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.

 

 

 

 

 

Culture Currents results for the new incarnation of the NPR jazz poll, the 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll for 2022

Down Beat cover from Dec. 31, 1952, noting the magazine’s first critics poll and Louis  Armstrong entering the DB Hall of Fame. Pinterest

Jazz critics polls go back at least 70 years, to the start of the Down Beat magazine jazz critics poll (magazine cover pictured above), in 1952, though the DB reader’s poll began in 1949, and the magazine dates back to 1934. I contributed to that poll in the 1980s.

But here we present (not the annual Down Beat poll nor the Village Voice‘s Pazz and Jop poll) The 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll which began modeled after the whimsically-named but otherwise-serious Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll of jazz and pop (see a vintage Voice issue below from 1984), begun by esteemed music critic Robert Christgau and continued for some years in Jazz and Pop Magazine, and to the present in The Voice, the New York weekly newspaper.

This poll is a different beast than the Down Beat poll, which solicits rankings for the best specific musicians on each instrument associated with the jazz idiom. That publication has long oriented itself to musicians, with technical “workshops,” transcriptions of solos, and “Pro Shop” — short features on instruments & gear. By contrast, this poll weighs opinions on the top ten best jazz albums of the year, and in miscellaneous categories, more geared to jazz aficionados and consumers.

The Francis Davis jazz poll was launched as a Village Voice poll, by the Grammy-Award-winning jazz writer Francis Davis. He is best known as the jazz critic for The Village Voice, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly, and was the long-time jazz critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s the author of a number of books including The History of the Blues, Jazz and its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader, and Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists and Singers. I contributed to The Village Voice jazz poll while at The Capital Times, in Madison, and later when it became the NPR Jazz Poll, by then the largest annual jazz poll in the world, last year compiled from “156 distinguished journalists and critics.”

Last year, the poll’s sponsorship shifted to The Arts Fuse, a curated, independent online arts magazine. Davis’s poll assistant, Tom Hull (who formerly wrote The Village Voice‘s Jazz Consumer Guide,) took over the main poll reigns this year (A link to the poll is at the bottom of this blog post).

Below are my poll choices from the list of results. You can also access my choices (and all critics choices) on the poll site two ways, but most easily by scrolling to the poll introduction page’s bottom (but just above the “methodology.”) to the link to the complete list of critics, alphabetically listed in the link.

Kevin Lynch (The Shepherd ExpressCulture Currents (Vernaculars Speak))

NEW RELEASES

  1. Ethan Philion, Meditations on Mingus (Sunnyside) (See cover above)
  2. Mary LaRose, Out Here [Music of Eric Dolphy] (Little (i) Music)
  3. Marquis Hill, New Gospel Revisited (Edition)
  4. Brian Lynch and Spheres of Influence, Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To (Holistic MusicWorks)
  5. Harry Skoler, Living in Sound: The Music of Charles Mingus (Sunnyside)
  6. Johannes Wallmann, Precarious Towers (Shifting Paradigm)
  7. James Francies, Purest Form (Blue Note ’21)
  8. Roberto Magris, Duo & Trio: Featuring Mark Colby (JMood)
  9. Black Lives: From Generation to Generation (Jammin’ Colors)
  10. Kase + Klassik, Live at the Opera House (B Side)

RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)

  1. Ornette Coleman, Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums (1958-59, Craft)
  2. Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964 (Jazz Detective/Elemental)
  3. Ray Charles, Genius + Soul = Jazz (Analog Productions Originals)

VOCAL

  • Chicago Soul Jazz Collective Meets Dee Alexander, On the Way to Be Free (JMarq)

DEBUT

  • Chase Elodia, Portrait Imperfect (Biophilia)

LATIN

  • Miguel Zenón, Música De Las Américas (Miel Music)
  • The poll invited brief comments from participating critics, which might appear on the poll site in the future in some context.
  • But here’s what I wrote:
  • Hear ye, this is a year of Charles Mingus re-emerging as a godfather of modern jazz, for artistic and honorary reasons. 2022 was the great bassist-bandleader-composer’s birth centennial, and his music speaks more pointedly than ever in our turbulent times.There’s no coincidence my top album choice of the year is Ethan Philion’s brilliant and impassioned Meditations on Mingus, Here’s link to my reviewhttps://kevernacular.com/?p=14938 . A second top-ten album, Harry Skoler’s — Living in Sound: The Music of Charles Mingus, was a warmly incantatory concerto-like setting for clarinetist virtuoso Skloer and orchestra, with a stellar lineup that included Christian McBride, Kenny Barron, Nicholas Payton, and Jonathan Blake, with arrangements by Ambrose Akinmusire and Darcy James Argue.
  • There was another worthy top-tenner, but I didn’t want this too-short list Mingus-clogged. The longtime Mingus Big Band sumptuously produced The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions, with vocals and narrations by Charles’s son Eric Mingus. The big band also highlighted a PBS special titled Let My Children Hear Mingushttps://www.charlesmingus.com/events/pbsmingusspecial
  • The ever-amazing “jazz detective” label Resonance unearthed The Lost Album at Ronnie Scott’s, a blazing Mingus sextet date driven by the underappreciated Detroit drummer Roy Brooks.
  • More, All About Jazz offered an excellent essay and critical round-up of 10 of Mingus’s greatest albums: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/charles-mingus-an-essential-top-ten-albums-charles-mingus
  • Plus, last year, singer-songwriter-pianist Stephanie Nilles produced a powerful, provocative and fascinating album. I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag – The White Flag was its ironic title. It may not be a jazz album by many measures, but it captures much of Mingus’s loving and raging spirit. — Kevin Lynch
  • I wrote about most of these albums in various contexts with in-depth reviews of my top six choices (searchable on my blog’s search bar) and my No. album 10 choice: KASE + Klassik Live at The Opera House. Among my other category choices, I reviewed Ornette Coleman’s Genesis of Genius box set.
  • Here’s a link to my review of my top album choice Meditations on Mingus by Ethan Philion:

    A jazz giant speaks to our times on Ethan Philion’s “Meditations on Mingus”

Finally, here’s the link to the jazz poll’s first page, where you’ll find one essay by Francis Davis, two by Hull and a photo essay by Hull on “Jazz Notables We Lost in 2022”:

The 17th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll

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Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra: Something New in a Grand Old Tradition

Saxophonist-bandleader Curt Hanrahan ( standing, far right) conducts the Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra. Photo by Leiko Napoli

The Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra will perform an album-release concert for Take it All at 6 p.m. Sunday Aug. 21 at the Racine Theater Guild, 2519 Northwestern Ave., Racine. For advance tickets, visit: MJO tickets

Is the jazz big band a relic of the swing era? Well, there’s still power in numbers, and wider musical vistas to explore. Despite inherent costliness, the art form has remained vital and evolving with such distinctive ensembles as The Maria Schneider Orchestra, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, The Mingus Big Band, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, John Beasley’s MONK’estra and The Vanguard Orchestra. The Brian Lynch Big Band won a Grammy award in 2020, led by the Milwaukee-raised trumpeter-composer-band leader.

Add the Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra to that list, with their auspicious second album, Take it All. It reveals a full plumbing of orchestral resources with both advanced contemporary aesthetics and catchy grooves aplenty. The MJO hardly emerged out of the blue. For 12 years, orchestra leader Curt Hanrahan led the UW-Milwaukee Jazz Ensemble, and the annual Woody Herman Jazz Festival, before retiring in 2017.

At the core of the new orchestra’s personnel is the synchronistic 30-plus-year-old jazz fusion band OPUS (which will open the Racine concert for the MJO). Between Hanrahan and his brother, drummer/co-bandleader Warren Hanrahan, they’ve performed with numerous big bands of the past, including Arturo Sandoval, Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra Jr., Harry Connick Jr., Lawrence Welk and Woody Herman’s band led by Frank Tiberi.

“I love all big bands and have observed, listened and learned from many of them but my main influence has always been the benevolent Woody Herman,” Hanrahan says. “The Milwaukee native was on the road for close to 50 years with various bands and ‘Herds’ and produced some of the most iconic and legendary jazz musicians, composers/arrangers that this American art form has to offer. Our jazz festivals are modeled after his Woody Herman/Sister Fabian scholarship and educational programs that began in the mid to late sixties.”

Milwaukee-born clarinetist-saxophonist Woody Herman. Courtesy Jazz Journal

Perhaps there’s hometown bias in Hanrahan’s affection for Herman’s “Thundering Herds,” but that big-band leader always forged bridges between swing orchestras and modern jazz. Jazz historian Ted Gioia writes, “Herman’s evolution from sweet music to traditional jazz to modern jazz is almost unprecedented in the history of music. For Woody Herman is best understood…as a catalyst. His talent lay in enabling – spurring those around him to their deepest creative currents, inspiring them, letting them ‘loose’.” Herman’s second Herd debuted the “Four Brothers” band, with a section of three tenor saxophones and one baritone, which provided a template for what would soon be called cool jazz.

Album cover courtesy Spotify 

Accordingly, The MJO projects through a forward-looking lense, with arrangements that facilitate rather than burden soloists and ensemble flair. The title tune “Take It All” opens with short phrases building suspense, then layers into dissonant yet alluring harmonies with a complex series of snapping ensemble accents. Tenor saxophonist Kyle Seifert delivers a measured solo rumination until the second chorus’s rising intensity driven by the big ensemble. Trumpeter David Katz provides deft, warm counterpoint, a la Thad Jones, to a sumptuous climax.

The second tune, “We All Love Eddie Harris,” reflects saxophonist Harris’s penchant for a cool but funky vamp that allows sassy rhythmic licks from Seifert, and quotes liberally from Harris’s swaggering, interval-skipping jazz classic “Freedom Jazz Dance.”

Ensuing material ranges from a tricky Oscar Peterson adaptation of the vintage finger-snapper “Sweet Georgia Brown” to “Covidity,” a Hanrahan piece reflecting the “angst of the pandemic era,” yet inspired by Elvin Jones’s Live at the Lighthouse album, a blazing hallmark of post-Coltrane jazz.

“Souljourner” closes the album with a transporting swirl of woodwinds detouring into a gritty jazz-fusion guitar solo from Steve Lewandowski. The MJO demonstrates how bigger is better when the outcome embraces a panoply of compelling moods and stylistic effects, allowing the listener to “take it all” in.

For information on the MJO, visit: https://www.mjojazz.com/

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This article was previously published in The Shepherd Express: MJO article

African Womanhood rises like a great savanna tree in Akindele John’s paintings

Akindele John, “Beautiful Comforter,”  Photos, courtesy Woodland Pattern

Review: And She Was Love, Akindele John, paintings, Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust Street, through Aug. 14.

Lest we forget, or never really knew, the ebony majesty of the African woman stands tall against the sky, as a great tree on the savanna, its tangled branches dancing and beckoning. That, of course, is the crowning Yoruba beauty of obinrin, of mama, of her mane’s unfettered play in air, the web and shadow of her hair. The observer’s eye then descends, from forehead and cheeks to neck, the sculpted shining beauty.

There is no mistaking the analog in Akindele John’s painting exhibit, And She Was Love, a visual paeon to African womanhood at the Woodland Pattern Book Center,  through Aug. 14. The many-limbed supplication to the sun thrives in what John strives to capture, the “nappturality” of “Black women who have chosen to exclusively wear their hair in a natural, Afro-textured state.”

John knows of what he paints, born in Ogun State, Nigeria and living currently in Lagos, the cultural, economic and entertainment capital of Africa. And as one of the continent’s largest and busiest seaports, Lagos carries plenty of logos (in Jungian terms) as a means of disseminating African cultural Diaspora.

This is an exhibit of six large portraits, each mirroring the other in deceptively simple posture of elegance, perhaps too easy to whisk through, yet calling distantly, like a horizon’s lioness roar, for attentive patience, for a measure of meditative honor. Who has been more typically overlooked, derided, and forsaken as surely as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, if not the woman of the world’s motherlode continent, and most notoriously, her countless offspring in America? Will one not discover in the amazing grace of these eyes, memories that even myth cannot erase, those of the signifying tree and a “poor wretch like me?”

This show’s officially marketed image, “Beautiful Comforter,” a woman holding a fluttering dove, is nothing overstated and yet fulsome in its slightly contained expressivity.

Akindele John, Girl with a Rose

She conveys a sage serenity. The brushstrokes, playful yet like a hand’s hollow, allow the work to breathe and hover in its own space. Two mirroring portraits, “Girl with a Rose” and “Girl with a White Cup,” apparently of the same woman, both boast Afros as unfettered as a black starburst, celebrating that hairstyle as a sort of spiritual assertion set against a sunlit halo, as all these heads are. John postures them admittedly saintlike in his celebration, yet vividly human. Her womanly femininity, the grace of her hand, adorned with yellow rose, all contrast to that burst, but remain of a piece, as self-defined power, and vibrant maternal fecundity.

Another, titled “The Blue Story,” depicts a woman holding an open book (Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye?). Here, as most everywhere, literacy is power, and font of expressed  wisdom. And is this perhaps an essential signifier of this grandly eccentric book center itself, even a candidate for its permanent collection?

Throughout these works the artist’s painterly arabesques – here loose, there tight – which enclose and define the forms, also articulate a gestural freedom that seems to reflect their worldly engagement, and the sensate essence of each woman’s presence.

Akindele John, “We are Here and Now” 

However, one of these paintings, which all blend and contrast oil and acrylic paint, is not a single portrait. And it’s the most compelling in the show, taking the liberty of slightly melding two women’s images, almost as Siamese twins. “We are Here and Now,” presents two figures embodying the sisterhood of “we”; one gazes to the left, and the other downward, forthright in awareness and reflection and, perhaps most vividly, each woman’s neck is a study in swan-like repose. Yet, in another of a sequence of finely-wrought contrasts, the bouquets in each woman hands are an expressionistic hive of power and possibility.

Finally, this is the one painting that superimposes, behind the two women’s heads, a rectangle over the sun circle, a cohering formal device, for sure. Nevertheless, the balance of all these portraits’ details, their accumulative contrasting dynamics, seem to whisper depths in their beauty, a yin-yang, see-saw type of tale, of her all-too-often tortured journey, from Middle Passage to chattel degradation, to Emancipation Proclamation and far beyond, what she has endured and conquered, and what she promises to be, with the sureness of sunrise.

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This review was first published in slightly shorter for in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/visual-art/woodland-patterns-visual-love-poem-to-african-women/

1 The exhibit was facilitated in partnership with Genre: Urban Arts, with crucial assistance from that organization’s creative director and owner Nakeysha Roberts Washington, a Woodland Pattern board member

Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust Street. Courtesy unbanmilwaukee.com

Whether Jazz, Hip-Hop or Electronic, trumpeter Jamie Breiwick rides the waves

Jazz artist Jamie Breiwick’s voice and vision have steadily grown, like rippling concentric circles, since he first caught the attention of fellow musicians, critics, and the public. The wind of his trumpet blowing plays a factor, but the wavelike depths arose from his extraordinary knowledge and honoring of the modern jazz tradition, while finding places in contemporary pop vernaculars for his voice, and realizing the wellsprings of his own creative identity.

That analogy seems apt as his seminal inspiration was Miles Davis, who shaped the tides of jazz time for decades, with an uncanny, lyrical and impressionistic sensibility, even as funky as he could get. “I had a Miles t-shirt in high school that I wore constantly,” Breiwick recalls. “The breadth of music he made is really staggering, whether bebop, free, rock, fusion, electronic, experimental, pop, hip-hop. He really blazed a lot of trails and left us with a lifetime of inspiration.”

Right now, Breiwick ranks among the four or five most important jazz musicians in Wisconsin and, among them, the youngest one on a still-rising arc of creative possibility. His prolific recorded output includes with De La Buena, and the influential 25-year band Clamnation. The pandemic threw many artists askew, but Breiwick pressed full-speed ahead, with voluminous recording and releasing on his own B-Side Recordings label.

The group KASE: Jamie Breiwick, trumpet and electronics; John Christensen, bass; knowsthetime, turntables and electronics. 

Breiwick’s graphic design talents sped this output. He creates all his own album covers (and those of others) with an imaginative but clean, post-1960s Blue Note Records compositional style. He just published a book of his jazz cover designs concurrently with an emblematic album, KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House. His jazz-hip-hop-electronics trio, with bassist John Christensen and turntablist Jordan Lee, joined Klassik, perhaps the region’s most musically gifted improv hip-hop singer-song maker, who also plays keyboards and saxophone. KASE logically expands Breiwick’s creative ripples into exploring “sonic landscapes” – Miles ahead, atmospheric, wonder-inducing.

The cassette cover of “KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House,” designed by Jamie Breiwick. Courtesy B-Side Graphics

Breiwick’s recorded and group projects have probed ground-breaking jazzers, including Davis, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and world-music traveler Don Cherry. He’s also played and recorded transcribed Davis solos for two Hal Leonard play-along books, among six various he’s recorded.  He values innovative contemporaries like Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire and Nicholas Payton, “an incredible trumpet player and musical conceptualist,” and “a thought leader and outspoken BAM (Black American Music) advocate.” He also teaches music at Prairie School, near Racine. How good is Breiwick teaching music? In 2013, he was nominated for the first-ever Grammy Music Educator Award, selected as one of 200 semi-finalists among over 30,000 nominees.

The cover of The Jewel: Live at the Dead Poet.

Shortly before the pandemic, Breiwick recorded The Jewel: Live at the Dead Poet, a New York trio recording on the leading independent label Ropeadope, with internationally acclaimed drummer-bandleader Matt Wilson, thus extending his national modern-jazz bona fides.

Breiwick plays a live date (here and in photo at top) with renowned drummer Matt Wilson and bassist John Tate.

Breiwick leaves popular success largely to his evolution and artistic authenticity.

“I think it is all in the delivery – people can tell if you are sincere or not. I try to create music and art that I would like myself and try not to be too corny or contrived, while at the same time recognizing my influences. What did Coltrane say? ‘You can play a shoestring if you are sincere,’ I think that is perfect.”

But he knows jazz musicians always need help in America’s capitalist society. Today they can increasingly help each other with online resources. In 2010, Breiwick co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, an online organization that promotes jazz and its community in the Milwaukee area.

His visual-designer talents suggest deeper creative destinations. “It is a similar path of discovery. Visual art and music relate in so many ways – texture, structure, organization, color, tone. Five or six of my favorite designers are also musicians. There’s some sort of elemental connection between the two disciplines…Miles Davis was an incredible painter. Jean-Michel Basquiat deeply loved music and often used musical imagery or references such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in his works.”

Perhaps his most daring recent recording is Solve for X, duets with a longtime collaborator. Guitarist-synthesist Jay Mollerskov took samples of Breiwick’s own trumpet solos, to create sonic counterpoints and textural backdrops for Breiwick to play against. It works like a musical mosaic – outward refracting, rather than narcissistic. That’s because Breiwick knows of whence he came, as a trumpeter and creator.

“I’m inspired by a lot of things, all sorts of music, visual art, architecture, history, stories, traveling,” he says. “I am just trying to better find out who I am, and ultimately just trying to keep moving forward.”

“Like (trumpeter) Clark Terry said, ‘Emulate, assimilate, innovate.’”

So, Breiwick’s self-discovery proceeds. As to forward progress, only time, his seemingly ever-expanding wave, will tell.

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This article was originally published in slightly shorter form in the May 2022 print magazine edition of The Shepherd Express, available free at many locations around Milwaukee County.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milwaukee’s Riverwest is Restless and Alive

Linneman's

“Solve for X” finds Jamie Breiwick and Jay Mollerskov as a musical Holmes and Watson?

Review: Jamie Breiwick & Jay Mollerskov – Solve for X (B Side)

Jamie Breiwick emerged by leaps and bounds as the most important jazz musician on the Milwaukee scene in 2021. The trumpeter-composer-conceptualizer works in both straight-ahead and cutting-edge realms.

His hip-hop/jazz trio KASE opened for Terence Blanchard’s E-Collective at the Marcus PAC, and he released a stunning bevy of albums, mostly on his own B Side label, but also, The Jewel (Live at The Dead Poet), a trio date on Ropeadope, with internationally-known drummer Matt Wilson, recorded live in New York.

Among the self-released albums, his latest, Solve for X, may be his strongest experimental album yet. The album cover by local printmaker Jay Arpin, depicting a massive iceberg, suggests the project’s quietly vast ambition and its “granular synthesis.” The album comprises “electronic works based completely on Jamie’s trumpet playing as the sole sound source.” The enigmatic title, borrowed from the Arpin print’s, suggests a creative inquiry as profound as the dimensions and revealing textures of the largely-submerged iceberg – the two musicians as a sort of musical Holmes and Watson, investigating a mysterious symbol perhaps signifying evidence of climate catastrophe.

Breiwick’s longtime friend, guitarist-synthesist Jay Mollerskov, took recordings of the trumpeter’s themes and solos, and mutated them into “granular landscapes” for the elegantly winged horn, a myriad of textures and tones. Breiwick displays exceptionally sustained lyricism.

On “Strata,” the ascending atmospheric spaciousness seems to virtually lift you out of your chair, beyond yourself, as if gazing down on the earth (in another strata), even suggesting a pensive moral pondering of humanity below. Here and elsewhere, the minimalist tonal aesthetic offers maximal textural effect.

“Traces of Things,” with its episodic fragments, suggests Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence.” Finally, “Reflect” delicately grounds the sonic outer limits like a mile-high kite-string, with rather gorgeous horn playing, including Breiwick’s son, Nolan, dueting with his father on trumpet.

Yet another Breiwick-brainchild album, KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House, was just released this week, featuring Klassik, the brilliant Milwaukee-based hip-hop singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

For more information, visit:

B Side Recordings

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This review was originally published in slightly shorter form, in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/solve-for-x-by-jamie-breiwick-b-side/

Jim Glynn, Restless Seeker, Part 2

 

Ed. note, This “Jim Glynn Part 2,” was accidentally posted a few days ago, even though obviously unfinished. I discovered that belately, after being out of town. Thanks for the generous “likes,” but here is the finished post. 

It was gratifying, but no great surprise, that many people responded to my last Culture Currents posting, with a vast array of comments and stories and appreciation of the late Jim Glynn. I now realize I can’t leave this subject at that. I need to add more to this man’s story and legacy, in my small way. Thus, this follow-up blog post.

What dawned on me today was about what Jim signified and how he functioned in our lives, meaning those who knew and were truly touched by him. In retrospect, it seems that for me, and I suspect a number of our other people, that this extraordinary Irishman may have been his own sort of “guru.” I believe he came to his wisdom the hard way, as perhaps most wisdom arrives, through the extraordinary trials, suffering and indignities that his paraplegia visited upon him over the course of most of his adult life.

I never really thought of him that way when he was alive, and I realize the “guru” notion may prompt a few eye rolls, but I doubt much among those who knew the man. Thinking back, I always felt somewhat blessed by his presence, and inspired, and perhaps, if I was lucky, even enlightened a bit by the restless seeker in him, in all its manifestations, towards what I recently called “enlightened serenity.”

This got me to thinking about a book I own and cherish, written by perhaps the most brilliant teacher I have ever had: Professor Ihab Hassan, an acclaimed literary critic, whom I had the privilege to study with in a graduate English lit seminar at UW-Milwaukee in the mid-1980s. And the notion of Jim’s seeking, or his quest in life — quiet as it may have seemed — led me back to Hassan’s superb book Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters.

I also thought part of Hassan’s rather poetic rigor (no oxymoron with him) and perspective came from being an Egyptian, emigrated to America at age 20, then specializing in American literature (His 1961 book Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel, made his name in the literary world). Jim responded to the culture and wisdoms of the East, and Egypt is perhaps the most mystical (as in Eastern, more than Arabic) of Middle Eastern cultures.

In his introduction, Hassan characterizes “the seeker” he is trying to illuminate in his book, and, the more I recall Jim and his spirit, the more I feel that he was something of the kind of seeker Hassan contemplates and investigates in his book. I will quote from it:

“The seeker, as I hope to show, has many faces. But he is not characterless or faceless. He is certainly self-reliant, tolerant of risk. He is mobile. He seeks a meaning, even if danger must attend his pursuit; he intuits that individuals need and consume meanings far more than products. And he suspects that the sacred…camouflages itself in that pursuit…he disdains vicarious jeopardy, pseudo-risks, packaged by prurient media or proffered by amusement parks. He knows unreal America. He knows, therefore that in venturous quests he may recover reality, constitute significance, maintain his vigor, all in those privileged moments of being when life vouchsafes its most secret rewards (my italics). Is this not the whole sense of Emersonian experience?” 1

This photo illustrates how Jim Glynn could transform risk into reward with quick, deft wit and charm. I believe he had double-parked in Chicago’s Loop with some friends and, sure enough, the cops pulled up. Jim swiftly disarmed them (not literally) and, before we knew it, he’d “borrowed” their squad car for this crazy scene! Jim’s in the car at right, in his psychedelic shirt, wearing a Chicago cop’s hat, with our bemused friend Mitch (Mitar) Covic, to Jim’s left. The woman below was Jim’s current girlfriend (name escapes me) and the two to the far left were Jim’s friends who I didn’t really know. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Hassan’s characterization of an American archetype (especially that which I italicize), seems to fit Jim Glynn perfectly. As my first post indicated, he was amazingly mobile, despite his paraplegia and, man, did he seek meaning more than products (musical recordings aside), even despite danger.

His questing was largely manifest culturally, beyond good friends and acquaintances (“brothers and “sisters”) through his long-time radio show’s expansively “out there” musical variety: Not simply esoteric, but capable of gracefully bringing back in the general listener by integrating popular, or at least vernacular music, of many sorts. Few disk jockeys I’ve heard did this as well. Not even the great Milwaukee DJ Ron Cuzner, to compare another jazz-oriented programmer, who really “limited” himself to jazz. WMSE today still does have some arguably comparable like “Tom Wanderer” or Paul Cebar, and to a degree “Dr. Sushi,” for those with strong jazz tastes. WUWM’s Bob Reitman remains great, but with largely a ’60s-’70s throwback show.

Clearly Jim’s questing, and ability, to swim across mile-wide and unpredictable Elkhart Lake with arms, signifies that quest. This swim was beyond my ability, by contrast to a few more-capable swimmer/amigos, like Harvey Taylor, Tom Truel, Heiko Eggers, and perhaps Tim Reichart, at a genuine level of physical danger and risk. Truel admits he needed professional scuba fins to “pull this off” with Jim, and just barely.

Truel’s generous and detailed e-mail response to me, a remembrance/tribute of it’s own, underscores what I’m driving at here.

Time, as Tom notes, was a profoundly relative term in Jim’s seemingly timeless quest” Tom writes:.

“I call it ‘Jimmy Glynn Time’. You might get together with Jim for a swim day and to truly enjoy it, one needed to clear the calendar for the day. ‘We will leave at 10AM from my house.’, would become 11 or 11:30. Time was never wasted. Many preparations. Plenty of yuks (eg. see photo above) and endless chat of music, great women and sacred herb. Not a boring delay to say the least, as long as one made no plans for the day and if you knew what you were getting into — no plans were made. With Jim –‘The Journey Was The Adventure’.”
(I’ll add that Jim wasn’t above transgression. I know that he drove his car many times under the influence of herb. Illegal yes, but, as with most comparative aspects of herb consumption, I consider that far less dangerous than drunken driving. Also, in his early radio years at WUWM, Jim would invite friends to the studio during his late night show, and everyone would partake of the “sacred herb,” whether toking or “indirectly,” amid the celestial cloud-offering to the bodiless goddess Mary Jane, suffusing the studio on high.)
Then, Tom Truel recalls: “(Jim, the DJ, is getting ready to play Dylan’s “Time Out Of Mind” in its entirety, one of his favorites, to set the mood and leave a clue in regard to shadow elements as well.)”

So I’m trying to work my way out of the “shadow elements” before they recede too far into the mists of time, or transcendence?

Another even more dramatic example of Jim’s seeking, regardless of danger, may have led directly to the accident that disabled him. I’m going to speculate here a bit, as Jim never told me the full details of the accident in any self-dramatizing or aggrandizing way. But consider the very fact that he was driving a Jeep (still infamously unsafe vehicles in the 1960s) through the Alps on a trip from Germany to France. Perhaps it was a personal trip but more likely military duty which, as a soldier, he would probably have volunteered for — given the risk and isolated, extended nature of it.

There was GI Jim Glynn, in the process attaining the sort of ultimate natural high he would strive to later simulate, or somewhat achieve, through exploratory creative music, simpatico friendship and marijuana. And then, in a sudden fated instant, he was tumbling, but also flying, through the air, in the mountains. This recalls a great Herman Melville notion of “a Catskill eagle in some souls” 3

Or, less exaltedly, Townes Van Zandt’s simpler image of “to live’s to fly, both low and high,” in his masterful song, “To Live’s to Fly.”

The last two-part chapter of Jim Glynn’s life-mission, finally was to leave Milwaukee — the city where many people loved him to varying degrees and to which he’d given so much — and embark on a late-life quest, by himself. He said he felt this city had grown stale for him. To the shock of many friends, he moved to Portland, Oregon, while a paraplegic in his early 60s.

It all soon fell apart. A “friend” who helped Jim move in, then ripped off a couple of boxes of “personal papers,” Jim said, which really had little value except to Jim himself.

He did some radio shows for the local Portland community station and the NPR outlet. Then one day he fell, probably on a rainy Portland street, and broke his leg, and found himself laid up with a large cast for quite a while.

Then he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, possibly the result of his constant need for a catheter, and being out there without a girlfriend/caretaker his hygiene likely suffered. .To say the least, Jim never really found his mojo in Portland.

Another person who addressed his quest was writer Doug Hissom, in his excellent 2004 Shepherd Express feature on Jim when he returned home. Hissom opens simply and directly, “Jim Glynn has come home to die.” He’d found the Portland jazz scene amazingly similar to Milwaukee,  “I found that jazz has a precarious toehold these days. To my horror. The extensive music scene (in Portland) Is aimed at people under 25.”

Yet, amid loneliness in the Northwest, his painful seeking earned wisdom and serenity. “I suddenly found myself a man without a country. I just realized one day, that yeah, it’s time to come back for my people. Where my roots are. It’s just time to come back to Milwaukee.

“They say you can’t come home again and some of that is right. But my rhythm’s gotten back. I’ve got back into a natural rhythm

“It’s the Zen feeling and Zen quality in Milwaukee where you can move at what I thought was a slow pace before, but now it’s about right.” Hissom writes that Jim was going to try to get back on the radio and spend some time in the clubs. “It’s like a whole world opened up to me when I came back,” Jim continued.

Then he told Hissom the same thing he said to me. “I really don’t know how much time I have. They say I’m really sick, but I don’t act sick. They told me today it’s a short time, maybe. But I’ve no idea.”

Hissom’s article ran in the Shepherd Express September 30-October 6, 2004 edition. Now, please note the photograph of Jim (at the top) from his memorial brochure. The photo was taken October 2, and there he is, with his rhythm back, paradiddling his conga drum, at a jam in a club.

On October 18, Jim took his restless quest for enlightened serenity out, to the greatest unknown of all.

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  1. Ihab Hassan, Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 13
  2. ““There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” — Herman Melville, Chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” Moby-Dick.

 

 

I remember “Dirty” Jack Covert, a man who could sell you any record and you’d almost always be thankful

 

Jack Covert, in 2017,  when he retired from his successful career in the book business, after a memorable start as a small Milwaukee record store owner. Courtesy onmilwaukee.com.

Dirty Jack hit the dirt hard, for the last time. It may be the last time, but I don’t know a music fan who dug deeper into music as a record buyer, and into album warehouses and personal collections, as an eager buyer-seller. Dan Burr’s Crumb-esque cartoon strip (below) illustrates that Jack Covert well, (taken from the linked obit by Dave Luhrssen of The Shepherd Express:)

Jack Covert obit

I’m a bit late in acknowledging Jack, but last week I was distracted by writing about the death of Nanci Griffith, another great person who fit into the popular music world in her own slightly square-peg-in-a-round-hole way.

Dirty Jack’s Record Rack, on Farwell and Irving, was my favorite record store in my youth, even though I ended up becoming an album buyer at Radio Doctor’s Soul Shop and Peaches Records. 1

But in the early ‘70s, Jack’s Rack was closer to my Downer Avenue family home during college at UWM, even during my early years working at Radio Doctors. And Jack’s always had plenty of jazz in stock as well as rock, as Jack’s tastes leaned jazz-wise, as did mine. Plus, his hole-in-the-wall shop was THE PLACE for hole-in-the-corner “cut-out” LPs, a dream for a collection builder’s on a budget. 2.

And Jack knew how to buy and sell. I remember Jack several times almost physically escorting me to the cash register with an album I was unsure about. He also wasn’t shy about letting his crankiness show right in the store and, with that Snidely Whiplash mustache, you shoulda been a bit suspicious of this guy (see the snapshot photo in Dave’s obit piece). Yet I almost always was thankful he sold me.

Dan Burr’s affectionate cartoon history of Dirty Jack’s Record Rack. The store staff members in the last panel, below Jack, are (L-R) Ed Heinzelman,* album buyer Terry Wachsmuth, Mark Schneider and Chris Ballone. Courtesy Dan Burr and Shepherd Express.

Take a look at the smile in the photo at top, taken when he retired. Back in the day, Jack would jump on you, then flash that I’m-your-pal-with-three aces smile, whenever he and you needed it.

And how many record stores in the 1970s had custom marketing matches, with the owner’s beaming mug on them, proclaiming it “Cut-Out Capital of the World!” ?

 

Courtesy ebay.com

His second-in-command at the Rack was a slightly-built long-hair named Terry, who had a bit of Jack’s crankiness, in a more skittish way. But Terry really knew his stuff, as did Mark Schneider, the friendliest Jack’s employee, in my memory. Mark wore his erudition gracefully. Today the San Francisco-based Schneider —  married to my former Milwaukee Journal colleague, rock critic Divina Infusino – comes to mind when I see Steve Earle’s guitarist Chris Masterson, who’s grown into a killer axe wielder since I last heard him live. Masterson, like Mark, has an affable personality and the same sort of long, ultra-blonde hair, and glasses. 1

I digress partly because I know Jack was a smart businessman who really valued and knew how to use his best employees. I think Mark would agree.

I also admit my comparisons of record store personnel to pop music artists may seem a bit over-the-top. But it’s something that I think Rob Fleming might nod his head to. He’s the slightly grandiose fictional owner of the record store in Nick Hornby’s wonderful novel High Fidelity, a comparison to Dirty Jack’s which Dave Luhrssen also makes aptly. I don’t think Jack or any of his guys floated through the sort of confused romanticism as does Rob (played by John Cusack in the hit film version). They knew how to channel their romantic impulses into music passions.

I had moved to Madison by the time Jack was hired at Schwartz Booksellers so I didn’t see him succeed as founder and president of 800-CEO-READ, a company that steered through the challenge from big box bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble and the rise of amazon.com “with ingenuity and a commitment to superior customer service for authors, customers, and the publishing houses themselves,” as the company’s press release on Covert’s death explains.

Jack Covert is also the co-author of 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You (Link). The 100 Best has been translated into over 10 languages and the hardcover sold over 40,000 copies.

I’m still an “any-day-now-it-shall-be-released” author, but maybe Jack and I connected a bit because he also turned out to be something of a journalist. He wrote more than 600 monthly Jack Covert Selects business book recommendations that run in newspapers and business journals across the country, and has been featured on CNN and NPR, in Inc. magazine, Fortune, the Harvard Business ReviewWashington PostNew York PostBusinessWeek, and more.

That’s dealing in the big time. Not everyone in “big” business is a crooked wheeler-dealer. At this point, I’ll make no more personality comparisons to famous people.

Yes, Jack Covert had the smarts and personality, and always knew how to sell his stuff. I’m sure that mustachioed smile and those crafty ways are serving him well with Saint Pete at The Pearly Gates.

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  • Thanks to Dirty Jack’s staffer Ed Heinzelman for background information.

1 Unlike Mark Schneider, Masterson may actually be albino, like his fellow guitar gunslinger Johnny Winter. But Masterson was tearing up “Hey Joe,” with Steve Earle at an even nastier pitch than on a 2017 video available on YouTube. I saw Earle and Masterson do that great murder ballad as an encore recently at Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

2. Cut-outs are out-of-print records, typically with a hole punched in the corner of an LP, or a mark obscuring the normal USBN scan bar. I suspect Jack Covert would later know very well how to find and market out-of-print books in a similar fashion.

 

How has capitalism worked out for you? Socialism is not a dirty word. Even less so is democratic socialism.

If a political novice like Donald Trump can become president, why not give a political novice, like New York Senate primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez –  with the energy, sharp intellect and vision of youth – a chance to apply her ideas about democratic socialism? We are, after all, a democratic society. Medium

Perhaps the most naked and time-worn example of American “anti-intellectualism” is the demonizing of the word “socialism.” Even some educated and seemingly thoughtful people instinctively react as if even the scent of socialism robs them of their precious liberties.

But the freedom capitalism promises – and now delivers so pathetically to “we the people” – is to empower or enrich persons or corporations in isolation, leaving distribution of wealth up to the enriched.

Yet in the United States, a person is almost invariably part of some community, if they admit it or not. Even a hard-working farmer, living perhaps a mile away from a neighbor, is sorely dependent on an economic system that runs fairly to compensate and support his labors. This means that a socio-economic system that balances the needs of individuals, as opposed to greedy wants, with the needs of the community makes sense. Why? Because trickle-down theories of capitalism rarely actually deliver to the people, whereas a social-minded system strives to assure the individual gets back something from the communal system.

I think a more socialist-oriented America can help redirect appropriate percentages of taxes on the rich, help close the terrible income equality gap, and stimulate the economy with greater consumer-spending power. Democratic socialism can co-exist with our capitalist system, in a dialectical tension, a check and balance, if citizens and our leaders do their jobs.

Bret Stevens, a conservative New York Times opinion columnist, reacted recently with condescending, patriarchal tone to the win of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old newcomer to politics who beat out an old Democratic Party insider, Joseph Crowley, in New York’s senatorial primary, and who has captured the imagination of a lot of America. She’s a self-described “social democrat.”

Stevens then trots out examples of how a few socialist governments in Mexico and South Africa have been corrupted. In Europe, democracies have consistently strengthened or formed since World War II, based on socialist principles. But their current struggles with reactionary politics are due to mainly to massive refugee flight from wars elsewhere. The problem isn’t the democratic socialism of, for example, Germany where, despite her challenges, chancellor Angela Merkel is now, in effect, the leader of the free world, now that President Trump his virtually abdicated such a role, with his anti-allies and pro-dictatorial perversities.

His disgraceful post-Summit press conference performance beside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday is only the latest (and perhaps the worst) example.

It’s true that any political system can be corrupted. That is why democracy can never be a spectator sport, and part of the people’s role is remain vigilant about keeping our politicians honest. And Mr. Stevens, what about the gross corruptions that capitalism has wrought, time after time after time? We live in one of the worst ever –  the reason why American people across much of the political spectrum want meaningful change, not the same old same old. 1

More in America’s societal key, Stevens sings the grindingly tired “left-center-right” song that has not an ounce of intellectual creativity in it:

“If Trump is the new Nixon, the right way to oppose him isn’t to summon the ghost of George McGovern. Try some version of Bill Clinton (minus the grossness) for a change: working-class affect, middle-class politics, upper-class aspirations.” 

First of all, Trump is proving far worse than Nixon, who at least had intelligence for political and policy nuance, and a sense of shame. And Nixon actually accomplished some policies that provided ordinary people social and economic benefit, unlike anything Trump has done. And summoning “the ghost of George McGovern” is lamely poking at a straw man.

As for what we should agree on, we do need finally “working-class affect, middle-class politics,” and even “upper-class aspirations.” Those are all things that a well-run government that functions for general societal benefit can provide, with good faith and creative collaboration. You might notice how Stevens’ historical cherry-picking ignores the historic elephant in the room, the most relevant history in modern America. Of course, that’s Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which produced the most successful and extended period of across-the-board prosperity in American history.

As John Nichols points out in his history of American socialism, Roosevelt “drew inspiration from the platforms of the Socialist party that (Eugene) Debs handed off to Norman Thomas. But Roosevelt, a lifelong reader of (Thomas) Paine quoted the pamphleteer’s fireside chats (‘So spoke Americans in the year 1776. So speak Americans today!’) borrowed at least as much from the distant revolutionary’s canon.” 2

We know that when social-minded policy is put on the table, conservatives often start bleating about profligate hand-outs to the needy. However, thinking of American farmers, Thomas Paine wrote in his pamphlet “Agrarian Justice”:

“But it is justice, and not charity, that is the principle of the plan. In all great cases it is necessary to have a principle more universally active than charity; and with respect to justice, it ought not to be left the choice of detached individuals whether they will do justice or not… It ought to be the act of the whole growing spontaneously out of the principles of the revolution, and the reputation of it ought to be national and not individual.” 3

I want to draw an arc from Thomas Paine to the New Deal more pointedly, to one of the most explicitly acclaimed examples of socialist success in American history – in Milwaukee – which Nichols details in his book. But it was a column on this very topic this week by Shepherd Express writer Joel McNally which actually inspired this blog.

The longtime journalist has also taught a class on urban history of Milwaukee at UW-Milwaukee. His column notes the swelling energy and activism begat by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and concisely delineates how the three consecutive Socialist mayors of Milwaukee, from 1910 to the 1960s, succeeded.

McNally explains that “there is a reason why young activists don’t consider socialism to be a scary word. They’re well-educated.” McNally then demarcates a history he taught his students, about what he calls “Milwaukee’s Socialist example.” The city’s three socialist mayors over that time were Emile Seidel (1910-1912); Daniel Hoan (1916-1940); and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960). The first, Seidel, helped clean up Mayor David Rose’s corrupt government, and Zeidler lives on as far more than a historical entity to those old enough to have witnessed his successful mayoral terms.

“But it was Hoan – the crusading socialist city attorney left standing after the 1912 purge of socialists who was elected mayor in 1916 and held the office for the next 24 years – who defined lasting contributions of Democratic Socialists to democracy itself,” McNally writes.

Socialist Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan on the cover of TIME magazine in 1936. Courtesy TIME

Daniel Hoan was so successful with a socialist Milwaukee government that he was “recognized nationally for its sound financial management while expanding public employment for those out of work.” The New York Times praised Hoan in December 1931, two years after the stock market crash of 1929, for paying its bills, delivering unemployment relief to hundreds of thousands, “and at the end of the year will have about $ 4 million in the bank.”

And TIME magazine, run by conservative Republican publisher Henry Luce, put Hoan on its cover in April 1936, reporting: “Under him, Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the US.”

McNally then describes how, despite The Democratic Party’s successful undermining of The Socialist Party, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt  “used public employment, unemployment benefits and other social safety net programs to pull the nation out of the Great Depression and become the most popular president in history.”
Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid,  Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act similarly are socialist programs, McNally notes.

“It’s as American as apple pie to elect a bright, new generation of Democratic Socialists. They’re fighting to preserve the American ideal of sharing the economic benefits of democracy with everyone, not just the wealthy.” 4

And we’re likely better off with more women public servants, like Ocasio-Cortez, baking America’s apple pie, because they’re often more skilled and experienced in the societal kitchen than men, and know how to slice and distribute the pies, to Make America Socially Equitable Again. How great would that America be?

____________

1 Bret Stevens,

“Democratic Socialism is Dem Doom,” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/democratic-socialism-alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html, The New York Times, July 6, 2018

2. John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, Verso, 2011, 46

3. Nichols, quoting Thomas Paine in The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, 50

4. Joel McNally, Democratic Socialists Aren’t Demons; They’re Just Energized Democrats, The Shepherd Express, July 12-18, p. 10, 2018