• Category Archives Music

  • Unasked Questions

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

    A project, perhaps the smooth beast rising from the deeps, keeps coming at me, jostling me, prodding me to imagine it into being. I’m not ready to go all the way there yet so let me set down a few bars, perhaps really only a jumble of notes not yet ordered by staff and clef.

    1. American art. Here would be American works that found their muse in the West as it came to be in the minds of a young country. Here the work of the Hudson River School, the Ash-can School, Wyeth, Homer and Hopper, even Ed Ruscha, artists whose work clawed away at the truth underneath the bones of American life and culture. Warhol and Pollock and Rothko, too. Morris Louis. Photographers like Anself Adams and Walker Evans and Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and Edward Weston. Seeking the American through our art.

    2. American music: jazz, Copland, Gershwin, Ives. Seeking the American in our music. Seeking the sounds that issue from the various rivers that make us an ocean.

    3. American thinkers like the American Renaissance, like Dewey and James, Wills and Veblen, DuBois and Douglas. What is our manner of thought, our direction? Our ideas that tear away at the fabric of this country, peaking behind it, looking for its connective tissue.

    4. American literature: Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Lovecraft, not just the luminaries here, but the dark lights, too. Probing, seeking for the through line from the first immigrants to the most recent, how they wove their lives together. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser.

    Poets yes, of course. Whitman, Silliman, Dickinson, Moore, Oliver, Berry, White, Collins…a long, long line of persons using words as scalpels to flense the fat off the American soul and leave it bloody, but bared

    These are the source material, the Americanness. And yes, I need more women and yes, I need more variety, but this is a long project, perhaps the last project, one focused on who we say, show, play that we are. Theater is not there in the list. Neither is invention. Nor war. Nor democracy. Nor politicians. Nor sport. Probably should be.

    This is too nebulous, too diffuse, too broad. In danger of being too shallow, too thin on the ground to matter. Maybe so. Or, maybe it’s just a search for the roots of my Self, its American roots. Not sure yet, like I said.


    Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Humanities Music US History Writing

  • Music for Labor Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                         College Moon

    Well, now I know if anybody comes and tries to steal our front porch, Gertie will let us know. Dave Scott is here today doing outside maintenance aimed at getting the best price out of our house. He’s replacing the front porch, painting and spiffing it up generally. While he uses saws and drills, Gertie barks. Once in a while she’ll run to the door and growl. This means she’s running toward the danger she senses.

    Most of the morning I packed maps, sorted file folders, got three more boxes of books packed. Two green, one red.

    Still listening to outlaw country, thinking about it as a kind of working class male protest music. Take this job and shove it, by David Allen Cole is an example. The figure in the song fantasizes about losing his wife and going to his boss with the news. He’d tell the boss, he says, that’d he lost the reason he was working so the boss can take this job and shove it. Another song echoes a t-shirt I saw yesterday at the fair, Protect My Civil Rights, Gun Owners Alliance. In this the song the man flies two flags on his property: the red white and blue and the rattle snake with “Don’t Tread on Me.” Sums up his world, he says.

    Those of us welcomed into the world of white male middle and upper middle class privilege at birth, especially those of us medicare card in the wallet types, have trouble appreciating the powerlessness experienced by those who struggle first to get a minimum wage job, then keep it. Success often means long hours in hot or dusty working conditions with little control over bathroom breaks, lunch times. Too, the work is repetitive and mind-killing. It’s no wonder that those trapped in such a work world often listen to outlaw country.

    You might wonder, I suppose, why I like it. I gravitate toward those willing to stand up to the situation they find themselves in. It’s why I’ve done a lot of labor union politics over the years and why I still believe in the labor movement. Whenever the corporation has the capital and the power, the person working for wages (not talking here about white collar workers like doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer programmers, managers-though there are situations, doctors being a good one, where working conditions for even these highly educated folks are bad.) is at a distinct power disadvantage as long they remain unrepresented by a union.

    Even in a time when unions are in decline, their logic has never been stronger. Just witness the home-care health workers vote this week here in Minnesota. As a potential user of their services in the future, I want these folks well-paid and well-trained. That will only happen with a union.

    So, happy labor day weekend.

     


    Music Politics

  • The Way West

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                  Lughnasa Moon

    More decluttering. Harder than it seems. Each decision means a bit of the past, or at least physical evidence of it, gets dismissed. It can feel harsh. I threw out today all the tours that I had designed while a docent at the MIA. Why? They are based specifically on objects at the MIA and will not be useful in another museum except in a very abstract way, too abstract to support moving them to Colorado. Still. Those tours, with 8-10 items, hours, sometimes days of research and the memories associated with the tours themselves were not just pieces of paper, but parts of my life.

    (trails west)

    It’s easier to throw out or box up to sell Minnesota focused gardening books and files. They’re related to a geographic particularity and we’ll not be here. The space those took up will have xeriscaping, Rocky Mountain flora, bee-keeping in the mountains books and files.

    Now all of the files and books in the garden study, the six bookshelves in the exercise area and the three in the area outside the garden study have been sorted and almost all boxed, appropriately taped, or tossed.

    Today’s music was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. You gotta serve somebody, it might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. The anti-libertarian ballad.


    Colorado Music The Move

  • Woolly Audio

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

    Got home tonight after listening to Woolly Mammoths play their current audio favs. Looked up in the night sky, around Cassiopeia to the north, and saw a satellite tracking fast against the Milky Way. A moment of foreground/background confusion. Here I am on earth, up there, in space is a human made object. Here. There. Sort of like anticipating the move. Here. There.

    (most likely this one, Envisat, a defunct European Space Agency Earth observatory)

    Mark Odegard asked us to bring material we’ve been listening to recently. Frank Broderick played Rodrigo (a classical guitar composition), the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th and a recorded version of him singing a Kris Kristofferson song. This was for Mary in case he died during surgery.

    Bill Schmidt had a clip from Krista Tippet interviewing Paul Cohelo and a track of Dave Brubeck. Stefan played an Indian music selection and two videos produced and sung by his son Taylor. Warren had Leo Kottke and Flogging Molly, an Irish punk band. Scott played the first movement of Appalachian Spring. Tom played Izzy, the Hawai’ian singer, and Kathleen Madigan. I didn’t catch Mark’s selection, but it was moody guitar music.

    (Flogging Molly)

    I played Dylan singing It Ain’t Me Babe and Willie Nelson, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys. Packing music.


    Music Woolly Mammoths

  • Three Score and Ten. And jazz.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                   Lughnasa Moon

    We celebrated Kate’s 70th tonight, 8 days ahead of her August 18th birthday. Down Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 is a town called Hastings with a new bridge over the Mississippi, two graceful arches painted orange and lit at night. Across the bridge and beyond Hastings is the Alexis Bailly vineyard, founded in 1973 by a Twin Cities’ attorney.

    Tonight, as it has done for four years now, KBEM joined with Nan Bailly, daughter of Alexis, to sponsor an evening of jazz and locally sourced food. Nan’s vineyards are green, healthy appearing and the building her father built (picture below) houses a small store and a wine bar.

    Behind the building is an area with carved boulder seats, contemporary metal sculpture scattered among native prairie and a spot where KBEM put up a large white tent and several long tables.

    The chef for the event, Stan Patalonis, put together a Latin menu with beginners that featured Spanish flavors then moved onto Latin America. The food was good, the wine plentiful and the jazz mellow. A suite of clouds gave us a cooler evening, just right in the mid-70’s, and the rain held off until the meal was done.

    Kate enjoyed the wine and her birthday celebration. We drove home along the river, then up 280 and 35E and 10 to Round Lake Boulevard. 70 is a landmark birthday and so was this evening.


    Cooking Family Holidays Music

  • Yeah

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

    Then again, there’s jazz.  Not sure how it made its way into my soul.  Sometime in my teens.  Might have been that see-it tour I took with the Methodist Church to New York and Washington, D.C.  Gene Krupa at the Metropole stands out as a memory, though just what I would have been doing there I have no idea.

    Jazz, like the Coltrane piece I’m listening to right now, Body and Soul, comes along with big east coast city memories, including the wood paneled corridors of Washington, D.C.  It feels like night time and carpeted hallways with people doing significant things, well past working hours.  Smoke filled rooms, half-empty glasses with lipstick stains and cigarette butts smoking in ceramic ashtrays.

    There’s also the stadium in Cincinnati where Coltrane shared the stage with Monk and Herbie Mann.  Where the jazz went on and on and then we returned to the place we were crashing, somewhere on Mount Adams, maybe on Celestial Avenue or Paradise or Monastery Street.  It had these kind of street names.

    The combination of marijuana, the jazz festival, the late 60’s and Mount Adams makes for a peculiar set of memories, as if for a while I floated along on Celestial Avenue listening to tenor sax riffs, that wonderful complexity of Monk’s piano, the flute, the horn all marking a variation on the theme of heaven.  Might have been.

    (Cincinnati landmark Immaculata Church on Mt. Adams in the background)

     

     


    Memories Music

  • Jazz. Yeah.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                Seed Catalog Moon

    To the Dakota tonight with my sweetie.  Warren and Sheryl attended this KBEM event, too.  The featured performers Charmin and Shapira are an improbable match.  He, Shapira, looks like a televangelist who maybe slipped along the line, and plays the guitar at times like Jimmy Hendrix.  At other times like a piano.  He’s subtle and smooth.

    Charmin could be a smaller Billy Holliday with a great range and soulful tone that comes out easily.  She sang standards, a nice piece by Thelonius Monk and another I imagine was part of Gershwin’s songbook.

    They were backed up a trio with a tenor sax, bass and drums.  All of the musicians were excellent.  I have a special fondness for the dreamy riffs that come from the saxophone and this guy was good.

    The Dakota is a local treasure, a Minnesota Treasure, like the Japanese National Treasure’s.  They put out quality food and music.

    The wind, must have been 10 mph or so, blasted us as we left and the below or right at zero reading made for punishment.  Glad to get to the car.

     


    Art and Culture Friends Minnesota Music Third Phase

  • .5%

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

    Last night Jerry, who has a big band show on KBEM, gave us some statistics.  “2% say jazz is their favorite music.  Another 2% say classical.  .5% like both.”  That puts Kate and me into the .5% bracket.

    (Coltrane)

    Jazz and classical music are an acquired taste.  Rock and roll and the other forms of popular music are, too, I suppose, but their acquisition comes laced into high school, i-tunes, radio.  Support of their sound comes through commercial channels that, though increasingly fractured, still provide marketing and distribution for them.  They also have youth culture on their side.

    Jazz still has a certain underground feel, a music played off the main streets of American culture and by the marginal and marginalized.  It is a music that languishes if it becomes popular, witness the fusion era and the cool jazz played on easy listening stations.  Now, with it’s popularity dwindling again, it can regenerate, offer the lure of the hidden, the cult.

    Classical music has a dwindling band of listeners, too, graying as are the jazz audiences. Classical music will find itself refreshed as it, too, becomes the province of smaller gatherings, people devoted to musicology, to the repertoire of yesterday.

    Neither of the significant aural art forms will disappear.  Yes, the opportunities to hear them may diminish, but there will always be live performances somewhere for both. The availability of recorded and digital music ensures that they will survive until other audiences find them.

    (Musical_Instruments  Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677)

    So it may be that classical music aficionados will attend trios and quartets in performance more than orchestras, though here the SPCO seems to be on firm footing at last.  Jazz followers will head to clubs and bars, much as they always have, and to the occasional festival.  Performers in both will gain renown in smaller groups, but they will be remembered.  Popularity is not the mark of good art, though you can’t deny its value for paying bills.


    Aging Art and Culture Music Third Phase

  • On the Eastern Shore

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

    Down to the river again tonight.  This time not on Nicollet Island but on the eastern shore, connecting to Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York, the businesses of St. Anthony on Main, a place much visited 30 years ago, less so now.  We were at Vic’s, a restaurant with a great view of a lit up Minneapolis sky line, the river running cold and sluggish below.

    Irv Williams (Photo: Kevin Brown)

    KBEM, jazz radio, had its Christmas party tonight, another, the last, of the years restaurant fund-raising evenings.  This one featured a 95 year old saxophonist, Irv Williams, short with a polished bald head the color of stained cherry.  He was, my Kate told me, Mr. Smooth.  His music wrapped around us as we ate and talked, a quiet tributary of the same great river plyed by John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.

    Warren and Sheryl were there, venturing out after four years in care-giver isolation, still trying to wrap their heads around the freedom they have.  It was a large crowd, maybe 3 or 4 times larger than usual because all the KBEM staff were there.

    There will be another jazz noir radio play in April and a restaurant night at the Dakota on January 22nd.


    Friends Holidays Music

  • Holiseason Begins to Put the Pedal Down

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

    We’re in that pre-holiday time when the air begins to take on a certain quality.  It’s part hope for a Thanksgiving (this time) that we both recall and imagine, a desire for an ideal time with family, with busyness, with good food and good memories made.

    There are those other times, the times before, when the magazines had turkeys in their ads and the Whitehouse spared a turkey.  This year it will be a Minnesota turkey.  The times when we all had to put on our Sunday clothes even though it was Thursday and drive to an Aunt’s or to Grandma’s or to a friends.  Football and stuffing, a browned turkey and mashed potatoes.  Too many people around a too small table.  That drowsy, sleepy feeling, a tryptophan haze.  The turkey drug.

    Those times mesh with hope, give it a flavor, a scent, a sound, a cast.  Those are, for me at least, good memories.  They give the time, this time, a pleasant before hand buzz, a family inflected smile.

    This is holiseason.  It has these moments one after the other.  Times when others and the world of commerce and the world of religion and the world of small children all begin to bang into each other, making the world merry.  Yes, it’s chaotic and capitalistic. No doubt of that.  But it’s also fun, filled with good songs and lights.  Gifts and cold weather.  At least here.  Not so much in Singapore and Muyhail.

    To all of you headed over the hills and through the woods.  Have fun.  Eat too much.  Laugh a lot.  Drive safely.

     


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Holidays Memories Music