Tag Archives: pandemic

“Precarious Towers” is Johannes Wallmann’s wary ode to America

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Courtesy Shifting Paradigm Records

Album review: Johannes Wallmann Precarious Towers (Shifting Paradigm Records)

Pianist-composer-bandleader Johannes Wallmann rises to precipitous heights in his 10th album, Precarious Towers, proving his ability to create a concept album, with the extra-musical aspects streaming gracefully throughout. 1 His band includes Down Beat magazine “rising star,” Chicago alto saxophonist Sharel Cassity, Milwaukee vibraphonist Mitch Shiner, Madison bassist John Christensen, and Milwaukee drummer Devin Drobka. “This is the all-star band from this incredibly fertile region of creative jazz in southern Wisconsin and Chicago that I’ve wanted to put together for years,” Wallmann says.

The album lives up to such expectations. Created during the pandemic, it addresses that experience variously, from the whimsically personal to the overtly political. But the music remains powerfully compelling and listenable modern jazz from one of the Midwest’s supreme musicians, who also leads the jazz studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The concept arose from watching his house-bound daughter ambitiously build tall structures with Lego segments, until they fell. Her father sees such effort as reflecting human aspiration, but also hubris. The title tune is indeed rhythmically precarious, with complex off-center tempi, especially from drummer Devin Drobka, a master of striking indirection and accent, while invariably still propelling a tune. Vibist Shiner elicits bluesy feeling reminiscent of Milt Jackson (here, and on the one cover, “Angel Eyes”) and altoist Cassity throughout displays a boppish sax voice that sings as deftly as it swings, a sort of Bird on flaming wings.

“McCoy” honors Wallmann’s greatest pianistic influence in a handsome Tyner-ish minor mode theme. Wallmann unleashes glittering arpeggios and resounding octaves. “Never Pet a Burning Dog” displays the composer’s wit, as an analog to proper pandemic precautions, and the changes here suggest that McCoy Tyner’s modal style is not mutually exclusive from shapely chord changes.

Keyboardist Johannes Wallmann (center) and saxophonist Sharel Cassity, who released the new album “Precarious Towers,” perform together recently at the Madison Jazz Festival. Photo by Kevin Lynch

The album climaxes with a three-part suite titled “Pandemica.” Part one, self-described as “pensive,” unfolds like an adagio etude. Part two, subtitled “Unreliable Narrator,” alludes to today’s head-swimming online media overload, with Shiner’s vibes well-articulating droll commentary. The final movement is explicit: “Defeat and Imprison the Conman Strongman.” It’s a dolorous yet ingenious Dorian-mode theme, with the “cognitive dissonance” of competing lines between bassist John Christensen and Wallmann’s left hand.

The album’s two-part denouement, in effect, is by turns lyrical “Try to Remember” (Wallmann’s tune, not the stage standard), and a fun piece inspired by a Madison tradition, entitled “Saturday Night Meat Raffle,” (to win high-protein food) which conveys a certain off-kilter social dynamic in a Frank Zappa-esque way. Throughout this brilliant album, the band brims with virtuosic elan and restraint, in service of Wallmann’s musical evocation and storytelling.

And Cassity, who recently shone brilliantly (with Wallmann) at the Madison Jazz Festival, is a star in a galaxy that still seems a tad remote from wider appreciation. So, look upward, and listen for her.

One might also read in all this album’s permutations, the precariousness of this nation’s democracy, but infused with hope and collective determination. 2

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This review was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/precarious-towers-by-johannes-wallmann/

  1. Wallmann’s album last year, Elegy for an Undiscovered Species, for jazz quintet and string orchestra, was named a “best of 2021” album by Down Beat magazine. It was also among the top 10 jazz best albums of 2021 in this writer’s international critics poll. Wallmann also leads the jazz program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as the inaugural John and Carolyn Peterson Prof. of Jazz Studies.
  2. Another bonus of this album is its delightfully comical (“Look out below!”) cover, courtesy of the uncannily resourceful graphic designer Jamie Breiwick (best known as a jazz musician), employing artwork by Amy Casey. In my book, it’s a candidate for album cover of the year.

Jazz Gallery show finds creative ways to begin again, emerging from pandemic

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Art exhibit review

“Places I’ve been and may never see again,/ I won’t say haunted but I get visited/ and it follows me around wherever I go./ Begin to begin, begin to begin.” — “Begin to Begin”  Field Report

If we’re not haunted by the last dreaded year, it surely still follows us around, at the very least with masks, whether pocketed or making us  strangers to friends. Worst of all is a plague of recollected fright, sickness and loss.

So slowly, we begin to begin, again, the new “old” life.

One of Milwaukee’s lesser-known art galleries reflects back on the pandemic with vivid and resonant forms and imagery. The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St., is best known as a live music venue, which obscures its distinguished history of well-curated and extremely diverse art exhibits, overseen by the venue’s manager Mark Lawson, who also curates galleries at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. 1

ReBegin: New Works for New Beginnings, a group show of 18 artists running through May 29,  suggests creative-rebirth from pandemic, but also how we may never see the places we’ve been to, in the same way.

Howard Leu’s noirish, black-and-white photo-archival print, “You Don’t Call No More,” conveys social loss, with art loft-like window panes separating the viewer from fog-enshrouded telephone poles.

Howard Leu, “You Don’t Call No More,” photo archival print. All photos of artwork by Amy Schmutte

Roxane Mayer’s gritty, cold-wax encaustic-entombed facades include the year’s other massive human pilgrimage to healing — defiant social activism — with a window-pane poster reading “Hate Has No Home Here.”

Jim Farrell’s two pieces, rich with evocative, story-telling textures, address the mind and psyche — “Ancestral Orbit” in profound quests, and “Logic Perimeter” in a human head’s mathematical cogitations, a fight-or-flight reflex toward cleansing the virus’s impact, a longed-for rebeginning.

Jim Farrell, “Logic Perimeter,” mixed media

Similarly, Karen Williams-Brusubradis’ large acrylic painting “Metamorphosis,” reveals the microscopic workings of an apparent human nervous system in transformation from forces playing, or preying, upon it.

Karen Williams-Brusubradis, “Metamorphosis,” acrylic painting

Among the most optimistic or affirmative pieces is Bennie Higgins’ lyrical “Frog Hunter III,” depicting an at-risk boy playing at a riverside, somewhat autobiographical in that Higgins, a former police officer and untrained artist, now counsels “men to be better men” at a women’s shelter, Lawson explains.

Bennie Higgins, “Frog Hunter III,” oil 

Amy Schmutte’s virtuosic and innovative color photography seems to depict spring’s inevitable emergence from an atmosphere-immersed haze. In her Lewis Carroll-esque titled “Sproutoutlyng,” a lusciously sinuous flower fights through a sublime shadow of infected memory. Schmutte, who co-curated the show, prints her photos on brushed metal plates “because the way that light plays with that surface adds another layer of beauty” in photography, which she thinks of as “writing with light.”

Well said.

Amy Schmutte, “Sproutoutlyng” photography on brushed metal

Yet for me, the most eloquent and powerful piece in the show is its only sculpture, “Chrysallis,” by Jessica Schubkegel. This is a life-sized figure of a small woman, prone, and apparently afflicted. The piece comprises a model constructed of wire mesh, covered by a skin montage of torn fragments from a medical text. Buoyed in grace with elegant gestures, the form follows one leg raised at the knee, sinuous hip contraposto, and an arm bent to reach gently for the throat. It balances a sense of repose and illness that dwells deep in uncertainty. For all that hard-earned beauty, the closer you look, the more you discover implications of insight in the medical bits of meaning, an immersive, acute sense of possible doom. Still, the title perseveres. This mummy-like presence mirrors nature’s rebirth, and a sense of emergence and deliverance.

Jessica Schubkegel, “Chrysallis,” textbook paper and wire

The show also includes work by Lawson, Gwen Graznow, Tayla Hart, John Kowalczyk, Bruce Knackert, Sharon Mergener, Bob Neuman,  Jeff Redmon, Sarah Risley, Dee Dee Schaefer, and Vesile Yilmaz.

A side gallery includes anime-style cartoons by McKinley Blackwell.

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1 The JGCA art exhibits are often curated by committee, including the organization’s board members or other artists Lawson invites to curate. Despite no live music this last year, the venue has survived the pandemic significantly thanks to a notable increase in sales of artwork, both in the gallery and especially online, Lawson says. Here’s the link to the JGCA’s visual art online: https://jazzgallerycenterforarts.org/art 

 

This review was first published in slightly altered form in Shepherd Express, here.