VIGNETTISTE.

The photographer (1943-2012) lived with his parents when he was asked to shoot a Bob Dylan album cover in 1965. Since Bob Dylan was friends with Allen Ginsberg and other beat poets, his parents were less than pleased that their son would hang out in such “bad company” (which subsequently became the title of one of his works). They asked him to mow the lawn, or they wouldn’t lend him their car to drive to San Francisco for the shooting. He did it, and while he did, he nervously focussed on the fact that he was about to document some very important events. The pictures he took on that day are some of his most famous work, he shot “the last gathering of the beats”, about all of the remaining beats hanging out in front of city light book, an independent bookstore that is still open today and was declared a historic landmark.

Larry Keenan documented counterculture life in beautifully shot black and white pictures. Just look at this one, it fills us with “sentiment and longing”, as Jack Magazine stated (same link, the magazine closed in 2010). It really does - allow me to digress, I just read a few works by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and read about their lives. I was astonished what a small role women played, or how bourgeois things were asked of them, without anyone noticing any hypocrisy. I was especially interested in Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady’s wife, who took part in beat culture, dutifully raised children, and then built up an impressive career - a story for another time. Anyway - I look at Keenan pictures, they make me nostalgic somehow, lingering questions or not.

Us jazz fans, we know 1959 was a milestone year for the genre. “Kind of Blue” came out, as well as “Giant Steps”, Mingus’ “Ah Um” and Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to come”. 

Stanley Whitney (*1946 in Philadelphia) was 13, and especially the latter inspired him deeply. “It wasn’t easy. I liked it, it wasn’t bourgeois, it wasn’t N.A.A.C.P., it wasn’t part of this boring conversation about race or integration. It was something totally different—a bigger part of the world. And that was where painters tried to take their painting”, he says in an (excellent) interview with BOMB magazine. 

The 60s were the heyday of abstract expressionism in the States. It took Whitney longer to feel at ease with being an abstract painter - he credits Jean-Michael Basquiat as the one who paved the road for other black abstract artists. 

jazz in a major, mainstream movie! Opening a jazz club like the ones in the old days, where the band is cookin’ and the air is hot, is one protagonist’s dream. More than once, we follow the camera into a club exactly like that. And please tell me - who doesn’t like that sound? Who wouldn’t follow a trumpet bebop line at midnight, opening a door into the past and party there like there was no tomorrow?  

There were some critical voices about how jazz is depicted in the movie, similar to the ones dismissing Whiplash as unrealistic (The previous film by filmmaker Damien Chazelle). They might have a point, but they are missing another one, in my modest opinion. Jazz is seeping (back) into popular culture. One way is to go is the one taken by the likes of Robert Glasper or Kamasi Washington, developing and mixing genres, picked up by big sellers like Kendrick Lamar. Then there are the contemporary jazz priests, playing for smaller audiences, concentrated in New York, like Donny McCaslin, who’s quartet piqued David Bowie’s interest. 

So I don’t see why there shouldn’t also be efforts to preserve earlier jazz, to try to master bebop or neo-bebop, and to want to be able to play it in front of people. 

“yeah it’s a jazz band .... hello?”

Are you trying to book a tour for your avantgarde-post-something-jazz-group? Watch this. It will prepare you for what’s out there, it’s not exaggerated, and it’s only funny in a masochistic kind of way*. I wonder if visual artists deal with this, too?

Robert Frank’s (*1924) book changed photography. It was published in 1958 and marked a breakthrough for him and a new style of photography, raw, quick and intuitive. He had travelled the USA on a Guggenheim fellowship that had been awarded to him three years before, and put together a road-trip reportage, documenting a divided country, racism, inequality, lack of possibilities in a bleak land. He narrowed 28′000 pictures down to 83 for the book and asked Jack Kerouac who he had met at a party to write an introduction for it.

It wasn’t well received at first. His style was called sloppy and full of technical imperfections. As is very often the case, its true importance as a document of american history, and introducer of a new photographic language, was recognized only years later, when he had quit photography to make movies for a short period.

Winter is coming, and something else is coming, too, a storm, or the end of the world, even. The USA are voting, and we are sitting on the edge of our seats unsure of the outcome of either outcome. Tonight and tomorrow we need an artist like David Shrigley (*1968), whose love for the absurd will help calm the anxiety. On his website, you can find two drawings that fit: “the wall”, and “the storm” (they are in fact untitled, but see for yourself)! Looking at the Glasgow-based-artist’s work, you won’t be sure whether it’s just funny or pathologically sad. It’s laugh-out-loud-hilarious, but the laughter will get stuck in your head because all of a sudden you’ll be afraid of what you thought was amusing. 

One of the best known paintings of the 20th century, Nighthawks shows three people in a bar, seemingly very lonely and isolated in a big city where fluorescent lights just started to change life at night. Hopper (1882-1967) himself didn’t give the picture the narrative of isolation, though he acknowledged that “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” American realism in painting was developed by several artists who decided to contrast Europe’s hegemonial position in the art world - they felt they needed to find their own language. The wanted to depict America’s changing society, and to portray urban life - as contemporary writers and musicians did. “Nighthawks” is a pop culture icon. Scale Models were made out of it, the diner was shown by the Simpsons as well as in Batman: Year One, there are operas, plays, albums (Tom Waits) and movies mentioning it or paying tribute to it.

time is ticking away. it’s slipping through fingers, and it’s eating, devouring hours like there was no tomorrow. And it doesn’t get full easily. 

So I’m all out of hours today. But I found this article showing some of Picasso‘s (1881-1973) self portraits, they show his evolution as an artist, just look at the pictures:

http://www.boredpanda.com/pablo-picasso-self-portrait-style-evolution/

I’ll find out more another day! It’s on my list.

Neil Cowley (*1972) is a successful musician, he has recorded quite a few albums and won prestigious prices. You think wow, but as soon as you hear that it’s a jazz musician I’m talking about, you’ll go “oh”, nod knowingly, thinking about ten old guys listening to a detuned piano in a basement. While there’s nothing wrong with that picture -  if you’re into jazz, you’re part of a small crowd, you know that - it’s interesting to find out what happens if music considered to be jazz is served to a public without the label attached. 

Which is exactly what happened to Neil Cowley. His solo piano piece “Grace” landed a spot in a Spotify Playlist (which are put together by humans, not algorithms), and was then streamed two million times.

Read the Guardian Story here!

Everybody knows “The Planets”. I don’t want to write about the suite today, since one day I’ll be happy to present it on its own. Holst (1874 - 1934) was a british composer who wanted to be a pianist, but had to change paths due to neuritis in his right arm when he was 17. He studied composition and trombone instead. Among other things, he pioneered music education for women at a school where he taught for almost 30 years, preferring teaching and composing to the effects of the fame he garnered with “The Planets”.

I 

“Serious babymaking sound”, is how HONNE describe their music. Electro-soul-pop duo Andy and James met on their first day of university, started jamming two weeks later, and have since released three EPs and an album, the latter just came out this July.

Honne means “real intent” in japanese, it stands for the true feelings and desires of a person, contrasting his actions in public or what society expects of her (”tatemae”). 

I like their album song versions, especially “Someone That Loves You”, including the video. But I always had a soft spot for acoustic sessions, ever since I discovered the MTV Unplugged series as a teenager. 

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-l5EIcNyo0)

Sometimes I wonder about pop music - I mean, I love it, and I have nothing but respect for the craft, for writers, producers and performers. Still, one could worry that one day everything will be said and done.

Sometimes I hear something that feels like a solution. Not on a metaphysical, but on a musical level - when I’ve been working on a piece for a while, looking for something that wasn’t quite there yet. This piece did exactly that for me last week. I couldn’t believe my ears. You can analyze it all you want, but it has a harmonic center and a foundation, just beautifully blurred by the weirdest voicings. 

Einojuhani Rautavaara (*1929) is a Finnish composer, who studied at Juilliard with Aaron Copland among others. His musical output is very impressive - he wrote eight symphonies and 14 concertos, just to name a few, and biographical operas like “Vincent”, based on van Gogh’s life. He worked with serial elements in his early career, but abandoned them pretty early, trying to find a synthesis between tonal harmony, which he loved writing and hearing,  and twelve-tone-technique. 

He felt that music was standing still in the fifties, being dictated by certain people, and composers from all over the world all writing the same pieces over and over.

Because I always work with so many tabs open, I happens that two play music at the same time. It doesn’t always result in noise, strangely enough - but that may also be a “déformation professionelle” of a jazz musician always looking for ever stranger sounds of course. It happened quite a few times that I loved parts of these running parallels so much that I tried to capture them while they lasted.

With Jaimeo Brown’s “Be So Glad”, it wasn’t a fleeting moment, it was meant like that, a spiritual with a jazz band slowly coming in and out of focus, reharmonizing what’s there without destroying it. This track, the whole album actually (”work songs”, released in february) is truly amazing, and something very new. 

Am I as old as I am?

Maybe not. Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down. Yesterday I was seven in the woods, a bandage covering my blind eye, in a bedroll Mother made me so I could sleep out in the woods far from people. A garter snake glided by without noticing me. A chickadee landed on my bare toe, so light she wasn’t believable. The night had been long and the treetops thick with a trillion stars. Who was I, half-blind on the forest floor who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight years later I can still inhabit that boy’s body without thinking of the time between. It is the burden of life to be many ages without seeing the end of time.

Seven in the Woods, 2016

It’s hard for me to imagine how people can move somewhere and commit to (and want to) stay there for, say, twenty years, till the kids move out of the house, or forever. If you’re lucky, you get to choose, if circumstances allow to weigh your options before deciding to stay in the city or move to the suburbs or further. But even if you make a conscious decision, how can you be sure you and your family will still be happy there in a few years, and not feel stuck? Will you still be able to just up and leave? And if you plan to stay somewhere for a long time, and raise kids there, how will that place shape you, and them?

Some people don’t have any uncertainty - they just belong somewhere. Jim Harrison (1937-2016), great poet and author (Legends of the Fall) felt constricted in cities. He preferred to be in the great wide open, far away from the nearest town, where he had to shoot at rattlesnakes and wolfs would eat his neighbor’s sheep right under his window. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efEfTPxrIa0

Spending a lot of time following some kind of artistic calling can make you restless sometimes. Am I on the right track? Did I miss something? Does what I do justify so much work, am I happy with the outcome, and when will I get better? It takes willpower, or procrastination, not to think about these questions for too long. And not to let them get too destructive. There are times when running away feels like the only option, letting go of everything and living a life without this kind of struggle promises such relief. I wonder if that’s why every band that ever existed has a song called “Runaway” in their repertory:

Maroon 5 // Bon Jovi // Kanye West // Jamiroquai // Linkin Park

Avril Lavigne // Pink // Bonnie Raitt // Ed Sheeran // Janet Jackson

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs // The National // Weezer //Snoop Dogg

...just to name a few and listed here in a completely random order (check out Wikipedia’s list.)