Riverwest Jazz Fest postscript: Man, it was a hundred-proof happening!

 

The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken, performing in Madison. isthmus.com

It was small and compact, but the first Riverwest Jazz Fest delivered a blow — a wake-up call — that should leave the city’s consciousness slightly dazed, and asking for more, if it has a cultural backbone.

Apologies if that lead exceeds an acceptable testosterone limit, but sometimes such associations seem more apt than others. Of course, it’s really too early to tell what sort of impact this event will have on the neighborhood or city, but you can begin to imagine by realizing that it was planned to be twice as big, and strives to be just that in the future.

As it was, the event, tucked neatly in a slightly two block-plus parameter of Center Street right off of Humboldt Blvd., allowed patrons easy access to all three bubbling venues: The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, Bar Centro, and Company Brewing. Plus, there was at least one band jamming in the storefront studios of Riverwest Radio, located between JGCA and Centro.

Talk about concentrated. Let’s say you couldn’t do much better even if you were a jazz-aholic who needs to down a row of hundred-proof musical shots.

Yes, I know, Wisconsin “has a drinking problem.” Maybe I’m better off retreating into comfy cliché-land for the faint-hearted. This was “the little fest that could.”

Three other venues were all originally solicited to be pioneering fest participants. Each had some reason to decline.

Their loss, of course, but hopefully herein lies a lesson or two about smart marketing, especially in your own neighborhood, the lifeblood of such small venues. Each venue did have to pony up pay for the musicians, as the whole event was free admission, donations and tips aside. But that sort of commitment is the first step in smart collaborative marketing. An organized event like a jazz fest pretty much assures a built-in audience and revenue boost.

Although none of the crowds were literally shoulder-to-shoulder, everywhere on Center, people either milled and chilled in the Harvest Moon nocturne, or strolled to another venue.

Kudos to JGCA president Mark Lawson, reportedly whose brainchild this was. I suspect Lawson might’ve sensed this was an urgent moment to give the neighborhood a cultural jolt, as his space had foundered somewhat in terms of consistent recent musical activity. That’s hardly to diminish the place as a consistently and successfully operated art gallery.

And yet, as is fairly well known, the venue has a tremendous music legacy to maintain, that of the historic Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, whose inspired grotto of a ghost it inhabits.

The venue now has the cultural audacity to be a grants-dependent, community-oriented “arts center.” Though sans the original venue’s bar, it remains the sort of thing this neighborhood should embrace gladly. So, JGCA is an ever-colorful listening space, and still boasts the now-vintage checkerboard stage that hosted many famous jazz names in the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery days, and a respectable Yamaha baby grand house piano, and new sound system. The space’s success as a visual art gallery derives from the owning entity, the Riverwest Artists Association, strongly oriented to visual artists, and its president, Lawson, is a professional gallery curator.

Drummer Victor DeLorenzo, formerly of The Violent Femmes and currently in the chamber rock duo Nineteen Thirteen, guest performs at the long-standing “Seeds Sounds” free jazz series at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts. riverwest.org.

His musical tastes lean toward more experimental and offbeat music than straight-ahead jazz, so “ya-never-know-what-you’re-gonna-get,” as a chocolate-loving pop philosopher once declared. Friday night strongly reinforced that reputation. The headline act proved as provocative and engrossing as its name, The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken (pictured at top) sports one of the most hilariously mock-bildungsroman monikers for a jazz band I’ve encountered.

The trio is led by ace and, yes, adventurous saxophonist Aaron Van Oudenallen (a.k.a. Aaron Gardner), who might be the second coming of electric-saxophone pioneer Eddie Harris; or what we hope Eddie would be doing today, if alive and pushing the hip envelope hard. Their set was a kaleidoscope of electronica, from slyly lyrical big-sky starbursts to Ab-Ex grunge, almost invariably underpinned by powerful currents of funk and driving rhythm. Van Oudenallen often plays with one hand twiddling an electronic effects box — as if an expose’ of the man behind the curtain, The Wizard of Odds.

Fender electric bassist Matt Turner regales the audience with his potent, pulsing virtuosity, and his eccentric affability. Drummer Jeremy Kunziar delivers multidirectional piston-like power.

This electronically deep-diving band has been around for a number of years and evidently has a decent (or indecent, as their name might suggest) following, at least slightly beneath “the lower frequencies,” where they speak to you, to paraphrase the great Invisible Man novelist Ralph Ellison.

The Chicken’s set included a boiling jam with trumpeter Jamie Breiwick sitting in, which climaxed with the band scorching Harris’s masterpiece “Freedom Jazz Dance,” a propulsive, shaman’s-shake of chord changes.

If you’re on Facebook, here’s a clip of The Chicken in full flight at the fest, during “Freedom,” courtesy of Tami Williams: https://www.facebook.com/fiilm/videos/3616003828679078

Meanwhile, over at the street’s straight-ahead jazz refuge, Bar Centro, a surprise waited in unknown-to-me bandleader and tenor saxophonist Tael Estremera, He was possibly the youngest performer in the fest, yet also the most modern trad-oriented, as I heard them covering small masterpieces from John Coltrane’s classic album Giant Steps, including the title tune and the exquisitely modulated “Naima.” The quartet’s guitarist, Ben Dameron, whose own band Heirloom did the opening set, seems to be everywhere these days, and is a flash-firing virtuoso, slightly reminiscent of John McLaughlin. You should him check out ASAP.

The stylishly curvaceous bar at Bar Centro is a strong feature of this fast-rising Riverwest jazz venue. visitmilwaukee.com.

Finally, a happy hubbub brimmed at a nearly packed house at Company Brewing. Trumpeter Eric Jacobson, best known for his bristling hard-bop, was delivering an appealingly relaxed set of modern jazz with a primo quartet of local vets, reflective of his excellent recent album Discover.

Jazz trumpeter Eric Jacobson. foxcitiesmagazine. com

Just about then, the festival’s headliner, double Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch, sauntered into Company and the table was set for the climax of the festival.

Alas, I had to depart just before Lynch’s set, but I have no doubt it was a compelling and bracing topper to an auspiciously-debuted event we hope becomes annual.

As for newborn Riverwest Jazz Fest, here’s a toast:

Let your garden grow,

in our pastures of cultural plenty,

as in, plenty mo’ music,

every which way you go.

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1. However, the arts center has consistently hosted a weekly “free jazz” workshop and, more recently, the Milwaukee Jazz Institute’s weekly educational jam sessions, and other community gatherings.

  • who says Riverwesters don’t have a politically incorrect sense of humor? I just took this snapshot of by back-alley Riverwest neighbor’s handsome new wooden security fence with the following sign. (Apologies for my impertinence).

Trumpeting Riverwest’s first Jazz Fest

Except during the swing era, jazz has almost always had to play the survivor’s game. The seminal American art form migrates, like small, hungry herds of mammalian musical genius – and, of course, at least one genius “Bird” — incessantly wandering urban savannahs for watering amenable holes that usually lubricate patrons with at least coffee drinks as they dig the sounds.

Milwaukee’s no different. Accordingly, three self-consciously hip neighborhoods in this city have sustained the music to varying degrees, along with a smattering of venues in the near-north side Harambee and Bronzeville neighborhoods.

However, the East Side’s long-standing Jazz Estate has largely abdicated it’s nominal attraction, leaving that neighborhood a relatively arid region for live jazz — ironically given the Estate new identity as “specialty drink bar.”

The most conspicuous jazzy neighborhood, in terms of an organized presence, has been the southside’s Bay View which annually hosts the large, one-day Bay View Jazz Festival. This successful endeavor is built along the festival’s backbone, Kinnickinnick Avenue, a promenade of quirky and fascinating storefronts, galleries, bars and music spaces.

Now, the third hip neighborhood, Riverwest, is trumpeting its “look-at-me” moment. Three music venues on Center Street are teaming up for the first Riverwest Jazz Fest, this Friday night at The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, Bar Centro, and Company Brewing.

The fest lineup (below) is colorfully diverse and headlined by two-time Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch. Another notable act is the fast-rising band Heirloom.

Heirloom

The venue with the most auspicious history is the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, located in the same space originally occupied by the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery which presented “a dazzling lineup of many of the most significant musicians in jazz history,” notes one of the fest’s organizers, trumpeter-bandleader-recording artist Jamie Breiwick. “With great respect for these pioneers of jazz, contemporary jazz isn’t an art form that recycles the past, but a dynamic evolving collaboration of inventive musicians that mirrors the present while creating the new future.” He invites patrons to “be a part of this new future with the first ever Riverwest Jazz Fest.”

The new fulcrum among the three venues that’s now offering jazz most consistently is the stylishly intimate Bar Centro, located kitty corner from the larger Company Brewing space.

All three venues are on Center Street within a couple blocks of each other, so there’s no excuse to not make the rounds, and support all three. The festival is free admission, but donations will be welcome as will be offerings to tip jars for the performing groups.

Here’s the Riverwest Jazz Fest lineup:

5:30 PM – New Orleans-style March with the Big Style Brass Band from Jazz Gallery to Company Brewing

Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts (926 E Center St)

6 PM – Jazz Flux

8 PM – The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken

Bar Centro (804 E Center St)

6 PM – Heirloom

8 PM – Tael Estremera Quartet

Company Brewing (735 E Center St)

9:30 PM – Eric Jacobson Quartet

11 PM – Brian Lynch Quartet

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This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/trumpeting-riverwests-jazz-fest/

 

Barry Velleman album spurs Milwaukee jazz memories in delightful and surprising ways

Album review: Barry Velleman/Harvie S. — Something Wonderful (RVS Records)

Barry Velleman should ring a bell, oh man—if you’re a Milwaukee jazz fan of a certain age.

The pianist credibly served as one of the house pianists at the legendary Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in the late ‘70s- early ‘80s. His performance and recording credits include Brian Lynch (who considers him a primary influence), Jerry Bergonzi, Phil Grenadier, Charles Davis, Gerald Cannon, Chuck Hedges, Jamie Breiwick, Eric Jacobson, Jerry Grillo and renowned bassist Harvie S, whom he’s known since high school. He’s one of my personal favorite interpreters of Thelonious Monk. After retiring as a Spanish professor at Marquette U., Velleman moved back to his home area near Boston.

Something Wonderful lives up to its title. As an appreciator of the pianist’s acerbic wit with Monk, the revelation for me was (perhaps I’d forgotten) his seeming effortlessness at lyrical playing. So, there’s plenty of musical meat, yet the album is a natural mood brightener.

Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch (left) considers pianist Barry Velleman (far right) a primary influence on him. This quartet photo includes Lynch, Velleman, bassist Chuck Ledvina and saxophonist David Bixler.

In his new biography, piano master Brad Mehldau speaks of the “unapproachable yet inviting” quality of certain great jazz pianists. You get that sense with Velleman, at times wondering at his wizardry, and its off-handedness. “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” bristles with characteristically pungent chords without overdoing it. He uses his chords like a painter adding depth and texture to his aural landscapes. There I go again, about his harmonies. Maybe there’s a song in his heart, or he understands harmony so well he can turn improvs into lovely melody by mining the structural essence.

A surprise is the seemingly cornball “Lollipops and Roses,” which he transforms with a cool intro and a medium-slow tempo, allowing the melody space to breathe, a very hip story of “What if? What about this?” Bassist Harvie S is superb throughout, but really shines by taking the arco melodic lead on the closer “Remind Me,” an underplayed Jerome Kern song.

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This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/something-wonderful-by-barry-velleman-and-harvie-s/

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the thoughtful guitarist Steve Peplin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image result for Spirits by Jamie Breiwick Quartet

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Lynch opens his own songbook again, and some frolicking birds flew out, singing a song

The Brian Lynch Quintet will perform at an album release event for Songbook Volume 2, at Bar Centro, 804 E. Center St., 8:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12. Tickets @milwaukeejazzinstitute.org  

 

A Thumbnail Brian Lynch Primer:

Brian Lynch’s trumpet burns, sings and rings the chimes of freedom, within your musical mind, and body.

He is also among the very best — among a steady but small class of musical culture- forgers. Nope, not forger as in faker.

I use forger, the perhaps nakedly exposed subject noun, because Lynch is forging fresh original musical edifices that dance in the wind, as he honors and plumbs the past. He’s mastered the modern jazz canon and advances the vernacular like nobody’s business.

He now supposes to ask: What about my sense of melody, harmony, and composition? He’s proven his ability’s on Songbook Vol 1, and across his storied career. So this is a typically high-grade Lynch release with studio players of any renown, of his choice.

Spoiler alert: Lynch wrote all the tunes on Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To.

Fear not. This is a typically high-grade Lynch release, with chosen studio musicians of any renown, of his choice, all ace purveyors of Cubano-Latin Jazz.

‘Tis is as much fun as you can have on a Brian Lynch album, even as its musical limbs are plenty meaty enough to step further into the fray of chaos, to make gleaming, spontaneously choreographed, swinging music out of it. He knows how to do that as an composer and arranger, having worked in the highest levels of mainstream jazz, in most of its group forms. (specific review at bottom)

After all he’s a Grammy Award winner for his own big band’s brilliant recording The Omni-American Book Club/ My Journey through Literature in Music. The two-CD session featured Donald Harrison, Regina Carter, Dafnis Prieto, Dave Leibman, and Orlando “Maraca” Valle, and Jim Snidero. Lynch burnishes the modern big band style with literary influences that speak profoundly to the troubles — and defiant potential — of a less-than-humane world, tight-roping their humanity between capitalists and real or neo-authoritarian governments.
His musical ensemble comrises various people he works with often in his Latin American musical travels as a music professor in Florida and through jazz upper circles of influence.

That two-CD aIbum grew from his deep reading of, among other writers, the pioneering African-American sociologist, socialist, historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. The album — featuring Donald Harrison, Dave Liebman, Jim Snidero, and Regina Carter, among others — climaxes a series of concept albums involving tributes to “unsung heroes” among trumpeters, a sequence which included his 2016 album commemorating the work of the great, short-lived post-bop trumpet master Woody Shaw, titled Madera Latino. That two-CD set — which also features fellow trumpeters Dave Douglas, Sean Jones and Philip Dizack — was Grammy-nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album. All of the trumpeter-tribute albums and the big-band recording are on Lynch’s own Hollistic Music Works label.

His previous album Brian Lynch Songbook Vol. 1: Bus Stop Serenade, suggested his own street cred, and shows that he long ago found his own voice as a composer, as well as a trumpeter, on previous recordings. Those often involved African-American recording collaborators and mentors like Milwaukee’s Melvin Rhyne and Buddy Montgomery, and saxophonists Harrison, Ralph Moore and Javon Jackson with whom he paired up for the front line of the final edition of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, perhaps the most legendary hard-bop band in jazz history. He also worked with another iconic hard-bop group, The Horace Silver Quintet, a post-bop quintet with Phil Woods, as well as the ground-breaking Toshikio Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Jazz Orchestra.

Following are a few photographic lights of fire in Brian Lynch’s long legacy. What follows is my review of Songbook: Vol. 2, to be released Aug. 12.  

In Ralph Peterson and the Messenger Legacy, trumpeter Brian Lynch revisits his front-line fellows, Bobby Watson (left) and Billy Pierce (right), from the final edition of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Photo courtesy jimmysoncongress.com

Brian Lynch’s educational and performance roots: This award-winning Wisconsin Conservatory of Music student jazz ensemble from the early 1980s, included Brian Brian Lynch on trumpet in the center. From left are guitarist John Zaffiro, drummer Mark Davis, bassist Al Anderson, pianist Marcus Robinson. To Lynch’s left are tenor saxophonist Rolla Armstead and trombonist Hary Kozlowski. Overseeing them is jazz program co-director Manty Ellis, at far right. Courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

** ****

REVIEW:

Brian Lynch and Spheres of Influence — Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To (Hollistic MusicWorks)

BY KEVIN LYNCH

Most musicians wouldn’t revisit their own original material, except in concert. But trumpeter Brian Lynch has always probed deeply into many of his artistic forebears, in his “unsung heroes” series and superb Woody Shaw tribute albums, among others. He eventually realized he’d accumulated a deep repertoire of his own originals worthy of reimagining, and owning a label allows this. His self-inquiry remains fruitful on Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To. It’s a way of highlighting his personal “spheres of influence,” which he traces to his early days with Milwaukee’s Latin Jazz band La Chazz. He crafted a style by expanding the bustling crossroads of Latin and modern jazz forms and expression.

Songbook’s subtitle is a key, undercutting any pretense of honorific self-regard, and suggests: “Respond any way you choose.” Some Latin tempos get fast and complex, yet you can “dance” along, literally, or figuratively – “go with it,” by halving the tempo and soaking it up. Yet Lynch invariably takes you by the hand, with his ever-affable lyricism, a rare gift for melody, even in the most heated trumpet improv. A primary “influence sphere” is the great pianist Eddie Palmieri with whom Lynch earned his first Grammy Award on 2006’s Simpatico. The opener “E.P.’s Plan” offers bristling horn harmonies, and Lynch’s solo pushes ideas like a dancer leading a mambo clave with el diablo. By contrast, “Across the Bridge” is a measured theme, seeming to signify a sturdy bridge for Latino and Norte American forms and sensibilities. Pianists Kemuel Roig and Alex Brown especially sustain the tricky Latin rhythms while expanding on sinuous solos, over electric bassist Rodner Padeilla, drummer Hillario Bell and percussionist Murphy Aucamp. 1

Among a wide-ranging wealth of Lynch “dance songs” is a lovely speculative breather, the elegant bolero “Que Seria La Vida” (What Would Life Be Like?). It would be far poorer without the growing Brian Lynch oeuvre.

The Brian Lynch Quintet will perform at an album release event for Songbook Volume 2, at Bar Centro, 804 E. Center St., 8:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12. Tickets @milwaukeejazzinstitute.org  

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This review was first publised in shorter form in The Shepherd Express: Brian Lynch Songbook review

  1. As with volume 1, Lynch offers Songbook, Vol. 2.as a low-priced two-CD set,  In this instance, for the second disc, he’s recorded or edited shorter “radio versions of all the tunes, except one. Those average about five to six minutes. And smartly Lynch included duration times for everything. So you can take in the songbook in shorter drafts or soak it all the way up, like the Caribbean Sea, released dancing, somewhere down deep in your soul.

Dave Bayles leads us down the road not taken

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, from 6 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.

_________

Neal Chandek is gone. May his trumpet bellow from the heavens, and shake our souls with his power.


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January 29, 2022, 11:45 a.m.
Had a marvelous, stimulating nearly 3-hour visit yesterday with my old friend (and former upstairs duplex neighbor), jazz musician Neal Chandek, who is in St. Mary’s hospital with a bad respiratory condition. He’s one of the most vibrant, knowledgeable and intelligent persons I know, and was in top form yesterday, aside from still being very dependent on induced oxygen, which he’ll need to continue with when he leaves. Thankfully now, he can periodically remove the full face mask to visit with friends (see photo). So please do so, he craves company.
***
“Descanse en Paz Amigo RIP” — guitarist Javier Mendez, in a farewell message to Neal Chandek
This death is devastating for me, the first personal friend of mine to die of complications of Covid. But I can only imagine what it means for the fellow musicians who were closest to him, and to family members.
Neal Chandek once dwelled near the heart of a booming Milwaukee jazz subculture, then for too long, in the shadows of even modest personal success – ever vital, yet a poor man in earthly goods. I suspect he even went hungry too often  And yet, what comes to mind is a quote from a film he might’ve “died for,” Babette’s Feast – “An artist is never poor.”
The notion serves up as mostly cold comfort to me today and yet, deep down, in the vast and sprawling feast-and-famine of life, I feel the warmth of this man’s heart, and the radiant energy of his creative intellect, and hunger for knowledge, beauty, and truth.
Yes, my still-warm and even pulsing memories of him center upon that wonderful afternoon in late January. This deeply-stricken keyboardist and somewhat-forgotten trumpeter had asked me to visit him, and to lend him a book, a biography or autobiography, he said, to immerse himself in, I think. to assuage, and perhaps find meaning for, his suffering.
So, I lent him my copy of Miles Davis, a biography by Ian Carr, a noted British jazz writer and trumpeter. Yet, when I spoke to him for the last time, by phone a few days later, sadly, this voracious reader and maven of jazz and history, could only tell me to come retrieve the book. He feared it might get lost when he is soon transferred. I never made it back in time.
I think he was also pondering a lifetime, his own, and perhaps how it might take the form of a biography, even if it is never quite written. But I hope it is inscribed somehow, on the stone beneath which he might lie, or in the wind of his ashes, even if only a musical sequence of dark marks dancing in the currents that eventually carry him to a higher ground.
My mind traces him with such a notion because, among the remarkable things we touched upon in that deeply-gratifying last conversation – mostly driven by his own desperate need to seize the day, a rare heathy one – was of a higher power.
As we talked, he delved into a profound justification for such a truth, by deftly exposing what he saw as the castle-on-a-cloud constructions of certain neo-atheist theorists, like Richard Dawkins.
I can’t do justice to how surgically he stitched together the underlying truth, as so much is implicitly understood, even hermetically sealed, yet so righteous, a perfectly resolved harmony of the spheres. His thoughts aligned beautifully with that which I carry within me, as a sort of spiritual ballast. I explained to him, I’m an agnostic who spends an inordinate amount of time searching, believing in something, even in the unprovable, which often seems to me so manifest that even The Greatest Silence resounds wordless in The Song of the Wind.
This admission of mine came as a great relief to him as, for some reason, he assumed I was an atheist. I now hang onto this harmonized exchange as a small reward of solace we shared, for him most preciously – for most persons encounter fears of the empirically unknown, while beginning to face mortality’s cruel countdown.
He also urged me to read the great lay theologian C.S. Lewis, who seemed a touchsone for Neal, and I plan on it, probably his Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, for starters, as I’ve read more about Lewis than his actual work, except as a adolescent, the children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I also will follow his urging to see the apparently extraordinary Nazi-era film Mephisto, an adaptation of the story of Doctor Faustus. And if I feel up to it, a book called Military Justice is to Justice what Military Music is to Music, a book by Robert Sherrill, with a title employing a Groucho Marx quote.
In those final 40-plus hospital-imprisoned days, the two-headed monster of COVID-19 and COPD pneumonia seared and ravaged his lungs. His pain and angst grew, until finally he could only reach out through social media with beckoning for prayers, the most genuine anyone could muster:
Neal Chandek Facebook Feb. 10, 11:52 a.m.
“Well, here I sit/lay. 34th day at St.Mary’s Hospital. Covid has scarred my lungs so badly that my body won’t absorb any oxygen. They’re not optimistic. I need your prayers. REAL PRAYERS!
READ MATTHEW 6/5 and you’ll know what I mean.”
Here’s Matthew 6/5 and 6/6, from The King James version:
6:5 And when thou prayest though shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
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Doubters, especially now, may reasonably question whether those “secret prayers” were “rewarded.” For sure, Neal clearly loved and cherished life, as a song in the wind he needed to draw from as long as possible. Might some measure of faith allow us to surmise that, by invoking the sacred Biblical wisdoms, Neal began gulping in a long breath of grace? Something to bellow his spirit upwards, and beyond?
The bellow would be the baying of his own trumpet, too-long forsaken, but essential to the musician he was.
Neal Chandek (right, on trumpet) with Bembe Orchestra, at Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Rainbow Summer, 1994. Pictured also, Alan Johnson, (left, on trumpet), Carlos Eguis Aguila, (center, on Bata drum – Okonkolo). Photo by Pat A Robinson.
I am deeply grateful that many friends have already honored him with spiritual salutations of many sorts on his Facebook page. In his last days, he surely had joyous memories of his 60th birthday celebration at Transfer Pizzeria Cafe, where a fulsome variety of friends, fans and well-wishers gathered that evening to hear him play with the Transfer Pizzeria Band, which he led there for more than a decade.
My oldest memories of Neal are of far-more-distant happy days in Milwaukee, when he lived upstairs from me on Astor Street, with fellow musician John Foshager. This was the mid-1980s, when I was covering jazz for The Milwaukee Journal, and he was playing piano and trumpet with La Chazz. That was a marvelous Latin-jazz group led by guitarist Toty Ramos. So Neal and I hit it off, with common interests extending even beyond the grand cavalcade of music of The African Diaspora.
I find it significant that, in the photo below of La Chazz, the band is gathered around a grand piano. That’s the instrument that Neal (second from left, in the photo) played and, as his very first Facebook honorific writer, Michael Reyes, recalls, Neil the pianist “could play a solid montuno, (and) he would often double on trumpet in the same ensemble.”
Image of La Chazz Courtesy of Cecil Negron Sr.
I’ll continue with a copy of Michael’s excellent memorial tribute to Neal:
Michael Reyes 
Facebook 
Tuesday, February 15, 5:42 p.m. 
A monumental figure in the history of Milwaukee’s jazz scene has left us today at age 66. Neal Chandek was a trumpeter, pianist, arranger, educator, historian and provocative devotee of jazz, blues, latin jazz, salsa, son, rumba and beyond. Neal’s work with the groundbreaking Wisconsin-based supergroup “La Chazz” was nothing short of inspirational. A pianist, who could play a solid montuno, he would often double on trumpet in the same ensemble.
He dedicated his life to the music he loved. An alumnus of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Neal was part of a contemporary group of virtuoso musicians that included Jeff Pietrangelo (trumpet legend), Brian Lynch, David Hazeltine, Jeff Chambers, Carl Allen, Toty Ramos, Cecil Negron, Walter “Wally” Robles, Albert Rivera, Jerry Grillo, Dennis Fermenich, Bill Martin and many others.
Neal’s commitment to music was 24/7. He would practice, teach, study, perform, rehearse and then read and reflect and meditate on music as much as his mind and body would physically allow him. He loved music of the African Diaspora as well as European Classical Music.
During the late ’70’s through the ‘80’s , Neal would often invite musicians to his home for after-hours listening parties (and jam sessions) that would extend past sunrise. Neal’s former room-mate, Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Brian Lynch, composed and recorded a song entitled “Chandek’s Den” in 1989 memorializing those moments on his album “Backroom Blues” (Criss Cross Jazz 1042CD). Legendary Drummer Art Blakey also included “Chandek’s Den” in his final album “Chippin In” (Timeless) in 1990.
After a period of wide ranging musical freelancing, he started to give lessons on a larger scale. Thanks to musician and business owner Russell Rossetto, Neal began to enjoy the blessing of a steady weekly gig as leader of the Neal Chandek Trio at Milwaukee’s Transfer Pizzeria.
There he would hold court before excited audiences who often were treated to special musical guests who would sit in. Some of those guests included members of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, as well as local, regional and national musicians who would stop by to say hi. Neal also invited young students to sit in to get experience.
Condolences to Neal’s sister Jane Prentice and her family. Sympathies go out to all of Neal’s friends, family, students, bandmates and loved ones.
Farewell Big Brother Neal Chandek RIP (b. 6-30-1955 d. 2-15-2022)
Neal Chandek. Photo by Leiko Napoli
I’ll conclude with a few final thoughts on Neal the man, the artist, and the jazz communitarian, partly inspired by this delightful photo (above) of Neal by noted Milwaukee jazz photographer Leiko Napoli. I think she captures the mature Neal Chandek’s personality as well as any photo that I’ve seen.
The man had a huge heart and a huge mind. The heart I hope to characterize by one more anecdote of my last visit with him on January 29. He was talking very hopefully and boldly as we were discussing common interests. He discovered that I, like him, am a golfer, and we compared notes on local golf courses and agreed that we should play a round as soon as the weather permitted. How much of this was wishful thinking, I wondered, given his state of possibly a chronic deficiency of oxygen, if somehow his lungs could recover. I had heard he was even a candidate for a lung transplant.
Another subject he brought up was gospel music, and he asked if I would be interested in going to a church service with a powerful gospel choir. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I enthusiastically said yes. As it is, perhaps I will hear a gospel choir some time which will bring me a little closer to Neal, and what I fancy to be his archangel’s trumpet.
And then, as we were talking about gospel singing he let loose with a few bars of resounding gospel-like soul singing of his own. I’ve heard a recording of him singing “Georgia on My Mind.” So I knew what he could do with his voice, but I was stunned that he could even belt out a few bars in his oxygen-compromised condition.
Yes, he was a little larger-than-life nearing death, on that afternoon. As the photo above suggests, he had an impish wit and intellect.
He could discourse on any number of subjects of historical or cultural significance. Sometimes, when he was really cooking, his flow of ideas and opinions could get a bit overbearing. But I think he was conscious of that, and during our conversation he frequently pulled himself back, to hear my response. I, of course, wanted to feed him all the intellectual oxygen he could ingest, to transform into golden moments of give-and-take.
I have one last anecdote about Neal, the jazz-jam maestro, which is part of my forthcoming (I swear!) book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy. I will save it for the publication of the book. Neal knows the story very well, and it demonstrates how his ability to connect with, and gather, musicians extended to some of the most celebrated jazz players who ever visited Milwaukee in the 1980s and early-1990s, a heyday of jazz in this city.
Descanse en Paz Amigo RIP.
____________

Two Milwaukee-bred trumpeting beacons illuminate the city’s music scene this month

Multi-Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch. Courtesy news miami.edu

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick with his hip-hop/jazz band KASE (l-r, Breiwick, John Christensen, bass, and Knowsthetime (Ian Carroll), turntables and electronics. Courtesy Brian Myr and Tone Madison

A pair of prodigious trumpeters blaze a sky-streaking reveille for Milwaukee music fans this month.

Perk an ear, to catch two of the best this town’s modern trumpet legacy has ever produced. The mirroring city-bred names are Brian Lynch, on Thursday, February 10, and Jamie Breiwick, on Friday, February 25.

In fact, these two trumpeters seem to have a mystical sort of synchronicity going, as they both graced Milwaukee with notable concert events exactly four years ago this month. See my article on that double event here:

Opening doors of modern jazz history with Milwaukee-native trumpeters Brian Lynch and Jamie Breiwick

To be clear, Lynch hasn’t resided in Milwaukee in decades. But he was raised in Milwaukee, attended Nicolet High School and The Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and developed his musical wings on the local jazz scene in the 1980s. A storied career  has seen him arguably surpass even legendary Green Lake-native Bunny Berigan as the premiere trumpet icon in state history. Yet he remains actively loyal to this city, returning annually for a trumpeting workshop and a recital.

This time, Lynch will do a free workshop at 6 p.m. followed by a 7:30 p.m. performance by his quartet at Bar Centro, 804 E. Center Street, the first local club date he’s done in quite a while. For tickets and information, visit: Brian Lynch Quartet at Bar Centro Feb. 10

Lynch’s quartet will include pianist Mark Davis, head of the events-sponsoring Milwaukee Jazz Institute; bassist Jeff Hamann (best known as longtime accompanist for the NPR radio program (now a podcast) “Whad’ya Know?”), and drummer Kyle Swan.

Lynch has never had a popular hit as big as Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started,” but Berigan claimed that distinction way back when swing jazz was the popular music of the day.

Lynch, has the honor of two Grammy awards and has reached perhaps unparalleled heights in recent years as a Milwaukee-bred jazz musician. Like Breiwick, he’s built on a historically informed mastery of the instrument and its musical tradition, most notably having won a Grammy award last year for Best Jazz Large Ensemble, for The Brian Lynch Big Band recording The Omni American Book Club/My Journey through Literature in Music.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 26: Brian Lynch of Brian Lynch Big Band accepts the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album award for The Omni-American Book Club onstage during the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards Premiere Ceremony at Microsoft Theater on January 26, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The two-CD aIbum grew from his deep reading of, among other writers, the pioneering African-American sociologist, socialist, historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. The album — featuring Donald Harrison, Dave Liebman, Jim Snidero, and Regina Carter, among others — climaxes a series of concept albums involving tributes to “unsung heroes” among trumpeters, a sequence which included his 2016 album commemorating the work of the great, short-lived post-bop trumpet master Woody Shaw, titled Madera Latino. That two-CD set — which also features fellow trumpeters Dave Douglas, Sean Jones and Philip Dizack — was Grammy-nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album. All of the trumpeter-tribute albums and the big-band recording are on Lynch’s own Hollistic Music Works label.

So, even if Brian himself is of Irish descent, most all of the trumpeters he has honored have been African-American, as have been the writers whose work inspired the big band album. 1 So, in several senses, his work honors Black History Month.

Over a long career, Lynch has done more than tribute the work of trumpeting predecessors. His latest album Brian Lynch Songbook Vol. 1: Bus Stop Serenade, suggests his own street cred, and shows that he long ago found his own voice as a composer, as well as a trumpeter, on previous recordings, often with African-American recording collaborators and mentors like Milwaukee’s Melvin Rhyne and Buddy Montgomery, and saxophonists Harrison, Ralph Moore and Javon Jackson with whom he paired up for the front line of the final edition of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, perhaps the most legendary hard-bop band in jazz history. He also worked with another iconic hard-bop group, The Horace Silver Quintet.  

The cover of Brian Lynch’s latest album. Courtesy lastrowmusic.com

And this Songbook Vol. 1 recording includes, besides longtime collaborator Snidero, two Black players, pianist Orrin Evans and drummer Donald Edwards.

The new album is the first in a series of “Songbooks” intended to reclaim the many original compositions that Lynch has recorded for other labels throughout his career. Those include at least one other tribute-type piece, Charles Tolliver, for yet another underrecognized post-bop trumpet stylist and composer. But the mining of his own material also reflects a great American tradition of freedom to pursue personal destiny: “I seem to have become quite stubborn in recent years about invoking artistic self-determination for myself at every opportunity, and having masters of my complete catalogue in my possession has become a bit of an obsession,” Lynch explains.

He has also specialized in Latin Jazz, having earned his first Grammy for the Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project’s Simpatico, as well as recording with The Buena Vista Social Club, Sheila E., Miguel Zenon, Roberto Magris, Tito Puente and Dafnis Preito, among others. 

I could go on about Lynch’s credits but, suffice to say, his is a musical career as auspicious as it is reflective of the great tradition he has extended.

So one expects, in his own compositions, the same high standards he has maintained for the exposition of historic figures deep within the jazz tradition.

***

Jamie Breiwick, actually a Racine-native, might be seen as a younger version of Lynch’s enterprising ambition via the instrument Louis Armstrong made the pioneering tool of supreme jazz soloists. He’s recorded several excellent albums of modern jazz and has, like Lynch, honored artistic forebears, with projects ranging from Thelonious Monk to Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. Breiwick has most recently exploded in the last year or so with a series of fascinating recordings facilitated by the creation, a la Lynch, of his own label, B Side Recordings.

The recordings have included several duets with resourceful partners, but Breiwick’s primary new vehicle has been a hybrid group called KASE, which synthesizes hip-hop instrumental aspects with jazz. One of the group’s pinnacle performance events to date was a collaboration with the jazz-oriented hip-hop singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Klassik, in a concert at the Stoughton Opera House. That collaboration has produced a new album on digital and very limited-edition cassette called Live at the Opera House. Breiwick will produce an album release event for the recording on Friday, February 25 (doors open 7 p.m., event at 8) at The Ivy House, a stylish new events-and-concert venue, at 906 S. Barclay Street in Milwaukee’s Fifth Ward.

Klassik, an extremely-gifted vocal stylist and songwriter, will perform a solo set at 8 p.m., followed by another set by KASE at 9, and a closing set by KASE and Klassik together, at 10 p.m.

Klassik (Kellen Abston), Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine.

The event will also be a print-media coming-out party for the B Side, if you will, of Breiwick’s talents, as a graphic artist, and his second business venture, B Side Graphics. This evening will debut the publication of Sound Museum, a book collection of his striking and stylish album covers, concert posters, and other graphic manifestations of his artistic talent. If you have seen any of Breiwick’s graphics work, you know it’s at a professional creative level comparable to his music. The cassette cover of Live at the Opera House (below) is a prime example:

Cover of “Live at the Opera House,” on B Side Recordings, designed by Jamie Breiwick. 

The event will also feature a pop-up shop by 262 Vintage, with select quality vintage clothing items for sale.

For information and tickets visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/kase-klassik-tickets-235636855177#map-target

___________

  1. Brian Lynch is no relation to this blogger, Kevin Lynch.

 

 

Ron Cuzner: Behind the cool, eccentric facade, a people person

Cuzner hangin’ with a celebrated Milwaukee guitarist, Manty Ellis.

The sublime strains of Duke Ellington’s nocturnal reverie, “Solitude” faded away. A voice arose in your radio, now, a few minutes after midnight:

“Good morning! And welcome to Friday…Ron Cuzner is my name. And this is The Dark Side, The Dark Side of Friday…the fourth of February, nineteen seventy-seven. This is jazz.”

Today, on March twenty-seventh, two thousand and three, Ron Cuzner made his last earthly exit. I wanted to honor his memory with reflections and documents never before published, photographs of Cuzner and his milieu by jazz photographer and quiltmaker Charles Queen, which clearly blend artistry and Milwaukee cultural history. 1

Cuzner often declared on the air that Billy Higgins was his favorite drummer, and part of me suspects that Higgins was his favorite musician period, because, not unlike Higgins, Cuzner was a master of rhythmic phrasing, of textured dynamics…of nuanced articulation…of the pregnant pause…of the held-breath ellipsis.

If Cuzner’s breath and voice weren’t akin to a drummer’s, consider an artist’s paintbrush and oils. But his medium was modern, electronic. He was an original in the medium of Marconi…the radio. On a stage, as the city’s first-call jazz concert emcee, he was almost equally at home. He commanded the stage with an offhanded grace, even when you had to snicker when he stood before a crowd, say, at Jazz in the Park — in his sports-car driver cap, funky shirts, shorts, sneakers and white socks. He often said that if he had not discovered jazz and radio, he would’ve gone into theater.

Ron Cuzner warms up the crowd as (l-r) Berkeley Fudge, Manty Ellis, and Victor Soward prepare to perform at Jazz in the Park.

Fudge and Ellis jamming in the Park

A bassist performs in front of the iconic St. John’s Cathedral at Jazz in the Park

Yes, “Ronald Graham Cuzner” had an ego, but he enfolded himself into the music like a man embracing the vibration, the sumptuous arrangement, the paradiddle parade, the butterfly melody. These were his vibrations, he felt, and they were his audience’s. In other words, I’m probing for a clue to the man behind the stylish vocal curtain.

The curtain was significant, it was clearly presentational and, perhaps some thought “Here was a Wizard of Oz,” or just a wizard of odd. Like the art form he loved, he wasn’t the right thing for everyone. In a way, Ron kept himself inside his own world, the world of Monk’s ” ‘Round Midnight,” the ultimate 100-proof jazz ballad (or is that Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”?). At the same time, he loved sharing, saying, in effect, isn’t this hip, or magnificent, or sheer brilliance?

I hope this photo essay reveals something anew, because Cuzner was invisible in his element, on the airwaves, seeping his intoxication into your subconscious. He was constantly reaching out. And, I would posit, there was a people person — there, behind the stylized hipster.

Jazz record store owner Ron Cuzner (center) displaying his Milwaukee Gemeitlekiet with jazz bandleader Nick Contorno (left) and musician Jim Krofta.

Though he didn’t ask for callers like a talk show, he welcomed them, because he was human, and how many people aren’t lonely sometimes in the wee, small hours of the morning? His classic time slot was midnight to 6 a.m. And any time I ever spoke with him, he was cool, and easy, but warm, like one last martini at closing time.

His playful friendliness was typified by a favorite line of his: “I sincerely hope you are warm tonight, and that you are together tonight, and that your cookie jar is filled to the very brim … with the cookies of your choice, of course.”

Cuzner (right) and his employee Sam Linde, welcome towering trumpeter Kaye Berigan, to the shop.

After you called him during his show for a request or a chat, he would often play a tune for you, but with a sly-but-personal manner. Many musicians especially may recall this post-chat Cuzner rap (fill in your name…): “It’s the suggestion of Kevin Lynch that you drive with caution this evening. You see, his life . . . may depend on it. A message of safety from Kevin Lynch and WFMR, Milwaukee.”

How cool is that? Huh? On one occasion I remember especially, we had a sweet little phone chat and then, immediately he played a tune from Dave Holland’s Conference of the Birds album. I was so impressed by his tacit musical dedication because he nailed me and my taste, because he knew me. Of course, my work as a Milwaukee jazz journalist helped him know my tastes, too. He would later have the remarkable graciousness to recommend me to replace him as a jazz radio host, when he left WLUM, an urban radio station.

These photos notably include his last public “gig,” as a record shop owner, at Ron Cuzner’s Mainstream Jazz Cellar. The place is where Ron literally met his audiences, musicians and lovers of the music, and of the moon’s moody atmosphere.

It became a slice of local jazz history as he hosted chamber jazz events, like one jam featuring then-budding jazz musicians (left to right, below), now-internationally known pianist David Hazeltine (standing, left), and two of his Wisconsin Conservatory students Mark Davis and John Foshager.

For me, and many others, Cuzner oversaw a quietly great era for The Music, as the city’s nocturnal jazz spirit. At 6 a.m., he’d sign off the air with the sun-rising music of Don Shirley. If you weren’t in blissful slumber, all felt right with the world.

If you don’t believe me, or put “trust” in Cuzner because he had trust in you, to have the best of good nights, as in this stylish evening bon mot:

Perhaps Milwaukee’s most renowned contemporary jazz musician, multiple Grammy-winner Brian Lynch (above), frequented Cuzner’s Jazz Cellar back in the day.

Cuzner also drew a hip and sporty crowd, like former MU basketball great, Bo Ellis,(below).

________________

1 Mark Davis is now a distinguished Milwaukee jazz pianist and director of the Milwaukee Jazz Institute.

All photographs by and courtesy of Charles Queen. 

“Milwaukee Jazz” breathes the life of the city’s history in America’s original art form

Jazz singer Jessie Hauck performs with two other key members of “Milwaukee Jazz” history, saxophonist Berkeley Fudge and guitarist Many Ellis. Courtesy Wisconsin Conservatory of Music

Book review: Milwaukee Jazz by Joey Grihalva, Arcadia Publishing $21.99

This illustrated history lives and breathes with its images, almost literally. The profusion of photos, from the 1920s to the present, lets you see horn players blowing fire, drummers thrashing and paradiddling, and singers wailing the blues. Milwaukee Jazz jump-starts the memories of anyone who lived through even some of the city’s remarkable jazz creativityFor young readers or non-Milwaukeeans, it should be revelatory. It’s loads of fun, but also significant in several ways. 

Milwaukee Jazz, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, helps substantially to correct a widespread impression. Milwaukee is considered a jazz backwater in many larger cities, most conspicuously Chicago, with which Milwaukee has, well, a complicated relationship. And yet, among the numerous illustrated gems in the book is the ironic tidbit that Herbie Hancock, arguably Chicago’s most famous pianist, got his first professional gig up the dusty country road here in Polka City.

Front and back cover of “Milwaukee Jazz,”  Photo courtesy WCM

Having closely covered Milwaukee arts during what author Joey Grihalva appropriately calls a “jazz Renaissance” in the 1980s, I see that scene as reflecting Milwaukee as an archetypal American city. It is the essence of the urban heartland (more on that later) And this notion helps us understand why, without much fanfare, most any other medium-to-large-sized American city has its own distinctive jazz scene, Madison being another example I can attest, to first hand. 1

So let’s dive into some of the images and memories vibrating through this almost effortlessly digestible book.

Do you remember, or know, that Duke Ellington seemed enchanted (as you see here) by Milwaukee entertainer and nightclub owner Minette Wilson, better known as “Satin Doll,” for whom he wrote and named one of his most famous tunes?

Duke Ellington (center) makes the jazz scene in Milwaukee which includes (directly below him) a possible muse, entertainer/club owner Minette “Satin Doll” Wilson. Courtesy Wisconsin Black Historical Society

In far less exalted terms, by the late 1950s the jazz club The Brass Rail “had primarily become a strip club with local musicians providing the soundtrack. This was true of most of the Mafia-owned venues downtown, of which there were many,” Grihalva writes. So, Milwaukee musicians did what they needed to make a living.  We later learn that, in 1959, Brass Rail owner Izzy Pogrob was almost certainly murdered by the mob for stealing a boxcar of their alcohol (probably illegally obtained to begin with).Thus, the shadows of this quintessential American city’s deeply ethnic-immigrant grain reveal themselves. Italian and other ethnic club owners did help sustain the music, though too often musicians went poorly paid, despite a musicians union.

By contrast, among the happiest stories is that of Al Jarreau, who grew up on E. Reservoir Avenue, developed in local clubs, and became a multi-Grammy winning vocalist with a chameleon-like stylistic and tonal latitude. But here we learn that Al’s father played the musical saw – with award-winning virtuosity. One infers from this information that young Al may have developed his almost bi-tonal singing ear by absorbing his father’s wowing, sing-song saw!

Jarreau return to “sweet home Milwaukee” frequently and lent his name to a scholarship at his alma mater, Lincoln High, before dying in 2017 at 76.

The city has also attracted great talents from elsewhere including, in modern times, pianist-vibist Buddy Montgomery from the famous musical family from Indianapolis, including his more-celebrated brother guitarist Wes Montgomery. Another Indianapolis transplant, organist Melvin Rhyne, and Montgomery became important figures in Milwaukee, by force of their prodigious talent, ability to develop young sidemen, and for Montgomery forming the Milwaukee Jazz Alliance to advance the interests of local musicians.

Another great musician, from Minneapolis, who grew up here (with local guitarist Manty Ellis as a sort of brother figure) was bop alto saxophonist Frank Morgan. He had a promising career snuffed by a 30-year drug bust jail term, but Morgan returned in the 1980s to international acclaim as an elder jazz statesman.

Alto saxophonist Frank Morgan (here with pianist George Cables) grew up in Milwaukee and, after decades of jail time for a drug bust, his career revived in the ’80s and ’90s to great acclaim. Courtesy Pat Robinson

As early as the 1920s, Georgia-born trumpeter Jabbo Smith was considered a rival to Louis Armstrong in traditional jazz. In the 1930s, he moved to Milwaukee where he stayed for decades, perhaps experiencing, even as a black musician, the city’s well-known bonhomie.

One of the city’s greatest native-born instrumental talents was also marketed as a rival to another more famous musician. Grihalva does this story justice, with four pages devoted to pianist/bandleader Sig Millonzi. Capitol Records signed him in the mid-’50s, hoping to market him as the “American Oscar Peterson.” Millonzi didn’t quite see himself as a version of someone else, so his national recording career was short-lived. But he dominated the Milwaukee scene in the ’50s and ’60s.with his legendary trio and his big band, which would become the Jack Carr-Ron DeVillers Big Band, after Millonzi’s death.

Celebrated Milwaukee jazz pianist and inter-racial pioneer Sig Millonzi leads his big band at Club Garibaldi in Bay View, where the group played every Monday night from 1975 until Millonzi’s death in 1977. Courtesy Stacy Vojvodich

This great Italian-American musician also contributes to one of the most important stories coursing through Milwaukee Jazz – the sometimes delicate but compelling saga of race relations in what remains one of America’s most racially fraught and segregated cities (partly due to its peculiar geography).

Grihalva reports that, in the 1920s, “the hottest (jazz) rooms were in the black neighborhood of Bronzeville. Located just north of downtown, most Bronzeville clubs were known as ‘black and tan’ because they welcomed both black and white patrons.” And yet, in 1924, black musicians in Milwaukee had to form their own union after being excluded from the local American Federation of musicians union.

This history is another reason why Milwaukee is an archetypal American city, as a microcosm of our nation’s troubles, complexities and sins. America’s indigenous musical art form, forged largely by descendants of African-American slaves, was embraced by various ethnic groups, which eventually led to crossing color lines. Millonzi recorded with black jazz entertainer Scat Johnson (who begat two talented musical sons) and Millonzi later became a big local draw at Summerfest performing with Berkeley Fudge and Manty Ellis, two leading local black players.

Another integrative exemplar was virtuoso Milwaukee guitarist George Pritchett, a  somewhat irascible character who, perhaps because of his willfulness, consistently employed black rhythm section players, including drummer Baltimore Bordeaux, “integrating otherwise all-white south side bars and clubs.”

Actual integration of local bands reaches back at least to the 1940s. A Milwaukee Jazz photo shows black and white musicians from that period jamming, including Jewish saxophonist Joe Aaron and (possibly) black local singer-pianist Claude Dorsey.

Black and white Milwaukee musicians from the 1940s jam, including Jewish saxophonist Joe Aaron (center) and possibly black singer-pianist Claude Dorsey (left). Courtesy Rick Aaron

Of course, the mythology, and often the practicality, of the jazz life told young, ambitious musicians to eventually test their mettle in New York or Chicago. So inevitably this city lost major talent, such as saxophonist Bunky Green and pianist Willie Pickens to the Windy City.

Then something happened in the early 1980s – Milwaukee’s “jazz renaissance.” Several important inner city clubs played a role, including Brothers Lounge, Space Lounge and The Main Event. But two crucial entities arose in synchronicity. In 1978, Chicago community organizer and amateur musician Chuck LaPaglia opened the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery on Center Street and – with his strong Chicago connections – got his ambitiously fledgling club on the touring circuit for national jazz performers.

The club location, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, on a direct artery into the inner city, facilitated integrated audiences and LaPaglia booked national acts several weekends a month, and filled out his calendar with an eclectic array of Chicago and Milwaukee performing arts talent.

Concurrently, The Wisconsin Conservatory of Music had established a jazz degree program (focusing on small combos unlike most jazz ed) led by Milwaukee guitarist Manty Ellis and pianist-educator-mentor Tony King. Avuncular and oracular, he was a harmonic genius, emerging from the tradition of Earl “Fatha” Hines. King traversed the bridge from early to modern jazz theory. His hunger for knowledge arose from “the Jim Crow segregation he endured as a child in southern Illinois.” King, Ellis and others, like saxophonist Fudge and Chicago pianist Eddie Baker, helped mold the school’s burgeoning baby boomer/Gen X breed of players.

The Wisconsin Conservatory of Music’s Tony King (right) instructed and inspired students and co-founded the school’s important jazz degree program. Courtesy WCM.

Crucially, these young musicians had the chance to intimately see and work with world-class musicians at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, including Milt Jackson, Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Dave Holland, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Betty Carter, The Monk-alumnus band Sphere, Art Blakey and the Marsalis brothers. Summerfest already had a big-name Jazz Oasis.

Yes, the music coursed through the thick, nocturnal city air with a darkly swinging pulse, as an ongoing alternative to disco and pop-rock. Dedicated disc jockeys like drive-timer Howard Austin and all-night jazz guru Ron Cuzner fed the real jazz thing into local airwaves and perhaps the subconsciousness of those sleeping to Cuzner’s music, “in my solitude.” On the Milwaukee River, it flowed too, through a riverfront jazz club in the up-the-Mississippi tradition, and on the East Side at the Jazz Estate.

Local record stores stocked the Savoy, Blue Note, Prestige, and Impulse labels and then, Afro-electric Miles Davis (!). A multi-venue Kool Jazz Festival with jazz superstars, from Sarah Vaughan to Ornette Coleman, came to town in 1982. Grihalva also rightly notes the jazz influence on the city’s internationally renowned punk-folk rock band, The Violent Femmes, which emerged during this renaissance. Newer Milwaukee groups like Foreign Goods work the crossroads of jazz, hip-hop and R&B.

Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch (pictured below as a WCM music student) who later joined Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, pianists David Hazeltine and Rick Germanson, bassists Gerald Cannon and Billy Johnson, drummers Carl Allen and Mark Johnson and others arose to national success from this northern gumbo of old and new jazz tradition – “paying dues” in jam sessions and for-the-door gigs, and the higher education standards that the lucrative big-band era begat modern jazz in high schools and colleges around the country.

Trumpeter Brian Lynch (left) auditions music with another student in the Wisconsin Conservatory listening room in the early 1980s. Lynch’s auspicious career has since included two Grammy Awards. Courtesy Joey Grihalva and WCM. 

Wisconsin Conservatory alumnus Lynch, now a music professor at the University of Miami, exemplifies the history-conscious American jazz artist, passing the music forward. This extensively-honored musician is capable of transmitting and embodying the music’s glory and its ghosts, having authored tribute albums to unsung trumpeters and, most recently, Madera Latino, a magnificent Latin-jazz interpretation of the music of Woody Shaw, an electrifying and advanced post-bop trumpeter who died before his time, under tragic circumstances. Lynch also frequently returns to Milwaukee for student workshops and concerts. A younger Milwaukee-area jazz trumpeter-educator-advocate with admirable historical perspective is Jamie Breiwick, who provided the book’s introduction.  

As a historical writer, Grihalva is comparatively young, but dedicated, and he has done  smart and diligent research to create this book. There are some notable omissions, such as the utterly original avant-garde bands Matrix 2 and especially the brilliant What On Earth? (identified in passing as a jazz-fusion group). Also one must note important 1970s jazz-fusion groups like Sweetbottom, which produced progressive fusion guitarist Daryl Stuermer – of Genesis, Jean-Luc Ponty-George Duke fame – and Street Life, the Warren Wiegratz-led house band for The Milwaukee Bucks for years. Reed wizard Wiegratz now works often with an award-winning Latin-jazz fusion band VIVO. Nor can we forget the stellar ensemble Opus, which remains active, educating and recording, with its original personnel.

And for the book’s panoply of artists and jazz-scene builders, Arcadia should’ve provided an index.

America, and the world, suffer profoundly today for having forgotten the wonders, complexities, and tragedies – the hard lessons of the 20th century. Yet, some of the best of the century was jazz, here, there and everywhere, now a global art form of the improviser-composer in a blues-based language, or freely spun ones. Celebrate and support it wherever you live. And best of all, hear it live, with friends, especially in a time when our sense of community has splintered radically, increasingly abstracted into “sharing” on miniature electronic devices. Jazz remains doggedly, a lifeblood of humane and democratic art, a music of tradition and liberation.

Especially in such a decreasingly literate age, image-rich Milwaukee Jazz is a vibrant document for any jazz lover, or music lover with open ears. It brings to mind the idea of American novelist William Faulkner, a quote adapted by Barack Obama in his “A More Perfect Union” speech: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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Milwaukee Jazz is available at local bookstores, and from www.arcadia publishing.com  To purchase a copy autographed by the author, visit http://www.mkejazzbook.com

Book signing events will be held Friday, October 11, at the Wisconsin Black Historical Society. Another event is tentatively planned for September in Sherman Park with the Manty Ellis Trio. Details coming soon.

Grihalva also plans an online e-supplement to the book, with more photos, and written contributions from others, including this writer.

  • 1 I explore this idea of Milwaukee as an archetypal American city in greater depth in my forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.
  • 2 Milwaukee’s jazz-classical-rock band Matrix should not be confused with the same-named fusion horn band from Appleton, which became recording artists for RCA in the 1970s. An original member of that Appleton group has recently blessed Wisconsin music history with the book Wisconsin Riffs: Jazz Profiles from the Heartland, a fairly comprehensive history of Wisconsin jazz musicians by Appleton educator-musician Kurt Dietrich. He’s the father of a gifted jazz orchestra leader/composer.arranger based in Madison, Paul Dietrich, who recently released a brilliant debut orchestra album.