Month: June 2018

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Permutations

Pilc Moutin Hoenig at Rochester International Jazz Fest
Pilc Moutin Hoenig at Rochester International Jazz Fest

Soccer, like music, is a shared international marvel, a phenomenon. The World Cup puts all the nations though a big funnel. The first round, which ended yesterday, culled the top thirty two teams to sixteen. The mash-ups, Germany vs. Mexico, Senegal v. Colombia, Iceland vs. Croatia were monumental. I was thinking about how the the World Cup is constructed, and the possible permutations that will produce a winner from the last eight matches, as we sat down for Pilc Moutin Hoenig’s set.

Finally. We heard our favorite band of this jazz festival. The band was introduced, the bass player plucked a few notes and the drummer answered with a few strategically placed taps. Were they just checking their levels? No, they were starting a dialog, one that turned into a cat and mouse game before taking on the form of a fully developed piece. But just as we were digesting that development the piano player stood up and walked away. The bass and drums were revealed in a dramatic new light. He sat back down and piece evolved into something else.

Was their set all improvised? Surely they revisit favorite themes. The three were great players but their greatest strength was their arranging. They fearlessly deconstructed their music in the same way they constructed it. The trio was confident enough to explore smaller configurations. Just think of the possible combinations. Piano and bass, bass and drums, bass and piano. Just piano, just bass, just drums. And when it came down to just one instrument wasn’t so much a solo as it was music, played on one instrument. Pilc whistled a tune while accompanying himself with a one note piano repetition. It was brilliant.

They continually let things gracefully fall apart. One of them would duck out of the arrangement and the song immediately took on a new shape. They did this over and over again through the whole night. About thirty minutes into their set they found themselves all playing an ending and they went with it. There was applause. And they went back to work.

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Jazz Fest Vs World Cup

Windy clear day at Sea Breeze, New York
Windy clear day at Sea Breeze, New York

Today is the halfway point of the Jazz Fest and The World Cup so it is too early to predict a winner but if I had to choose now there is no question, the World Cup wins. There has been an abundance of sensational matches. Unpredictable and thrilling, two words I could associate with this year’s lineup. We’ve time shifted games so we can watch them all but we’re at the stage now where two games are played simultaneously to settle the final standings of each group. Half go on, of course, and yesterday Spain tied Morocco with a late goal at the same time as Iran tied Portugal. And today we learn whether Messi goes home.

Life is short. Except if you’re Pete Tierney (no relation to the Tierney side of my family). Pete lived at Saint Ann’s down the hall from where my parents were for the couple years of their lives. He was in his 105th year and his obit was in the paper today. He attributed his long life to Mt Gay Rum. “Just the right amount every day.” There was another fellow on the same page who died with only one regret, that he didn’t live long enough to see Donald Trump thrown out of office. Old guys like me say they check the obits everyday and if we don’t see our picture in it we carry on.

I’ve been keeping track of the groups we’ve heard at the Jazz Fest over here.

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Chamber Jazz

Kuala Trio at the Rochester International Jazz Fest 2018
Kuala Trio at the Rochester International Jazz Fest 2018

We started the night at Montage without knowing anything about the band. The room was packed, standing room only, and it was about thirty degrees warmer than outside. Their air conditioning was not up to the task so they had the back door open and a large fan whirling away. Christian Sands Trio, piano, bass and drums, was tearing it up with a big back beat and showman-like piano swells that had the crowd cheering. They brought it way down for “Deep Purple” and still had the room in the palm of their hands as they had us with the melody. Sands does two solo piano sets at Hatch Recital Hall tonight.

Sonidos Unidos, the popular local Latin music band, had twelve people on the small RG&E tent stage and I counted seven strings on the bass player’s instrument. They always sound good.

It wasn’t until the third song that I realized there was no bass player in the trio at the Lutheran Church. Kuala Trio held themselves together with the space around their perfectly placed parts. Mostly slow, even mournful at times, and always pretty in a sad sort of way. They mixed European folk with classical and jazz and played like a chamber ensemble, at times just sax or sax and drums or long stretches of piano and drums. They were each such great players they made their instruments sound like a million bucks.

We pushed our earplugs in and stepped into the big tent for a few songs by Moon Hooch. Two tenor sax players darting around the stage like professional wrestlers with a great dancehall drummer. They augmented this sound with some keyboard programming and got the party going on a Sunday night.

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Huge Generalization

Drummer and keyboard player on East Main Street in Rochester, New York
Drummer and keyboard player on East Main Street in Rochester, New York

These two street musicians had switched instruments tonight and they sounded great.

The line for the Bad Plus went around the corner to Franklin Street but we weren’t worried, we’d been in this venue, now called Temple Theater, back in the eighties to see Yellowman, Grace Jones and The Replacements and we knew there was plenty of space. I was excited to see the Bad Plus with their new pianist, Orrin Evans. I found him just as melodic but more angular and impactful. The band has carved out their own space with a sound that is hard to pin down. One attribute is a constant. The group playing, one player’s part hanging on the other, creates the sound. I especially liked “Savages,” a hypnotic groove of a song from their new record.

Saxophonist, Sigurdur Flosason, left Iceland to study with David Baker at Indiana University in Bloomington. Peggi Fournier also went to Indiana University but she studied saxophone with Rich Stim. His band was a perfect fit with the Lutheran Church where we sat in the pews contemplating the setting sun through the stained glass windows. He finished with with “Serenading the Moon,” a tribute to Hoagy Carmichael (a Bloomington native)/Johnny Mercer song, “Skylark.” We talked to Flosason after the performance and never mentioned Iceland’s 2-0 World Cup loss to Nigeria.

Django Bates’ Beloved Trio has a new record produced by Manfred Eicher at ECM. Funny how a record label, Impulse, Blue Note, ECM, informs the sound. To my ears ECM leaves the blues out of jazz. A huge generalization. Bates’s free flowing piano melodies hardly needed the adornment of the rest of the beloved trio.

Melissa Aldana, the Chilean tenor saxophonist at Kilbourn works in a moody, blue territory, steeped in the right parts of the tradition but the band seemed oddly disconnected from the songs. We only heard a few songs but I kept waiting for them to dig in. I might have missed that part. We went home to watch Germany score in the last minute of stoppage time.

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Drawn In

Drummer and keyboard player on East Main Street in Rochester, New York
Drummer and keyboard player on East Main Street in Rochester, New York

These guys, performing on the street near Hatch Hall, posed for me while they were playing. The drums were about five times louder than the keyboard.

We didn’t know the names so we listened to the samples and were left with only a few choices for the opening night of the Jazz Fest. More time to watch the three World Cup matches we had time shifted.

Seventeen years in and we are still able to find free parking downtown. We walked by the old Milestones, what was once a venue for the festival, James Blood Ulmer comes to mind, and a solo guitarist was playing in the parking lot patio. He had a foot pedal rigged to play a tamborine and an old suitcase that played like a bass drum. Can’t even remember what he sounded like. We were on our way to the Xerox Auditorium and we were drawn into the Rhythm Dogs performance in front of the Inn on Broadway. Drawn that is by the rock solid R&B drummer, Laris Ashford. Anybody could have played anything in front of that guy. We only lasted a few minutes because it was painfully loud.

Alfredo Rodriguez and Pedrito Martinez at Xerox Auditorium were a pure joy to hear. We had heard both at past festivals in completely different settings, Rodriguez with his trio at Kilbourn and Martinez leading Cuban dance/pop ensembles. They played fast and furious and then slow and pretty. The classically trained pianist’s free flowing melodies worked magic with the rhythms of the Cuban streets. We were tempted to return for the second set but the World Cup called.

Marius Neset at the Lutheran Church went from dreamy pretty to frenetic in the same song. Their material was richly orchestrated and executed with near precision. We sat between the piano and vibraphone and those two instruments sounded especially good in stereo harmony. Their arrangements were mostly joyous and the band was clearly having fun so the progressive tendencies remained infectious.

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Downsize

Small house at 236 Avondale in Rochester, New York
Small house at 236 Avondale in Rochester, New York

Everyone is buying less, driving less, eating locally and reducing their footprint. If you’re thinking of downsizing, this small house on Coolidge Road is for sale. We’ve walked by it many times but have never seen anyone coming or going. We asked a neighbor if anyone lives in there and he said someone did for many years, a relative of someone else on the street, but he said it had been empty for a while. We noticed it had just come on the market and it comes with a full sized house right next door. It caught my eye because it is about the size a the small house Dave Mahoney and I lived in in Bloomington. Someone broke in there and stole our stereo. “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” was on the turntable and we were left with just the jacket.

Peggi and I did battle with some wasps today, a fairly big project for us. They were building a paper nest inside the umbrella by the pool. Bees kept coming and going and you couldn’t get near enough to open it so we really weren’t sure what was going on under there. We brought a candle down there, something Peggi had picked up to keep bugs away. We lit that for starters and set it on the table under the umbrella. My cousin had just paid us a visit a few days ago and she gave us a small box of essential oils. Peppermint and Lemongrass were in there, oils that are supposed repel bees. We put some of that on a cotton ball and taped it to the end of a long stick which I shoved up under the umbrella. They didn’t like it and flew out but stayed close. Others kept coming and there were twenty or so around the umbrella but they were more confused than anything.

We went home for some soap and water, something we had read they really don’t like. We put it in a spray bottle and misted them and the umbrella. Once we got the umbrella up we found two paper nests and no bees. Its supposed to rain tonight so that will clean up the mess.

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Salute

Summer Solstice Sea Breeze New York 2018
Summer Solstice Sea Breeze New York 2018

Rick and I were in the decisive third round of our horseshoe match. Duane was in town and he and Peggi were talking and watching from the yellow and blue chairs. And three “gals” (one of my cousin’s favorite words) came walking down our dead-end street. Marilyn, who had moved to the mountains years ago, Olga and Kathy walked over from Kathy’s sweet spot on the bay. We toasted the Summer Solstice by splitting a tall Genny in small glasses.

A sunset walk on the pier was in order. Jumbo Shrimp was playing on the beach at Marge’s. They were doing J Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ “Last Kiss”” when we got to the end and they sounded fuller than the the guitar/drums duo we had heard a few years ago. The night was still young. We had to see Ronaldo score again and then cheer Spain on as they barely bested Iran in the World Cup. All this and Jazz Fest starts rudely starts tomorrow.

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We Are All Mexicans

Brown cow posing on Himrod Penn Yan Road
Brown cow posing on Himrod Penn Yan Road

We had to watch the host team, Russia, play Saudi Arabia in the the opener. The opening rounds come fast and furious. The only reason they qualified is because they were the host so it was fun to see them win 5-0. Spain and Portugal, the Iberian rivals, played to a 3-3 tie. We desperately wanted Spain but despite their incredible possession stats, Ronaldo was unstoppable with three goals. And he could have had a winning fourth if he had done what any minor league player would have, just run toward the goal for scraps after you set your teammate up. Wouldn’t want to muss his hair.

Argentina and Iceland was a great matchup. Smallest country ever to qualify vs Messi and company. We sided with Argentina and the 1-1 tie is what they deserved. As bad as we wanted Brazil to win they couldn’t top Switzerland so their 1-1 tie gives both of them just 1 point in the standings and Serbia vaults to the top of that group with their win over Costa Rica.

The ties were good games, all of them, but it felt so good when Mexico defeated Germany 1-0. I think they blew Germany’s minds, like Jessie Owens did in the 1936 Olympics. This was an exhilarating match, probably the best of the Cup but I hope not. The methodical Germans kept their cool and maintained 61 percent possession but Mexico, when they got the ball, knew exactly what to do with it. They sprinted toward the goal. And although they took only half the shots Germany tried, they put one in. Without the US in this thing we are all Mexicans!

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Apostle Of Beauty

White Lincoln Continental parked at Sea Breeze, New York
White Lincoln Continental parked at Sea Breeze, New York

No, this isn’t the Popemobile. Although Pope Paul VI did use a modified 1965 Lincoln Continental to greet crowds in New York City. The current pope’s ride is a more modest, Ford Focus.

The world, our world, would be a better place if everyone saw the new Wim Wenders’ movie, “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.” In it Francis has plenty of advice for mankind, common sense advice that you can’t argue with regardless of your religion or lack thereof. I think he is a genius or at the very least, a living saint. The first pope from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, the first Jesuit, but most of all, the first pope ever to choose the name of Francis, the patron saint of the environment.

He likens the neglect of the Earth to the neglect of the poor and he looks to artists for a way out. He says, “The biblical story of creation is a mythical form of expression” and “an artist is an apostle of beauty.” He asks us to “imitate God with our hands.”

The movie is playing at the Little now. If you can’t get there you could watch the 60 Minutes interview with Wenders. It is full of wisdom.

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Big Ten Mystery

Paul Dodd playing soccer for Indiana University verses Saint Louis in 1968
Paul Dodd playing soccer for Indiana University verses Saint Louis in 1968

Summertime around here is way too busy. It is short so activities are scheduled at a manic pace and the season flies by. It takes a real effort to slow things down. We are still a week away from the official start of the season but by then the days will already be getting shorter. Jazz Fest starts next week, nine nights of music downtown, and the days will be consumed with World Cup matches. We have already recorded the opening match between Russia and Saudi Arabia so we’ll have to catch up with that after dinner.

I think back to my first year at Indiana University where our soccer coach, Jerry Yeagley, gave us a talk at one of the first practices. He was telling us how much time we would be expected to put into practice and travel to away games. He said I know you will find this hard to believe but when you get that busy you would think that your grades would suffer but he told us it was just the opposite. Something like the busier we were, the the better we use our time. I really wanted to believe that.

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Way Past “Time To Educate”

Laurie Simmons's "Clothes Make The Man" at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea
Laurie Simmons’s “Clothes Make The Man” at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea

Rochester is one of seven cities in the US that can claim half of their children are living below the poverty line. This is something that is hard to believe for those of us lucky enough to be on the other side. And according to the Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester compounds the poverty with extreme racial and economic segregation. New York State is the most segregated state in the country. What is a kid born into these circumstances gonna do?

The Urban Suburban program is growing but they’re simply syphoning off the best, those that could be role models for the rest. And one sixth of city students go to charter schools, the ones without disabilities or language problems. Last year at Kodak Park School fewer than ten percent of the students were proficient in math and and English.

The newspaper, in a series called “Time to Educate,” is looking for solutions but right now they are in probing mode. They are asking for suggestions as to what they should be investigating. This a problem that belongs to all of us and it will bring us all down if we don’t do something about it.

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More Questions

Adam and Eve sculpture, Eve from Adam's Rib, Santo Domingo De La Calzada Cathedral
Adam and Eve sculpture, Eve from Adam’s Rib, Santo Domingo De La Calzada Cathedral

Peggi’s sister sent us a link to an article in the LA Times about “Strangers on the Earth,” a documentary on the Camino de Santiago. We’ve already seen three movies about the Camino and we were in the middle of watching “The Milky Way,” Buñuel’s 1969 masterpiece. It is surely the wildest movie about religion and the Camino (which is sometimes referred to as “The Milky Way”). I say “in the middle of watching” because the Netflix dvd locked up on us about halfway through because of scratches on the disc. Don’t you just wish everything was streamable?

While we were walking the actual Camino, from one small town church to the next, my cousin told us she felt like she missed out by not going to a Catholic school. I found myself making an argument for how she lucked out. She was never in a class in the middle of math when the teacher rounded us up to go next door to a mass in the church. She never had a nun veer off topic in the middle of an English lesson so we could hear a religious parable. And she probably had a gym in her school building and a phys-ed teacher.

In truth, Religion class, part of our daily curriculum, was sometimes as thought provoking as Buñuel’s movie. In fact, that is what I remember most from Catholic school. And it was the questioning that stuck with me, the same questions that are bantered about in “The Milky Way.” How can it be said that we have a free will when God knows exactly what we will do before we do it? All the things that can only be settled by accepting them as articles of faith, they just don’t make logical sense. The mysteries are meant to be confounding.

A friend of my parents requested a Mass for my parents today on what would have been their sixty-ninth anniversary. The priest had a beard and the altar boy role was played by a woman with grey hair and an ankle length skirt. The church, Saint Thomas More, was rather plain, lots of brick and a simple modern crucifix. I feel as though there is an effort underway to remove the mystery.

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Never Worked A Day In His Life

Skywater for Leonardo 5 and 6 by Peter Monacelli 2017
Skywater for Leonardo 5 and 6 by Peter Monacelli 2017

We asked Pete if he could recommend someone to take an old metal frame, single pane window out of our basement and replace it with some thermal glass. He recommended himself and me (as a helper). He’s done this before so I should have seen it coming. He has been doing construction, remodeling mostly, for his whole life and he claims to “have never worked a day in his life.” He loves the work and jumped at the chance to hang out. Pete plays drums with the Debbie Kendrick Project, our favorite band, and he is also one of our favorite artists so it was a joy working with him for the last two days.

He brought a couple of books over for us to look at. They were individual sheets in plastic sleeves, collages pairing copies of work by Renaissance artists paired with a modern artist. Chillida was in there, our new favorite Spanish artist. And to complete each panel, he painted and drew over, under and around the collage, all part of an ongoing series entitled, “Looking for Home.” The second day he brought over an old music book of American Songs. He’s working his way through this book painting over most of the pages with Casein paint, an old, milk-based medium. The pages are beautiful beyond belief.

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Summertime Prep

David Murray and Kahil El'zabar playing Summertime at Bop Shop in Rochester, New YorkSummertimelg
David Murray and Kahil El’zabar playing Summertime at Bop Shop in Rochester, New YorkSummertimelg

it is a pretty safe bet we won’t see or hear a show at the Jazz Fest as good as David Murray and Kahil El’zabar were on Monday night at the Bop Shop. David Murray was a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and he won a Grammy. Kahil has played with Pharoah Sanders, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder and Archie Shepp. He was knighted by the Council General of France. Together, as a duo, they cover a lot of ground, Murray on sax, bass clarinet and vocals, El’zabar on drums, percussion, thumb piano and vocals.

We have seen them many times because they are always fabulous but Monday was even better. Matt Guanere was recording them for a new cd, Aaron Winters was taking still photos and the performance was being videoed for the Bop Shop’s YouTube channel. The band was in tip top shape and their version of “Summertime” blew us away.

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WWJD

Sax Player entertaining bus passengers in Midtown Manhattan
Sax Player entertaining bus passengers in Midtown Manhattan

The F Train wasn’t running this weekend so we caught the Q at Beverley and just stopped at DeKalb, our last stop before going under the river. Wearing shorts and a dirty white sweatshirt, stinking to high heaven and speaking loudly, like he was giving orders and clearly didn’t even know how to go about soliciting our sympathy. “Please help me out. I’m trying to put some shoes on my feet.”

Looking down I saw that his feet were swollen and I tried to picture him walking the City streets in bare feet. People on the train did their best to ignore him but a couple of teenage boys were laughing as he moved on to the the next car. A few minutes later he came back through our car singing, “I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back.” Would a dollar have helped this guy out? What would Christ have done? We got off at 42nd Street and coming out of the next car was that same guy with his shoes in his hand.

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Théâtres de Mémoire

Calder mobile at Hauser Wirth in Chelsea
Calder mobile at Hauser Wirth in Chelsea

Our list of shows in Chelsea was shorter than ever. Just one must see, Marlene Dumas’s “Myths & Mortals” at David Zwirner on 20th, so we started there. Luscious, large, thinly painted oils, mostly nudes in gorgeous colors and small watery watercolors, mostly black and white, swiftly executed and expressive, work created for a recent Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s “Venus & Adonis.”

Hauser Wirth is always good so we headed there next. They have galleries all over the world and their 22nd Street spot is especially comfortable with its café, bookstore and bathroom. They were showing the collection of Sylvia Perlstein, a Max’s Kansas City denizen. The Calder, above, is from that show.

From here we just wandered, staying between 9th and 10th of course, and stumbled into shows featuring Jean Dubuffet’s (Basquiat’s father) “Théâtres de Mémoire,” Al Held, whose heroic, thickly painted abstracts from the fifties look fresh today, Jenny Saville’s new paintings that show the work, the scrubbing out, the reworking, the buttery finish to the strokes and Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, three huge rooms of them.

Coincidentally, the last two shows we saw we’re by a wife and her husband. Both are the parents of the actress and director, Lena Dunham. Laurie Simmons from Cindy Sherman’s Picture Generation is showing her dummies and picture thought bubble photos at Mary Boone and her husband, Carroll Dunham, is showing his “vulgar beyond belief” (Los Angeles Times) male wrestler paintings at Gladstone Gallery. It was a perfect afternoon.

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Mythic Being

Like Life exhibit at Met Breur in NYC
Like Life exhibit at Met Breur in NYC

Peggi and I had dinner at an Italian place on the Upper West Side. We ate outdoors and sat next to Annie Liebowitz. I thought about how we were going to visit two major museums the next day?

We started with MoMA. “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016” is kind of a geeky title but then Adrian Piper is a geeky gal. The show at MoMA is the result of a four-year collaboration with The Hammer Museum and is the most comprehensive retrospective of Piper’s work to date.

The show opens with her LSD paintings and Sol Lewitt-like (her friend) drawings. I dove into her obsessive diary entries and was sold on her brainy humor. Check out this early early performance piece. Her angry art from the eighties made me laugh out loud. She tackles racism head on but in ways as sly as a fox. Large screen videos show her teaching classes in Funk Dancing. This is a huge show that manages to leave you wanting much more.

Duane had a doctor’s appointment on the Upper East Side so we made plans to meet him up there when he got out. We were on the third floor of the Met Breur’s show, “Like Life: Sculpture, Color & The Body” when he joined us. The show is a sensation, one where the wall tags make it even more so because the sculptures include realistic, contemporary human forms, religious figures, Ex Votos (sacred offerings) and dolls as well as centuries old, idealized human form, marble statues. I knew the Church had a problem with nudity but if I hadn’t read the text I wouldn’t have thought about the problems created when worshippers fell in love with the statue instead of the intended depiction. The show was so well done it was “Like Life.”

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Ritmo Tiempo Silencio

Chillida sculpture at Hauser Wirth on 69th Street, NYC
Chillida sculpture at Hauser Wirth on 69th Street, NYC

In Leon last month, where we temporarily broke our pilgrimage, I found a small art book in the gift shop of the Gaudi Museum. It was on an artist I had never heard of but I fell in love with his work. Eduardo Chillida studied architecture in Madrid and then drawing at the Circulo de Belles Artes. After school he moved to Paris and began sculpting. The mini retrospective at Hauser Wirth Uptown includes these mediums plus prints, assemblages and a large dosage of his writing, in artist books and displayed as wall quotes.

We had slept in Midtown at the old Leona Chelmsley joint, the Park Lane, overlooking the Park if your room is in the front of the place, and we walked though the park with a latte on our way up to 69th Street. We were standing outside the gallery when they opened this morning and we spent a few hours with three floors of Chillida plus a small sculpture in the garden and a movie about him made by his daughter. All his work is sculptural in that every piece takes its place in space with mutual respect for the negative space. It is like Music in that sense, a beautiful experience.

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