Brian Lynch — Unsung Heroes: A Tribute to Some Underappreciated Trumpet Masters, Volumes 1 and 2 (Hollistic Musicworks)

Recent jazz rarely swings or sings with the fire and verve of these straight-ahead sessions. Brian Lynch, perhaps Milwaukee’s greatest baby-boomer gift to jazz, has trumpeted for such iconic names as  Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Phil Woods, Eddie Palmieri and Toshiko Akiyoshi.

With scholarly artfulness, Lynch mines compositions from unheralded trumpeters. He digs deep into their now-cold cases, like a detective with enough of a criminal mind to always get his man.

Lynch (no relation to the writer) earned the 2006 Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year Grammy for his album,  “The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Recording Project – Simpatico,”  It’s a near-definitive statement of Palmieri’s mature art and Lynch arranged all its large ensembles and produced the record. Still, he’s slightly undervalued in the landscape of brass giants, which may have inspired his sense of justice regarding these nearly forgotten musician-composers.

I heard Lynch often in his developing years in Milwaukee, and unforgettably once in a small inner-city club owned by a relative of the great saxophonist Sonny Stitt, who played there that night. Lynch was blowing when Sonny noticed something. While Brian played, the bebop legend bent over, grabbed the startled trumpeter’s upper back and jammed his palm into his gut, forcing him into a more erect posture to improve his projection. It worked, and Brian’s song burned brighter from that day on. Now it illuminates another layer of songfulness buried in the jazz tradition.

This recording project amounts to serious jazz archeology. Lynch says that almost all of the tunes on the two volumes were never recorded by other artists than the composers and two, by Idrees Sulieman and Tommy Turrentine on Vol. 2, though published, evidently have never been recorded.

There’s something special about Lynch’s dusting off these relative unknowns — as if you’re hearing trumpet bells that gleam fleetingly in sunlight that teases us amid clouds that beckon the blues. And yet here they are, captured in aural amber.

Trumpeter and bandleader Brian Lynch. Courtesy mwanaafrica.com

Tommy Turrentine is a street-corner poem in name and music. Add these names: Idrees Sullivan, Joe Gordon, Donald Byrd, Claudio Roditi, Ira Sullivan, Howard McGee, Charles Tolliver, Louis Smith, Kamau Adilifu.

These amount to dances with bebop spirits. Lynch’s own sinuous playing never calls undue attention to itself, yet it proclaims these compositions’ timelessness, and mourns the loss of their clarion call.  The project mixes of righteous covers and a few pitch-perfect Lynch originals.

Among volume one highlights: “Household of Saud” by Charles Tolliver, which searches ardently like a hunter traversing the peaks and valleys of time.

Here’s a video of the recording of Tolliver’s “Household of Saud”:

http://vimeo.com/channels/unsungheroes

Louis Smith’s bebop maze “Wetu” unfolds with effortless grace; the chops-busting changes seen as natural as breathing. Meanwhile, “RoditiSamba,” a Lynch composition dedicated to Roditi, saunters like a rake surveying the sun-blessed pulchritude on a Rio beach.

These recordings’ professional sheen never allows inspiration, conviviality or gutsy swing to take a backseat, thanks to saxophonists Vincent Herring, Alex Hoffman, pianist Rob Schneiderman, bassist David Wong, drummer Pete Van Nostrand and conga player Vicente “Little Johnny” Rivero.

Here’s a video of the recording of Tolliver’s Household of Saud:

http://vimeo.com/channels/unsungheroes

Volume 2:

This 2013 release is  a separate CD but, coming from Volume one’s same three-day sessions, they fit together like a twin bros. Howard McGee’s floating “Sandy” pinpricks the soul with the sad majesty of memory. Idrees Sullivan’s “Short Steps” enchants while demonstrating how intervals shape melody and harmonic motion. Suddenly you hear Lynch’s own “Marissa’s Mood” (dedicated Ira Sullivan) — a more complex weave of changes and rhythmic phrasing — and understand how composers appeal, with the deftest strokes, to our head and our heart. Lynch’s solo, a gem of sustained melodic invention, and the ensuing ensemble carry the romantic torch like a handful of dancing long-stemmed roses.

Lynch dedicates the album to “the great Tommy Turrentine,” brother of renowned sax man Stanley, and includes Tommy’s “Gone but not Forgotten” which might aptly title this project, if not for the actual title’s click-the-heels salute to these trumpeters’ unsung glory, as a kind of fading musical ideal. The “heroes” add up to a substantial and satisfying reassessment of hard-bop history.

                                           Lynch relaxin’ at Camarillo? Courtesy berkeleyagency.com

Among recent releases on Lynch’s Hollistic Music Works label are two albums that reveal his loyal appreciation of the Midwest jazz scene, and he’s featured on both. Lynch returns to Milwaukee frequently for residencies at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, one of which led to Combinations: Live at the Jazz Estate, co-led by Milwaukee-based trumpeter Eric Jacobson and saxophonist Eric Schoor, billed as the Eric Jacobson Schoor Quintet + Brian Lynch, and recorded at Milwaukee’s premier jazz club. It also features a rarely recorded Milwaukee legend on piano, Barry Velleman, a Monk-esque modernist, and the Conservatory’s crackling faculty rhythm section, Jeff Hamann on bass and Dave Bayles on drums.

The second recent Hollistic recording Naptown Legacy is nominally dedicated to Naptown a.k.a. Indianapolis, with its great tradition of musicians like the Montgomery brothers, Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson, James Spaulding, David Baker, Slide Hampton and others. The date is led by drummer and Indianapolis native Ray Appleton, who has played with many of those Naptown greats as well many years with Wes Montgomery’s pianistic brother Buddy, who spent much of his career in Milwaukee. This date however, features a Milwaukee native, the swinging piano virtuoso Rick Germanson who’s making a strong name for himself in Manhattan and as a recording artist. (Full disclosure: Germanson played at my wedding, but don’t count that against him.)

Check out all the CD, video, educational and digital download offerings at Lynch’s label website: http://hollisticmusicworks.com/

CD cover photo credits: Vol. 1 — atane.net . Vol. 2 — brianlynchband.com 

A shorter version of this review was published in the Shepherd Express

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Dear Culture Currents readers,

I thought that you browsing visitors might find this list of interest. This post contains the titles of each blog post that I’ve written here, ranked by WordPress according to the number of hits each has received.

So it’s a list of the most popular blogs in descending order. The most hits by far to date was at the home page/archives, representing people checking out my latest posting or searching through the archives, which are listed by months only on the home page sidebar.

So this new list allows a reader a little easier access to the archives. Simply click on any title and you’ll be directed straight to it. 

The most popular single post to date is my Moby Dick-like interpretation of Santiago Calatrava’s celebrated addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum (pictured above). I was also happy to see that many culturally attuned people apparently find it significant that Milwaukee has lost its last black talk radio station.

I realize “The Day the United States Hanged a Woman” is a provocative title, but the movie review amounts also to a fascinating true historical story that resonates today, regarding capital punishment.

And the Duane Allman posting is a testament to that great guitarist’s ongoing legacy, evident most notably in the work of Derek Trucks, co-leader of the marvelous Tedeschi-Trucks Band which, in my book, has no peer today among groups attempting to combine and expand on a wide range of roots music styles.
I hope this information helps you to enjoy Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak) a bit more.
As always, thank you very much for visiting, reading and commenting.
Best,

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch)

All Culture Currents postings in order of number of hits (listed after each title):

1.Home page / Archives3,108

2. Discovering a Famous Seafaring Scene in Calatrava’s Pavilion490

3. The loss of Milwaukee’s black talk radio stirs memories of Marvin Gaye485

4. “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” — and Duane Allman *479

5. The Day the United States Hanged a Woman463If These Quilts Could Talk: Signals along the Underground Railroad436Will the Wolf Survive — or Attack? Examining “The Grey” Controversy328Rembrandt: Last Chances To See a Life-Changing Work of Art306A remarkable Mother’s Day story of an unforgettable “Lady” and her gifted son, Arshile Gorky242My All-time Best Americana/Roots albums.221The Deadly Attack of the Smart Phone Zombies205Ishmael and Queequeg: the Original Pan-Cultural Odd Couple?175Samsara: A Wordless World of Magnificent Images (opens Friday)173The Magician Behind Miles: Reviving the American Individualism of Gil Evans146Blogger bio133Garry Wills exposes the cultural roots of America’s gun mentality124Kathy Mattea’s “Coal Journey” Back Home116If Dylan wanted to back him up, he must’ve been a hell of a leader. On mountains, he was.115A graphic version of T. Monk (but not Bud Powell) getting unfairly busted by racist cops…112Jeffrey Foucault: Songwriter on a Train to You112Resources99An Elegy to a Symphonic Musician — Bill Bennett90Manty Ellis builds a new foundation for Milwaukee’s jazz scene89Edward S. Curtis preserved America’s Vanishing Race for Posterity86Milwaukee’s Revived Jazz Gallery: A Beacon for Creative Freedom Burns Again81Undecided Voters (in Swing States?): Who Are Those Guys?81Gifted trumpeter-composer Philip Dizack will play three Milwaukee dates77The “Magic Book” of Weather Report and Zawinul interview71More images from Edward Curtis and The Vanishing Race69Eagle Wings and Byrd Calls, and a Gust of Defiantly Mystical Romanticism68Clyfford Still? Yes, the great American painter still holds up, in a whole museum64A grand dame of jazz presents a celebration of “Dexter Gordon @ 90.”60The Aura of the African-American in Visual Art and Culture59Is the Tedeschi Trucks Band the Best American Group Working Today?56They’ve got the back of the Man in Black: Johnny Cash56Political Call and Response and The Falling Man Who Still Haunts55The paranoid and racist John Birch Society is alive in new guises.51Tedeschi Trucks Band – Part 2: A Comparison and a Closer Look50Edo de Waart records Mahler/Harvey Taylor’s new trumpeting50Following the inextiguishable flight of The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”50Riding with another African American as “guilty” as Trayvon Martin, and Pip50My Best Jazz Experiences of 2012 (in memory of James Hazard)49The Perpetual Adolescence of Match.com: Social Network Bans Moby-Dick49Collage: Piecing Together Snips and Heaps of a Common Cultural Act — in Colorado46Weather Report: From the First Lightning Bolt to the Rise of a Jazz Tsunami46Why Gore Vidal (1925-2012) Still Matters45Singer Jackie Allen’s Sophistication and Soul comes home to Milwaukee45Out There in the Life and Time of Dave Brubeck (1920-2012)44Photos That Made History and Make You Remember43The Adventures of Madame Maggie, or the Return of the Hound of the Baskervilles.42Levon Helm and The Band: A Speculative Fictional Fragment and a Tribute41The original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery’s Shadow and Act38Guy Clark and Darrell Scott: Country Troubadours for Our Times38Bandleader Maria Schneider walks a wintry tightrope over her jazz success37Stepping Inside the Outside the Box New Music Festival37My best albums of 2012 in roots vernacular music34Thoreau on newsworthiness/ Environmental writing anthology33Superband leader Christensen survives, but still fights for his financial life33Bluegrass inventor Bill Monroe (Sept. 13, 1911-Sept. 9, 1996) Springs a Surprise32A Musical Meditation on Honor and Barack Obama30Rediscovering a Cezanne Chateau in my Basement30Plucking Musical Fruit Deep in Appalachia30Three Decisive Days of the Civil War, 150 years ago this week30Paul Ryan: The Story of the Peanut Butter-munching Automaton and his Granny29Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist: Marilynne Robinson26Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” endures a modern-day “Shock Corridor.”25Rodney Crowell’s long and winding road back to Emmylou24Antler reaches for sky-born ideas and touches people down here23Is She Safe Because Buddha is on the Smart Phone?22Culture Currents moves to the Grand Tetons22P.S. On Trayvon Martin post. Is Zimmerman a provoker or a victim? (Give us The Watchman!)22Riding with another African American as “guilty” as Trayvon Martin, and Pip21Sand County Songs: Aldo Leopold’s Words and Ideas Make Beautiful Music.21Maria Schneider just nabbed 3 Classical Grammies. Deservedly?20Inside a real wild animal sanctuary20“Edward Curtis and the Vanishing Race,” two more memorable samples19Did I see yo mammy steal somebody’s Grammy? Kudos and Komplaints19Toni Morrison on Melville and the Language of Denial19“Hope Springs” Bubbles Below the Oscar Radar18On 9/11 Anniversary: How Another City Survived its own Fallen Men (Women and Children)18Five Visionary Musicians Travel to the Apocalypse and Beyond17Another list of ideas for action from Walter Mosley17The Tedeschi Trucks Band: As Timeless as the Red Rocks of Colorado17P.S. On Trayvon Martin post. Is Zimmerman a provoker or a victim? (Give us The Watchman!)17A Coen Brothers movie reaches for a rootsy wrinkle in time16A Walmart Cinderella Sweeps Up on Desolation Row15“Big Miracle”: A video movie gem hidden below an icy Alaskan surface15“Trains That Passed in the Night” — How photographer O. Winston Link told a classic American story14John Mellencamp and Stephen King conjur the Ghost Brothers of Darkland County14Wall Street on the Edge: A Deadly Margin for Error14The Flatlanders head for the hills, or was it for a sure-bet payday?14A very brief photo essay on driving into Appalachia14How can the government be everywhere stealing our guns, Senator Lee?13Santana, Trucks and Tedeschi feelin’ good13Climber-skiier-banojist Bill Briggs redux and a correction12Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick plays at his CD release party Saturday at the Jazz Estate12Does Marion Cotillard forge an anti-Ahab heroine for our time in “Rust and Bone”?12Heyyy watermelon man, the whole world hears you playin’ that jazz!12While Republicans filibuster (and fiddle), the grieving wall of Newtown may come to life12You Doubt Ryan Thinks of Humans as Mathematical Digits?12Thoughts of a saddened and bemused Bee Gees fan from 196712Paul Geremia Dwells in the Obscure Depths of the Blues He Brings to Light12Another trip, with abundant comic relief from politics and other ugly human doings11WORDS, SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF COMMON (AND UNCOMMON) CULTURE11More thoughts on Levon Helm from Louie Perez of Los Lobos and a great video10Jeffrey Foucault’s Cold Satellite Transmits a Yeats-like Vibe109Digging (up) the Year’s Vernaculars, Roots and All9Two Guys and Their Guitars98Another dose of too-slippery-to-peg Americana8A few thoughts on “Take Five.”7Getting down off your horse and savin’ a little face is as American as apple pie in the face.7Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair. Hover through the Fog and Filthy Air!7A Gust of Cooling Emily Dickinson7Amiri Baraka: A Native Son of Racial Reality and Necessity6“Black Radio” Radiates Across Milwaukee’s Great Divide5Local labor movement struggles for job creation.4As Mittor Romsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams…4National Literacy Month is here4Something to do, to be responsible for.3Happy About a Hanging?3now vote to recall3Does Walker walk the walk, too? Nah, he just pushes a pile he treats like garbage (cartoon by Kevin Lynch).3#2 (loading title)2What’s Scott Walker up to now?2#1 (loading title)2Moby rises again (intact) on match.com1

Russell Banks  — A Permanent Member of the Family (Ecco) $25.99 228 pages.

From a son’s massive saga of his father, Civil War firebrand John Brown, to his incisive story collection, Russell Banks has demonstrated acute insight into human relations, in a myriad of their intensely pressurized, comic and tragic permutations.

Ostensibly about family in the broadest sense, these stories rarely comfort but reveal how most all of us strive upstream for human connection, an instinct often as haphazard as a windblown leaf.

Banks is best known as a novelist, and two of his books have been made into acclaimed films, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter. His 2004 novel, The Darling, about the odyssey of a wanted 1960s radical, is in development with Jessica Chastain in the title role. His epic John Brown novel, Cloudsplitter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and stands up to any historical novel in recent memory.

James Coburn (right) won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in the film adaptation of  “Affliction,” Russell Banks’ novel of a troubled and divorced working-class man. The character is played by Nick Nolte. Courtesy sodahead.com

Two of his most provocative novels involve young protagonists. Rule off the Bone is a sort of picaresque mix of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. Banks’ last novel, Memory of Lost Skin, follows the struggles of a very young man who has done a sentence for a sex offense, and must fend for himself in a fearful world that refuses to understand much, including his crime’s context, until a sociology professor takes interest in him. And yet, Banks was always a masterful short story writer. The previous collection Angel on the Roof contained all his short fiction, until this one.

The opening story, “Former Marine” exposes the fault lines of desperate paternal pride and love to heartbreaking and shocking effect. An ex-Marine can’t bring himself to admit to his three grown sons the precipice he has recklessly reached in his life. Along the way comes a scene in which the father stops in a movie theater to watch the recent film Lincoln. It seems an incongruous act for this man on the edge, yet very telling of humanity’s crooked path, following perhaps the instinct to find succor or salvation in the past.

The rest of the stories in A Permanent Member of the Family are comparatively muted in final effect, until the last story, but each illuminates the strange, comical and provisional beauty of human interaction in a seeming harsh world.

Author Russell Banks. Courtesy online.wsj.com

The title story concerns a divorcing family hanging onto the pet dog like a life buoy that each must pass among them in a manner that may not really save any of them. The father, struggling hard to keep the family intact despite diminishing odds, finally has all of his four daughters in his car at once. Hope springs anew. Then he makes a fatal mistake. A heavy pick and cold, hard earth come to signify the damage done to a family’s heart.

“Searching for Veronica” involves a mother’s enigmatic quest to find her missing daughter, but may be a search to find herself just as much. One conversation has a meta-consciousness aura, a rather literary contemplation of how blood and identity entwine. But it works completely as real-life dialogue, the mark of a master fiction writer.

Sometimes Banks’ people do find tender if temporary connections that strike deep chords of joy and pain. In “Lost and Found” a middle-aged man and woman rekindle romance after five years:

“It wasn’t male vanity. It was Ellen herself, a very specific woman, whose smoky low voice, green eyes, dry humor and right, interesting words, and yes, slender legs, that had got to him. That and the way she made him feel about himself…funny, smart, good-looking, and lonely. These were feelings about himself that he had lost, bit by bit, over the years of his marriage in middle-age, small increments of loss, so that he wasn’t even aware of the loss, until that night when they ended up alone in his room at the Marriott. Lost and, because of her, found. And then all of a sudden lost again. Until now.”

“Blue” is almost surreal, yet utterly plausible — a black woman, shopping for a car, is trapped in a far corner of the dealer’s large lot by a vicious guard dog. The salesmen, having pegged her a “tire-kicker” who’ll leave and return, close the lot. After hours, a young male Good Samaritan finally offers her hope of rescue, like a long lost son.

The closing story, “The Green Door” concerns a drunken family man fatefully attracted to a sex club, and a casino bartender-narrator, playing the classic role of social facilitator.

Yet, in these tales, nothing is quite as it seems, and Banks, with no contrivance, shines lyrical light and shadow upon his characters’ yearning and risk, suffering and loss, with sage understanding of the deep corners of human nature.

I suspect that these are stories, like those in Angel, that I will return to, and make permanent members of my family.

Here’s a video of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interviewing Russell Banks about his writing and his choice of writing through the voices of outcasts, criminals and revolutionaries. It includes a scene from the film The Sweet Hereafter, a story about “lost childhood.” : http://barclayagency.com/speakers/videos/banks.html/1

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

Editorial assistance by Ann K. Peterson

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.”

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