Richard Davis (1930-2023) laid the bass for countless great recordings and live performances over a long, storied career

Richard Davis presiding over a bass camp for young musicians.
As a bassist, Richard Davis was the essence of eloquence. Whether playing pizzicato or arco, few could match his way of choosing just the right notes, of leaving just enough space for a soloist to breathe in, or of pushing the edge of careening freedom with a dramatic sense of momentum, song, and swing.

Richard DAVIS (bass, electric bass) – USA.
Paris IV. Centre Georges Pompidou.

And so, the wide world of jazz, and of classical music, lost a great voice in his passing on September 6, at age 93.
He was an extraordinarily gracious man, yet he had a prodigious strength of backbone and character, which only grew more impressive in advancing years.
His vast experience and wisdom could play a leading role in advancing racial relations.
This doubtlessly drew from the great respect he possessed from musicians of all races.
Yet he knew how difficult and ongoing the struggle for racial equality and justice would be. Perhaps he was a type of shaman in the modern world, as what he was striving for was what he called “racial healing.” which he dedicated his later years to. He formed a Madison branch of the Institute for Racial Healing, a national grassroots organization that deals with race problems through workshops, group support and activism.

At a 2015 panel discussion, he said America needs to focus less on making reparations for racial injustices of the past and focus on atoning for the injustices of the present, in particular the criminal justice system, Rob Thomas reported for The Capital Times.

“Why not start with the new slaves — the prisoners?” Davis asked. “We are guilty of having the most of them. We are the most racist state in the country” in terms of percentage of African-American men who are incarcerated. “Don’t you want to cringe a little bit — that we are the most racist state in the country? On Wisconsin!”

He was an extremely popular professor known for richly anecdotal lectures on music and his experiences working with great jazz musicians, including Sarah Vaughan, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, John Lewis, and Andrew Hill, and classical legends like Leonard Bernstein and Igor Stravinsky.
I heard and cherished his playing on numerous jazz albums, but I must admit he really first caught my attention with his melodious improvising on Van Morrison’s extraordinarily daring and poetic album Astral Weeks, in 1968. That session, which Davis confirmed, provided no charts or musical direction from Morrison, forced the musicians to completely wing it. The session helped earn Davis position number 34 in Rolling Stone’s poll “50 Greatest Bassists of All Time” which, as you’d imagine, is dominated by rock bassists, many of whom can draw no comparison to an artist like Davis. It was about him “conjuring impossibly poignant phrases to complement Morrison’s poetry on tracks like ‘Beside You.’ ” “For me, it was Richard all the way,” Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein said, reflecting on the record 40 years later. “Richard was the soul of the album.”
Bass virtuoso Richard Davis at mid-career. Rolling Stone
You can search out his vast library of recordings but an easier way to hear him is a set of special memorial broadcasts honoring the life of Richard Davis, from WKCR-FM radio. The broadcast will preempt all regularly-scheduled Out to Lunch shows. That’s 11 a.m to 2 p.m. Central time. The closing two episodes are Thursday October 26th and Friday the 27th. WCKR is the Columbia University radio station in New York but it is streamable here: https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/richard-davis-memorial-broadcast-0#
Here’s a brief biography on Davis, courtesy of WKCR:
Davis played a pivotal role as a bassist on iconic Blue Note records with artists like Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, and Eric Dolphy. WKCR honors Davis by preempting all Out to Lunch slots this week, for his collaboration with Eric Dolphy that led to his groundbreaking 1964 album Out to Lunch!
Born in Chicago, Davis hailed from a family with musical roots. His early education in double bass took place during high school, guided by the music educator Walter Dyett. Under Dyett’s mentorship, Davis honed his abilities, traversing the realms of classical compositions and the burgeoning world of jazz improvisation that was taking shape in the late 1940s.
After completing his studies at Chicago’s VanderCook College, Davis set his sights on New York City. In 1954, in his early twenties, he made the pivotal move to the Big Apple, marking the next significant chapter in his musical journey.
During his time in New York, Davis established himself as a highly sought-after double bassist, showcasing his versatility and adaptability as he collaborated with a wide range of musicians and played at renowned jazz clubs across the city. His ability to seamlessly blend his classical training with the evolving improvisational styles of jazz earned him a reputation as a unique and versatile talent in the music world. As the 1950s transitioned into the 1960s, Davis’s contributions to the jazz community continued to evolve, setting the stage for a remarkable career that has left an indelible mark on the world of music.
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Here’s a review I wrote for The Capital Times of a masterful later-period Richard Davis album, The Bassist: Homage to Diversity, from 2001.
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I also had the honor and pleasure to visit Davis for an interview for The Milwaukee Journal‘s Sunday Wisconsin magazine in 1984. It is memorable, aside from the brilliance Davis brought to the interview, by the uncanny nature of the very day I visited him in his horse farm outside of Barneveld, Wisconsin.
After the interview, I drove through the small town of Barneveld and headed back east. Soon I was engulfed in a very powerful rainstorm and, before long, my tin-can of a car, a Ford Fiesta, broke down on the highway. By then, the storm had become quite violent, and I was lucky to get my car to a garage for repair.
I made it home and it wasn’t until the next morning when I arrived at The Journal newsroom that I saw the headline. A tremendous tornado had devastated the town of Barneveld the night before.
I was able to calculate that I missed the tornado by no more than 20 to 30 minutes. My article incorporates the experience of the tornado, so I will proceed no further. I hope you enjoy this very special moment in time for myself and Richard Davis.
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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.
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With your blogger’s Hornet as “local color,” “The Blues Brothers” is named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry

Jake Blues ( Dan Aykroyd) and Elwood Blues (John Belushi) with their now-iconic Bluesmobile in thew promotional poster the movie “The Blues Brothers.” Courtesy hourz.com

History rewind to early 1980:

I was driving east on Milwaukee I-94, heading home after my slightly nerve-wracking part-time job as a school bus driver (a job to augment free-lancing for The Milwaukee Journal). It was always stressful, yet gratifying, having other people’s precious children in your hands, to deliver them safely to school, or home (even the obligatory brat-distraction every few rides).

My nose had just rid itself of the funky Red Star Yeast smell ever-permeating the 16th street overpass (back then). So, as I now enjoyed the sunny afternoon and approaching lakefront, I noticed a car, with smoke billowing from its hood, speeding down the still-under-construction Lakefront Freeway, which had gone so long uncompleted, it was dubbed “the freeway to nowhere.”  Another car followed in hot pursuit.

My God, I thought instantly, two cars headed for the end of the unfinished freeway segment which leads to pure, thin air, high above the lakefront !

In the next moment, I noticed a mobile film camera unit following the cars. Crazy, man!

Then I recalled the news that director John Landis had brought the production company, for his forthcoming big-budget comedy The Blues Brothers, up to Milwaukee from Chicago, where all of the film is ostensibly set, and shot. However, for a climactic chase scene, Landis needed an elevated freeway that ended in pure nothingness, and Milwaukee had it.

Having by chance seen this bit of filming in person, I looked forward to the movie, starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, which turned out to be one of the zaniest and most brilliant car-chase comedies since It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Plus, it was a hip sort of roots musical, with one of the greatest arrays of musical talent ever performing in a scripted film.

And now, The Blues Brothers has received one of the ultimate formal recognitions, having been inducted into the 2021 National Film Registry of the Library of Congress (I didn’t know about this until my sister Sheila Lynch emailed me yesterday with the news.).

There’s no question it’s a great comedy (at times over the top, of car after crashing car) worthy of the registry, and absolutely bursting with stirring blues, soul and gospel music by such legendary onscreen performers, including Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, Chaka Kahn, and the Blues Brothers’ (Belushi and Aykroyd) own rhythm section, comprising the great studio musicians best known collectively as the MGs, as in Booker T and the MGs. The movie’s soundtrack is a classic of that those genres of recorded music.

Here’s a video clip from Aretha’s knock-out performance of “Think” in the film, where she plays an under-appreciated, overworked waitress at a cafe the boys stop at for lunch.

The bros also commiserate with one of the mightiest of soul brothers, Ray Charles (That’s what I said!). Courtesy IMDb

Jake and Elwood Blues do a rave-up with, among others, legendary R&B guitarist Steve Cropper (white long-sleeve shirt, in background) Courtesy https://oneroomwithaview.wordpress.com 1

And it’s got a very redeeming storyline (with a script co-written by Akyroyd and Landis)  in which paroled convict Jake and his blood brother Elwood, set out on “a mission from God” to save from foreclosure the Roman Catholic orphanage in which they were raised. To do so, they must reunite their R&B band and organize a performance to earn $5,000 needed to pay the orphanage’s property tax bill. Along the way, they are targeted by a homicidal “mystery woman”, Neo-Nazis, and a country and western band— all while being relentlessly pursued by the police.

During the high-speed chase from a battalion of cop cars, on Wacker Drive with its numerous buttress I-beams under the Chicago “L,” with the Bluesmobile surging up to 120 mph (according to their speedometer), the brothers still find a moment of cultural acknowledgement.

“Up ahead is the Honorable Richard G. Daley Plaza,” driver Jake announces.

“Isn’t that Picasso there?” Elwood asks (referencing Picasso’s untitled monumental sculpture, known as “Chicago Picasso”) .

“Yep.”

Here’s the Library of Congress announcement of the 25 new films inducted for 2021: https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/12/library-of-congresses-announced-25-new-films-for-the-national-film-registry/

The brothers journey actually begins the night before — or in the wee hours of the morning (the film’s timeline isn’t exactly bulletproof) somewhere in Northern Illinois, where Jake and Elwood begin their quest to transport the money they’ve raised to save their childhood orphanage to Chicago City Hall in their decommissioned cop car with the famous line: “There’s 106 miles to Chicago. We’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

When I saw the film in the movie theater, I enjoyed it immensely and near the end, came the final freeway chase scene between The Blues Brothers and another even more nefarious foe, Neo-Nazis, led by the comic actor Henry Gibson. Then, in an editing flash, I recognized the Milwaukee interchange and skyline, as the chase’s backdrop.

In this stunt scene from “The Blues Brothers,” the Bluesmobile flies over another car in a scene, I believe, from the segment filmed in in Milwaukee. Courtesy Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock. 

Sure enough, they’d used that segment in the film. Then, in one scene of the chase I noticed, in the background, a small white car following slowly behind, off to the right. I squinted, blinked my eyes, and then exclaimed right in the theater, “That’s my car!”

Several annoyed moviegoers turned to glare at me. But sure enough, it was me driving my white AMC Hornet with its bent-up front bumper (from an accident shortly after I bought it from Big Bills used car lot on Center and Fond du Lac Avenue). I’d never dreamed my car would be in a scene.

So, The Hornet and I had become “local color” in The Blues Brothers, even if only mainly white, with some rust highlights and a crooked chrome bumper.

In this clip (below) from that final scene, my Hornet is clearly visible for several seconds at the 1:20 mark, puttering along on the other side of traffic cones, as the Blues Brothers’ stolen cop car continues its epic flight scene from the Neo-Nazis.

The scene, by the way, has a priceless throwaway line – from one Nazi to the other –  that seems like an oblique homage to Joe E. Brown’s classic closing line from another great comedy, Some Like it Hot.

 If you freeze the frame at 1:24, and look closely, you might even make out my smashed-in front bumper (with the chrome bumper pushed up above the white body frame on the left side, as the photo of my car below shows)

The Blues Brothers vehicle, the so-called Bluesmobile, is seen in the movie poster photo at top with Jake and Elwood. The stolen cop car, a souped-up 1974 Dodge Monaco sedan, was chosen as one of the most iconic cars in movie history by GQ magazine.  2

So, in my small world, my little old AMC Hornet has become just a wee bit iconic, I daresay. The jalopy was a 3-speed stick shift on the column, and fun to drive. Here’s a photo of my “famous”‘ rust-bucket shortly before I traded it in for another used car, which would have another historic story attached to it, a tale for another time.

Kevin with his (iconic? or I comic?) AMC Hornet on the day he traded it in for a little red tin can called a Ford Fiesta. 

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1 This is actually a shot of the Blues Brothers performing on Saturday Night Live, the “brothers” genesis as well-known co-comedians. Most of the performance stills of the band from the movie are from the other side of a chain-link fence and poorly discernible. The fence was erected because the band was playing a warm-up gig in a country music bar, with a really tough crowd, before their successful big fundraising concert.

2 GQ commented, “The Bluesmobile makes the (most iconic movie cars) list not just because it was a cool car driven by cool dudes doing cool stunts, but because of the chaos left in its wake. The cars were so battered by all the stunts and crashes that there was a 24-hour body shop on set. By the end of the filming, 103 cars had been trashed, a record for any film, right up until a total of 104 was reached… by the sequel, Blues Brothers 2000.”

 

 

Regarding the self-caricature as my latest blog cover image

I explained the genesis and story of this drawing in a recent blog but I decided to make it my current blog header image because the Facebook posting of it was well-received. Plus, it may be the only depiction of me as a writer in action, aside from the shot of me interviewing singer Asha Puthli, from a few years later (below).

The drawing caricatures me in the 1980s when I was writing for The Milwaukee Journal (and freelancing for Down Beat, the occasion of the photo with Asha) but looking for a full-time newspaper staff position, thus I created this drawing as a catchy job-pitch stationary header.

As I remain an arts & entertainment writer, the 1980s images remain apt, if graced — more than baggaged — I hope, by time.

Retrieving Lost Moments in Time with Stan Getz

A portrait of Stan Getz. Courtesy RW Theaters.

Why now? Why Stan Getz now? Because he’s a voice in time and beyond time, a voice within and wherever. Wherever I go, I’ve come to know, I yearn to hear him, and all he has to say.

I understand now, as well as a non-saxophonist can, what John Coltrane meant when he said of Getz, “We’d all sound like that if we could.”  Coltrane was, among other things, a supreme master of balladeering, where many saxophonists make their bid for a sound as beautiful as possible.

My own analogue to Coltrane’s indirect superlative: I would carry Getz’s sound with me further than any other instrument’s, if forced to forsake all but one. Maybe it’s a Sophie’s choice between Getz and Miles Davis.

As a relatively young journalist, I had already reviewed a Getz performance at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery for The Milwaukee Journal, a highlight among many superb artists I heard and reviewed there. Two years later, I interviewed him in Chicago, then wrote a feature previewing a Getz performance at a Rainbow Summer concert in Milwaukee. There I met him again afterwards and, though brief, the reacquaintance still holds a tight grip on my heart. You see, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I agreed to accompany him in a walk to his hotel room, but he had one small condition.

Would I please carry his saxophone for him? After the performance, he was fatigued, partly the byproduct of years of abuse of his body with drugs and alcohol.

I accepted the task gladly, and the instant thrill of carrying one of the world’s most revered artistic instruments, beside its owner and artmaker, inspired a short poem, “Bossa Not So Nova.” 1

So, I’ve written about Getz in three modes but, mea culpa, it still doesn’t seem enough.

Lately I’ve revisited him upon buying a used copy of the Getz musical biography Nobody Else But Me, by Dave Gelly. It discourses across the artist’s career with close readings of numerous Getz recordings, his legacy beyond memories, as he died in 1991.

This excellent book prompted me to dig out an array of Getz recordings.

As I write, I’m listening to him essay “Infant Eyes,” an exquisite ballad by another giant of the tenor sax, Wayne Shorter, and each limpid whole note unfurls with delicious tenderness and knowing delicacy.

The album “Moments in Time,” recorded in 1976, was released in 2016. Courtesy Resonance Records.

But he’s much more than a fatherly cradle-rocker.

I couldn’t have responded to this recording much earlier than a few years ago, when I obtained a copy of the Getz album Moments in Time, recorded live by Getz’s Quartet in 1976, but not released until 2016 on Resonance, a label specializing in what I’d call “jazz archeology.” 2

And there’s more affinity between Getz and Shorter than a few of Wayne’s tunes in Getz’s repertoire. The sound of their voices resonates similarly, an exquisitely soft vibration, a singing like a distinctly masculine bird that — warbles and vibratos aside — can hold a note like a distant horizon of destiny. Both saxophonists have lived lives deeply shadowed by tragedy, likely informing their profound sensibilities.

Indeed now, the tune playing is “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and it belies one misplaced reservation I held about Getz in the past.

He disabused me of it when I saw him in 1982 at the Jazz Gallery.

But I’m referring to back in the mid-1960s, when he broke into broad public awareness with his lilting bossa nova luminosities. He could hold and caress a note as if it were palpable and breathing which, with him, it truly was. Such audible tenderness enchanted me as much as any other single jazz artist did with one recording, Getz/Gilberto.

Cover of the famous album “Getz/Gilberto.” Connect Brazil.

And sure enough, right now with Horace Silver’s “Peace” (from Moments in Time), Getz is beguiling yet again. Getz/Gilberto, created, arranged, and recorded by virtually all Brazilian musicians, racked up unprecedented sales for a jazz recording (2 million copies in 1964) and became the first non-American album to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, in 1965.

But back during the bossa nova craze, for all my admiration, I doubted whether Getz was capable of anything approaching what I call “The Cry.”

I do hear a cry in the “wild goose cry” tune I’d just heard, but I’m referring to a sound often heard among saxophonists in the 1960s, during the same time Getz lulled and seduced with “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Getz and vocalist Astrud Gilberto who sang the huge international hit, “The Girl from Ipanema.” which propelled the album “Getz/Gilberto” to great sales heights and an “Album of the Year” Grammy.

The notion of “The Cry” is the expressionism that numerous saxophonists especially began manifesting during that period of social upheaval and raised consciousness over racial injustice. It’s a heavily freighted topic and subtext. So perhaps its unsurprising that a naturally lyrical white saxophonist isn’t easily associated with it. Nevertheless, over the years, the true and extraordinary range of Getz’s expressive power expanded, and his own version of “The Cry” arose, as such a vivid contrast to his inherently singing style that it carried the weight of striking effects, like a sculptor’s chisel discharging chards and sparks, to convey how life can force us to extremes of feeling and response.

To me, Getz seemed to be universalizing the plight and poignance conveyed in “The Cry,” most often associated with African-American musicians. This is not to minimize the racial suffering those artists endured and expressed, but to find the shared humanity in it. Getz’s suffering might be arguably his own demons’ making, more than of a cruel society built on systemic racism. He even was capable of violence under the influence, which he always regretted, even serving brief incarceration.

Gelly insightfully notes a great irony, how the drugs and liquor might’ve facilitated an “alpha state” in which, Getz explained, “the less you concentrate the better. The best way to create is to get in the alpha state…what we would call relaxed concentration.”

Such can be the price of art. Does that make it ill-begotten? Illegitimate?

As a Russian Jew, he may have had ancestral instincts of suffering and class oppression hounding his psyche. Accordingly, he seems a different sort of expressive animal — “Nobody Else But Me” as he might say. The simplicity of the declaration also may reflect Getz’s uniqueness, his fingerprint identity, his sonic originality as a pied piper whom, when heard, we still feel compelled to follow, decades after bossa nova first sailed across waves and valleys. Years after his last living breath.

Thank the music gods for his voice, retrieved and captured.

_________

1 a poem about Stan Getz (written to the cadence of “Girl from Ipanema.”)

2 Moments in Time comprises mainly classic and modern jazz standards with Getz’s working quartet at the time: pianist Joanne Brackeen, bassist Clint Houston and drummer Billy Hart. However, Resonance also released simultaneously a Getz album Getz/Gilberto ’76, highlighting guitarist-singer Joao Gilberto, and Brazilian songs,

pps. I also wrote about Getz when I found a used copy of his album Sweet Rain, as few years ago.

 

3. Here’s a review of a live Getz performance at The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, in 1982:

 

Riverwest: a place with its own face, of curious and wondrous facets, and a couple of perfect strangers

I have lived in a number of neighborhoods in my lifetime in Milwaukee and Madison, most of them quite congenial: A south side family bungalow right north of a Mitchell Field take-off strip where giant jets shook my youthful body and imagination with sonic booms. In Madison’s Nakoma neighborhood, a house influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style, and engulfed in tall pines, and a few blocks away from the city’s splendid Arboretum.

But there is only one neighborhood that I have returned to reside in, for a second time by choice, and that is Milwaukee’s Riverwest. I originally moved here when I bought a duplex with my sister Nancy In the 1980s, which she still lives in. It was a period of great cultural and political vitality, and an ideal location, as much of my journalistic work then was covering music at the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, right in the neighborhood, for The Milwaukee Journal.

So, when I moved back to Milwaukee from Madison in 2008, I knew I wanted to return to this unpredictably diverse, slightly funky and always vital region. The following photo essay comprises images compiled on a walk the full-length of Riverwest on the street that I live on, which ended on the North Avenue water reservoir overlooking downtown.
I’m sure any number of other photo portraits could be made by taking different routes around this consistently vibrant neighborhood. But this is mine, from a walk taken the last day of February as the smallest buds began to claim their place and space to grow into.

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This image characterizes the interface of the urban and natural surroundings – an old, weathered Riverwest sidewalk and a crystal-clear puddle, revealing the tree overhead in which you can just sense the tiny buds emerging from its tips, reaching out to the sky’s fleeting blues. I’d also call this a Katrin Talbot photo, because she consistently gets highly observant shots of small or even grand beauties often standing right under our distracted noses, or toeses (Yes, I’m talking to “smart phone”-addled pedestrians.) Katrin is a gifted Madison photographer, poet, and symphony musician whose Facebook page I recommend you check out.

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Here’s a block of houses that perfectly reflects the architectural characterization of Riverwest residences as depicted in the neighborhood  signs recently placed all around our neck of the woods. The sign also suggests the way Riverwest overlooks downtown, especially from its high point, the North Avenue water reservoir.
It’s an absolutely big sky view of downtown, perhaps the best that a pedestrian can find. Though I did walk to the top of the reservoir on this day, I did not include that city skyline view, because the subject here is Riverwest.

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If the iconic image of the new Riverwest signs captures the neighborhood reasonably well, the next two images help dispel some of the stereotypes about who lives here. And I didn’t have to go far to find these – they were actually the first two photographs I took. In this one above, the apparent residence of a United States Marine proudly displays his or her service flag. And yet, this resident resolutely keeps this blue sign out front,  long after the intensely contentious and politically transformative 2011 recall effort to remove Gov. Scott Walker.

The neighbor’s long-standing statement of dissent might not seem typical of a highly disciplined military person, nor such a person’s typical politics. But it reflects a well-trained person who understands the role of a true citizen and patriot. I see it as an excellent example of the independent thinking one finds in this neighborhood, even if a majority of residents probably lean from the center to the left.

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Here’s another charming Riverwest stereotype refutation, and a close neighbor of the Walker-protesting Marine above. Clearly not everyone in the neighborhood is a lefty secular humanist, agnostic or atheist. The number of venerable, still-active churches in the neighborhood testifies to that, even if their attendance tends lower than it was a few decades ago. But these Riverwest neighbors put their love of Jesus Christ’s mother Mary out front for everyone to see, along with the rather mischievous-looking elves scampering around to behind her.

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There is certainly a profusion of artistic types in our neighborhood and here’s a delightful example. This painted metal relief sculpture gives you an idea where this resident might be if not at home – out on the waves amid sun, the clouds, the birds and aquatic sea life. It alludes to how close we are to Lake Michigan, just across the nearby Milwaukee River for which we are named, and yonder, though Shorewood.

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The literacy of Riverwest residents is somewhat of a given, but our valuing of the written word is something we share with our community. On my walk down my neighborhood street alone, I counted four “LittleFreeLibraries” such as this one. There’s some predictable titles, such as one by mega-selling Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown on the left. But also discover, if you look closely, a copy of the last book that the late, great John Cheever wrote, a slim novella titled Oh What a Paradise it Seems, a characteristically bittersweet observation, published shortly before his death of cancer in 1982. Also note, on  the far right, a novel by the great Polish-American novelist Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent. This slightly less well-known Conrad novel is Victory published in 1915, a psychological thriller set on an Indonesian island, and which draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Tempest.

I stopped by Riverwest’s storefront radio station WXRW-104.1 FM, but it wasn’t on the air and so there was little to see. But it’s a very interesting station you can check out here:

http://tunein.com/radio/Riverwest-Radio-1041-s258641/

So, I went next door to the Fuel Cafe for a newspaper, and a quintessential Riverwest moment occured. Several people were eating late lunches and, as I walked out, one man stood up with a tray laden with a scattering of tortilla chips. “Hey, anyone want the rest of these chips?” he called out. “Otherwise I’m gonna throw ’em out.”

“I’ll take ’em!” another dude piped up, and the not-so-secret sharer delivered them to him. At what other restaurant would you see such an open act of sharing between perfect strangers, regardless of conventional decorum? That’s Riverwest, for you.

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At the “fork” in one intersection, I took the path more traveled for me, which has often made all the difference. That led me to Woodland Pattern Book Center, on Locust Street, which may be the intellectual and perhaps, despite all the churches, the spiritual heart of neighborhood.

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The long, white facade of the building announces it’s utterly unique nature. The facade changes from time to time, with varying names, quotations and imagery usually signifying human life, intellect and expression in relation to the grand natural environment we share.

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Woodland Pattern specializes in small press publications, and it may be the largest such collection in a bookstore between the coasts. You will especially find a vast array of poetry in full book form, and in numerous chapbooks on the card rack-like display in the photo above on the left, and even more of an eccentric collection of chapbooks in the file cabinets in the foreground.
The center, co-founded by artist Anne Kingsbury, regularly presents a stimulating panoply of cultural events – author readings, regular art exhibits in its far third room, and concerts of exploratory and avant-garde music, often improvisational in nature.
For all of this, Woodland Pattern sustains its highly non-commercial offerings by having established itself as a valuable state cultural resource.

So it gets a fair share of grants and government funding but also relies on the membership of its patrons. I renewed my membership on this visit, and picked up a small book by the great nature writer Barry Lopez called The Rediscovery of North America, which was actually a Thomas D. Clarke lecture Lopez gave in 1990, a sort of meditation on Christopher Columbus and the history of rampant exploitation of The New World’s astonishing natural bounty and indigenous peoples. The Spaniards began the cruel plunder, which continues as a large part of our capitalistic mentality and political culture. But Lopez also posits hope and evidence that we are “rediscovering” our own continent with a newfound caring, partly by listening to what our indigenous peoples and species have to tell us.

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Before leaving Woodland Pattern, it’s worth noting the distinct and timely political consciousness that the store conveys, as evidenced by the sign in the middle of this photograph, taken from outside on the street.

I would’ve like to have stopped into another neighborhood institution, the Falcon Bowl Hall, on the corner of Clarke and Fratney Sts., but they were closed and, as a neighbor told me, they open maybe at five or seven but it’s very unpredictable. The Falcon bar has a bowling alley in his basement, a true working-class, middle-America past time that again goes against the grain of typical perceptions of this neighborhood. It will also host the Riverwest Follies at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 25.

Another closed place I bypassed this afternoon was the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts on Center St., which continues the storied tradition of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in its own way, as a multi-arts center, which I’ve written about quite a bit on this blog.

But another local bar did beckon me, shortly after 3 PM, with open doors, and typically alluring artwork.rw art bar 1rw art bar window

The Art Bar on Burleigh St. is my favorite tavern in Riverwest, and probably in Milwaukee, the city of taverns. That’s mainly because I’m more of an art lover than an alcohol imbiber. Besides the artwork in regular changing exhibits, the place also has a pool table and a dartboard, both which get regular use. Ah, but the art! Look above in another front-window shot, peeping in on the vividly colorful work on display, a  group show of portrait painters.

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Among the current Art Bar exhibitors, Elias Zananiri (top) shows personages with deeply radiant ethnic ornamentation and expressivity.  Les Leffingwell (above) meanwhile provides a personal inlet into the troubled but resilient souls of blues musicians.

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Mike Judy shows that an eccentric and humorous portraiture style can figuratively capture humanity with its pants down while allowing them a measure of personal dignity.art bar 2

“Everyday Portraits” by Jody Reid includes this affectionate, virtuosic and insightful portrait of a guy named “Brad.” It’s worth zooming in for some of the detail of the oil canvas.

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Further on down the street, I got to Fratney Street School, a highly-regarded bi-lingual elementary school, with some very small kids shooting a multi-colored basketball (top) and a very exclusive conference of two – make that three – young girls on this ingeniously engaging jungle gym.rw truck

Riverwest also expresses itself in its vehicles. Like an almost-forgotten beauty queen contestant, this bizarre four-wheeled contraption was just waiting for its picture to be taken, and to be discovered.

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We began our little Riverwest tour with a home making a political statement and we end with another home doing the same. Like the die-hard “Recall Walker” dissenter, this ingeniously homemade HIllARY Clinton sign, made out of painted tree branches and wire – which blazes in the night with Christmas tree lights – remains proudly and defiantly up, in this very strange Age of Trump. We all know who the people’s choice was in this election.

T’was a relatively serene midweek afternoon walk, with not a lot of people out, but plenty of life still abounded in our good, old neighborhood.