Gelvin Noel Gallery
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, Illinois
February 28, 2013
Douglas Ewart, alto clarinet, sopranino saxophone, didgeridoo, flutes, percussion, electronics
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet
Elaine and I were fortunate to hear Douglas Ewart when he was last in east-central Illinois, for a week-long residency at the University of Illinois’s Allen Hall/Unit One. Last night’s performance was part of a second Allen Hall residency devoted to teaching and improvising with students.¹
Ewart and Wadada Leo Smith met in 1967 as members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. They brought to last night’s performance — a single improvised piece, somewhere over an hour long — a long history of musical empathy. The two musicians made a striking contrast: Ewart sitting or standing before of a table full of instruments, some modest electronics in front of him, a cloth covered with little instruments and tops at his feet; Smith with one instrument and two mutes. Their communication was a matter of deep listening, as Smith rarely if ever opened his eyes while playing.
The performance offered a great variety of musical textures: muted trumpet against didgeridoo, open trumpet against alto clarinet, a long wooden flute pinging and popping like a percussion instrument, sopranino saxophone playing multiphonic parallel fourths, sopranino and trumpet chasing one another and bouncing off the walls, and at times nothing more than tiny bells (fitted to a crepuscular stamping stick) and whistling columns of air. Ewart was often the supportive figure, furnishing a rumbling foundation for Smith’s fanfares, growls, half-valve effects, multiphonics, and brilliant, round sound. Most striking to me were three somber interludes — two for sopranino and trumpet, one for flute and trumpet — that sounded like spontaneously composed music for mourners. The performance ended almost as it began, with short muted trumpet statements, this time against alto clarinet. Then, as Ewart’s sonic tops spun and fell, Smith commented on our hapless, hopeless Congress, and Ewart commented on the need for greater government support for the arts — support, he said, that would be paid back “nine-hundredfold.”
Last night’s performance was a rare blast, and at times a rare whisper. Great thanks to Jason Finkelman for continuing to bring the news to east-central Illinois.
¹ Lucky students. Our son Ben was among them last time around.
Related reading
Douglas Ewart
Wadada Leo Smith
Douglas Ewart and Stephen Goldstein (Krannert 2011, my account)
Douglas Ewart and Quasar (Krannert 2015, my account)
Friday, March 1, 2013
Douglas Ewart
and Wadada Leo Smith
By Michael Leddy at 1:08 PM comments: 0
Mark Hurst on Google Glass
Mark Hurst: “The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience — not of the user, but of everyone other than the user.” As Hurst goes on to say, “The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.” Hurst’s post is the best thing I’ve read about Google Glass.
By Michael Leddy at 8:29 AM comments: 2
Overheard
On a street in a nearby city, a trio of young voices:
“What the hell?”
“What the hell? What the hell?”
“Senior adviser, my ass!”
Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
[Hearing and preserving a scrap of anonymous conversation: very different from Google Glass.]
By Michael Leddy at 8:20 AM comments: 0
Recently updated
The Armory Show The Cubies’ A B C has been reprinted.
By Michael Leddy at 8:17 AM comments: 0
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Google Glass
John Gruber, on Sergey Brin’s claim that Google Glass is a way beyond the antisocial smartphone:
I can see the argument that dicking around with our phones in public is not cool, that we should pay more attention to our companions and surroundings, and less to our computer displays. Strapping a computer display to your face is not the answer.
By Michael Leddy at 10:17 AM comments: 0
The front end
Thirty-odd years after I worked in a discount department store, I am happy to learn that the checkout area in such establishments is still called “the front end.” Supermarkets likewise.
Two retail tales
Going on break
Goodbye, Muzak
By Michael Leddy at 10:13 AM comments: 1
Wallace Stevens on persimmons
From a November 24, 1941 letter to C. L. Daughtry:
Many thanks for the persimmons. These meant more to me than you can imagine. I have far more things to eat and far more things to drink than are good for me. I indulge in abstemious spells merely to keep my balance.[This post is for Craig and Marjorie.]
Wild persimmons make one feel like a hungry man in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees. There is nothing more desolate than a persimmon tree, with the old ripe fruit hanging on it. As you see, there is such a thing as being a spiritual epicure.
Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997).
By Michael Leddy at 7:50 AM comments: 0
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Deborah Rhode on prestige
in academic life
Deborah Rhode says everything I’d want to say about academic life and “the pursuit of prestige”:
Status hierarchies carry special costs in university life. For most faculty, one of the main motivations for choosing an academic career, and one of its main satisfactions, is intellectual freedom. Professors value having control over their own time, agendas, and priorities. Yet that freedom is diminished when the pursuit of prestige becomes controlling. Moreover, because academic recognition is to some extent a relative good, a large percentage of the profession is bound to come up short. . . .It is of course easier to feel free to agree with Rhode if one has tenure.
The solutions are obvious in principle and elusive in practice. The fundamental challenge is for academics to stay focused on their own values, and to make the best use of their abilities in the service of goals that they find most meaningful. Rewards can come from many sources, and not all of them register prominently on the conventional pecking order. Harvard philosopher William James once claimed that “to give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.” Whether or not the satisfactions are truly equivalent, letting go of certain status needs is often far preferable to the alternative.
In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
[I take pleasure in remembering that prestige has its origin in matters of conjuring and illusion.]
By Michael Leddy at 8:45 AM comments: 0
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
The Armory Show
The Art Institute of Chicago has online a virtual trek through the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, the exhibition known as the Armory Show, which introduced American audiences to new directions in painting and sculpture. The museum also has the show’s catalogue and other documents available as free PDFs. Not to be missed: The Cubies’ A B C, a contemporary sendup of Matisse, Picasso, Stein, and others, words by Mary Mills Lyall, illustrations by Earl Harvey Lyall. A sample:
P’s for Picasso, Picabia and Party
(Who deal in abstractions, distractions and such.)
When, with vision chaotic and expletives hearty,
You beg of a Cubie their sense to impart, he
Profoundly makes answer: “In little is much.”
—P’s for Picasso, Picabia and Party.
[Making light of Picabia in general and Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande) in particular.]
Did “Picasso, Picabia and Party” inspire “Parker, Pound, or Picasso,” Philip Larkin’s encapsulation of all that he loathed in music, writing, and art? My guess is not likely : Larkin was a thoroughgoing provincial, and capable of derisive alliteration on his own. How provincial? From his 1982 Paris Review interview: “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”
*
March 1: The Cubies’ A B C has been reprinted.
[The phrase “Parker, Pound, or Picasso” appears in All What Jazz: A Record Diary (1985). Did you know that the 1913 exhibition traveled to New York, Chicago, and Boston? Me neither.]
By Michael Leddy at 9:18 AM comments: 0
Monday, February 25, 2013
Proust in NYC
Two reports on the Morgan Library’s Swann’s Way celebration: The Sweet Troubles of Proust (New York Review of Books), In Search Of Proust, No Cookies (Wall Street Journal).
[Did you know that before madeleine there were biscottes?]
By Michael Leddy at 10:23 AM comments: 2