Category Archives: Music

Family, Great Work, Music, Our Land and Home

The First of July

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Summer                                                                  Healing Moon

Hodges Plumbing came out yesterday. They will install the gas line to the generator. Gary or Mike Hodges, I didn’t get his first name, arrived in a red truck and wearing overalls, has a gray handlebar mustache, gets up slowly after visiting the crawl space, and has a train whistle as his ringtone. I liked him.

The generator has to get over to the breaker boxes first, of course, and that’s Eric Ginter’s job. He and 3 other guys will muscle it out of the garage and over to the west side of the house. Eric will install the automatic transfer switch and hook up the generator to it. The automatic transfer switch starts the generator when power goes out in the house and shuts it off when the power returns.

While waiting for Hodges to arrive, I cut down aspen suckers and painted them with an herbicide designed to take out heavy brush and poison ivy. In the wild aspens throw out suckers in a ring around a parent tree. When the suckers grow to a certain size, they throw out more. One of the largest living organisms is an aspen stand which began from one tree*. I’m encouraging certain aspens by not cutting them down, but leaving them enough space to grow large. They are fire resistant, as Jacob Ware, deputy chief for the Elk Creek Fire Protection District, said. “Water, not pitch.”

In the evening we went again to Dazzlejazz, having been there last Friday with Tom and Roxann, this time with Jon and Jen. It was a sweet evening. We gave Jon a large gift to help pay down his student loan debt, part of the house sale proceeds. They were both surprised. They asked about my surgery and how they could support Kate. We listened to groups of teen jazz musicians, two jazz bands and a choral group. One tenor sax player really caught my attention, an edgy growly sound.

We drove into the mountains, back home, with Venus and Jupiter in conjunction and a bright full healing moon hanging in the southwestern sky.

*The Pando (Utah) grove consists of about 47,000 tree trunks, and it covers a little more than 100 acres of land. Overall, researchers believe it could weigh 13-million pounds.

Great Work, Music, Woolly Mammoths

Dazzle

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Summer                                                           Healing Moon

Looking forward to seeing Tom and Roxann Crane tonight at Dazzlejazz. They’re in town for a few days, then Tom has some work here. We’ll see the Ken Walker sextet at this Colorado jazz institution. Good food, too.

Here’s a thought for all you eco-minded folks, Arcadia Power. The High Country News, a journal of liberal/progressive thought about the West published in Paonia, Colorado recommended them and I’ve taken some time to research their business model. They take the bill from your utility company, then buy renewable energy certificates to completely offset your usage. It raises your bill about 1.5 cents a kilowatt, but it means your energy use comes from sustainable energy products. Or, supports an equivalent amount of sustainable energy, either way you want to look at it.

 

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Music, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

JFest

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Beltane                                                            Closing Moon

 

Kate and I went to Boulder J Fest yesterday. It was on Pearl Street Mall, a three block long pedestrian mall that is the heart of downtown Boulder. We had a great time, wandering among booths that featured Jewish crafts people, Kosher food, humanist Judaism, Judaism Your Way and B’Nai Brith among many others.

We ate lunch in an excellent Italian trattoria with outdoor seating that gave us a comfortable front row seats to the performance tent. We first heard Lost Tribe, a klezmer band with extraordinary range doing everything from Bob Dylan to reggae klezmer. After they finished an acapella Orthodox group Six13 took over the stage.

Here’s a video of one of their number on youtube:

Art and Culture, Colorado, Family, Music

Dazzled

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Spring                                                       Mountain Spring Moon

Dazzlejazz is a the kind of jazz joint I’ve always wanted to discover: an intimate space, good food and great music. We heard music by Claude Bolling, four pieces, a couple of folks we didn’t recognize and one composer, a Ukranian, new to us, named Nikolai Kapustin.

The listening room, where we ate, insists on turned-off cell phones and no conversation during the performances out of respect for the musicians. It appeals to me, but it does take away some of the joint nature of the place. But not much.

The first set featured a saxophone quartet. The manner of the composition echoed throughout most of the pieces. The music began in a classical vein, a slow exposition setting up a more complex rearrangement of the initial lines in movements to come. But. Rather than segue into a gavotte or an adagio or a largo the playing took off in a jazzy, sometimes discordant direction. It became plaintive and solos broke out into innovative twists. This was by a composer named Frederickson.

The next set was the Toot Suite by Bolling,  trumpet backed up by a jazz trio. The pianist, in particular, was very good as was the trumpeter. Again, a slow exposition, then, a sudden crash of the drums and the piece was off. The trumpeter reminded Kate of Bradford Marsalis. All the Bolling pieces were wonderful, suites for trumpet, flute, cello and violin.

There were two surprises. The Kapustin piece had a violin and piano, both played by

young women from local universities, both Russian and charismatic. His work is worth getting to know.

The second surprise was the finale, a flamenco played on the harp by a woman introduced as expert in special methods of playing the harp. She glissandoed and strummed, then, near the end, began whacking the harp’s base as the imitated the clacking of castanets. She finished with a flourish, left hand in the air. Ole!

The food was good. The company better and the music just right.

 

Garden, Health, Music, Original Relation, Our Land and Home

Habits Changing

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Spring                                                       Mountain Spring Moon

That new habit? Already changing. Figured out that drinking lots of water during my afternoon workouts made my night’s sleep get interrupted. Often enough to be annoying. So, I moved my workouts to mornings, starting this morning. Several positives came into focus in addition to having the whole day to get rid of excess water: cooler, a good thing for summer days. Leaves afternoons and early evenings free. An endorphin boost in the am is good. No sun coming in through the loft door makes the TV easier to see.

So, I have to rejigger my schedule again, accounting for the first hour of the day as exercise, then breakfast. Thinking about that now.

Tonight Kate and I will go into Denver to Dazzle Jazz for an evening of jazz in classical music. A good mix for us since we’re classical music and jazz fans, about 5% of the musical audience according to a DJ from KBEM in Minneapolis

I just reviewed the first pass at the light and shade study. We may not have many options for vegetables. I’m going to repeat the study in a month with better defined areas and more systematic spots for taking the pictures, make them uniform from hour to hour.

Art and Culture, Music

Transported

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Samain                                                                             Moving Moon

Kate and I just got back from a baroque/early music concert in St. Paul at the Baroque Room. After Bach’s Orchestral Suite Nr. 2 in B Minor, I leaned over to her and said, “Would you like to get coffee afterward at the St. Paul Hotel?”

That was my question the last St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concert of March in 1988. I’d waited the entire season to ask her out and almost didn’t even then. After that, we dated, then in 1990 got married not far from the Ordway Theater where we had met. The St. Paul Landmark center is just across Rice Park.

Chamber Music, the sort which the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has made its repertoire, was originally just that, music played in a chamber, or room. The Baroque Room is a small chamber in which the Flying Forms, a Baroque ensemble, play and invite others in to play. They manage the room and the concert series there. I recommend it. The experience is intimate, just like chamber music was meant to be.

While writing this, I began to wonder where I first encountered chamber music. I think it must have been through a wonderful program that was in place while I was in seminary. It offered coupons for very cheap season tickets to the Guthrie, the Minnesota Orchestra and, I imagine, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

When I first started going to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, they were directed by Dennis Russell Davies and played in the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium on the campus of St. Catharine’s college in St. Paul. Something in early music, baroque music and classical music speaks to my soul. I’m not literate enough musically to know what it is, but when I hear Bach or Mozart, Haydn, Purcell, Telemann a mode of transport occurs that carries me into another time and into a more serene and gentle world.

Realized today that I miss it. Kate and I stopped going some time ago. The evening drives, the 8 pm start time, the soft lights and warmth made the concerts sleep inducing. An affront to the music and to ourselves. 20 years or so I went, often weekly during the season, so this music was a major part of my life for a very long time.

Gonna spend some money in Colorado and get our sound system up and working so we can listen at home. We’ve not done much of that at all.

Music, Politics, US History

Strange Fruit

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Samain                                                                           Moving Moon

Ferguson. A situation where any decision would have been met with anger and disappointment. I don’t pretend to know the facts well enough to evaluate the grand jury’s decision. It is clear however that the black community, after a recent string of publicized police related deaths, will question the conclusions.

Look at this from the perspective of Ferguson’s black community. An unarmed teen-ager is shot down in the street by a white police officer. The government and most of the police force is white. There have been high visibility instances this year of other police related killings of black people. Too, this sort of violence, violence sanctioned by those in power is not a new thing, not at all.

Considering the inherent violence in the enslavement, sale and servitude of Africans early in our history, a violence only ended by a great spasm of violence, and even then not truly ended but substituted for by Jim Crow laws, the Klan and structural racism, it is important to understand that the situation looks very different from within the black community. The assumption there is not on behalf of the police, or the benevolence of the government, rather it is fed by what Billie Holliday called Strange fruit. And understandably so from my vantage point.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Music, US History, Writing

Unasked Questions

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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.

Music, Politics

Music for Labor Day

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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.

 

Colorado, Music, The Move

The Way West

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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.