I don’t have a specific reason for revisiting this image as my blog header. I’d seen enough of my nifty little self-caricature, which is clearly dated.
This image, a photo by Joe Alper, is dated, too, probably 1963-64, but it’s timeless. John Coltrane consulting with McCoy Tyner, a collusion of two titanic talents and spirits. So It’s a “go to” when I need some spiritual protein.
Of course, the cigar didn’t help Coltrane’s heath. He died at 40, of liver failure. But we can hardly feel superior in 2022, unless we stoop to such small conquering.
Lead singerJeff Taylor and The Altered Five Blues Band were among the big crowd-pleasers at the 40th Annual Atwood Fest on Madison’s east side last weekend. All photos by Kevin Lynch
I had a fabulous sun-soaked weekend at the 40th annual Atwood Fest, on Madison’s east side. This is the best street festival I have attended in some time. For starters, Madison lived up to its colorful and left-leaning reputation, something you could see, hear and smell — in the steady scent of burning cannabis drifting into our nostrils among a group of people gathered under some shade trees listening to Steely Dane, on Sunday.
However I didn’t quite see everything I might have, to get the full experience.
I had my head down and was wearing my broad-brimmed sun hat as I riffled through used CDs at the WORT radio station booth. I heard my girlfriend Ann say, “Kevin, you just missed a topless woman, who walked right by.”
That did get me to look up, long enough to catch what is called “the philosopher’s view” of a striking woman (which Ann assured me she was), receding into the distance. But from 20 feet away I saw her liberally tattooed back, and attached to her (covered) derrière was a sign that read “MY BODY, MY CHOICE.”
She was clearly and boldly making a protest statement about the recent Supreme Court overturning of Roe versus Wade which had guaranteed women legal abortions since the mid-1970s. It was a vivid bit of symbolism, signifying her gender and sexuality and the inherent motherhood of the female bosom. (Of course me, the inveterate music album browser, had to miss the full impact). Still I give the woman credit and for her courage and commitment to, um, raising consciousness, as well as eyebrows.
Elsewhere, less, provocatively, we saw several senior women walking around with blue hair. One younger woman had several piercings adorning every facial orifice, and created a few new orifices. It’s really something to see women of a several feminist generations in full force. And of course, tattoos advertised individuality (or now-dated trendiness?) galore, artfully bespeckling both genders.
There was also plenty of delicious food, but I’m here to offer you a photo essay on the music. I was drawn back to the city I worked and lived in for nearly 20 years after marvelous day at the Madison Jazz Festival, on the Wisconsin Union Terrace beside Lake Mendota, earlier this summer.
For us, the music started relatively low-key with Inside Pocket, a jazz quartet leaning toward contemporary and post-bop styles with several shapely compositions by guitarist composer Pat Metheny, even though there’s no guitarist in this group. However the group’s tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin pulled us into a fine afternoon mood with, slightly brooding yet lyrical playing somewhat reminiscent of the cool-to-bop school of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon.
Tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin of the jazz quartet Inside Pocket eased us into the stimulating atmosphere of Atwood Fest Saturday afternoon.
The next group we heard was actually playing their debut gig. Called with droll, non-P.C. panache, Lawnmower, it’s led my a fascinating and accomplished guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude. A UW Madison music department lecturer, Patenaude has performed globally in a wide array of world music and American vernacular styles and contexts, including playing on recordings by Metheny and The Grateful Dead. Patenaude has played with most of the region’s top jazz musicians, including the award-winning Tony Castaneda’s Latin Jazz Sextet. I ran into Tony as he took in this sun-drenched set. Louka’s eclecticism is a tribute to both musicians’ open-minded voraciousness, given that what Tony, the master Latino conga-player, was listening to was something like bluegrass music. This group didn’t even have a percussionist.
Guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude leads his new progressive bluegrass group Lawnmower (above L-R: Shauncey Ali, fiddle; Patenaude, guitar, Dave Havas, bass; Aaron Nolan guitar; and Isaac DeBroux-Slone, mandolin) and (below) takes a solo accompanied by bassist Havas.
Louka’s band had the peculiar soulfulness of bluegrass mixed with sophisticated string-playing interplay, by turns lilting and rhythmically charged. As Castaneda said to me, “call it progressive bluegrass.” Fair enough. They performed mostly original songs by Patenaude, who’s worth checking out on his most recent album of mostly originals under his own name, titled Testing Your Patience. However, he did end the set with an exemplary version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” The album includes Louka doing a sardonically laconic rendition of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Annotator Joy Dragland calls the album Louka’s “fever dream.”
Tony Castaneda split to check out the New Orleans band Sam Price and The True Believers at another stage, understandably because, he said the group’s percussionist was borrowing Tony’s conga drum. Price’s band was next on my list of “must hear” bands and they hardly disappointed. This was the most collectively high-energy group I saw that weekend with a swampy, funk style reminiscent of Little Feat, replete with slickly woozy organ playing, and a vibe both jittery and jumping. It also included a feisty, bouncy female singer and Price, a leather-lunged singer and bassist. They spilled over the whole street of Atwood with an infectiously greasy, gumbo boil.
Now we be dancing despite ourselves, lubed a bit, in my case, by a sudsy glass of Oktoberfest beer.
Sam Price, and The True Believers, straight from New Orleans, rock and boogie the Heritage Stage at the top of Atwood Fest, in it’s 40th year.
We then moved to the Clyde Stubblefield Stage to catch TheAltered Five Blues Band, from Milwaukee. the band sure plays like it’s altered, in the best sense, probably with some of “Milwaukee’s finest.” Lead guitarist Jeff Schroedl was ripping off a searing solo just as we walked up, as the whole band doled out heaping helpings of steamy electric Chicago-style blues, interspersed with the hard rock edge that blues-style helped infuse the venerable vernacular with.
Lead singer Jeff Taylor rides the power as Brew City’s Altered Five Blues Band fills it up with contemporary Chicago-style blues, with a full Milwaukee head.
Rotund but rollin’ and tumblin’ lead singer Jeff Taylor may be “a heart attack waiting to happen” as retired NP Ann commented. But on this waning afternoon, he belted out the good gooey blue stuff with gusto, and a stentorian vocal heartiness recalling B.B. King. You can see and hear why this band as won awards, including current nominations from The Blues Foundation, for best contemporary blues album, Holler If You Hear Me, and the title song for “best song.”
But this afternoon, with beer in hand, I felt like the good-time strut of the band’s “Great Minds Drink Alike” :
After this set, gal pal Ann was running out of gas a bit, and my cup was drained, so we exited despite more good music to be had.
We planned to be back right when everything kicked off on Sunday with Steely Dane.
***
It was 12 noon when some folks are still in church, but the crowd gathered at the Clyde Stubblefield Stage ended up attending their own revival meeting. The resurrection is the music of Steely Dan. I’m normally not inclined to indulge much in cover bands. But I’d heard Steely Dane live previously and, frankly, they’re a gas. This band’s nominal wordplay conveys that it’s band members all reside in Dane County, the surrounding region of the one-of-a-kind capital city that is sometimes referred to as “sixty-four square miles surrounded by reality.” The way this world is right now, I was hungry for the hip escapism of those 64 squares, as epitomized by Steely Dane.
It’s a 13 to 15 member band, with four horn players, three female backup singers, and two keyboard players along with two guitarists, bass, percussion, and drums. Three members share lead vocals, striving to approximate Donald Fagen’s raring, chameleon-cobra singing. That fulsome force provides the pulsing flexibility of extremely dynamic musical muscles, which makes Steely Dan’s music so intoxicating and almost good buddy-like in it’s catchiness.
Steely Dane horn section (top): (L-R) Al Falaschi, Jim Doherty and Courtney Larsen, with keyboardist-musical director Dave Stoler. Another SD personnel segment (above) includes (L-R) guitarist-vocalist Jay Moran, bassist Phil Lyons, singer-keyboardist-co-leader Dave Adler, and background singers Megan Moran and Lo Marie.
So the effect was that this big joyous big crowd were SD true believers who knew many of the lyrics they sang along with, not unlike biblical verses duly memorized. Except wafting herb, as mentioned, is the substitute for incense. And Steely Dan is as secular as music gets. Steely Dan’s resident genius Donald Fagen crafted songs about love, loss and “the royal scam,” with a variety of intriguingly romantic, roguish and eccentric characters, and even sweeps us back to high school days without seeming corny or trite.
Steely Dane’s frontman Dave Adler’s evident Donald Fagen wannabe-ism has morphed, with diligent practice and zeal, into a Fagen might-as-well-be-ism. As gal pal Ann Peterson commented during the band’s exuberant 90-minute (without a break) set, “If you close your eyes, you can easily imagine that it’s Steely Dan.”
If that sounds like a perfectly ingenuous critical comment, it’s also spot on. This band has taken in, mastered and absorbed what sounds like most of Steely Dan’s repertoire, and they’ve got it down cold, that is to say, cool, but also quite hot, and utterly convincing.
The co-founder of the band, along with Adler, is the accomplished and respected Madison jazz pianist Dave Stoler. And what a contrast in stage presences. Dave Adler bounces around, flailing limbs like Gumby on steroids. He sings with a kind of please-love-me-to-death ardency. You get the feeling he’d perform ’till he woke up the moon and, remember, this was noon.
By contrast, band co-founder Dave Stoler, studious and nearly immobile, is a Buddha with dancing fingers, yet absorbed in awareness of the musical whole, given that he does the arranging for this big ensemble. He’s previously fronted a full jazz orchestra project. To intro one song, Stoler also delivered an cappella piano solo brimming with extended chords and slowly spiraling substitutions.
Guitarist Jay Moran does his best to muster the bite of Walter Becker’s guitar and ably handles some of the vocals. None of the lead singers quite matches Fagen’s elastic, gut-to-the tongue sass.
But the Dane ensemble is so strong, supple and committed to this material, and with gospel-like call and responses, it plunges into the memory and heart, and mainlines Steely Dan’s “when-Josie-comes-home” nostalgia amid sardonic philosophizing.
Here’s saxophonist-vocalist Al Falaschi, Adler and Moran highlighted in a goes-down-so-easy version of “Do It Again,” recorded at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee.
Similarly, In this band’s hands,“Aja” still unfolds as a gorgeous little suite, that breathes and arches its back like a big ol’ tiger. The “up on the hill” refrain has strong spiritual overtones, but mainly about social acceptance, and consolidation. “When all my dime dancing is through, I’ll run to you.”
. Tenor saxophonist Falaschi did a reasonable, though hardly imitative, Wayne Shorter solo. And drummer Joey Banks rippled through the long, polyrhythmic “Aja” outro made famous by “Bad” Steve Gadd.
By contrast, “Reeling in the Years” allowed listeners to dance way out on the memory line, with all the euphoria that caught everybody’s ear when Dan first hit the charts. The Dan-by-way-of-Dane waves of slithering funk is too delicious to deny, and you sense this is as good as it’ll get – especially given that the real Steely Dan rarely toured live, being largely a recording studio creature, as gleamingly brilliant and contagious as those got with hip, R&B-jazzy song jammin’. 1
During a short stint in the 1970s, I worked at the North Shore Milwaukee audio store Sound Stage, and SD’s masterpiece album Aja, was our favorite demo record, to show off the equipment. You see, the album’s production level, with Victor Feldman’s souped-up marimbas like tolling redwoods, is about as high as the music can get you. It felt about that way Sunday, as high noon unfolded into the after’s Mary Jane-filled glow.
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Steely Dane has recently won “best cover band” awards from both Madison Area Music Awards and Madison Magazine.
The outrage of marchers is evident in signage at this protest of the Dobbs V. Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization abortion case, overturning the landmark Roe v Wade decision, in New York, June 24, 2022. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Approval of the Supreme Court has traditionally been high, as it is the branch of government seen as most above the taint of politics. However, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the court’s public approval rating has plummeted, from 54% in March to 44% in May to a new low of 38% in July, according to a new national poll by Marquette University.
“The obvious cause is the June 24 decision known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a ruling opposed by almost two-thirds of Americans who have an opinion on it. The decline in the court’s approval has come entirely from people who disagree with that ruling undoing a constitutional right to abortion.” 1
I’ve read most of the decision and here’s why I think it went far astray from righteousness. The Court’s written majority opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade works hard to delegitimize the varied aspects of the inherent rights of women contained in a variety of established laws and precedents, and Constitutional amendments.
However, Justice Samuel Alito’s written effort is almost completely engaged in the abstract of legal theory and argument, and ultimately funnels all subsequent decisions on actual abortion in America into “a state’s assertion of powers” – which the majority opinion elevates to the status of a secular godliness.
Alito now brings to mind Pontius Pilate washing his hands (symbolically of Christ’s blood) after sentencing him to a public crucifixion. This decision will lead to the unnecessary deaths of countless women, mainly those disenfranchised women (typically of color) with little resources, who will be forced into “back-alley” abortions or self-abortions, or who will die in childbirth — a statistically far more dangerous situation than legal abortion from a qualified doctor.
How smart (and noble?) do the choice opponents think they are in their attempt to reduce abortions? This misogynistic ruling might work about as well as the institutionally racist “war on drugs.” An article in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books details how the now-reversed abortion bans in Ireland did nothing to reduce abortions. 2
Whatever happened to the rights of the individual Americans, under the premise that “all (persons) are created equal,” and due the same rights, as the Declaration of Independence declared? This is a very serious question, which must be answered.
In other words, the majority’s approach epitomizes the “above it all,” and “holier than thou” posture of those who would conceptually separate any potential child from their mother, even as it presumes to save the fetus’s life. ( As a male, I won’t even begin to do justice to such a posture forsaking the mother, the giver, and sustainer, of life). Both mother and child are forgotten, after birth, in this arid moral universe. Yet, a child is born to live a meaningful life, not merely born for the sake of being born. A healthy, nurturing mother is crucial to the baby’s survival, and subsequent growth and development, into a life of hopefully honest citizenship.
The peculiar nature of this doctrinaire separation of child and mother (by prioritizing rights of a fetus) and from their ensuing lives, characterizes the conceptual flaw of such a purity, indeed a Puritan, attitude, with its fixation on the moment of conception. It is profound inconsideration of real life. It is as if to say, there is a pure way to decide upon, and live life when, in fact, life is a complex weave of relative purities and distinct impurities, some which strengthen the corpus by the fortification of layered harmonies, just as a scar naturally strengthens a skin from further defilement or penetration.
Returning to religious terms that I hope some choice opponents might hear, there’s a difference between purity and holiness. Christ noted that “we are all sinners,” thus human purity is an oxymoron, if not an impossibility. We are blessed by God’s grace so that we may be forgiven our sins, or failings. Even the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” does not specify. Have we not all killed a living creature, in some sense, to consume for nutritional purposes? A mother must make the hard decision to bear another child or not, so she may properly manage the burden of children she has already. Even a childless woman may not be ready for motherhood, for good reasons only she and her doctor know in reality. This is all part of the proverbial Cycle of Life, an often-harsh reality duly blessed by its Creator, to believers, but surely Darwinian to some degree.
Further, if we value the nuclear family, as conservatives typically purport to, how can that be formed or sustained properly when a woman is raped, or a victim of incest?
I will concede this, that an abortion should occur before the point of fetal “viability” or, if later, only if the mother’s life is otherwise seriously threatened by birth.
To another large point, imagine the consequences of widespread abortion bans in this vastly overpopulated world, a profound reason for the overconsumption of fossil fuels and overdevelopment bringing us the climate change threatening the planet. This gargantuan reality single-minded anti-abortionists seemingly ignore as well, with astonishing hubris.
By contrast, the dissenting Supreme Court opinion (from Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) delves directly and profoundly into the personal realities of pregnancy, in all its threatening uncertainties. This is the real life that any woman or legal child, regardless of how she is impregnated, must face and endure. Regardless of what opponents of choice may think, she must face these realities, because the saving of a would-be child can, and ought, to be a blessing.
But that is always accompanied by the realities and hardships, psychological as well as physical, that the human body, even at its most empowered and exalted, struggles to transcend. This brings us again to her naturally endowed rights, to be able to live a humane life.
Read this from the court’s minority dissent:
“Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 856. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions.
“A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an unsafe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all.” 3
***
Finally, and so sadly, we now have the disgraceful revelation of actual behavior of the majority’s principal author, Samuel Alito. We get a good sense of the man behind this atrocious decision. Alito showed some of his true colors in a recent public speech by mocking foreign leaders who condemned the decision, in manner dripping with condescension, because they have no right to an honorable opinion on “American law.”
Mother Jones magazine pulls no punches in reportorial response (below). But judge for yourself, in the video clip. Why is this man playing for laughs, about this matter?
Even more, he implicitly derides Macron, Johnson and others for being mere politicians. Yet what has Alito, Thomas and the three Trump appointees become, beneath their august robes, with such radical judicial activism, defying the opinion of the American majority, and of legal precedent?
This stunning album amounts to an artist replanting in a profoundly fertile motherlode of his evolution, by reinterpreting the material of his very first album. The harvest is a quantum artistic leap. Chicago-native Hill is already established as one of the most talented and resourceful trumpeter-composers in jazz. Here he assembles a group of band leaders (several Blue Note label artists) and the quality quotient spikes. And it’s virtually all performed live in concert, a testament to the high art of the improviser (A series of studio-recorded a cappella solo pieces allows each of the sextet’s sidemen to to stand up and speak his peace.).
The floating, portentous “Intro” arrests our attention, and the ensuing “Law & Order” unfurls waves a of witness, drama and testament. Tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III enters a quietly enchanting storyteller but inevitably lifts us to cathartic cries of betrayal of justice, of true law and order. Vibist Joel Ross and pianist James Francies suggest, in their heavily populated lines, the bustle of the hoi polloi, and the pianist especially conveys a boiling tension in his hurtling momentum surges. If you haven’t heard him, Francies is a revelation, perhaps even if you have. To me, his linear speed doesn’t feel gratuitous or showy, rather it is breathtaking – burning with purpose, like a meteor striving for an explosive destiny. At other times, it’s as if his profuse ideas are spilling out over the edges of a sentence. This is music you feel in your bones, your whole being, such is its insinuating power.
Marquis Hill live. Courtesy mobile twitter.com
On “The Believer” everyone steps out hot and gives it up, as believers in, if nothing else, their extraordinary collective power which, by compounding exponentially, suggests a pipeline to some higher power. New Gospel, indeed. The tune exemplifies Hill’s compositional gifts, crafting edge-of-the-precipice pathways for improvs, suspended by oddly beguiling melodies. He won jazz’s greatest performance honor, The Thelonious Monk International Competition in 2014, underscoring his promise, now fully realized. 1
He’s admittedly out of the hard-bop blues tradition of Lee Morgan but deepened by expressive textures suggesting the influence of fellow Chicago brass avant-avatar Wadada Leo Smith, and aspects of many great trumpeters between. One can easily drink deeply from this album purely on the artistic virtuosity – throughout drummer Kendrick Scott bristles and flares like a string of artfully controlled fireworks. Yet there’s a cumulative demonstration of a spiritual mine, which has only strengthened in repose, replenished to fuel the powers of endurance, defiance, and resolution in a world seemingly out to get the already-disenfranchised American everyman, and woman.
Andrew Trim will perform at an album release event, at 7 p.m. July 27, Anodyne Coffee Roasters, 224 West Bruce Street, Milwaukee, WI 53204.
With his somewhat curious album title, Retroreflector, one wonders what guitarist Andrew Trim is reflecting on retrospectively. The slyly infectious groove his quartet lays down on the title tune leads you Pied Piper-like behind textural footsteps sketched out with deftly articulated power chords.
To me, this backwards-glancing album title lands upon Hendrix, as in “slight return,” a la “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the coda to his masterpiece Electric Ladyland. Yet Trim is not leaning too heavily on the Hendrix mystique; rather he’s beginning to carve out his own space inhabited by both pugnacious power chording and poetry.
Speaking of poetry, the second tune, “Swirl,” evoked for me one of my favorite poems, Herman Melville’s “Shiloh,” a politically-pointed reflection on a graveyard of perpetually sleeping Civil War soldiers. Trim endows his more ambiguous subject matter with a certain grace, even if that poem was never specifically associated. A tentative melancholy is buoyed by lyrical wonder. “Shiloh” the poem almost sneaks up on its tragedy with the tender attentiveness: skimming lightly, wheeling still/ the swallows fly low/space over the field and clouded days,the force field of Shiloh –/ over the field were April rain/ Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain…” Melville deftly evokes the men on death’s doorstep. Trim’s theme seems to melt in the air as it picks out atmospheric spots, as if circling bird paths. Then guest guitarist Dave Miller injects a rough counterpoint, evoking the dire conflict contained in each stolen life six feet under – “… Through the pause of night/ that followed the Sunday fight/ around the church of Shiloh –/ the church so lone, the log-built one, / that echoed to many a parting groan…” The poem quickly inserts a painfully poignant statement about the politics of the war between brethren.
I hope other listeners find enough in Trim’s artistry to pursue this, if not other poetic or artistic analogues. This veteran Milwaukee guitarist as developed into one of the most original instrumental voices in Milwaukee, one deeply infused with a latter-day, anti-sainthood of psychedelia.
Guitarist-composer Andrew Trim. Courtesy bandcamp.com
And throughout, I detect a wide range of possible other influences, perhaps most striking Bill Frisell’s haunted pastoral jazz style, on “Lullabye.” The limpid, arcane melody sounds like a question sung out loud, in pure sound. On “Eclipse Plans” I sense some of Jeff Beck’s exquisitely executed guitar distortion. Elsewhere, consider Pat Metheny’s bright-beaming electronica or, by contrast, the driven Black-rock of the guitar-led trio Harriet Tubman. Such associations reflect the impressive range of Trim’s sonic vocabulary.
Also, in ensemble, Retroreflector is sustained superbly by Trim’s bandmates: Dan Pierson on keyboards and synthesizers, Barry Paul Clark on bass, and Nick Lang on drums.
Ultimately Trim’s exploratory work, for its tough harmonic brio, also reaches for his own brand of beauty, that which dwells in the deep cavern between raw, unmined sound and sunlit silhouettes.
Andrew Trim recently posted a meme on Facebook (below) which aptly characterizes his venture on Retroreflector: “Reach for the moon: A door opens into a smaller room.”
I suspect something extraordinary, perhaps even sacred, may dwell in that enclosure. Such are the revelations of committed creativity.
Review: And She Was Love, Akindele John, paintings, Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust Street, through Aug. 14.
Lest we forget, or never really knew, the ebony majesty of the African woman stands tall against the sky, as a great tree on the savanna, its tangled branches dancing and beckoning. That, of course, is the crowning Yoruba beauty of obinrin, of mama, of her mane’s unfettered play in air, the web and shadow of her hair. The observer’s eye then descends, from forehead and cheeks to neck, the sculpted shining beauty.
There is no mistaking the analog in Akindele John’s painting exhibit, And She Was Love, a visual paeon to African womanhood at the Woodland Pattern Book Center, through Aug. 14. The many-limbed supplication to the sun thrives in what John strives to capture, the “nappturality” of “Black women who have chosen to exclusively wear their hair in a natural, Afro-textured state.”
John knows of what he paints, born in Ogun State, Nigeria and living currently in Lagos, the cultural, economic and entertainment capital of Africa. And as one of the continent’s largest and busiest seaports, Lagos carries plenty of logos (in Jungian terms) as a means of disseminating African cultural Diaspora.
This is an exhibit of six large portraits, each mirroring the other in deceptively simple posture of elegance, perhaps too easy to whisk through, yet calling distantly, like a horizon’s lioness roar, for attentive patience, for a measure of meditative honor. Who has been more typically overlooked, derided, and forsaken as surely as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, if not the woman of the world’s motherlode continent, and most notoriously, her countless offspring in America? Will one not discover in the amazing grace of these eyes, memories that even myth cannot erase, those of the signifying tree and a “poor wretch like me?”
This show’s officially marketed image, “Beautiful Comforter,” a woman holding a fluttering dove, is nothing overstated and yet fulsome in its slightly contained expressivity.
Akindele John, Girl with a Rose
She conveys a sage serenity. The brushstrokes, playful yet like a hand’s hollow, allow the work to breathe and hover in its own space. Two mirroring portraits, “Girl with a Rose” and “Girl with a White Cup,” apparently of the same woman, both boast Afros as unfettered as a black starburst, celebrating that hairstyle as a sort of spiritual assertion set against a sunlit halo, as all these heads are. John postures them admittedly saintlike in his celebration, yet vividly human. Her womanly femininity, the grace of her hand, adorned with yellow rose, all contrast to that burst, but remain of a piece, as self-defined power, and vibrant maternal fecundity.
Another, titled “The Blue Story,” depicts a woman holding an open book (Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye?). Here, as most everywhere, literacy is power, and font of expressed wisdom. And is this perhaps an essential signifier of this grandly eccentric book center itself, even a candidate for its permanent collection?
Throughout these works the artist’s painterly arabesques – here loose, there tight – which enclose and define the forms, also articulate a gestural freedom that seems to reflect their worldly engagement, and the sensate essence of each woman’s presence.
Akindele John, “We are Here and Now”
However, one of these paintings, which all blend and contrast oil and acrylic paint, is not a single portrait. And it’s the most compelling in the show, taking the liberty of slightly melding two women’s images, almost as Siamese twins. “We are Here and Now,” presents two figures embodying the sisterhood of “we”; one gazes to the left, and the other downward, forthright in awareness and reflection and, perhaps most vividly, each woman’s neck is a study in swan-like repose. Yet, in another of a sequence of finely-wrought contrasts, the bouquets in each woman hands are an expressionistic hive of power and possibility.
Finally, this is the one painting that superimposes, behind the two women’s heads, a rectangle over the sun circle, a cohering formal device, for sure. Nevertheless, the balance of all these portraits’ details, their accumulative contrasting dynamics, seem to whisper depths in their beauty, a yin-yang, see-saw type of tale, of her all-too-often tortured journey, from Middle Passage to chattel degradation, to Emancipation Proclamation and far beyond, what she has endured and conquered, and what she promises to be, with the sureness of sunrise.
1 The exhibit was facilitated in partnership with Genre: Urban Arts, with crucial assistance from that organization’s creative director and owner Nakeysha Roberts Washington, a Woodland Pattern board member
Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust Street. Courtesy unbanmilwaukee.com
The musicians tip jar, accompanied by The Dave Bayles Trio, at The Uptowner Bar. All photos by Kevin Lynch
THE DAVE BAYLES TRIO AT THE UPTOWNER BAR, EVERY TUESDAY
THE DAVE BAYLES QUARTET AT RIVERWEST PIZZA, FRIDAY, JULY 8
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“I took the one less traveled by/ And that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.”
Dave Bayles is something of a poet of the drums. Since the drums are the most fundamental of instruments in jazz, and in most African-American vernacular musics, that sort of makes him a poet of musical essences. You can hear and feel the magnetic power of his verse-like cadences in the propulsive swing he generates with other musicians.
This skill is so well established that he’s arguably Wisconsin’s premiere straight-ahead jazz drummer. He’s best-known as the long-time drummer of the all-star sextet We Six. That band comprises faculty of the Milwaukee Jazz Institute, where Bayles is principal percussion instructor. For many years, Bayles has also driven the engine of The Dave Stoler Trio, led by the powerhouse Madison pianist. He’s also backed up many big jazz names, including Peter Bernstein, Rick Germanson, Benny Golson, Slide Hampton, Brian Lynch, Brother Jack McDuff, Charles McPherson, Melvin Rhyne, and Phil Woods. Bayles is also now drumming for the resurrected Toty Ramos Latin Jazz Sextet, which played at Riverwest Pizza last week.
Drummer-bandleader Dave Bayles at The Uptowner
However, all that implies a well-trod path, gilded with justifiable esteem, along which the heartbeat of modern mainstream jazz strides. Fair enough.
And yet, quiet as it’s kept, the drummer-bandleader has led THE DAVE BAYLES TRIO, an intimate and compulsively exploratory trio gig through the backroads of the pandemic to the present – every Tuesday night at The Uptowner Bar, on the corner of Humboldt Boulevard and Center Street in Milwaukee.
The Dave Bayles Trio, (L-R) Russ Johnson, trumpet; Dave Bayles, drums; Clay Schaub, Bass.
“It is a delightful, creative group that I thoroughly enjoy,” Bayles muses modestly. Yet the trio has built much intrepid synchronicity along the road not taken. They plan on releasing a live album recorded at The Uptowner.
The regular trio includes the redoubtable and elastically adaptable bassist Clay Schaub. Out front is Russ Johnson, IMO the Midwest’s most powerfully creative and masterful trumpeter – north of Chicago’s Wadada Leo Smith and Marquis Hill, who now actually spend most of their time on the East Coast.(p.s. This Tuesday, July 12, Johnson and Schaub will be out of town. They will be replaced for this week by alto saxophonist Clay Lyons and bassist Doug Hayes.)
Russ Johnson at The Uptowner
So, if you stop by on a Tuesday night, you’ll begin to sense the phenomenon of talent and creative verve that sustains Johnson’s pre-eminence, which he reasserted recently in Madison in an all-star jam session led by the brilliant pianist-composer Johannes Wallmann, to celebrate the retirement of two veteran and beloved Madison jazz radio programmers. That night, Johnson’s trumpet blistered through the firewall of wonder when the music called out for it, and sang seductively at other times.
The informal vibe of The Uptowner is conductive to experimentation and unfettered daring, to venturing a few huge steps beyond.
So, if you want a taste of what the great jazz writer Whitney Balliett once called “the sound of surprise,” stop on by.
The venerable building that houses The Uptowner recently had its roof replaced, and Bayles relates that “someone said that one night we blew the roof off the joint.” Hyperbole? It may not be so improbable. This ship is full-steam ahead. Bayles asserts, “The gig will be going on until the building falls down.”
Here are a few photos of the group at The Uptowner, “workin’ and steamin’ ” into a stratosphere that’s a free ride for all patrons.
Ah, but don’t forget the musicians tip jar.
THE DAVE BAYLES QUARTET AT RIVERWEST PIZZA: And yet, now that summer is high, Bayles is about to debut a new quartet outdoors, on the beguiling terrace of Riverwest Pizza, 932 E. Wright Street, from6 to 9 p.m. this Friday, July 8. This quartet features singer Pamela York, saxophonist Chris Medsen, and bassist Jeff Hamann. Bayles hopes to continue this gig, though at intervals less frequent than his trio at The Uptowner.
Regardless, this quartet promises to be a breath of fresh air, in the best sense.
WHAT: Award-winning jazz, blues, bossa-samba group VIVO, at Bayshore Sounds of Summer
WHERE: The Yard at Bayshore Shopping Center, 5800 Port Washington Rd.
WHEN: 6-9 p.m. Friday, July 1, 2022
ADMISSION: Free
The steamy air slithers into your lungs and comes out as salty slime, a runnin’ down your breast. But your friends, baby, they don’t treat you like a guest. At least not here.
Apologies to Grace Slick, but this here is Slick weather. Really, what we have here is margarita weather, Wisconsin style. What we do not have is a failure to communicate.
So, salt up that slippery glass rim to replenish your sodium loss, toss in a clatter of ice cubes, mix in the tequila and fruit concoction — and one more ingredient:
VIVO is Wisconsin’s musical analogue to a margarita. And yet, it takes you places you can’t quite get to with the floozy-booze, which tends to lead you on a circular path that has blotto at the bottom, as good as it feels. But VIVO’s places are where humanitv — artfully multiplied by five or six players and palm-tree breezes — transports you, wherever the award-winning jazz-bossa-samba group wants you to go. You’ll be thankful for the trip. You might even get up and dance in the heat, because it’ll be 6 p.m. or even pushing sundown.
VIVO live. Courtesy Wisconsin Rapids Times
Who’s VIVO? I’d start with winds and keyboard whiz Warren Wiegratz. For 25 years, he led Streetlife, the high-energy jazz-funk-fusion band that raced all over the musical map as the long-time house band for the Milwaukee Bucks.
But there’s a more suave side to sax-burner Wiegratz. With VIVO, you get to hear more of him romancing the flute and melodica. VIVO vocalist Pam Duronio — who also peppers mallated bongos — sings an intoxicating array of jazz, blues, bossa nova and samba songs, often in Spanish and Portuguese. She also possess an radiant aura that relaxes as well as it stimulates. This VIVO stuff is musical therapy, if you let it be
VIVO singer and percussionist Pam Duronio performs with multi-instrumentalist Warren Wiegratz in a performance on the Milwaukee lakefront a few year back. Photo by Kevin Lynch
And what about this musical synchronicity? The percolating ensemble is veteran, through and through, but at its organic core is this: Duronio is a long-time marriage partner with ace guitarist Tim Stemper — who can blaze and beguile with the best of them. And almost always the winding twain shall meet, in harmonies of the most satisfying and surprising sort.
So I am heading down to Bayshore tomorrow evening, with my gal pal, around six for a tall glass of VIVO, partly because I have an excuse to celebrate and live it up a bit, as it’s my birthday tomorrow.
But you sure don’t need such an excuse to drink in this group and drink up, and feel a little more alive than you did before.
Album review: Johannes Wallmann Precarious Towers (Shifting Paradigm Records)
Pianist-composer-bandleader Johannes Wallmann rises to precipitous heights in his 10th album, Precarious Towers, proving his ability to create a concept album, with the extra-musical aspects streaming gracefully throughout. 1 His band includes Down Beat magazine “rising star,” Chicago alto saxophonist Sharel Cassity, Milwaukee vibraphonist Mitch Shiner, Madison bassist John Christensen, and Milwaukee drummer Devin Drobka. “This is the all-star band from this incredibly fertile region of creative jazz in southern Wisconsin and Chicago that I’ve wanted to put together for years,” Wallmann says.
The album lives up to such expectations. Created during the pandemic, it addresses that experience variously, from the whimsically personal to the overtly political. But the music remains powerfully compelling and listenable modern jazz from one of the Midwest’s supreme musicians, who also leads the jazz studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The concept arose from watching his house-bound daughter ambitiously build tall structures with Lego segments, until they fell. Her father sees such effort as reflecting human aspiration, but also hubris. The title tune is indeed rhythmically precarious, with complex off-center tempi, especially from drummer Devin Drobka, a master of striking indirection and accent, while invariably still propelling a tune. Vibist Shiner elicits bluesy feeling reminiscent of Milt Jackson (here, and on the one cover, “Angel Eyes”) and altoist Cassity throughout displays a boppish sax voice that sings as deftly as it swings, a sort of Bird on flaming wings.
“McCoy” honors Wallmann’s greatest pianistic influence in a handsome Tyner-ish minor mode theme. Wallmann unleashes glittering arpeggios and resounding octaves. “Never Pet a Burning Dog” displays the composer’s wit, as an analog to proper pandemic precautions, and the changes here suggest that McCoy Tyner’s modal style is not mutually exclusive from shapely chord changes.
Keyboardist Johannes Wallmann (center) and saxophonist Sharel Cassity, who released the new album “Precarious Towers,” perform together recently at the Madison Jazz Festival. Photo by Kevin Lynch
The album climaxes with a three-part suite titled “Pandemica.” Part one, self-described as “pensive,” unfolds like an adagio etude. Part two, subtitled “Unreliable Narrator,” alludes to today’s head-swimming online media overload, with Shiner’s vibes well-articulating droll commentary. The final movement is explicit: “Defeat and Imprison the Conman Strongman.” It’s a dolorous yet ingenious Dorian-mode theme, with the “cognitive dissonance” of competing lines between bassist John Christensen and Wallmann’s left hand.
The album’s two-part denouement, in effect, is by turns lyrical “Try to Remember” (Wallmann’s tune, not the stage standard), and a fun piece inspired by a Madison tradition, entitled “Saturday Night Meat Raffle,” (to win high-protein food) which conveys a certain off-kilter social dynamic in a Frank Zappa-esque way. Throughout this brilliant album, the band brims with virtuosic elan and restraint, in service of Wallmann’s musical evocation and storytelling.
And Cassity, who recently shone brilliantly (with Wallmann) at the Madison Jazz Festival, is a star in a galaxy that still seems a tad remote from wider appreciation. So, look upward, and listen for her.
One might also read in all this album’s permutations, the precariousness of this nation’s democracy, but infused with hope and collective determination. 2
Wallmann’s album last year, Elegy for an Undiscovered Species, for jazz quintet and string orchestra, was named a “best of 2021” album by Down Beat magazine. It was also among the top 10 jazz best albums of 2021 in this writer’s international critics poll. Wallmann also leads the jazz program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as the inaugural John and Carolyn Peterson Prof. of Jazz Studies.
Another bonus of this album is its delightfully comical (“Look out below!”) cover, courtesy of the uncannily resourceful graphic designer Jamie Breiwick (best known as a jazz musician), employing artwork by Amy Casey. In my book, it’s a candidate for album cover of the year.
Saturday the sky sang brilliant blue, the wind whispered Mary, and the sun burned like the jazz, from warm to hot. I returned to arguably the best summer jazz festival in Wisconsin, The Madison Jazz Festival. The event immersed the city in jazz for nine days, in the streets, clubs, and concert halls, and on the ever-inviting Union Terrace, overlooking Lake Mendota.
The Terrace is where I made plans to meet one of my dearest friends from my 20 years in Madison, Richard “Ricardo” Meyer. It had been too long since I had seen Ricardo. All the music was free admission on The Terrace, and pretty much world-class, in a diversity of styles. So we only paid for drippingly-delicious cones from the Union’s famous Babcock ice cream stand, and for burgers and brats at the bandstand-side food vendor.
When we arrived, Emma Dayhuff and the Phoenix Ensemble was in full gear, and providing some of the most incendiary music of the afternoon. The quartet included tenor saxophonist Isaiah Collier, alto saxophonist Greg Ward, and drummer Vincent Davis, led by bassist Dayhuff, who is a PhD candidate in jazz performance at the UW-Madison. She’s already garnered enough reputation to be working this day with leading Chicago musicians Collier, Ward, and Davis.
Isaiah Collier, sax, Emma Dayhuff, bass, and Vincent Davis, drums, perform at the Madison Jazz Festival. All photos of the festival by Kevin Lynch
One elderly listener near me grumbled “they don’t have any singer,” perhaps a bit challenged by the extended solos, especially of tenor man Collier. But I assured him that the next act will be led by a singer.
After the break, Twin Cities vocalist Sarah Greer changed the pace and mood decidedly with a blend of originals and standards. She showcased a voice with extraordinary dynamic range, especially on the top end, recalling the extraordinary pop-soul singer Minnie Ripperton.
Then came the band that I knew would be top-notch. It was billed as Sharel Cassity and the UW Faculty Band — Johannes Wallmann, keyboards, Peter Dominguez, bass, and Matt Endres, drums.
Twin cities jazz singer Sarah Greer.
Sharel Cassity and the UW Jazz Faculty Band at the Madison Jazz Festival (above and below.).
For me, and I suspect many others, the revelation of the afternoon was alto saxophonist Cassity, which is saying something considering I expected Greg Ward to be the top alto player of the day. He’s superb, for sure, yet I didn’t hear all of his set with Emma Dayhuff.
However, between what I’ve heard of Cassity on Precarious Towers, the new album by Johannes Wallmann (to be reviewed on this blog soon), and on this afternoon, her sound and soul are as sundrenched as the day. That’s not to say Cassity’s playing lacks a wide range of shades, shadows and nuances. She has all the chops she needs to express in a soulfully post-bop manner. These days it’s risky to comment on gender, but I can’t think of a better female saxophonist I’ve heard. She’s right up there with the best alto players of any gender.
And despite having a brand-new album of his own to promote, Wallmann was generous enough to allow Cassity the spotlight, as the quartet performed largely her own original compositions from her albums. This gambit hopefully will help promote his new album once people realize that, on Precarious Towers, she’s the horn soloist — in effect, the sonic element catching the sunlight atop those towers. 1
Sharel Cassity’s playing and horn catch the sunlight on the Union Terrace Saturday
What was most memorable Saturday was when she paused to explain how one piece was inspired by a quote by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She proceeded to recite the King quote: “I refuse to believe that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war, that the bright day of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil.”
She then played her tune “Be the Change” from her album Evolve.
This all had remarkable resonance to me because, just before her set, my friend Ricardo Meyer had revealed to me that he had rejected the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. His alternative duty was two years in Mexico doing public service and, while there, he attended the historic 1968 Mexico Olympics. This event is most famous for the occasion of two African-American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising black-gloved fists in the air during the awards ceremony for the 200-meter dash. Though interpreted controversially as a gesture of black power, Smith later said in an interview, “It was a cry for freedom and for human rights. We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
Of course, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis in March, seven months before those Olympics. In the many years since, the need for the transformation that King envisioned remains a struggle, all the more reason for anyone and everyone to “be the change,” as Cassity puts it.
At Saturday’s Madison Jazz Festival event, my old friend Richard “Ricardo” Meyer offered up the fist-in-the-air “for freedom and human rights,” echoing the famous gesture of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos (below) at an awards ceremony in the 1968 Olympics, which Ricardo attended. The video below documents the occasion.
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1 A bit of research shows Cassity has plenty of reason to claim a spotlight: From All About Jazz: Listed as “Rising Star Alto Saxophone” in Down Beat Magazine for the past 11 consecutive years (this persistent “rising star” categorizing makes me wonder if she’s butted up against a critical glass ceiling).
“Sharel has appeared on the Today Show, earned her MA from The Juilliard School under full scholarship, won the 2007 ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Award & has been inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. Cassity has shared the stage with jazz luminaries including Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis & the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra; as well as mainstream artists Aretha Franklin, Natalie Merchant, Vanessa Williams & Trisha Yearwood. She has released five albums as a bandleader and appeared on over 30 as a sideman, toured 24 countries and performed at leading venues like the Newport Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival & the North Sea Jazz Festival.”
