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November 29, 2006

An initial attempt to redress the unfairness of things

We miss records all the time, good ones. In some kind of better world -- if I were a better listener, if there were more hours, if there were less drek to wade through -- all the good music we hear would end up being written about in print. But it doesn't. The stack on the far right of the nearest CD cabinet has been accumulating for several months. It is filled with discs I've stumbled upon late, too late to push into the magazine, or played quite randomly a second time in a better mood.

That stack is about ready to fall over, and so I shall try to quit nattering on about politics and art and trees and tend to the music. This will be a kind of alternate year-end list, or an apology, or a belated introduction. I will write about them as time permits these next few weeks, and in no particular order.

Beginning with the sophomore release from Crooked Still. Now, I happen to have returned to this disc because Signature Sounds has made copies available as part of the new subscriber advertisement which will appear in our January-February issue, which is what I'm really supposed to be working on just now. But this isn't advertorial, just belated enthusiasm.

Shaken By A Low Sound came out in late August, which means I would have played it about the same time we were putting together the Old Crow Medicine Show cover story, about the same time my daughter was dancing to the Duhks. And since they, too, are a new variant on old time string band music, I suspect the record got passed over because we didn't want to overbalance the magazine in that direction, or because I just wasn't paying attention to what I was hearing, or, even, because I forgot to play the darn thing.

Mistakes were made.

Their website describes this as "rock energy co-exist[ing] with old-time mountain soul," and then, a paragraph later, suggests the phrase "alternative bluegrass." Yes, but not quite.

Vocalist Aoife O'Donovan and bass player Corey DiMario met at the New England Conservatory of Music. Cellist Rushad Eggleston and banjo player Gregory Liszt were jamming together at MIT. They met at a party. Made a record. Made another record, this one. Liszt has ended up touring with Springsteen's Seeger Sessions group, which has doubtless put a damper on his main band's growth.

Somewhere else amid their bio they suggest that they wished to revisit old-time music knowing everything we know now, rather than pretending ignorance. Which opens up all kinds of attractive possibilities, and is refreshing for its intellectual honesty. That, and their training, mean they pick cleanly and elegantly, and there's not a whole lot of dirt around the edges. The cello -- a long-neglected tone in rock, save for Alejandro Escovedo's bands -- gives a lyric gravity to their music, and an elegant burnish. But in the end you either like or don't like the lead singer's voice, and Ms. O'Donovan is, in her own way, spectacular. Clean and breathy and powerful (but not overpowering) and sweet. Hers is not the sometimes-startling instrument of the Duhks' Jessee Havey, and has little enough blues edge to it. And yet it is almost perfect.

She gives knowing and distinctive readings to these old songs, to Bill Monroe's "Can't You Hear Me Callin'" and, especially, "Wind And Rain," and, curiously, to Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen."

I shall try to pay better attention when their next album arrives.

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November 26, 2006

In memory of Mose Tolliver

Dimly, I came to art, and utterly without training. That may, in the end, explain how I came to be sympathetic to untrained artists, though, as Mark Lanegan long ago reminded me, "it's all punk rock." Only I think he said it better.
It started here: A couple of times in my late teens father arranged for me to travel, sort of with him, to Chicago and New York. His only requirement was that I visit one of the major art museums in each city. Later, when I quit a pretty good job (and not a moment before I'd worn out my welcome) to open Vox Populi Gallery in Seattle, in collaboration with a fellow named Carl Carlson, I reminded dad that it was his fault.
Or at least something he'd stirred up.
Mother lined the stairwell with drawings from some of her architecture classes at Berkeley in the early 1950s, but I have none of her talent.
Somewhere in a roll is a poster of El Greco's "View of Toledo" that I brought back from Chicago, that summer of 1976, though I rarely hung it because the colors were too pale an imitation of the original.
During my grade school years, when I collected stamps (and what do you do with such a collection now?), I was perplexed by Grandma Moses and the whole idea of untrained art. I suspect she merited a spread in Life or National Geographic when I was a kid, though she died in 1961 and so I cannot have seen the Life magazine which put her on the cover when she turned 100.
Years later the woman with whom I kept company decided we should go to the art fair being held in the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Seattle. I do not remember having been excited by the prospect, but, nevertheless, I bought a piece by an Atlanta artist named Derrick Minter, an illustration for a children's book that features a black preacher and a snake, carved out of common pine. It was not quite folk art -- he was an art school grad apparently oblivious to the tradition his work echoed -- and I can remember looking at Leroy Alman's carving at the Mia Gallery's stall, and wishing my Christmas bonus had been that much. I cannot remember whether Mia carried Mose Tolliver, or not, nor where I first heard of him. I know that for some time I misunderstood his name, signed Moset in somewhat dyslexic characters, to be pronounced "moze-ay," and so declaimed my ignorance for all to hear.
Somewhere in all that I caught on to Howard Finster, probably because of his cover art for the Talking Heads. Jeff Suhey, who during his time at A&M signed the Ass Ponys and 16 Horsepower, and with whom I might have ended up friends had I stayed in LA (last I heard Jeff was buying and renovating houses with his father), was once kind enough to pick up a couple pieces from Paradise Garden and send them to me, long before Finster's work was worth what it is today.
At some point before Vox Populi was even a glimmer local TV profiled two African-American executives -- bankers, I believe -- who had quit their corporate jobs to open an art gallery. Somehow that story, and the fact that the brother of one of my co-workers was one of the great underground LA poster artists (POG, he signed his posters, but nobody really knows about him anymore) emboldened me to think I should open a gallery, though I had never been inside one before I built Vox Pop.
I went to the African-American gallery a few times, and found them oddly unfriendly. It could have been that I was the wrong color for that neighborhood, or that I didn't dress the part of a buyer (as, in fact, I was not), or that they viewed me as competition. They had some of Mose Tolliver's pieces on their walls, and I remember that they wanted something like $1200 for them, which either meant they didn't wish to sell or that they'd paid far too much.
One of the rites of passage for folk art collectors is driving through remote parts of the American South and buying directly from the artists. Many of whom are poor, and remain so, despite the collectibility of their work (if R.A. Miller had received a fraction of what his Blow Oskars now sell for, at least his dogs would have eaten better, if not his kin; and his cataracts might have been fixed sooner). I'm a kid from the suburbs of Seattle, and have seen very little real poverty. Smelled less of it. I talked Carl into letting me spend some of our limited start-up money to fly to the South and buy art for Vox Populi. In retrospect, I'd have done better financially had I simply spent what I had on things I like and kept them, rather than going into the gallery business, but we had fun and I hope some of the folks who bought Finster and Miller and other pieces from us for what now seems a song,well, I hope they remember Vox Pop fondly.
So I began at Paradise Garden, where I ran into Michael Finster, and his father, Roy. Michael has the talent, though we had trouble selling his art. It's still among my favorite work hanging in our home, and makes a nice transition from unconscious to conscious outsider art. He quit painting for a while, but every once in a while I see dribbles of new work on the internet when I search for him. And then drove to Tubby Brown's place, and RA Miller's, and then off to search for Leroy Alman and Jimmy Lee Suddeth with bad directions that never worked, and thence toward Montgomery, Alabama, where Mose Tolliver worked with his daughter, Annie.
Mose had been crippled in a warehouse accident, and his employer had given him a bunch of housepaint by way of...I don't know...guilt, maybe. Rehabilitation? Something. He hung his paintings outside his house, and, eventually, white people who collected such things started buying them. In time his children caught the habit, and it is now difficult to be certain that paintings he signed came from his brush.
I had been told of an antique shop in Prattville, Alabama (at least as I remember it today), and stopped there first. The proprietress had hung a folk art show there a while before, and had lots of pieces left over, including a trove of Mose and Annie Tolliver's work. I bought everything I could afford and could pack, and discovered the really fabulous work of Calvin Livingston. She had a van Mose had painted that could have been mine for $5,000, and some days I wish I'd had the money. I hope somebody saved it from rot, anyhow. She also had a couple huge pieces by Livingston that I simply could not figure out how to get home, save for buying the Tolliver van and driving them, and I was pretty certain it wouldn't make it from Prattville, Alabama, to Seattle, Washington.
So that's where I bought most of the Mose Tolliver pieces we sold, and didn't sell, the ones that hang on our living room wall, save for one older piece that came through the gallery doors as part of a collection.
Somehow I was warned off visiting Tolliver. I didn't have a native guide, and he lived in a bad neighborhood, and some of his kids were a little rough. I think I turned back, too, because the Talladega 500 was that weekend, and I feared stock car traffic.
Anyhow, this morning, dancing around the internet for a spare moment, I ran onto a mention on the Yard Dog website that Mose Tolliver had passed away October 30. Which means, I suppose, that the paintings he signed are worth more than they were on October 29, but that's not the point.
At least I don't think that's the point.
We have a long ladder which I am sometimes obliged to climb. Because I do not handle heights well, I have found that there is a step beyond which I simply cannot go. That is as close as I can come to explaining why I didn't visit Mose T, nor Jimmy Suddeth. (All these people, save Michael Finster and Calvin Livingston, are now gone, and I wonder whether the tradition they so inadvertently nurtured will survive the next generation.) Finances and schedule will answer why I never went back (save to Paradise Garden, which crumbled into...family chaos, I guess, and was near enough to Atlanta to be on the way home occasionally).
There is a social component to buying directly from the artist that I have yet to master. They seek, I think, a kind of validation from we who are not at all like the, and yet respond to their work. And there's an element of hustle, of conning the unknowing affluent in to paying for something they don't value. Plus there's a rich history of predatory art dealers, which leads to various kinds of misunderstandings and complex trust issues. I remember one dealer who bought everything RA Miller had done that morning (that is, everything save the ten or twelve pieces I'd picked out), whether she liked it or not, because she knew she could sell it wherever up north her gallery was. And because if she bought it nobody else could. I felt badly for the collectors who arrived that Saturday afternoon to find his shelves bare, though he worked quickly and maybe they didn't stay bare for long.
I didn't want to be one of those people. I didn't wish to exploit artists. I didn't wish to be a tourist in a crack neighborhood, didn't know how to drive to Mose Tolliver's house and not play that role.
He was 82 when he died, though his birth date is rendered in several ways, and that, too, may be wrong.

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November 24, 2006

An apology to our orchard

They say one should never know too much about how laws or made, nor sausage. I read too much about politics (at the moment, Haynes Johnson's The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism) while Susan reads, perhaps, too much about where food comes from (at the moment, Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating).
Needless to say, we don't eat a lot of sausage.
Last year, about this time (I'd just finished William Kunstler's The Long Emergency), our concerns converged with my father-in-law's fallow land, and we planted a small orchard of leaveless sticks. Forty trees in all -- plums, cherries (some of which are actually bushes, but who's counting?), pears, and apples. Along the other side of the pond we planted blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries.
There's an old pear tree by the other pond, and last year it decided to bear fruit; everybody we know still has jars of pears they can't entirely figure out what to do with, and that was just from one tree. Goodness knows what we imagine we'll do with a whole orchard, but it will be some few years before we come to that problem.
We all imagined this would be a fun family project, that we would find and make time to tend to these new plants. We planted them, mulched them, and my father-in-law kept the fields bushhogged.
And that was about it.
Good intentions don't weed. I went out with a hoe one day over the summer, about killed myself after a couple hours in the sun and maybe twenty feet of soil cleared. Never went back, though I meant to.
Now...they're very young plants, and so, past sun and water, there's not so much we can do (or at least that we know we can do) to improve their lot in life. We lost one apple tree over the winter, and, through inertia and an unwillingness to use pesticides, the raspberries didn't make it. Nor did the hybrid blackberries Dan transplanted, though we hadn't really thought they would survive. Some of the tender leaves were carefully attended to by small creatures we could neither find nor identify, but that unwanted nibbling seems not to have harmed anthing too much.
And so now it's fall again. We'd meant to plant more trees; Dan has talked about trying to join the effort to re-establish chesnutt trees in Eastern Kentucky, but our businesses have all gotten busier than we'd counted on, and so we haven't found time even really to talk about what trees to buy, nor where to put them.
And so we have agreed to do our very best to mulch everything before winter hits, and to try to do better next year. And we will probably forego pruning and training the limbs, if only because I'm afraid of killing a young tree with my ignorant efforts at kindness.
All that said, we walked out to the orchard after Thanksgiving dinner on a glorious crisp blue day, the white tail of a deer scattering down the pipeline, and I had to smile. It's still my favorite view in Eastern Kentucky, particularly when our little girl's running eagerly toward some object the rest of us can't even see.

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November 15, 2006

A bagpipe interlude

Some part of each day is taken up with the fending off of various publicists and musicians wanting to know if I've listened to their record yet. And usually I haven't, for the usual reasons. Or I don't remember having not liked it well enough to answer their question more politely than that.
The music of Rufus Harley, about whom I knew nothing until late last night, when I finally approached the tubs of unopened mail lurking behind this desk, is one of those reasons. And so it is that I have spent the better part of this morning listening to the four Atlantic albums Mr. Harley recorded as the leading exponent of the bagpipe's jazz potential (courtesy the fine eccentrics at Rhino Handmade, I hasten to add).
Now, I know that sounds funny. He knew it sounded funny (alas, Mr. Harley succumbed to pancreatic cancer this August), but took it seriously, for he had found his instrument and it wasn't simply a gimmick to draw attention to his skills on other horns. Producer Joel Dorn knew it was an odd notion, but the liner notes suggest that it was his recordings of Harley which cemented Dorn's rise to staff producer with Atlantic. The liners also note that John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins were sufficiently interested in the instrument Harley stumbled upon while watching JFK's funeral that they, too, had (but did not play in public) bagpipes. Something about lessons in breathing, and, perhaps, the astringent tone of the instrument.
Up until this morning I would have said bagpipes played the finest music ever written to create a killing mood. This is because I went to a high school with a bagpipe band, and often felt the sound they sent across the gym gave our basketball team a substantial home court advantage. (And I went to a jock high school; at various times I have taken undue pride in the fact that our quarterback and wide receiver played on opposite sides, and in very different roles, during one Super Bowl. Actually, now that I've tried to fact-check myself, it appears both were on the rosters and didn't play. Whatever. It was a jock high school.)
Four albums, on two discs, of bagpipe jazz. And not simply new approachs to standards like "Motherless Child" and "Chim Chim Cheree" but unexpected blasts at "Eight Miles High" and one of my childhood favorites, "Windy." Ending with a previously unreleased "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" that does nothing to diminish the glories of the folk process.
(None of which should at all suggest I'm about to go on a Big Country binge; I'm not. Really. Not even close.)
Perhaps later I will settle down and listen to music we might more reasonably write about in print. But for the moment, I think I'll cue up "Windy" one more time. The man could play.
And that's why I keep opening the mail.

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November 10, 2006

Having thrown the bums out...

However partisan I may seem, here and elsewhere, it is nevertheless true that I voted for at least two Republicans running for local office this last election. Both lost, but both were opposing established and powerful figures. I might have voted otherwise had I expected them to win, perhaps.
Every once in a while the body politic raises itself from the dust and calls for a change. I don't know that this most recent election remotely suggests a shift in anybody's beliefs, save the certainty that those in office have been there long enough and done enough damage, and it's somebody else's turn. This, in part, is why term limits are silly: That's our job. And, anyway, term limits devolve power into the hands of staff (who remain in the various capitols working for the new folks, regardless) and the lobbiest, who've been having our way.
If nothing else, turning out the Republicans behind the Beltway should provoke no small consternation on K Street, where the lobbiests have their well-appointed buildlings, and where -- at the behest of Rovian Republicans -- they have suffered very few Democrats to work these last years.
I heard Rick Majerus say this about a college basketball game, and presume he stole it from somebody wiser, but...you must be willing to accept in defeat what you would accept in victory.
Hah! And was Rowan County the only place where gas prices went up ten cents the day after the election?
Regardless, it's folly to argue the Democrats won anything. They were the only game in town, and the other team had clearly run amok. They have yet to advance anything like a new idea, though some of the old ones (increasing minimum wage, for example) still have plenty of merit.
The danger for the Democrats is that, having been given the keys to both house of Congress, they will find the nation's problems intractable, and Iraq unwinnable by any terms, and thus be handed the blame in the 2008 presidential elections. But they know that, and so do the Republicans.
And so we have a new game afoot.
There's still this problem, the won that put them in office and won't go away: We shouldn't have invaded Iraq, we did so under false pretenses, and I probably need to get over that because it no longer matters. We're there. We've created a mess, and we've got to fix it somehow. And that doesn't mean declaring victory and leaving.
If I were a Democratic Senator, the first thing I'd want to do is hold hearings on how money was spent in Iraq. Fortunes were made, of that I've no doubt, but little appears to have been accomplished. All politics are local, and local politics in Iraq are about religion, yes, but they're also about jobs and electricity and being able to walk the streets safely. I fear the only way to accomplish those things in Iraq involves essentially re-invading the country, putting hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground and spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And we should quit trying to impose a democracy of our choice on the people, because every time I hear Bush say that it translates to: making the world safe for strip malls. But that's just my two cents.
The real winners are the two independent Senators, who have promised to caucus with the Democrats, but who now possess crucial swing votes. The Democrats now need Joe Lieberman, even as the architect of his primary defeat, Howard Dean, is clearly one of the major actors in the party's present victory. And so it is that his adversary's actions have uniquely benefitted him. I should think Dr. Dean has made his bones. I wonder if he'll run again. For a time I thought I'd vote for him, and then he seemed unable to handle the pressure, and ill suited to the job. Perhaps he's grown into it.
The cover profile of Hillary Clinton in the Atlantic suggested her personality is much like that of the nuclear engineer, Jimmy Carter, who proved unable to focus on more than one problem at a time. I suspect she will find herself able to wield more power and do more good as a Senator from New York than she ever might in the White House. And I don't think she can be elected, much as I think we're overdue for a woman (or a minority) in that office.
Ah. And if I were an entering Senator the second thing I would do is press for a self-sufficient energy policy, and one which doesn't involve destroying vast hunks of nature.
But nobody asked me, did they?

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