal and socio-cultural evocation.

The context for these photos begins with my own deep personal haunting for this Halloween. My life plunged into the too-frequent madness of urban existence in October when a driver smashed into the rear of my car and totalled it. I was miraculously uninjured. But I gained a visceral understanding of the irresponsibility and cowardice of a hit-and-run driver.

My car’s life with me ended as nature moved into her death cycle which, for me and many others, is the most beautiful time of year. That’s why annually I try to take a fall colors trip of some sort. But this year, my pathetically mangled vehicle was unable to take me on that trip. So I hung around Milwaukee and gathered some images and thoughts befitting our darkening season. The first image (at top) is the best self-haunting of a house that I encountered his Halloween. It was on the northwest corner of Downer and Newton Avenues in Shorewood and, in fact, a stone’s throw away from the home that I grew up in, which is slightly visible through the trees on the lower right.
The other wooded shots are from Downer Woods, only four blocks from that former family home on Downer. The remarkably evocative and figurative tree in dark silhouette (below) is my new Facebook theme page photo, and illustrates how some dying and denuded trees still go out in a burst of glory.

My old friend Frank Stemper, who lived a mere one block away from the woods, spent most of his young life in them, “mostly playing ‘guns,’ during which I once, when hunting Germans, uttered my famous phrase: ‘Quiet guys – I hear footprints!’

“I also remember once UWM cancelled class because of a huge snowstorm and you and I built a fort in the woods as if we were 8 and not 18.” I’d forgotten that escapade.

The close-up of the tree leaves shows the sorts of environmental diseases our flora and fauna suffer from. It’s the doomed oak tree in front of my current upper flat. The black spots have been showing up every fall since I moved here a few years ago, but the spots seem to get bigger each year.

The penultimate photo offers an image of renewal and beauty…in the little inch-by-incher I encountered in the new Arboretum in Milwaukee, adjacent to the Urban Ecology Center on N. Park St., along the Milwaukee River. It’s a wonderfully promising green space that people have worked hard to revive and sustain. This fuzzy little fellow was soaking up the sun on a gorgeous Saturday.

Finally, I go from my shortest subject to the tallest. The autumn photograph of the Channel 6 TV tower on Capitol Drive was taken from the back balcony of my upper flat in River West. When I was younger and an active mountain climber I once aspired to climb the tower, but I never got it together to pull that off. Still, at certain times, it’s one of the most majestic sights in Milwaukee, our own pared-down version of the Eiffel Tower.

Moby Dick’s ghost haunts Downer Woods.

A “hand-painted” reproduction of “Scipio, The Negro,” oil by Paul Cezanne 1864, from chinaoilpaintinggallery.com. 

Something stirred in me as it doubtlessly did in Eugene Kane — even more profoundly — when he first saw the reproduction of painting of a sinewy yet vulnerable black man, which his sister Edna gave him 30 years ago.

Kane, my former colleague at The Milwaukee Journal, posted a photo of the painting reproduction on his Facebook page on October 18, wanting to know if any FB friends could help identify the unsigned, unmarked piece’s progeny. I glanced at it distractedly and suggested the influence of Van Gogh and, thinking it may be an American artist, of Thomas Hart Benton. I also flashed on Goya. (Another Kane FB friend, Portia Freckle Eye Cobb suggested an “Art road show” estimate for the piece — which I mention mainly for the pleasure of typing Ms. Cobb’s deliciously colorful name.)

A bit of research by Gene’s friend Sharee Davis identified it as Paul Cézanne’s, Scipio, the Negro from 1865. Cézanne is a personal favorite of mine. How could my memory fail so?  In 1977, on a free-lancer’s budget, I pilgrimaged to New York to see his late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. I should’ve recognized Cezanne’s palette and style immediately, even if he’s best known for his landscapes and still lifes, The Card Players aside.

Cezanne’s card players have been reproduced into endless kitsch and his Scipio risks the same, as he’s now available on a T-shirt, a tie, a clock and a mug. After a certain debatable point, mechanical production dilutes cool into kitsch, partially measured by the relative silliness of the product and the aesthetic compromising of the image. Nevertheless, Gene’s framed, three-decades-old, “hand-painted” reproduction retains a finely-aged cool, and reveals Cézanne’s penetrating ability to probe the virtual DNA of molecular mass, a painterly insight that gave all his work a perpetual inner tension. The painter never let conventional technique obscure this energy.

The force of his shape-shifting abstraction earned him the rightful name of The Father of Modern Art. And in Scipio you see how Cezanne’s painterly grappling with mass touches on the human truth of this African man. Scipio looks almost as solid as a Cezanne mountainside, and yet you sense his palpable human presence in the rough-hewn strokes and highlights. 1  (However the “hand-painted” reproduction above compromises the original and loses aura or authenticity because, to my eye, some brushstrokes are too facile and quick to be Cezanne’s, which typically seem to dig right into the canvas.)

Still you sense that this man, though muscular, carries an unfathomably weighted spirit. It’s the proverbial walk-a-mile-in-this-man’s-shoes image.

His head rests on his left arm, which looks a bit peculiar. But its strangeness is loaded. The limb and the broad white backdrop suggest something emerging from his       consciousness or memory  — the arm of a lynched slave hanging like “strange fruit from a popular tree,” as Billie Holiday once sang with a searingly desolate empathy. (The racist Ku Klux Klan, coincidentally or not, began in 1865, the same year Cezanne painted Cipio. In retrospect, the white backdrop foreshadows the Klan’s adoption of white robes in their early 20th century revival.)

Kane interprets it slightly differently, with the white form as a Sisyphusian stone. “It’s a strong visual presence for me, a strong black man who seems worn down by his challenges, almost like he’s been pushing that rock up a mountain or something, even though he’s seated,” he says. “Chipping away at the stone, perhaps. Many visitors to my home comment on it; it always gets a reaction.”

Now freelancing, Kane still writes a Sunday Crossroads section column for The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, marked by his sardonic-yet-humane wit and cut-to-the-quick insights, especially regarding issues relating to the African-American experience.

However, without having seen his art work in person, I’m 99.9 percent sure that it is a reproduction of the original Cézanne painting, which is part of the collection of The Sao Paulo Museum of Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Unless, that is, Gene’s sister was the real-life counterpart to Renée Russo in the art-heist movie The Thomas Crown Affair.

This is not to extoll the purchase of reproductions over original works of art — especially by affordable local or regional artists. I still abide by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” of, say, an original painting “which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” as he wrote in his classic 1936 essay The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Benjamin compares this aura to the experience of nature, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend social bases with a contemporary decay of the aura.” One social base is “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” 2

Benjamin clearly challenged the value of mass reproduction. I might offer an example of loss of aura by comparing the two art images hanging over my desk:  A print reproduction of Honore Daumier’s Third-Class Carriage from 1864 and an original enamel-on-wood panel portrait Ornette Coleman, of the innovative jazz saxophonist-composer painted around 1997 by Iowa artist Wayne Deutsch.*

An original painting “Ornette Coleman” on left, and a printed reproduction of Daumier’s “Third Class Carriage.” Photo: Kevin Lynch

The enamel painting is such a powerful image that I not-infrequently sense it traversing the distance to my senses – “casting a shadow” over me as I sit at my desk writing. I glance up and the surface of Ornette’s larger-than-life visage glistens in its oily luminescence, pulling me into the depths of his fulsome eyelids and knowing, melancholy eyes, into the creases and asymmetry of his middle-aged face, and the brow marks betraying the burning intelligence of a maverick artist, and the psychic and physical abuse he’s endured  over his controversial career.

“Ornette Coleman” by Wayne Duetsch. enamel on wood board ca. 1997 from Metropolitan Art. photo: Kevin Lynch

(Apologies for the poor photo. [by KL] The light on Ornette’s neck really flattens out the image.)

For all his ostensible sophistication, Coleman is, at root, a Texas bluesman which he started out as, though always in his own idiosyncratic way, as exemplified by the double-jointed cowboy swing of his early classic tune “Ramblin’.” Listen here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN33ULk40a0

This face is a roadmap of a ramblin’ American cultural odyssey.

An odyssey, of course, is a great journey far from home and perhaps eventually back — a Homer, a Huck Finn, an Ishmael. This brings me the famous American Ishmael, Herman Melville, and to the extraordinary 1865 portrait by Elihu Vedder, titled Jayne Jackson: Formerly a Slave, which inspired a remarkable Melville poem. By then, Jayne was a “free woman” yet, as she appears to gaze down into the long road that emancipation presents her — she seems to search for a place she might call home, somewhere, in America? In a post-racial Nirvana? Might she also harbor feelings about the “security” of the plantation, as horrible as that experience likely was? She could likely tell about being more than “Twelve Years a Slave,” the title of the new Steve McQueen film based on a true story of a free black man sold back into slavery. 

Herman Melville saw Vedder’s sketch for the painting in the spring exhibition of the National Academy in 1865 and was inspired to pen his poem “Formerly a Slave.” The sketch is the frontispiece art in the 2001 Prometheus Books edition of his Civil War poems, Battle Pieces and  Aspects of the War. For me and a growing number of readers, this book is one most powerful, insightful and beautiful collections of poetic response to war, and is often compared to Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps section of Leaves of Grass.

Actually Melville was experiencing the war at somewhat of a distance, not having served in the war as a soldier or as a nurse, as Whitman did. However, he did sneak up to front lines with his Union soldier brother Allan — and accompanied a daring Calvary hunt for the brilliant Confederate guerrilla fighter George Mosby. That resulted in the long narrative poem The Scout Toward Aldie.  Throughout Battle Pieces, one senses a balance of distance and immediacy in Melville’s experience which is a literary extension of Benjamin’s idea of the art aura traversing a distance to reach a viewer.

Here’s the poem he wrote about Jayne Jackson’s image:

Formerly a Slave (An idealized portrait, by E. Vedder, in the spring exhibition of the National Academy, 1865)

By Herman Melville

The sufferance of her race is shown,

And retrospect of life,

Which now too late deliverance dawns upon;

Yet is she not at strife.

Her children’s children they shall know

The good withheld from her;

And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer –

In spirit she sees the stir

Far down the depth of thousand years,

And marks the revel shine;

 Her dusky face is lit with sober light,

Sibylline, yet benign. 3

Melville’s subtitle “an idealized portrait,” suggests his intellectual distance from Jackson’s “aura,” as do his allusions to the historical implications of her private reverie. And yet, such a poem surely bears a powerfully direct experience of that aura, reaching out to Melville, like Ornette Coleman’s face does to me. Phrases like “prophetic cheer” and the striking “marks the revel shine” detect what we might call the resilient blues spirit within Jackson’s melancholy. 4  And neither Ornette’s nor Jayne Jackson’s eyes look at the viewer so we, especially Caucasians like myself, gaze with a certain voyeuristic wonder, so strong is the artist’s exposure of the subject’s being. 5

If this old woman removed her top and exposed her back, one wonders if it might resemble that of Cézanne’s Scipio, who seems to carry a slave’s experience in his body.

And yet, I also return to the Daumier reproduction which, though the lacking the “Ornette” painting’s aura, is beautiful and moving. Daumier’s unsentimental visual storytelling from 1864 highlights the central figure, an elderly woman in the third-class train seating who seems like a kindred spirit to Jayne Jackson. In fact, Vedder’s sketch and painting of Jackson were done a year after the Daumier. So Vedder, a cosmopolitan American who had studied in Paris, had possibly seen Daumier’s image not long before portraying Jackson, the “Sybilline” — a female prophet. They are both masterfully attuned images of humble yet potentially transcendent women (notice the elderly passenger’s private smile and almost serene expression) enduring social systems stacked against them. 6

Today Walter Benjamin may be subject to charges of elitism; his essay bemoans how movies are an experience of a “distracted public” as opposed to one that concentrates on a single painting and its aura. The democratization of art allows multitudes edification, entertainment, inspiration and aesthetic pleasure from living with a great art work’s image, though bereft of its “aura.” Yet cultural democratization comes at a price, which fosters illusion. Reproductions have improved, as has the quality of photography and film, both advanced commercial art forms in their own rite, of course. Sure, HD TV offers a new intensity of apparent clarity. Yet digital pixilation filters out any residual sense of the artwork’s inherent presence.

Plus, Benjamin, a German-Jew writing in 1936, ends his essay by brilliantly forecasting how Fascism would latch onto mass reproduction to disseminate unprecedented amounts of racist, Aryan-suprematist propaganda, which helped instilled the mass mentality that led to World War II and The Holocaust. Today, we have accumulating evidence of the pervasive dangers of Internet media to privacy and civil liberties, even as The Web allows new sorts of freedoms, illusions thereof, and traps.

If only the Nazis (or the KKK or any racist groups) comprehended the implications of a painting like Amos “Ashante” Johnson’s Original Man, a 1968 pastel. It alludes to Africa as the historical motherlode of humanity. The deeply symbolic portrait from the great Paul R. Jones Collection of African-American Art, also addresses “notions of the evolution of man, and alludes to the fundamental relatedness of all people,” writes essayist Amalia Amaki.  “With the background blacked out, the multiethnic head appears to float out of infinity.” 7

Ultimately, a reproduction should inspire us to venture to see the original artwork, to buy original art, to expand and intensify our experience of artistic truth and beauty. Let art’s aura breathe. Feed it like your senses, embrace it like your lifeblood. I think most art of  value is a creative byproduct of our “better angels,” even if it is blasphemous, as Melville’s Moby-Dick sometimes is. As Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, upon finishing his masterpiece: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

* “Ornette Coleman” by Wayne Deutsch was a gift from my ex-wife, Beth Bartoszek, purchased at Jeb Prazak’s Metropolitan Art in Dodgeville WI, which is no longer open.

1. Cezanne may have titled painting for his subject’s actual name, or he may have chosen to give the man historic resonance. Scipio Africanus was the name of an African general and statesman in the Roman Empire, which clearly lends symbolic power to his identity, burdened as he may appear.

2. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books, 1969, 222-223

3. The excellent Prometheus edition of Melville’s Battle Pieces corrects some egregious omissions and printing mistakes in the University of Massachusetts Press edition 1972. Prometheus also includes a forward by Civil War historian James McPherson, an invaluable interpretive essay by the great poetry critic and scholar Helen Vendler, as well as essays by Rosanna Warren, Richard Cox, and Paul Dowling.

4. The cultural historian and critic Albert Murray and novelist-essayist Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man) are two writers who explicated the concept of “the blues spirit” as an aspect of the African-American experience and perhaps character long predating the formulation of the blues as a musical genre in the 20th century.

5. In Vedder’s finished painting of Jayne Jackson she seems to exist in a murky cloud of existential uncertainty. One wonders if Melville’s poem would’ve been as hopeful had he seen this painting, part of the Frick collection:http://images.frick.org/PORTAL/IMAGEINFO.php?file=/Volumes/digitallab_xinet_5/NEH_grant/acetate/POST/folder/50130_POST.tif

6. The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, the current PBS series on Tuesday nights, hosted by cultural historian and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., offers a great opportunity to understand how our social systems have historically dealt with the African-American. The series also seems to be employing many storytelling visual art images. One wonders what Benjamin might have made of such ambitious and high-minded cultural democratization.  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/

7. A Century of African American Art: The Paul R Jones Collection, ed. Amalia K. Amaki, The University Museum, University of Delaware and Rutgers University Press, 2006, 9

“Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.” The image from 1985 shows John Mellencamp’s knack for literary horror, 15 years before he began writing a musical with iconic horror writer Stephen King. The song about a dying Heartland farm was one of the singer-songwriter’s first indelible artistic statements. Some years ago, Mellencamp bought a lake cabin which turned out to be allegedly haunted — by accidental deaths and restless spirits — the inspiration for Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the ambitious stage production that will come to Fort Wayne (Embassy Theatre) Oct. 24, Madison (Overture Center)  Oct. 25. Rockford Oct. 26 (Coronado Theatre), Milwaukee (Riverside Theatre) on October 29 and Minneapolis (State Theatre)  Oct, 31, then on to Iowa.

Not surprisingly Mellencamp is a Stephen King fan and he approached King with the idea of doing a libretto for what became a “live radio musical,” says Ghost Brothers director Susan Booth. The story’s key dynamic is two mirroring male relationships — dead brothers who haunt their living nephews in a Southern Gothic atmosphere of poisoned character entanglement.

The story of jealousy, murder and suicide is set in a Mississippi cabin “haunted by the ghosts of people that had a terrible thing happen,” King said. “Because it is so awful, their spirits stayed there, and then the whole chain of events starts to repeat itself.”

This all grew from a working relationship of two symbolic blood brothers. King’s prolific literary sensibility rises relentlessly like a specter from the darkest shadows of the American experience. King’s also an amateur musician, and a roots music aficionado.

“The greatest thing about Ghost Brothers is my friendship with Steve King,” Mellencamp said in an interview with The Tennessean in Nashville. “He and I are like brothers. In 15 years, I don’t think we’ve had a cross word. We laugh at each other and teased each other quite a lot, but never has there been any kind of, I’m really mad about this.”

The project also marked the reunion of two estranged brothers, Dave and Phil Alvin who perform on the recording. However, the biography John Mellencamp: Born in a Small Town details his problematic issues with collaboration.

“I don’t play well with the other kids, and neither did Steve,” Mellencamp admits. “Steve lives in Maine by himself. I live in Indiana by myself so the idea of him and I working together doesn’t sound like it would work very well, both of us are very respectful of each other, and it’s worked fantastically.”

That almost ominous isolation belies the charisma and strong connections of their individual talents, which attracted an all-star cast recording. That includes Mellencamp’s current girlfriend, Meg Ryan, as Monique, the mother of the living brothers.

The third member of the dead uncle’s love triangle is Anna sung by the silver-throated Neko Case. One of the first really gripping songs is “Wrong Wrong Wrong About Me” by “The Shape” a ghostly figure sung by Elvis Costello with Marc Ribot’s far-eastern psychedelic guitar backwash.

Frank and Drake argue in roles by actors Matthew McConaughey and Hamish Linklater. The ironic “Brotherly Love” moves with the shambling funkiness characteristic of Mellencamp’s recent work, with  singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham (Oscar-winner for Crazy Heart) and Will Daily, as the brothers.

A spectral aura deepens when Kris Kristofferson, as the father Joe, sings “How Many Days.” Joe’s the younger brother of the two dead uncles and the father of Frank and Drake,. “Home Again” quivers with a winsome lyrical soulfulness in a four-part harmony among Sheryl Crow, Taj Mahal and the Alvin brothers.

On “You are Blind” gravel-throated Ryan Bingham as Drake reflects on his love for the woman he shares with his brother.

Kristofferson’s father Frank begins to tell his story and Taj Mahal invokes chaos in “Tear This Cabin Down,” to convey the horror of the murder site.

Joe continues story about brothers “who couldn’t get along.” in 1967 when it happened.

A brotherly heart to heart may not deter tragic fate. Courtesy mediagalleryusatoday.com  

Sung by young Clyde Mulroney, “My Name is Joe,” is a touchingly plainitive flashback ode about the father as a boy and “the runt to the family,” whose big brothers “will take care of me.” Later Roseanne Cash sing Monique’s song “You Don’t Know Me” which reveals how love is ravaged by tragedy and misunderstand, yet a forgiveness persists.

And yet  the dead brothers’ mother Jenna can only ponder, “It all goes so fast and it’s all so rich, life I mean, and love. It slips away from this world, like silk.” She calls out for Andy and Jack, “where did you go?” a sentiment superbly expressed by Sheryl Crow in “Away From This World.”

Finally the song “Truth” is a stirring, swelling ensemble song with Mellencamp having the final musical word.

Taken as a whole, the recording sprawls but it hangs together like a dark, engulfing cloud of inevitability, with committed performances and excellent music.

____

The touring cast has some of its own star-power but promises proven acting and musical chops. Ghost Brothers should be more compelling as a dramatic story line on stage. The show stars actor Bruce Greenwood as the father Joe McCandless. Greenwood is perhaps best known for his roles as JFK in the film Thirteen Days, in Flight as Denzel Washington’s friend and union rep, and as Captain Christopher Pike in the 2009 Star Trek film and its sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Broadway actress Emily Skinner, who plays Monique, received a Tony Award nomination for Side Show, and has had leading roles in Jekyll & Hyde, James Joyce’s The Dead, The Full Monty and Billy Elliot.

Both the ghostly uncles and the nephews vie for the hearts of a woman: One is Anna, played by Kylie Brown, who has recently appeared in Atlanta productions of Hello Dolly and Hair. The other, Jenna, is played by Kate Ferber, whose recent credits include the one-woman show One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro.
The Shape, a devil-like character, is played by Jake LaBotz, who is a blues singer-songwriter and has acted in films by Sylvester Stallone and Steve Buscemi. LaBotz has released six of his own albums.

The Shape casts a bluesy spell over the people of Darkland County.

The company’s music ensemble is Mellencamp’s longtime band, led by bandleader Andy York on guitar, percussionist Dane Clark, Troye Kinnett on Keyboards and harmonica and upright bassist Jon Gunnell.

Producer T-Bone Burnett (in suit, front left)  takes a bow with co-authors John Mellencamp and Stephen King in an early production of Ghost Brothers. www.lijas-library.com

The libretto’s shades of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and perhaps Carson McCullers underscore that King is a more subtle psychological writer than often given credit for. Typically penetrating lyrics and memorable refrains by Mellencamp reflect a theme of suffering, resilience and self-acceptance in the face of fate.

Booth says the gritty, low production values “allows us to sit and listen to Stephen’s words and plug our imagination in, rather than having the work done for us by a fully stage production.”

__________________________

The photos in this blog are from a previous production of “Ghost Brothers.”

A version of this story was published in The Shepherd Express.