METROPOLIS

mark weber | the bubbadinos | my country band

Monsieur K. — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:56:59 +0000

Mark Weber | 27 feb 1999 | Photo: James Gale

The idea that became the Bubbadinos came to me during my exile in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1986. Living so far from home I began to think about my family and family history and growing up playing country music with my granddad in California.

1991 my wife and I found ourselves in Albuquerque. And by 1995 it was time to make the idea a reality. I had had all of those yearsto think about it and to scout out musicians and I have to brag and say I sure picked a perfect bunch of guys for this operation. This was no hodge podge of merely whoever happened to be available. I wanted these particular musicians.

All of the early sessions were done at the old Ubik Studios at Buena Vista & Gold in Albuquerque, on the 2nd floor. Manny Rettinger was the engineer and chief punter. (I swear, some of that stuff we recorded sounded so gawd awful and he’d come running out of his booth all excited at how amazing it was — I’d be sitting there with my guitar and headphones and look up at him thinking, WHEW what IS this guy smoking?) Well, that first session was a deal where I wanted to record some of the songs I used to do with my grandfather. I had intentions of doing a CD of music and poetry on the subject of Okies. But, after that first session the whole thing just got out of hand. And I should say here that the Bubbadinos became a thing unto itself, I take no credit for it, ha ha ha. It had a mind of its own completely outside my feeble idea of what I had originally planned. In fact, singing in that band was like trying to hold onto a skinny tree in a tornado. There were some titanic personalities amongst that ensemble and behind the recording console and the energy at the center of that music was like a powder keg and when it went off we all held on for dear life. It was an explosion. A maelstrom. There was nothing bland about the Bubbadinos when they were making music.

My heritage is Ulster-Scot and Ken’s is Catholic and as you’ll recall from Irish history it’s been since 1600 (the siege of Derry, 1689) that we havent gotten along too well. Dino claims he’s descended from Vikings. Weaver is descended from English. Stefan is a native New Mexican and studied microtones with Joe Maneri at New England Conservatory. Manny’s mother is Apache. Mary is full-blooded Navajo. Quincy is Ulster-Scot. So, that was our blood lines. The spirits of our ancestors ranged war in the studio. We raised Hell.

The thing was the core quintet was comprised of three hardcore avant-garde motherfuckers and me and Ken were the normal guys. Ken is a long-time member of the band Bayou Seco and has a history that includes playing with the Balfa Brothers. Myself, I’m a jazz guy and a writer. Stefan has gigged with Cecil Taylor. Dino was with Ike & Tina Turner for a couple years. Mark Weaver tried to keep us all in line, even as much as he would have rather been improvising. The Bubbadinos only played in public four times. We played in the studio one hundred and four times. A lot. In that, we were like Jelly Roll Morton’s famous Red Hot Peppers who only worked in the studio and never played in public. So that was the Bubbadinos 1995-2005 RIP. We made five CDs and sundry other recordings. –Mark Weber | 22feb10

I dearly love the bubbadinos and all of the music that we created together and I especially miss the relationship that Big Web, Quincy (Dr. Q) and I (Bubba D), had in the mixing, sequencing stages of each recording project (great times in the studio). I can give you a few memorable quotes. J.A. Deane

Kenneth Keppeler | 3 december 1999 | Photo: James Gale

As much as Bubba D loved playing the tracking sessions Dino loved the mixing sessions with the post crew DQW (dino/quincy/weber). When we finally dug into the studio “concept album” (#4- yup, we’re beating a dead horse/the sargent bubbadino sessions), we used George Martin’s book (with a little help from my friends), about the making of Revolver/Sgt. Pepper’s/Magical Mystery Tour, as the script for the entire project. – J.A. Deane

The Bubbadinos | 27 february 1999 | Photo: James Gale

I had a picture of the Reverend Lonnie Ferris (who inspired the “full on energy” portion of bubba d’s musical direction), over my amp as sort of a global filter on the sound.- J.A. Deane

Mark Weaver | 27 february 1999 | Photo: James Gale

At the very first Bubbadinos recording session, the very first song we recorded (with no rehearsal) was “Wade in the Water”. After we played the song, Mark asked the engineer (Manny), to play it back, which he did. After the playback a hush fell over the room, and then Ken (Keppeler) said “Well, there goes my credibility as a folk musician”. –J.A. Deane

Mark Weber | 27 february 1999 | Photo: James Gale

The first time that I brought my “fretless mountain dulcimer” (dulce= sweet) to a Bubbadinos session, after Big Web heard me play it he immediately re-named it the “acerbis” (acerbic=sour).– J.A. Deane

The Bubbadinos | 27 february 1999 | Photo: James Gale

I intentionally kept a very primitive (punk rock) relationship with my lap steel guitar during the entire life of the Bubbadinos (which is actually harder than one might think) and did my best to always come at the instrument (at every session), with a complete lack of technique just all ear. The theory being “as long as you keep that slide moving, you are bound to be close to something thats going to work” (this also meant that I couldn’t reproduce any thing I played, which I think drove Big Web a little crazy at the time). At recording sessions when Quincy would ask “Who wants Dino in the headphones”, there would be a resounding “NO”. –J.A. Deane

J.A. Deane | 2 september 2001 | Photo: Mark Weber

When Big Web asked me to join his new band the (as yet un-named) Bubbadinos he asked me to play trombone but I told him that I wanted to play lapsteel guitar. He said “I didn’t know that you could play the steel guitar”, I said “I can’t”. –J.A. Deane

Kenneth Keppeler | 3 december 1999 | Photo: David Hughes

Where are they now? – I was the Pete Best of the Bubbadinos, but actually i wasn’t from the valley, and after my pulley broke, I couldn’t take the rope across the river. Moved into a junkyard and found the Chuppers and the Player People living there. Joined up. –Manny Rettinger

Mary Redhouse | 30 october 2000 | Photo: Mark Weber

At the first session for the Bubbadinos third CD recorded in Studio A at KUNM when Ken arrived I pointed out where he was to set up his operation, and as I pointed around the room to where everybody else was sitting, I said, and that’s where Dino will be and Stefan right next to him. Ken said, “Good, so all the noise will be coming from the same place.” –Mark Weber

Mark Weaver

Dino & Colleen moved to Ribera, New Mexico, from Oakland, around 1995. And somewhere around that time I drove the two hours north from Albuquerque to visit them. This is a little adobe village with house trailers and horses and a little restaurant called The Sad Cafe. And as I blundered around trying to make sense of the directions to Dino’s house, a little mud-spatter’d car started following me. I decided to pull into the dirt parkinglot of the Catholic Church and this car with dogs all hanging out the windows and a rough customer wearing a yellow Caterpillar duckbill hat pulled right up behind me. I looked in my rear-view mirror and said to myself, “I wonder what this bubba wants.” And it turned out to be Dino in disquise! And thus is how Dino became Bubba D. —Mark Weber

Kenneth Keppeler | 27 february 1999 | David Hughes

The photos from February 27, 1999 were from a performance arranged by Dino’s friend from San Francisco and it was called “Cookie Marenco Presents THE BUBBADINOS in the Liquid Audio Crash Pad” at the Doubletree Hotel, downtown Albuquerque. I don’t remember what songs we did — I’m sure there’s a set list somewhere — Cookie recorded it, you can see the pop filter stuck on my face — there were quite a few Bubbadino renditions of old country songs that never made it to CD. Just imagine what a goldmine country music is, we could spend years just playing Buck Owens, or Ernest Tubb, or Carl Smith. Myself, I had to write songs for the CDs because we couldn’t afford to pay for the rights for as many songs as can fill up a CD. Which was a shame, because there are so many great country songs.– Mark Weber

Mark Weber with his Grandfather Harry | 1976

Ken’s Bubbadino Story

I met Mark at a concert Bayou Seco did at a park in Albuquerque. We talked for a while and I brought him back to our house near the Pueblo Cultural Center. It’s a nice place and we could hear the native music coming from the center and, at the right time of year, it’s possible to see the Voladores from Mexico spinning around a very high pole at the cultural center. They are tied by their feet and just go twirling away up there in the air. Jeanie, my wife and musical friend and partner, really liked living that close to such a fine place.

Anyway, Mark came over and we talked about Jazz and Blues and Folk music and growing up in LA, him in Cucamunga (a wonderful name, much better than Oxnard), and me from East LA. His people came from Kansas and mine from New Mexico so we had some of that 20’s and 30’s forced migration and hard scrabble attitude. We also had connections to the junkie world, me with my brothers and he, with himself. I recall that we both had a lot of admiration for the guitar playing and singing of Joseph Spence, who can nail any song to the side of heaven’s golden gate, pure feeling.

I don’t know when he mentioned that he had this idea for a band, but it sounded good to me. I have spent too much, or not enough, time playing and busking on the street, to worry whether I could play with such fine musicians as he told me about.

Well, I soon found that I was swimming in a pretty deep musical ocean with these guys so I just sort of tried to hang on without making any serious mistakes, of course it was hard to hear with all the avant garde crashing and howling around the studio.

I guess I finally figured out that when they gave me a sheet of music with weird notes and chords I’d never heard of, that the best road for me to take was act like I knew what I was doing, and as soon as we started I closed my eyes, ignoring the hieroglyphics on the paper, and played what seemed to work, sometimes in tune, sometimes not. Maybe that gave it the special Bubbadinos sound, a bit of traditional meandering around the practiced chaos of the band.

I think Mark and I and Mark Weaver might have been the main ones that practiced anything. Weaver really held us together with that beautiful Tuba of his. Now, Weber has a lot of interesting timing tricks in his singing, poetry and musical arrangements and I figure it didn’t bother me much at all as I’ve learned a lot from old traditional musicians and they can be all over the place, adding a beat, pulling out a half measure there, changing the chords all over the place and making the music fit the words. I actually got back at the boys one time. I brought in a tune from West Virginia, composed by the great old fiddler (now deceased) Ernie Carpenter, called the Elk River Blues. Jeanie and I were playing with a good friend at the time, M. Mueller, and he transcribed the tune and it seemed to work best with a measure of 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4, though it had a nice slow and beautiful Appalachian beat to it. Man, I shoulda left the music at home, they spent an hour trying to figure it out. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing sometimes and I kept telling them that I was going to take the damn music and tear it up and they should just learn it by ear, like we did. Anyway, we got several fine recordings of it on various Bubbadino and Albuzerxque CDs.

I’m not much for writing down things but I figured I’d better do something because Mark kept sending me little reminders that I should.–Ken Keppeler – March 10, 2010

Bubbadinos: More than what Bubba D knows

Welcome to Mutant Country, the down-home alien world of the Bubbadinos. If you look at the song titles on the Bubbadinos’ first CD, Ready As We’ll Ever Be (Zerx Records), most of the cuts are readily identifiable: “Lost Highway”, “Tennessee Waltz”, “Amazing Grace”, “Battle Hymn Of The Republic”, “Pancho & Lefty”. But I guarantee you’ve never heard these tunes sound like this. As an advertisement for their first public performance at Albuquerque’s Outpost Performance Space read: ‘The Bubbadinos done tarred of playing all the regular notes.”

In one published 1997 interview, chief Bubba Mark Weber talked about the band he was forming. “I’ve managed to talk these jazz musicians (and one Cajun) into playing them old country songs me and my granddad used to do,” Weber said. This is not so different than what Jimmie Rodgers was doing in the late ’20s.” Maybe so — but I don’t think Jimmie done it this way.

Weber, a writer and poet by trade, and his cohorts created a surreal country sound that would repulse purists among the country and folk set as well as the jazzbos. With a lap steel sounding like an assault weapon, a grunting tuba, and a fiddle trying to make sense of everything while a singer growled and mumbled the lyrics of country classics or venerated spirituals over the din, it’s easy to see why. “The jazz crowd, from whence most of us come, don’t want to have anything to do with country music,” Weber says. “The country crowd would string us up if they could find us; and the folkie people have turned so rigid and conservative and narrow-minded, they shiver at the thought of us.”

Stefan Dill and Mark Weber | 20 february 1996

While purists of any stripe might be horrified by the avant-hillbilly sounds of the Bubbadinos, fans of the Residents or Captain Beefheart or Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 or even Giant Sand probably would understand. The origin of the Bubbadinos began back in Weber’s native Los Angeles in 1995, when he and several collaborators created a music and spoken word collage. Weber told stories about making music with his grandfather between snatches of songs performed with a band (which included pre-Geral-dine Fibbers Nels Cline) at the Alligator in Santa Monica. Back in Albuquerque, he decided to record the verses of songs he’d left out of the performance piece. For this he rounded up Bubba D, aka J.A. Dino Deane (lap steel and bass flute), Mark Weaver (tuba), Ken Keppeler (fiddle, accordion, mandolin, harmonica, jawharp) and Stefan Dill (flamenco guitar and hubcap), who previously worked with jazz great Cecil Taylor.

Bubba D is a jazz trombonist who says he used to hide his albums by The Band from his jazz cohorts. Weber originally approached him to play his horn with the Bubbadinos, but “I said the only way I’d be in this band was if I could play lap steel. He said he didn’t know I played lap steel and I said, ‘I don’t.’ But that didn’t bother him. I still like to maintain a primitive relationship with that instrument.”

Keppeler is the only Bubbadino with a country or folk music background, having played for nearly 20 years or so in a Cajun-centric band called Bayou Seco with his wife, Jeannie McLerie. Former residents of Louisiana, the couple has worked with the likes of the Balfa Brothers and Beausoleil.

According to Bubba D, after hearing the playback of “Wade In The Water”, the first song the Bubbadinos recorded, “Everyone grew real quiet. Finally Ken said, ‘Well, there goes my credibility as a folk musician.’”

Credibility or not, Keppeler remains a Bubbadino, joining the group in recording their second, soon-to-be-released CD, We’re Really Making Music Now. This will contain covers such as “I’m An Old Cowhand”, Johnny Paycheck’s “11 Months And 29 Days”, Jimmie Rodgers’ “My Blue Eyed Jane” and the Japanese pop hit “Sukiyaki”, as well as a dozen or so Weber originals.

For the time being, the Bubbadinos are a studio phenomenon, with only two live performances under their belts. Geography is a problem, as the band members live all over the state. But Weber intends for the band to continue; as he puts it, “We’re still not quite where I want it to be.” — STEPHEN W. TERRELL | No Depression | page 24 | march-april 1999

Please click any of the following thumbs and click it’s right or left side to browse through this gallery.

Set In Our Ways

THE BUBBADINOS: Ken Keppeler — fretless gut banjo, mandolin, jaw harp, pentecostalism, harmonica, vocals, button accordions, fiddle. Mark Weber – vocals, Okie box guitar, hubcaps (track 1). Stefan Dill — flamenco guitar, electric guitars. Mark Weaver – tuba, scissors, hubcaps (track 11). Bubba D — tambourine, background vocals, fretless mountain dulcimer, lap steel, shakuhachi & live looping. Mary Redhouse – vocals. GUEST BUBBADINO: Michael Vlatkovich – trombone

Tracklist: 1. Black Rising Sun (6:29) 2. Approaching of the Disco Void (Fahey) (3:25) 3. Long Black Veil (MariJohn Wilkin & Danny Dill) (4:27) 4. Ten Years Ago (Long Black Veil part 2) (3:40) 5. Flickering (J.A.Deane)(2:10) 6. Buttons & Bows (For Dinah Shore) (J.Livingston/R.B.Evans) (2:13)Download 7. Moon River (Jhonny Mercer/Henry Mancini (2:34) 8. Way Back Long Ago & Now (11:46) 9. Keep Your Lamp Trimmed (trad. ) (3:36) 10. Old Dan Tucker (p.d.) (3:41) 11. Hardnose (4:03) 12. Pecos River (J.A. Deane) (1:16) Download 13. Rain is Hard and Rain is Good (2:23) 14. Route 3 (J.A.Deane) (2:45) 15. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (Hank Williams) (3:06) 16. Black Diamond Express Train to Hell (Keppeler) (12:33) 17. Mythical Kansas (2:23)

When Big Web asked me to join his new band the (as yet un-named) Bubbadinos he asked me to play trombone but I told him that I wanted to play lapsteel guitar. He said “I didn’t know that you could play the steel guitar”, I said “I can’t”. J.A. Deane

Click here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

Up, We’re Beating A Dead Horse

We read George Martin’s book about the making of SGT PEPPER and decided we’d like to make a record like that.

THE BUBBADINOS: Stefan Dill - flamenco & electric guitars, re-enlist trumpet, Ken Keppeler – mandolin, fretless banjo, violin, jaw harp, button accordion, harmonica, Mary Redhouse – vocls, Mark Weber – guitar, vocals, Bubba D – schroeder piano, lapsteel, shakuhachi, dulcimer, bass flute, Mark Weaver – tuba, trombone, Juan Taike – percussion, Guests: Simon Ortiz – reading his poem “A New Story”, Sankirtan Das – “Hare Krishna”, Dick Barnes – washboard and reading his poem “The Wisdom of the Pioneers”

Tracklist: 1. Code Blue Alert – (4:47) 2. Walkin Mood – (3:27) 3. You Don’t Seem To Miss Me – (3:58) (Jim Lauderdale) 4. Particles Drifting – (4:40) 5. Leaving the Nest – (2:35)Download 6. Bless Your Heart – (2:10) 7. Bloody Bone – (2:36) 8. Wasteland – (4:36) 9. Elk River Blues – (1:57) (Ernie Carpenter) (words by Mark Weber) 10. A New Story – (4:05) 11. Here in the Real World – (3:23) (Alan Jackson & Mark Irwin) 12. Nickel and a Dime – (2:53) (Mark Weber & Todd Moore)Download 13. Walkin Mood (reprise) – (8:37) 14. Gambler’s Providence – (1:18) 15. Paint it Baxter Black (glory be rama rama glory be) – (8:40)

As much as Bubba D loved playing the tracking sessions Dino loved the mixing sessions with the post crew DQW (dino/quincy/weber). When we finally dug into the studio “concept album” (#4- yup, we’re beating a dead horse/the sargent bubbadino sessions), we used George Martin’s book (with a little help from my friends), about the making of Revolver/Sgt. Pepper’s/Magical Mystery Tour, as the script for the entire project. J.A. Deane

Click here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

The Band Only A Mother Could Love

– Ultra Americana Deluxe –

THE BUBBADINOS: Stefan Dill – flamenco guitar, double-neck electric, hubcaps. Mark Weaver – tuba, trombone, hubcaps. Ken Keppeler – banjo, harmonica, mandolin, accordion, harmony vocal, gritas de Lobo Mexicano, fiddle, jaw harp. Bubba D – lap steel, bass flute, piano, bells, Schroeder piano. Mark Weber - Okie guitar, vocals, violin, piano.

Recorded on May 9,1999 in Albuquerque (except solo tracks) Recording and Mastering by Quincy Adams. Mixed by DQW w/assist from The Jackson Pollock Memorial Ambiance Enhancement Device Pallbearers — Craig Goldsmith & Queenellen, and thanks to Julie Weaver for the use of her piano on track 12. ZERX # 021

Tracklist: 1. Death Don’t Have No Mercy (Trad.) (4:02) 2. Suzy Got Famous, Then She Got Dead (2:03)Download 3. Bars of the Prison – Ken solo (1:36) 4. Trooper’s Return (2:14) 5. The Living End (2:36) 6. Goin’ Home – Dino solo (2:13) 7. You Are My Sunshine (Davis & Mitchell) (2:52) 8. Greenville (Lucinda Williams) (3:30) 9. Hard Times (Stephen Foster) (2:44) 10. Winter of ‘99 (3:36) 11. Singing the Blues (MelvinEndslyy) (1:10)Download 12. Poundin’ the Ivories – Weber solo (:54) 13. Clementine (:51) 14. Yankee Doodle (1:11) 15. O Susanna (:34) 16. Glory Camp (1:13) 17. Closer Walk With Thee – Weaver solo (2:08) 18. There’s Always Mexico (1:22)Download 19. Cielito Lindo (1:03) 20. poem/Ashokan Farewell (Weber/Jay Ungar) (4:16) 21. Amazing Grace – Stefan solo (2:17) 22. The Mountain (Steve Earle) (3:15) 23. The Big Offramps of Life (3:26) 24. Party Line (3:57) 25. O Bury Me Not (:16)

The first time that I brought my “fretless mountain dulcimer” (dulce=sweet) to a Bubbadinos session, after Big Web heard me play it he immediately re-named it the “acerbis” (acerbic=sour). J.A. Deane

“As it sez right there on the slip cover, Ultra Americana Deluxe. And may I just add to that, here and right now, that these here Bubbadinos continue to explore the EXTREMELY alt. Western kinda canyons even Johnny Dowd merely peers down every now and then… provide more than their fair share of Uneasy Listening Pleasure… Turn it on, tune in, drop far out.” — Gary “Pig” Gold, In Music We Trust, March 2003

“Tenuousness, trepidation, drought, locust, musica antigua, cant & want, pock-marked chrome, lapsed backyard hallucinations, clippity-clop cowboys & Indians, flat tires, cloven-hoofed, low odds, dice, subdural hematoma, jail house coffee, bellybutton lint… It is easy to say you have to hear it but you have to hear it. And once you hear it you say, I gotta hear it again. And again.” — Michael Basinski, The Hold, November 2000

Click here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

We’re Really Makinbg Music Now

– Honky Tonk Chamber Music –

THE BUBBADINOS: Mark Weaver – tuba, Stefan Dill – flamenco guitar, ‘59 Strat, trumpet, Bubba D – lap steel, bass flute, piano, drums, Mark Weber – vocals, guitar, violin, harmonica, Ken Keppeler – violin, mandolin, banjo, accordion, harmonica.

The quiet before the storm. Lonesome whippoorwill. MY grandfather used to call me up and say, “Mark, when’re we gonna make some music?” and I’d haul over to his place and we’d make some. Will the rappers someday be able to call their grandkids and ask the same ? — Mark Weber

Recorded by Manny Rettinger. Mixed by DQW. Mastered at Quincy Adams Productions. All done during 1998 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Tracklist: 1. Lone Prairie (1:25)Download 2. Fading Into The Sunset (Johnny Mercer) (3:53) 3. Nuevo Sukiyaki (Nakamura/Rokusuke) (1:22) 4. 11 Months & 29 Days (Paychcck/Sherrill) (3:31) 5. John Fahey’s Last Bottle (1:58) 6. Walking the Floors Over You (Ernest Tubb) (3:42) 7. Cherokee Hawkin’s Fear Song (1:37) 8. Autumn Going Away (4:32) 9. Walking By Myself (Jimmy Rogers) (2:16) 10. Procrastinator’s Interlude (1:12) 11. O Bury Me Not/On the Trail (trad./Grofe) (6:03) 12. Rusty Cars (Weber/Weaver) (2:29) 13. My Blue-Eyed Jane (Jimmie Rodgers) (2:56)Download 14. Dimestore Wrangler Blues (:46) 15. Love Song of the Starved & Broke (2:29) 16. Gothic Interlude (1:19) 17. Nothin Happenin (1:37) 18. Pastoral in Open D (4:59) 19. Call It What You Want (1:56)Download 20. Albuquerque Nocturne (8:01) ZERX 014

I intentionally kept a very primitive (punk rock) relationship with the instrument over the life of the band (which is allot harder than one might think). I tried to come at the instrument at each session with a complete lack of technique, full on energy and all ears. The theory was “if you just keep the bar moving, you’re bound to be close to something that’s gonna work”. Of course this also meant that I couldn’t really reproduce anything I played which I think really drove Weber a little crazy at the time, but it had to be done. At recording sessions when Quincy would ask “who wants dino in the headphones”, there would be a resounding “NO”. J.A. Deane

Click here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

Ready As We’ll Ever Be

Every town in America has half a dozen prettified country bands but no place on Earth is there a band like the Bubbadinos.

Los BUBBADINOS: Mark Weaver — tuba * Ken Keppeler — accordions, banjo, violin, mandolin, harmonica, jawharp,vocals * Manny Rettinger — sound * Mark Weber — guitar & song & tambourine * Bubba D — lapsteel, electronics & bass flute * Stefan Dill — flamenco guitars & hubcaps.

Guest BUBBADINOS - Gretchen Parlato — song * Jon Baldwin — cornet * David Parlato — bass * Lee Taylor — clarinet

Recorded, mixed & mastered at UBIK Sound, Albuquerque, New Mexico, during 1997. SPECIAL THANKS to Tommy Guralnick, Cookie Marenco, Bill Plake, Jeff Bryan, KUNM, Paula Mayhew (for the “lyrics” to Battlehymn), and as always to my Janet.

Tracklist: 1.) Wade in the WaterDownload 2.) Country Song 3.) If You Got The Money 4.) South of the Border 5.) Pancho & Lefty 6.) Swing Low Sweet Chariot 7.) Lost Highway 8.) Tennessee Waltz 9.) Key to the Highway 10.) Jingle Jangle 11.) I Am aPilgrim 12.) Shenandoah 13.) Pistol Packin Mama 14.) Farewell, Farewell 15.) Red River Valley 16.) Pastures of Plenty 17.) Wild Mountain Thyme 18.) Amazing Grace 19.) Cotton Fields 20.) Battle Hymn of the Republic 21.) What a Friend We Have in Jesus 22.) Wing & a PrayerDownload 23.) Lord Knows I’m Drinkin 24.) Wings of a Dove 25.) Battle Hymn of the Playground 26.) You Ain’t Goin Nowhere 27.) Camptown Races 28.) Bringing in the Sheaves 29.) Rock of AgesDownload 30.) St. James Infirmary 31.) Way South of the Border

At the very first Bubbadinos recording session, the very first song we recorded (with no rehearsal) was “Wade in the Water”. After we played the song, Mark asked the engineer (Manny), to play it back, which he did. After the playback a hush fell over the room, and then Ken (Keppeler) said “Well, there goes my credibility as a folk musician”. – J.A. Deane (21, febr.2010)

Click here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

Mark Weber | 4 september 2005 | Photo: Herb Brass

mark weber | joe somoza and the other

Monsieur K. — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:57:59 +0000

Off The Wall | art work by Jill Somoza

One of these days I’m going to make a pilgrimage to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to see Joe Somoza’s lawn chair where he writes all of his amazing poetry.

It is a poetry of incidentals, and even more than that, it is a poetry of the peregrinations of the mind. I’ve always thought he was influenced by the Buddhists and when I asked him this he said that he’s never sat cross-legged on the floor in a room full of Buddhists, that that doesn’t interest him, though he loves to read books on Buddhism.

He has a light touch. Almost ephemeral. That gossamer veil that separates us from our real selves and what is the authentic world.

As the Buddha has it, our selves are part and parcel to the world. The self is a construct of the material world. There is something else underneath what we have come to know as our “self,” that those of us who practice meditation know as The Witness. Joe’s poetry has intimations of this “other.” As well, the poems locate themselves in the moment, they are involved with the Now.

And Joe is a poet of little moments. I’ve read all four of Joe Somoza’s books, since 1990, one every five or seven years appears, are there others, before that? See, I’m asking questions just like Joe. He’s intrigued but not confused. I realize, again, this morning that the thing I’ve been looking to write into my own poetry, Joe has already got there. So, maybe I can retire my pen and typewriter and wait for Joe’s next book! It’s a type of poetry that is perilously close to making itself obsolescent. Superflous. It approaches the place where poems disappear. This is, to my way of thinking, an amazing feat. That’s another thing Buddhism does, and pre-Buddhistic, Vedic, Vedantic thought, it precludes all such preponderances.

Joe’s poems are poised between all of that. It’s a poetry beyond certainties and uncertainties. It is merely Joe sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard allowing the quiet days to roll before him.

In my aged cynicism there are very few poets that I enjoy reading anymore, so many of them seem conflicted, or intent on impressing us with their feats of derring-do. Their Bukowski-backed-into-a-corner caged-animal stance. It’s all anxiety and angst. Tiresome. Ponderous and of questionable motives. There is nothing nourishing or revitalizing about those kind of poems. Joe is more considerate. I bet you anything he uses his blinkers when he’s out tooling around in his car. (This would put him in the minority in New Mexico.) He doesn’t drive in your blind spot. He is thoughtful in the main, or, as Buddhists have it: mindful. Mindfulness is one of the core doctrines.

His poems are somewhat related to Frank O’Hara’s though nowhere as flippant. Frank’s great poems often remind me of hangover thinking, that sort of goofy craziness that glows around the edges of a hangover. (I’ve often thought that driving under the influence of a hangover is more dangerous than drunk.) Joe merely inhabits the same immediacy and off-handedness that Frank was so good at. Masters that can turn anything into poetry.

Joe does not lean on the world, does not encumber you, he doesn’t crowd you. Everything is left as it is, in situ. He has gone beyond having an axe to grind.

He was an English professor for 22 years at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, and has been retired for 15. He says every morning he goes out to his lawn chair and writes. Every so often he and his wife Jill venture the five hours north to Albuquerque to visit friends and Joe gives a poetry reading. This he did last Sunday at Acequia Books, a god’s-honest bookstore, run by a real old-fashioned Johnsonian bookman named Gary Wilkie. Photos of jazzman Ted Joans on the wall and a framed letter from Ezra Pound that seethes. We live in a fast-paced ever-changing digital techno world where less and less value is placed upon contemplation. I don’t trust this new world. The techies have taken over. April before last when Bradford and I were driving north up Rt.5 we stopped west of Bakersfield to take a leak behind a dilapidated shack down a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere. I kept the car key in my pocket because who knows in this new world if some errant wavelength will float by and lock all the doors? (This rental car had one of those clickers that magically locks or unlocks the doors with a touch of a button from twenty paces.) We could be locked out standing in this cottonfield with our dicks in our hands. Key in pocket, always. I don’t trust this new world.

artwork by Jill Somoza

In summary:

1) There are no absolutes in Joe Somoza’s poetry.
2) There is no meanness in Joe Somoza’s poetry. He is gifted with expansiveness of spirit.
3) Joe Somoza is devoid of bullcrap. He is washed clean.
4) Does he give us meaning? Sure. Why not; in that he questions the idea of meaning.
5) You can hear Joe reading his poems on ALBUZERXQUE Vol. 4
6) Is this poetry related to confessional poetry? Maybe. Though, he’s not overly concerned
with unburdening himself. Nor is he afraid to reveal.
7) His four collections are:

OUT OF THIS WORLD (Cinco Puntos Press, 1990)
SOJOURNER, SO TO SPEAK (La Alameda Press, 1997)
CITYZEN (La Alameda Press, 2001)
SHOCK OF WHITE HAIR (Sin Fronteras Press, 2007)

–Mark Weber | 2mar10 Albuquerque

Yesterday. Tomorrow

Something I thought
sounded interesting yesterday,
now
sounds hollow.

Now I don’t
need to say “now”
any longer.

“Any longer” doesn’t sound
as long as it did
yesterday.

Yesterday. Tomorrow.
If I can’t pontificate
any more, I can at least
procrastinate.

Declaration

A simple declarative sentence
this is not. Nothing
is simple.
You sit down to your hamburger
at Bob’s, and they’ve forgotten
the ketchup. Then you notice
the homeless man
at the window.
You want to declare
your disgust with the system,
your brotherhood,
but what he really
wants, you don’t have
to share. In fact,
if someone
has to lose, you’re glad
that you’re winning,
for now.
Is this how to run
a civilization?

Squeak

– “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”
Howl and Other Poems

On the e-mail this morning, no one
had anything nice to say.
Just that I should send some
money, or protest some
injustice, and all I need to to
is click.
My friends, except for one or two,
have given up their typewriters.
Cigarettes went long ago. Any day,
we’ll trade in our t-shirts and levis and
be expected to behave maturely.
I go with the flow, not very
confrontational. My mother used to
warm me about being deported. Even
60 years in America and I still consider
English my second
language, though I hardly
speak my first.
My cousin from New Jersey thinks I’m
unrealistic. I don’t subscribe to
cable or the morning paper, and quickly
get bored at Wal-Mart though I
shop there all the time. It’s hard
to beat their prices no matter how
politically incorrect.
I dream of traveling to some country
without cell phones or McDonald’s but
there are hardly any left. Even
Cambodia and Afghanistan have lost their
exotic appeal due to over-coverage
of our wars.
And China
shipped its last pandas
to the zoo.
Out the window, the wind
stirs the dust and pollen
and makes things move like
shadows through the trees.

Joseph Somoza Reads

Joseph Somoza is the author of Out Of This World (Cinco Puntos 1990), Sojourner, So To Speak (La Alameda 1997), Cityzen (La Alameda 2001), and Shock of White Hair (Sin Fronteras 2007).

Please click the back cover for more details.

Download listen to Joseph Somoza | In The Clouds | from the Vox Audio CD edited by Bruce Holsapple.

Download listen to Joseph Somoza | Spell | from the Vox Audio CD edited by Bruce Holsapple.

incl. shipment cost world-wide

Joseph Somoza

Reads in Placitas, NM, June 2005

Joseph Somoza taught literature and creative writing at NMSU for 22 years, editing poetry for Puerto Del Sol during most of that time. He has published four previous chapbooks and three full books of poetry, the most recent being Cityzen (La Alameda, 2002). He’s done readings of his poems in many venues throughout the country, including The Green Mill (Chicago), Cody’s (Berkeley), The Cornelia Street Cafe (New York), The Elliston Poetry Library (University of Cincinnati), the Mesa (AZ) Literary Festival, and The Living Batch Bookstore (Albuquerque). He lives in Las Cruces with wife Jill, a painter. Jill Somoza has been painting, drawing, papermaking, and doing collage paintings for 40 years. She has experimented with various materials and is currently painting on vinyl, superimposing large, oddly-shaped, translucent panels.

The works shown here are small single-plane pieces of acrylic and photo-transfers on vinyl. She studied art at the University of Iowa, UTEP, and NMSU, and has shown her work at varaious galleries, including The Bridge Center for Contemporary Art in El Paso, Branigan Cultural Center and in “Close To The Border” at the NMSU gallery in Las Cruces, Hansford Gallery in New York, and Sanchez Gallery in San Francisco. Most recently, she had work in the Summer Regional Invitational 2003 at NMSU. She lives with poet Joe Somoza, with whom she raised 3 kids who all have happy, independent lives.

Please click the back cover to enlarge.

Download listen to Joseph Somoza | In Our Dreams | from the Vox Audio CD edited by Bruce Holsapple.

incl. shipment cost world-wide

Many more Vox Audio releases can be found by clicking any of the following artists…

Vox Audio: Compact Disks of Contemporary Poetry Edited by Bruce Holsapple featuring Mera Wolf, Todd Moore, Lee Sharkey, Margaret Randall, John Macker, Albert Huffstickler, David Benedetti, Gary Brower, Michael Rothenberg, David Meltzer, Jeffrey Lee, David Abel, Burt Hatlen, Gene Frumkin, Joan Logghe, Bobby Byrd, Joe Hayes, Mary Rising Higgins, George Kalamaras, Mary Ann Cain, Larry Goodell, Chico Martin, Bill Sylvester, Craig Dworkin, John Tritica, Dana Wilde, Joseph Somoza, David Empfield, Timothy Wright, Jim Bishop, Nathaniel Tarn, Janet Rodney, Michael Boughn, Wayne Crawford, Mary McGinnis, Anne MacNaughton, Peter Rabbit, Lawrence Welsh, Keith Wilson, Donald Guravich, Joanne Kyger, John Clarke, Charles Keil and Bruce Holsapple.

Joe Somoza | Photo by Bruce Holsapple

mark weber | pismo beach

Monsieur K. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:15:21 +0000

Gas Station Pismo Beach, California 1970’s| Photo: Mark Weber

Essentially, we all
drift through life

floating

Like a dream . . . .
aaeven as
much as we intend to direct ourselves, oh, in the many
endeavors, that seem to require
aaaaaaaaaour attention

Yes, a dream, as I get older it all seems like a dream

It’s not as if I remember everything . . .
after all, our lives are a mist, the gossamer curtains
gentle breeze . . .

The 1970s for me, it seems I was drifting continuously . . .

This photo of Pismo Beach I find in a box, more dreamlike than real . . .

California used to be full of these little fog-bound coastal towns lost in time
there were sand dunes at Pismo, you could sleep there among the dunes
lay there watching the stars and listening to the ocean

Staring out in space once more trying to fathom the conundrum
that the universe never ends . . .

—Mark Weber | 6feb10

lawrence welsh | a savage refinement: the art of bill rakocy

Monsieur K. — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:31:57 +0000

For wanderers and journalists alike, a new city is all about discoveries: the digging in to find an essence that might not get covered by the national media.

When I moved to El Paso, Texas, fifteen years ago, one of my major discoveries was the art of Bill Rakocy. Although Rakocy wasn’t well known outside of the region, he is one of the greatest chroniclers of life in the desert Southwest, both as it was and as it is.

When I first discovered Rakocy’s work, I had just moved to El Paso after living in Los Angeles for 34 years. So there I was, soaking up every shadow, every street corner, every face. I was eager to learn all I could about my new home.

At that time, the Hal Marcus Gallery sat on Mesa Street on the city’s Westside. When I opened the door to Marcus’ gallery, I became overwhelmed by a 40-year retrospective of Rakocy’s work. Who is he? I wondered. Who is this world-class painter who chose El Paso as his home?

At first, I soaked up the eclectic influences in his work: impressionism, realism, abstraction and expressionism that had been digested, mastered and then refined through decades in El Paso’s blinding sun and hot wind. At that show, a small oil called “Road to Newcastle, Pennsylvania,” served as a touchstone for the entire exhibit. This landscape of burnt trees, distorted roads and overtaxed telephone poles captured both a type of primitivism and old-world refinement, as if Degas ingested Max Beckmann and Van Gogh and then they all got stranded by the gritty railroad tracks off Paisano Drive in El Paso. From there, they could see the Rio Grande, Juarez, the Jesus Saves Rescue Mission and watch the cars fly by on Interstate 10; cars heading east and west for places like Los Angeles, Houston and New Orleans. Strapped with oil, watercolors and acrylics, these masters, I imagined, could paint until they became the wind, the nonstop blowing sand, the blinding sun and, finally, the shifting shadows off the last vestiges of the Rocky Mountains. Then, perhaps, they could all become collectively what Bill Rakocy is: A highly individualistic desert voice and vision. And then I forgot about him. But how does one really forget?

Twelve years later, I read in a local newspaper that a 50-year-retrospective was taking place at a new, larger Hal Marcus Gallery. By this time, a lot had changed.

I was now married and the father of two young children.

“Let’s go to the opening,” I told my wife. “It’ll be worth it.”

The gallery that day, which was packed with people, was full of work going back to the 1940s: oils, water colors and acrylics of El Paso, Juarez, Taos, Santa Fe, Italy and countless ghost towns forgotten by most but not by Rakocy. Historical figures like Pancho Villa and Porfirio Diaz shared space with anonymous street vendors and border-town musicians. It had all been digested, twisted, loved and rediscovered through Rakocy’s eyes and brushes. I was blown away by the savagery, the refinement, the punk ethos of get it down and get it done at any cost.

Rakocy has mastered so many styles that the untrained observer may doubt that the paintings are by the same artist. But they all bear his signature love of color. In some of his paintings, especially his water colors, his brush strokes are spontaneous, broad, modern, savage and beautiful, like the storms that suddenly overtake the mountains and creosote land and then dissipate as quickly as they form, leaving the smell of chaparral in their aftermath. In others, a Southwestern impressionist applies refined strokes of vivid color, so that one disappears into the El Paso wetlands desert scape, sits among mountain flowers or walks into a Colorado ghost town of the 1800s.

His self published, do-it-yourself books by Bravo Press were there too, with titles like Images: Paso del Norte; Ghosts of Kingston and Hillsboro; Villa Raids; and Trails to Ruidoso. They all served as historical primers to his commitment and fascination with his Southwest home.

When we left the gallery, I couldn’t get his work out of my mind. I closed my eyes and a ragged Taos landscape appeared, or was it the death mask of Pancho Villa? I also kept flashing back to “Layolia Church: Barrio, EP, TX,” a bold oil that portrayed the church’s neighborhood importance in wild hues of blues and pinks and shadows. In reality, the colors may or may not have existed on that barrio street, but they all worked in an organic extravagance of site and almost audible sound.

After a few days of this, I did what I needed to do. I went to the phone book, got his number and called.

“Sure,” he said, “come on by.”

If overwhelmed by his gallery retrospectives, I was almost knocked down by his “studios.” I say studios because it took four of them to house all of his artwork. My heart raced as I looked over decades of his daily discipline: stacks of oils in one corner, murals in progress in another, portfolios of sketches from his school days at the Kansas City Art Institute.

When I left, I walked out with a small oil and a watercolor. Somehow, I knew I’d return. We also talked that day for hours about writing, art and history, and Rakocy showed me dozens of turn of the 20th century black and white photos of Mexico, New Mexico and Texas.

I don’t want to say, in the end, that I became a junky for going to see Bill and his gracious wife Gloria, who is also a fine painter, but I did. My wife and I would scrape some money together, and off I’d go again, perhaps every three or four months.

About a week ago, I spent another two hours with Rakocy, and as I was getting back in my truck and saying goodbye, his paintings started dancing in my head. I noticed he hadn’t sold a recent main street portrait of Hillsboro, New Mexico, or was that “Telluride, Colorado, 1880’s”? That’s always my downfall because I’ll obsess and dream of it, and then we’ll see if there’s any cash left over, and then I’ll call Bill.

How long can this last? Hopefully forever, but I must remain realalistic. Rakocy is 85 years old now and I’m 50, but as long as there’s another chance to talk about art, the Mexican Revolution or El Paso, I’ll return. It’s all about creating, anyway, and what feeds our lives, might just feed our souls too. For Rakocy, then, it’s all about soul – the commitment to daily study, painting, and writing.

“It’s the digging,” he said recently. “It’s all about the digging.”

Here’s hoping the digging and work never stop. If they do, however, a lot will remain for the rest of us to enjoy. Maybe then we’ll remember a man who never gave up, one who kept on going until the digging was complete.

Lawrence Welsh’s

eighth book of poetry, Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. During the past 20 years, his poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in about 200 national and regional magazines and anthologies. Welsh is an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College.

No related posts.

mark weber | the judson crews I know

Monsieur K. — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:29:54 +0000

Judson Crews – Taos, December 24, 2000 | Photo by Mark Weber

We were drinking buddies. My wife and I had moved to Albuquerque the summer of 1991. I knew from reading the little (aka: the littles) poetry magazines that Judson Crews lived in Albuquerque. I think it was Joan Jobe Smith or Marilyn Johnson who gave Judson my address because one day I received a letter from Judson and so we got together. Drank and talked poetry.

Back then the little poetry magazines were on fire. There were at least a hundred very good crazy lively poetry magazines in America during the 1970s and 1980s before the web wiped them out. They didn’t have huge print runs and circulation was spotty, but somehow we all read them. That is, mostly poets read them. And it wasn’t that the writing was all that good, in retrospect, it was mostly the immediacy of them and the exuberance, and the sheer fun of it that made them so good. Poets could cobble together various anxieties and a few nonsequiturs and give it a title and boom boom you got a poem. And boom boom boom you could have it published. All of the poems worked together like a giant soup. Judson had been a mainstay of the littles for decades.

Judson has a style that consists of improvising. He starts off with an opening gambit and then lets it go wherever it suggests. There is nothing in his poems that is factually true, he doesn’t write about his life or tell stories about derring do. The poems write themselves, in a way. I used to argue with him about this, but, over time I’ve come to see his way as so perfect and sensible. It’s not like the poems are not true themselves. And that there are not truths in the poems.

I think Judson was a remarkable poet. In some ways it took me a few years to realize the full measure of his accomplishment.

Nowadays he lives in Taos, New Mexico, near his two daughters and his granddaughters. Mildred Tolbert, the photographer (see her book AMONG THE TAOS MODERNS) passed away in 2007 at age 89. Judson is now 92 and lives at the Taos Living Center. His daughter Anna Bush Crews selected these photos that Judson took in the 1980s. Anna Bush lives half the year in Taos and half in Wales where she taught photography at the university. Judson’s second daughter, Carole Crews, just published a magnificent book on adobe construction called CLAY CULTURE: PLASTERS, PAINTS AND PRESERVATION. Janet and I visited with them over the holidays. His grandson, Sohrab Crews, (son of Anna Bush) is an artist and has a gallery in London. –Mark Weber, 1feb10 Albuquerque

NOTE: Judson can be found on ALBUZERXQUE Vol. 6

Judson Crews during wild party — solstice 1991 Albuquerque — drawing by his grandson Sohrab Crews

Judson Crews | self portrait

MANY ISLANDS

I never said that summer was a sword
I never said that all the soldiers would be dead

The moon rises in summer as in winter
no bayonet yet has spiked it for long

Oh our season, our season, prismatic as time
our time pragmatic as love. The moon

Left debris in its wake on many islands
on many islands the soldiers lie

They lie in the arms of the memory of mercy
they lie as if smitten with the memory of love

But it was not the memory that did it here
nor was it the summer’s cruel sword

Judson Crews | smile in Mexico

In Texas we got persimmons

This is what she said, standing in
water just at her breasts — those tiny

Little boobs. Thirteen you might think
she was, but eighteen was more like it

They are up there until the frost turns
them to sugar. I know, I said

What you got in Texas. Man
and boy I was Texan for three

Decades. This was at Llano Quemado
the Taos hot springs. Likely, the first

Time she was ever naked in front
of a stranger. Texas. Girls, girls

Some of them are girls forever, no matter
how they grow. The leaves are gone

She said. And they are sweet as sugar
– but you have to shake them down

Judson Crews | as CHET

It’s waking. You
aaaaaaawoke me. It’s bright

Sun. And as far as the eye can see
it’s a wedding day. Not to a bride

To the earth’s birth. To birdsong
to the rainbow in a cloudless sky

Epithalmia. You are hissing in
my deaf ear — dreamer, dreamer, dreaming

Judson Crews | pose for Huntress

So it happened
aaaayou got a wood-tick

Imbedded in your genital pelt. You never
noticed, till he was sucked full

Of your blood, and began to hurt — that
loathsome thing black as a blueberry

How ashamed you were and loathing
as if he were an unchosen rival lover

Leeching upon your intimate self
I screwed him out, careful not to

break off his head in your tender
flesh and make a festering sore

It was only after I threw him and
shattered him and splattered your blood

Upon a rock — that I knew
my true feelings. Then I observed

For days that dark star, and questioned

myself, Am I not he

Judson Crews | red stripe selfportrait

It’s not that she led me on

I was a fool for asking, where are we
going — we were gone. We?

I was there alone. I could tell you
the awe I felt, the vista and all

Its mystical receding planes
but it’s not so — I was numb

My wonder was a deeper wonder
why was I brought here

How will I seek a way
of turning back

Judson Crews | shoebox light

If the gods were weeping it is for

Themselves they weep. How many
days did Noah prepare an ark

And provision it — with slugs
and bumblebees, diverse untoward

Creatures. And a few casks of old wine –
Has one of us yet

aaaaaaaaaaNot waded ashore

Judson Crews | December 26, 2009 Taos, New Mexico | Photo: Mark Weber

Judson Crews & his daughters Anna Bush & Carole Crews December 26, 2009 Taos, New Mexico | Photo: Mark Weber

mark weber | nuances

Monsieur K. — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:03:23 +0000

Drawing by Mark Weber

NUANCES

I’ll venture a line, a sort
of speculation, spectacular,
sepulchral, purely a set of
words that caught my ear

And call it an opening gambit
upon which to improvise, or
as we say in jazz: to riff

Not to be confused with riffs, those
infamous background taunting phrases
from a Kansas City horn section

No, I mean riff in the sense
of taking a joy ride into a subject
and experiencing along the way
all of the conjunctions the words
bring up, surprisingly

Pure invention, even then is nearly
impossible given the freight our words
have gather’d over centuries, ghost
meanings that loom behind
the scenes, making language

Such a deep mountain lake, what
do they call those in Utah? a cirque?
crystal clear lakes in the high
altitudes, dark reflecting a blue sky
or frozen solid, say

As starchy as the dowager battleship
who decides to sing at table in
a Marx Brothers movie

You wince, you look for
an exit, and there’s a tip-toeing Harpo
showing you the way out

Maybe at this point you crumple
the page and toss it
into the fire, decide to put
on Sonny Rollins Lp CONTEMPORARY
LEADERS, which
is loaded with inspiration, maybe
some
of it will rub off?

You tinker with some
of the earlier stanzas
realize you didn’t mean “sepulchral,”
my inner ear overshot the word “spectral,”
a word I associate with William S. Burroughs,
same as I associate “ennui” with Henry Miller,
same as I associate hundreds of other
words with the writers who have
worked with them,
though,
“sepulchral” could work, in an
off-handed kind of way, like a tomb
for dead words, words
that hit a dead-end
their meanings will dissolve, various nuances
will be divvied up between 17 other words, new
and old, plunder’d
the English language absorbs
everything in its path (a similar characteristic
of jazz)

How many times have I lookt up a word
in the dictionary only to find myself thinking that
the lexicographers missed something, that
there’s a nuance still lurking in
the shadows

An ancient penumbra surrounding
a word, like fire, or maybe smoke is the more poetic
descriptor?
nuances still lurking in the shadows, cackling
like one of Steve Richmond’s gagaku demons

BUT! Words are still only the
conveyance, not an end in themselves
(unless, you find interest in what the “language poets”
concern themselves with,
and this “concrete poetry” where words are
very much an end in themselves, a fascinating
field of writing, really, but
I have bigger fish to fry — I know, you’re
waiting like e.e. cummings for me to
close this parenthesis, but maybe I’ll just
keep whispering, only if to add a dash of mystery? –
contrariness has a welcome place
in poetry

There are 3 things I can say
about that last stanza:
1) Strunk & White quite correctly advise us
to avoid the word “really”
2) yoga also is not an end in itself, even
as much as it could be, generously
3) this poem is becoming much too long

Maybe a 4th comment could be some-
thing I thought about yesterday, chuckling
to myself how incredible Todd Moore is with
short poems: presently, we’re
working on another installment of our
Noir Jazz radio show, and
how Todd can write more poetry in one or two
weeks than most poets can write in a
lifetime, it’s as if he has a
faucet that he turns on
and out comes pure poetry
over-flowing with pathos, narrative, back story,
front story, humor, menace, flower-sniffing dogs, you
name it, he’s got it all going, and all
with a mere twenty words or so

And then, what about inspiration?
Well, presumably that’s the fuel you run on
and
when it fizzles out, you
stop
or maybe draw funny squiggles on paper
and send them to Klaus to adorn the margins
of this poem

– mark weber – 25jan10

Drawing by Mark Weber

romare bearden | empress

Monsieur K. — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:58:05 +0000

Romare Bearden | Empress

Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx and completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in science and education. He often put his education on pause to be a professional baseball player.

After he started to focus more on his art and less on athletics, he took courses in art that led to him being a lead cartoonist and art editor for the Eucleian Society’s (a secretive student society at NYU) monthly journal, The Medley.

Bearden also focused on the written art form. He wrote and published articles on numerous topics and is well-known for his written works. Among these talents, he also designed costumes and sets for prominent dance and theater companies, illustrated books by influential authors, co-wrote books about African American art and culture, and composed songs. Many years after he had stopped focusing on athletics, the Philadelphia Athletics offered him the chance to play professional baseball, only if he would agree to “pass as white”—an offer he refused, which jumpstarted his artistic growth.

Bearden grew as an artist not by learning how to create new techniques and mediums, but by his life experiences, and the different decades he created art and the different events that took place completely reshaped his vision of art. He studied under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. At this time his paintings were often of scenes in the American South, and his style was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Shortly thereafter he began the first of his stints as a case worker for the New York Department of Social Services. During World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945. He would return to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne under the auspices of the GI Bill.

This completely changed his style of art as he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human; specifically scenes from the Passion of the Christ. He had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York times, called a “debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns” to what became known as his stylistic approach which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art (Witkovsky 1989: 258). His works were exhibited in Sam Kootz’s gallery until his work was deemed not abstract enough.

During his success in the gallery, however, he produced Golgotha, a painting from his series of the Passion of the Christ. Golgotha is an abstract representation of the Crucifixion. The eye of the viewer is drawn to the middle of the image first, where Bearden has rendered Christ’s body. The body parts are stylized into abstract geometric shapes, yet still too realistic to be concretely abstract; this work has a feel of early Cubism. The body is in a central position and yet darkly contrasting with the highlighted crowds. The crowds of people are on the left and right, and are encapsulated within large spheres of bright colors of purple and indigo. The background of the painting is depicted in lighter jewel tones dissected with linear black ink. Bearden used these colors and contrasts because of the abstract influence of the time, but also for their meanings.

Bearden intended to not focus on Christ but he wanted to emulate rather the emotions and actions of the crowds gathered around the Crucifixion. He worked hard to “depict myths in an attempt to convey universal human values and reactions” (Witkovsky 1989: 260). According to Bearden himself, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are the greatest expressions of man’s humanism, not because of Christ’s actual existence but the idea of him that lived on through other men. This is why Bearden focuses on Christ’s body first, to portray the idea of the myth, and then highlights the crowd, to show how the idea is passed on to men.

While it may seem as if Bearden was emphasizing the Biblical interpretations of Christ and the Crucifixion, he was actually focusing on the spiritual intent. He wanted to show ideas of humanism and thought that cannot be seen by the eye, but “must be digested by the mind” (Witkovsky, 1989: 260). This is in accordance with the time he produced this image, as other famous artists creating avant-garde abstract representations of historically significant events, such as Motherwell’s commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, Pollock’s investigation of the Northwest Coast Indian art, Rothko’s and Newman’s interpretations of Biblical stories, etc. Bearden used this form of art to depict humanity during a period of time when he didn’t see humanity in existence through the war (Romare Bearden Foundation, 1990). However, Bearden stands out from these other artists as his works, including Golgotha, are a little too realistic for this time, and he was kicked out of Sam Kootz’s gallery.

Bearden turned to music, co-writing the hit song Sea Breeze, which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie; it is still considered a jazz classic. In 1954, at age 42, he married Nanette (Rohan) Bearden, a 27 year old accomplished dancer and noted beauty who herself became an artist and critic. The couple eventually created the Bearden Foundation to assist young artists. Nanette Bearden was also instrumental in convincing her husband to return to visual art.

In the late 1950s, Bearden’s work became more abstract, using layers of oil paint to produce muted, hidden effects. In 1956, Bearden began studying with a Chinese calligrapher, whom he credits with introducing him to new ideas about space and composition in painting. He also spent a lot of time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt. He began exhibiting again in 1960. About this time the couple established a second home in the Caribbean island of St. Maarten.

Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as “a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete” (Witkovsky 1989: 266), which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century “exploration of abstraction” (Witkovsky 1989: 267). His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings’ focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

During the 1960s civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage (Brenner Hinish and Moore, 2003). After helping to found an artist’s group in support of civil rights, Bearden’s work became more representational and more overtly socially conscious. He used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium as glossy magazines were fairly new. He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how not only were African American rights moving forward, but so was his socially conscious art. In 1964, he held an exhibition he called Projections, where he introduced his new collage style. These works were very well received, and these are generally considered to be his best work (Fine, 2004).

There have been numerous museum shows of Bearden’s work since then, including a 1971 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Prevalence of Ritual, an exhibition of his highly prized prints entitled A Graphic Odyssey showing the work of the last fifteen years of his life, and the 2005 National Gallery of Art retrospective entitled The Art of Romare Bearden.

One of his most famous series, Prevalence of Ritual, concentrated mostly on southern African American life. He used these collages to show his rejection of the Harmon Foundation’s, the Chicago arts organization, emphasis on the idea that African Americans must reproduce their culture in their art (Greene, 1971). Bearden found this to be a burden on African artists, because he saw this idea creating an emphasis on reproducing something that already exists in the world. He used this new series to speak out against this limitation on Black artists, and to emphasize modern art.

In this series, one of the pieces is entitled Baptism. Bearden was influenced by Francisco Zubaran, and based Baptism off of Zubaran’s piece The Virgin Protectress of the Carthusians. Bearden wanted to show how the water that is about to be poured on the subject being baptized is always moving, giving the whole collage a feel and sense of temporal flux. This is a direct connection with the fact that African Americans’ rights were always changing, and society itself was in a temporal flux at the time he created this image. Bearden wanted to show how nothing is fixed, and represented this idea throughout the image: not only is the subject being baptized about to have water poured from the top, but the subject is also about to be submerged in water. Every aspect of the collage is moving and will never be the same more than once, which was congruent with society at the time.

In “The Art of Romare Bearden”, Ruth Fine describes his themes as “universal”. “A well-read man whose friends were other artists, writers, poets and jazz musicians, Bearden mined their worlds as well as his own for topics to explore. He took his imagery from both the everyday rituals of African American rural life in the south and urban life in the north, melding those American experiences with his personal experiences and with the themes of classical literature, religion, myth, music and daily human ritual.”

A mural by Romare Bearden in the Gateway Center subway station in Pittsburgh is worth $15 million, more than the cash-strapped transit agency expected, raising questions about how it should be cared for once it is removed before the station is demolished. “We did not expect it to be that much,” Port Authority of Allegheny County spokeswoman Judi McNeil said. “We don’t have the wherewithal to be a caretaker of such a valuable piece.” It would cost the agency more than $100,000 a year to insure the 60-foot-by-13-foot tile mural, McNeil said. Bearden was paid $90,000 for the project, titled “Pittsburgh Recollections.” It was installed in 1984.

Romare Bearden died in New York on March 12, 1988 due to complications from bone cancer. In their obituary for him, the New York Times called Bearden “one of America’s pre-eminent artists” and “the nation’s foremost collagist.”

Two years after his death, The Romare Bearden Foundation was founded. This non-profit organization not only serves as Bearden’s official Estate, but also helps “to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of this preeminent American artist.” Recently, it has begun developing grant-giving programs aimed at funding and supporting children, young (emerging) artists and scholars. In Charlotte, Romare Bearden has a street named after him, intersecting West Boulevard, on the west side of the city. On that site, Romare Bearden Drive is surrounded by the West Boulevard Public Library branch and rows of townhouses.

Published works

Romare Bearden is the author of:

* Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Romare Bearden is the coauthor of:

* with Harry Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art, New York: Doubleday, 1972
* with Carl Holty, The Painter’s Mind, Taylor & Francis, 1981
* with Harry Henderson, of A History of African-American Artists. From 1792 to present, New York: Pantheon Books 19

Honors achieved

* Founded the 306 Group, a club for Harlem artists
* In 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
* In 1972 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters
* In 1987, the year before he died, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts
* In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Romare Bearden on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Works

* Abstract (painting)
* The Blues (collage) – 1975, Honolulu Academy of Arts
* The Calabash (collage) – 1970, Library of Congress
* Carolina Shout (collage) – The Mint Museum of Art
* Falling Star (painting)
* Fisherman (painting)
* The Lantern (painting)
* Last of the Blue Devils
* Morning of the Rooster
* Patchwork Quilt (collage) – 1970, Museum of Modern Art
* Piano Lesson (painting) – Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
* Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings (collage)
* Return of the Prodigal Son – 1967, Albright-Knox Art Gallery
* Rocket to the Moon (collage)
* She-Ba
* Showtime (painting)
* Summertime (collage) – 1967, Saint Louis Art Museum
* The Woodshed
* Wrapping it up at the Lafayette

Notes

1. ^ Romare Bearden Foundation, 1990
2. ^ Romare Bearden Foundation, 1990
3. ^ Romare Bearden: Scenes From the Portfolios Sacred Heart University
4. ^ Romare Bearden: Man of Many Parts Paul Trachtman, 1 February 2004
5. ^ A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker
6. ^ Bearden Subway Mural Takes Pittsburgh by Surprise, ARTINFO, April 25, 2008, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27459/…, retrieved 2008-04-28
7. ^ Subway mural is valued at $15 million - CNN.com
8. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht… New York Times “Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter, Dies at 75″ By C. GERALD FRASER. March 13, 1988
9. ^ http://www.beardenfoundation.org/mission… Mission Statement page on the Romare Bearden Foundation website
10. ^ http://www.beardenfoundation.org/program… New Initiatives page on the Romare Bearden Foundation website
11. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

Sources

* Vaughn, William (2000). Encyclopedia of Artists. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN 0-19-521572-9.
* Yenser, Thomas (editor) (1930-1931-1932 Third Edition). Who’s Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of African Descent in America. Who’s Who in Colored America, Brooklyn, New York. [Provides biography of mother, Bessye J. Bearden]
* “Romare Bearden Foundation Biography”. http://www.beardenfoundation.org/artlife…. Retrieved October 4, 2005.
* Brenner, Carla, Hinish, Heidi, and Moore, Barbara. 2003. The Art of Romare Bearden, National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Romare Bearden Foundation website
The Art of Romare Bearden at the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Marshall Arts presents Romare Bearden
Bearden Foundation biography
Romare Bearden Images: Hollis Taggart Galleries
“Romare Bearden: The Music in His Art, A Pictorial Odyssey” – by Ronald David Jackson. video, 2005
Romare Bearden Artwork Examples on AskART.
Romare Bearden papers online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Review of Romare Bearden’s exhibit at the Whitney Museum by John Haber
Columbus Museum of Art Bearden’s 1967 collage and mixed media piece La Primavera (click on picture for larger image)
Conjuring Bearden Exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art
Romare Bearden’s public artwork at Westchester Square-East Tremont Avenue, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit.
Price, Sally and Richard Price. 2006. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

source

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eliot katz | midnight poem

Monsieur K. — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:39:14 +0000

Midnight Poem

Well, I’m home on my 49th birthday, after a movie, champagne, & loving, up late, still drinking champagne & listening to Monk & Coltrane’s new CD that Vivian gave me. It’s a new CD, but it was recorded in 1957, my birth year, and I’m listening to “Monk’s Mood” and it sounds pretty much like my mood, a little down about life, the planet, and human bones in general, but still trying to keep a hopeful spark alive at the core.

This is a year things might really change for the better— even some conservative libertarians are upset with Bush’s NSA spying without court warrants, and now the Bush gang is playing defense by playing offense & going after the whistleblowers. Even conservative Americans have sympathy for a courageous whistleblower. And now the 2nd song on the CD is “Evidence,” as if there isn’t already more than enough. Yeah, the ice caps are melting, ocean waters rising, & it looks like we’re up a shit’s creek that’s growing warmer & more bacterial. There are a lot more boats than there were in Noah’s time, and I wonder if a submarine can handle a biblically proportioned flood.

Now, we’ve moved into a song called “Nutty” and that’s about as good a description of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crew as we’re likely to find. Hey, is history repeating itself, or did Monk and Coltrane expect us to uncover this recording almost fifty years later? The movie Vivian and I watched tonight was “Grizzley Man,” about a guy so enthusiastic to protect bears that he decided foolishly to live among them and almost dare them to attack. That sounds a bit like life amidst the poetry scene. Maybe wolves. Ah, where is Allen Ginsberg’s sane voice and presence at this planet’s crazy moment? Put in perspective, I guess Bush’s wars aren’t killing as many as most of the big wars of the 20th century, in fact it seems like his thinking that this war on a relatively small stateless terrorist group is the equivalent of World War II is one of the many reasons his tactics and strategies have been insane. But yet, with technology’s growing lethality, somehow it seems like out-of-control violence is as threatening as ever, as if spying on Americans is closer to Orwell’s 1984 than it would seem in a more ecological landscape.

And Bush’s obsession makes him seem like he’s been dropped into the White House from another planet, by a space ship certainly not made from human skin & bones. In the end, he’s probably far less dangerous than the last century’s craziest world leaders. Isn’t he? I still think he needs to be impeached—for the illegal spying and an illegal and unwarranted war that has killed over 100,000 Iraqis and over 2,000 American soldiers and that has saturated the Iraqi soil with enough depleted uranium to keep the cancer and birth defects coming for decades, if global warming doesn’t kill us all first.

The other day I found out REM’s Michael Stipe and I have the same birthday. He’s gotten a lot further in the art world than I have, but I still have most of my hair. I’ve got a bad back, get depressed sometimes during the holiday season & around my birthday, so on this my 49th birthday I ask my hair not to desert me! Thankfully, Vivian hasn’t deserted me yet, just fell asleep earlier than me in other room. The tune playing now is called “Epistrophy.” Is that a real word or a Monk word? The applause in this live recording is astonishing. I mostly try to stay away from needing too much approval, which I know is a Buddhist trap. Let go of attachments, I’ve heard the Dalai Lama say, though he certainly gets plenty of applause. Maybe for my 50th birthday, I’ll try to organize my first birthday party in about three decades, I’ll make it a benefit for one of my favorite activist or media watchdog groups. Even if nobody shows up, maybe we could make a recording that someone will find in a flea market fifty years later? –Eliot Katz, Queens, NY

from Big Hammer No. 11 Iniquity Press / Vendetta Books. If you are interested in this issue please click here…

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jeff schlanger | mark weber | long division

Monsieur K. — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:07:36 +0000

a little coversation between Jeff Schlanger and Mark Weber:

Sure, Mark,
you, your poetry and the lands through which you move did it.–JEff

JEff,

I LIKE IT ! Can we send it to Klaus @ Metropolis website, maybe he’ll mount it.–mark

Mark,

I’ve been enjoying your mellow baritone introduce a beautiful mix of music and remembering it delivering some poems live downtown. Yesterday musicWitness did some marker work on the cover of my inscribed copy of Long Division to better reflect the headlights coming at you during long night drives across the American West.

Even though this may not be what you were expecting from Santa, Happy Holidays and a healthy and creative New Year !–Jeff

I have a huge regard for Jeff Schlanger’s graphic art, and his jazz art, easily one of the main cats , up there with David Stone Martin and Leo Meiersdorff, so if he wants to scribble on the cover of one of my books then I think it’s worth looking at. Picasso used to do things like that.–Mark

Yes, Mark & Klaus, this is becoming a most appropriate notice of the ongoing resonance of Romare Bearden’s uniquely musical art in 2010. The 3 Bearden pictures forwarded were intended to illustrate our conversation which had begun with Mark’s poems and has come now, with Hal McKusick’s help, to encourage a further look into art & jazz.

Romare Bearden’s art sings eloquently for itself, no need for verbal comment from this musicWitness®, who is looking to speak through pictures made during live performance. Jeff Schlanger

Romare Bearden | Empress

Joe Henderson-Black Is The Color | Label: Milestone Records | Catalog#: MSP 9040 | Format: Vinyl, LP | Released: 1972

. . . just where can a person find Vinny Golia’s graphic works? We know from his biography that he spent his years in New York City, before moving to California (via Zuni, New Mexico) that he was an artist. The only examples I’ve ever seen are on album covers and they bear further investigation. There is Joe Henderson’s BLACK IS THE COLOR which is a fast line drawing, as is the cover to Dave Holland & Barre Phillips’ MUSIC FROM TWO BASSES. His (uncredited) work with airbrush can be found on the Chick Corea Lp THE SONG OF SINGING. Just those 3 and they date from the early 70s. Then, when he started Nine Winds Records he put some of his art on the covers of the early issues — most notably the airbrush art on NW # 3, the double-Lp IN THE RIGHT ORDER by Vinny Golia Trio. Others on Nine Winds would be # 9 Lp THE GIFT OF FURY and # 27 Lp OUT FOR BLOOD which remind somewhat of Philip Guston’s works on paper, pencil and ink. Glutinous amorphous shapes tumbling together in two dimensions. –Mark Weber

Leo Meiersdorff: 1934 – 1994

Leo Meiersdorff was born on December 14th, 1934, in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany. Meiersdorff grew up at the obscure family estate in East Prussia, where he discovered his love for music at a very early age. He practiced Beethoven and Mozart on the old family piano with so much passion and enthusiasm that everybody foresaw his future as a concert pianist.

All that changed however, when after the war he was sent to Berlin to study art and classical music at the academy – and for the first time he heard on the armed forces network radio the music of the Americans: JAZZ. He became fascinated with its sound and rhythm; Ludwig and Amadeus went out of the window as Leo switched to jazz piano and trombone. While during the day he attended his art classes studying the German expressionist masters, his evenings belonged to the rehearsals of his own jazz band. In 1954 he went with his band on a tour, first around Germany, then throughout Europe. But even as a full-time musician, Leo kept his sketchbook and water colors handy and whenever he could, he painted his surroundings and the people he met.

When the band finally returned to Berlin in 1958, a gallery owner saw his works and offered him a show. The exhibition was a smash hit: all of the exhibited works sold in the first 3 days and one of the enthusiastic critics saw in him “the most promising young artist of the postwar German avant guard”. Other artists would have enjoyed the sudden success and tried to build a future on it, but Leo always needed new challenges — and so in 1959, with the money he made, he landed in New York to conquer to new world…please read the complete biography by clicking here…

David Stone Martin (1913–1992)

born David Livingstone Martin, was an influential American artist best known for his illustrations on jazz record albums.

He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and was greatly influenced by the line art of Ben Shahn. By 1950, Martin had produced more than 100 covers for Mercury, Disc and Dial record albums. Many assignments came from his long time friend, record producer Norman Granz.

For various companies, Martin eventually created illustrations for more than 400 record albums. Many of these were simply line art combined with a single color. Martin’s favorite tool was a crowquill pen which enabled him to do delicate line work. CBS-TV art director William Golden gave Martin many print ad assignments during the 1950s, and Martin soon expanded into illustration for Seventeen, The Saturday Evening Post and other slick magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. His studio was located in Roosevelt, New Jersey. He is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution. David Stone Martin died in 1992.

Regarding jazz painters. I am a long time admirer of Romare Bearden. In the late 70’s, I was aware of Leo Meiersdorff from the Thad and Mel “Consummation” LP cover and admired his early style very much. You know his work.

About 1978 I had a few days work in New Orleans and a friend told me of a gallery in the Quarter that had Leo’s work. I purchased three originals then. When Concord Records was preparing “Make Your Own Fun,” the producer said he was going to have an ad agency work on the cover. I said that would probably mean a gold saxophone on a red velvet pillow. He liked the idea! I said “NO!” and suggested one of the Meiersdorff’s that hangs next to my desk. Carl Jefferson liked it very much and it became the cover – after I found Leo and got his permission. We remained in touch for a time and I have a beautiful 1991 “Jazz At Sea – SIS Norway” poster he sent.

Regards, Gary Foster

Hi Mark,

How about jazz musicians that are artists…..like me.

I studied art in Italy for 3 years and I have been creating various constructions and paintings ever since.

My

last

piece

is

enclosed.

Don Preston

Mark,

Bobby Bradford just sent me his MO’tet & Extet CD’s and there are your fine western liner notes. I also enjoyed reading your road poem sequence which brought back spaces passed through in three old van western drives in the 1960-71 era.

Bobby Bradford just played with his Octet in NY (with David Murray, Baikida Carroll, Andrew Cyrille) at the Jazz Standard October 4, 2009. She, 26 x 40”, was made during the second set, Crooked Blues (and the detail) in the first. The Octet nailed his music. The place was packed with musicians who gave BB the Festival of the New Trumpet (FONT) award.

Bobby was enthusiastic about the pictures. He has had a California vase I made by his Altadena fireplace all these years.

BB is beautiful,

Jeff

Reid Miles’s

inventive use of type, moody photography and a minimalist colour palette helped Blue Note establish itself as the hippest of all jazz labels. Blue Note Recordings: the name still resonates today. Synonymous with artistic flair, the label is a fading memory of jazz’s ‘golden age’. Yet for all its musical importance, Blue Note was equally significant in terms of design. Under Reid Miles, the label’s sleeves formed a cornerstone of the graphic design canon. Established in 1939 by Berlin-born Alfred Lion, Blue Note was an American label founded on love for an American art form. Intent on capturing the performances, Lion teamed up with Francis Wolff to realise his dream. Wolff was an accomplished photographer, whose moody renditions of jazz’s top cats adorned many early Blue Note sleeves. It wasn’t until the appointment of Chicago-born designer Reid Miles in 1956, however, that the label truly found its graphic voice.

Lion and Wolff refused to compromise creativity, allowing pioneers such as Thelonious Monk free reign to explore jazz’s cutting edge. It’s fitting that Miles’s first notable sleeve was a Thelonious Monk reissue (pictured above). Exploding onto the scene, his bold hyphenation of ‘Thelo-nious’ broke all the rules, treating the syllables as visual building blocks. Blue Note quickly became Miles’s playground; a space to challenge himself, artists and the audience. Interestingly, Miles preferred classical music to jazz, trading in his Blue Note sample copies and not even listening to the music. Given this, it’s amazing that Miles’s designs were so ‘tight’. As Felix Cromey writes in Blue Note: The Album Cover Art: “Miles made the cover sound like it knew what lay in store for the listener: an abstract design hinting at innovations, cool strides for cool notes, the symbolic implications of typefaces and tones.”

Distant style. Dutch designers Experimental Jetset are intrigued by this relationship, saying that it is, “interesting to see that a designer who really managed to capture the essence of his time, was also, in a way, disconnected from that very essence.” Adding that it is perhaps, “distance, not engagement, that makes the designer.” This ‘distance’ is important, and allowed Miles to experiment. He “never settled into a typeface or system”, notes Richard Cook in Blue Note The Biography. Whatever form Miles’s designs took, they bore an unmistakable power. From Sonny Clark’s Cool Struttin, to Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones, Miles, Cook says, “made sure that his sleeves were as heavyweight as the music inside.”

Blue Note is Miles for many, but a number of other designers, including Paul Bacon and John Hermansader, made notable contributions. Pop art god Andy Warhol even made an appearance, yet Miles’s Midas touch was predictably involved, having been behind the decision to commission Warhol to create the cover of Kenny Burrell’s 1969 Blue Lights LP. Talented as Miles clearly was, his position was uncommonly fortunate. With unrestricted access to Wolff’s atmospheric photography, combined with artistic control bordering on autocracy, the elements for great design were in place. Add the skill of the performers, plus burgeoning record sales, and it almost appears as if Miles was home and dry before he’d started.

Miles ahead. While his designs certainly benefited from a sympathetic label boss and Wolff’s superb raw material, Miles added an unquantifiable element to the mix. Like his namesake Miles Davis, his absence was felt as much as his presence. It’s not that Blue Note was visually a one-man-band, but Miles was the prodigal soloist. He galvanised the greatness around him to create legend, transforming the constituent parts into genreredefi ning symphonies of fantastic form and colour. Miles’s greatest achievement was the harmonious blending of modernism with a distinct personality. His greatest sleeves, such as Dexter Gordon’s Go, were unashamedly dynamic typographic treatments. For all his compositional flair, Miles also knew when to play hands-off, letting Wolff’s expressive photography drive sleeves such as John Coltrane’s legendary Blue Train. That’s why Miles’s sleeves fit so well; they visually represent jazz. At once personal and progressive, vernacular and global – reflecting the most human of artforms.

Blue Note was hit hard by the reinvention of jazz in the late 1960s and the label began to drift slowly away from the cutting edge. Dismantling began in 1967 with Lion’s retirement. A sale of the label to Liberty Records followed in 1969 and Wolff died in 1971. The new owners were bereft of invention, lacking the passion and the understanding that had informed the founders’ success. As the viability of jazz came under the spotlight, Blue Note retreated to the safety of ‘straight’ jazz, dispensing with Reid Miles in the process. Stripped of its creative heart, the label was dead in the water. Following a series of takeovers, it was strategically phased out under EMI in 1979.

New directions. Hope arrived with a 1985-label relaunch, signalling a number of reissues and new releases. The label has since regained some of its commercial success, with new artists such as Norah Jones shifting thousands of records. But in an era increasingly defined by artist – and agent – power, much of what the label stood for has inevitably been lost. As current label head Bruce Lundvall conceded to Texas’ Austin Chronicle: “People ask me, ‘is Blue Note what it used to be?’ I say no, it can’t be. All the covers were designed by Reid Miles, and they were great, but the artists didn’t have much say about them. [These days] every artist wants their own cover designer.” Blue Note’s legacy is actually artistic patronage. The label’s success, and the achievements of Reid Miles, were made possible not just through Lion’s leadership, but through public support. It’s easy to look back nostalgically at the era, but there have been plenty of examples since – such as Malcolm Garrett’s 1970s work for the Buzzcocks, Vaughan Oliver’s covers for 4AD during the 1980s and labels such as Ai Recordings and Rune Grammofon, which ably demonstrate not only the importance of good cover design, but also inspire a widespread appreciative fan base. source

The graphic artist Reid Miles made an indelible stamp on the jazz look. His hundreds of album covers for Blue Note expressed an evolved, mature, Bauhausian, jazz perception, the jazz mind. His large simplified block shapes organized in two dimensions utilized as much wide open space as a good jazz solo. Was he a Greenwich Village beatnik? Where did he come from? He made modern and modernism real. Utilitarian. Universal. Comfortable and pleasurable to look at, and into. –Mark Weber

Mark,

Happy New Year !

Beginning with your poetry cover graphic, our initial conversation has opened up to jazz painters and now recording cover art.

Here are the first two musicWitness® covers from the tail end of the gloriously tactile LP era:

WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET: Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music —Black Saint, 1986.

BILLY BANG SEXTET: Live at Carlos 1 — Soul Note, 1987.

Cover Art was done during the live performances and printed from photographic film transparencies. Cover Designs were done full-size (12+” square) with mat-knife, glue, tape and press-apply lettering.

Soon after their release, both covers were laminated onto the tops of 24” square wooden café tables at the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street in New York City, then moved downtown to Leonard Street until its close. Many more subsequent paintings were done live on those two tables of performances by members of the WSQ (David Murray, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett) and of Billy Bang’s Sextet (Roy Campbell, William Parker, Thurman Barker).

There have been about 3 dozen CD recording cover projects since those nights, but the hands-on feel, every step of the way, to creative LP sound publication remains a permanent thrill to the body. –Jeff

Mark Weber reading in Cleveland @ Barking Spider circa 1988 | Photo by James Lang

Sensibilities are influenced by the times, and they come and go. My fondness for all things beatnik is decidedly a generational thing. Of being born into a strait-laced America of the 1950s, as part of a large post-war baby boom all coming of age at the same time. If Dobie Gillis on tv was intended to be a spoof on beatniks it backfired on me, because I thought Dobie was the stuff. Sitting out late at night to hear the freight train go by was (and still is) vastly interesting to me (Dobie took his dates to listen to trains). Playing bongoes on the beach and drinking jug wine, wearing French berets, sleek girls in leotards, writing spontaneous haikus, and knowing artists who could have raptures over drooling paint was everything I wanted — where do you sign up!

I still harbor romantic notions about bohemian artists in Greenwich Village of the beatnik era. Living in cold water flats in the Village sounded purely romantic to me. And how naturally and perfectly integrated Kerouac went from mountain climbing to hanging out in jazz clubs still amazes me.

Who were these beatniks? Who were these artists that rejected mainstream America? Who lived through the dark days of the Cold War. Who resisted conformity and the mass consumerist delusions.

Who painted those large canvases behind Bird in those photos in Village basement clubs? Who were these seekers who were on the same trajectory as Cezanne, who’s paintings were investigations into how the eye sees, and how the brain sees?

Every city had them — John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Larry Bell in Los Angeles. Bruce Conners, Wally Hedrick, George Hams, Jay DeFeo and Joan Brown in San Francisco. New York City must have been over-flowing with them — John Chamberlain began is compressed auto parts assemblages those years. Bob DeNiro’s dad was a beatnik painter! Bob Thompson who painted Steve Lacy’s album cover THE ZOO, was there. W. Eugene Smith was there. Reid Miles. The circle of painters surrounded Romare Bearden were in & out, and included the late Reggie Gammon who spent his last twenty years in Albuquerque painting jazz scenes (and listening to my radio show every Thursday afternoon! He’d call me up, “Mark, I love you!” and I’d respond, “I love you, too, Reggie.”) David X. Young was painting up a storm and hosting jazz sessions in his loft (see & hear the CD+book collection JAZZ LOFT).

Many of them were influenced by the action painting of the abstract expressionists of the Cedar Tavern crowd. They were purely unrefined and raw and emotional and serious about life. My all time favorite is David Stone Martin, a beatnik to the core. Unfathomable and indefatigable to squares everywhere.

Jeff Schlanger has taken the next logical step. –Mark Weber

Photo by Jim Lang, Cleveland, Ohio

Mark,

Bob Thompson did the cover painting in 1963 for Steve Lacy’s The Forest and The Zoo recording on ESP. We had met earlier, introduced by painter Chris Lane, from the bus to Music & Art.

As Mike Johnston mentioned, the paintings of Thompson, who was deep into the cutting-edge musicians downtown and the beat writers, are saturated in jazz rhythms. But a gifted man got caught in the kind of headlight glare that could force an amiable western poet into exile from his California home. In 1966 Bob Thompson, who brushed out a cultural treasury in just a few years, died at 29 in Rome. Lacy recorded the quartet music that same year in Buenos Aires.

A drawing board was at Steve Lacy’s feet in 1993 when he played a focussed patterns on soprano at the old Knitting Factory. The guy in the lower right corner is the late Irving Stone, who, together with his wife Stephanie, (her ear is in the picture too) were champion listener-supporters of new music live on the New York City scene. They followed John Zorn, Charles Gayle and many, many others from their earliest public performances. (The Stone, Zorn’s musicians club where you and I met last fall, is named in their honor.)

The second set that night was an intense Charles Gayle tenor solo called Preach on my picture. Both pictures were part of a feature
in Morning, a mass-market manga magazine published in Japan as you can see.

One World.

Jeff

mark weber | poetry band

Monsieur K. — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:31:59 +0000

Download listen to the Mark Weber Poetry Band | you are not finally dead

ELLIPTICAL VOLATILE TANGENTS

(Zerx 068)
Music for Mixed Woodwinds, Poetry, & Brass. MARK WEBER POETRY BAND. Live at the Outpost Performance Space, December 15, 2005, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Michael Vlatkovich, trombone, percussion | Bill Payne, clarinet | William Roper, tuba, percussion, vocals | Richard Tabnik, alto sax (tracks 16, 18, 20) | Quincy Adams, soundboard | Mark Weber, poems, harmonica. Recorded by Manny Rettinger | Master’d by Quincy Adams.

*track 8 “south for winter” is a composition by Michael Vlatkovich. *everything else entirely improvised *tracks 4 & 13 we pancaked Q’s reference recording (mini-disk) on top of Manny’s *tracks 16, 18, 20, recorded at 475 Studios, Williamsburg NY by Connie Crothers *tracks 15, 17, 19 rec. by Mark Weber at 725 Studios, Albuquerque.

set 1

1. I’m sitting here amid
2. The Celts
3. missed your big chance
4. Little Walter
5. The History of Jazz
6. the ocean
7. you are not finally dead
8. south for winter/deep in
9. GUERRA, BEHEMOTH
10. Cherokee Hawkins & Beer
11. (glacier)
12. he hated Christmas

set 2

13. i slept the clock around (sleep sequence)
14. Happy Birthday for Alicia
15. Hubclar #7 MW & BP 17dec05 at 725
16. Turtle Night MW & Richard Tabnik 5dec04
17. Hubclar #9 ibid.
18. Friendliness MW & RT 5dec04 Brooklyn
19. Unholy March MPV+WR+BP trio 14dec05 at 725
20. The History of Jazz MW & RT 18sept05 Brooklyn

“The poetry was a perfect foil to a musical background, consequently a good time was had by all, a visual and audible treat.” —Kenny Davern

There were two motives for having this concert. I wanted a chamber quartet of horns to back my poetry and for that I wanted to use friends from Los Angeles and New York City. The other was that I wanted to read my series of poems on the subject of sleep. There’s a lot to be said about sleep, in an amorphous poetry-like way, simply because we do not know what sleep is. Sleep predates humanity. It is very ancient. Maybe when the moon split off from the Earth the afterglow was the grandmother of sleep. Whatever it is, I was sure these particular brass and woodwinds players could get to it. We even wore pajamas and night caps. I held my favorite pillow. Turned the lights low and had Quincy drench us in reverb. That was the second half. That’s what all the audience hubbub is at the beginning of the second half, when they saw us walk out on stage in our jammies. We read them bedtime stories.

December of ought five was in the thirties. Coldish. Michael drove out from Los Angeles and Bill flew in from Vegas (I had only met him the year before at a recording session in Brooklyn at Connie Crother’s studio)(Michael I’ve known since the 70s) …….. William flew in from L.A. and then we all got down to the serious business of hanging out. (Horace Tapscott once told me that sometimes rehearsals for his Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra was just to go hang out in the park, “and that was the rehearsal.”) Richard was to fly in from NYC but had to reschedule to go see a chiropractor, he slipped a disc, threw his back out, and, ultimately had to miss the gig. Wow. I was bummed and had to readjust my brain. I had this sound in my head how these four would sound together and now we had to shift gears.

As a consolation I include here a few things Richard and I do as a duet when we perform with the Connie Crothers Quintet.
The Outpost Performance Space in Albuquerque is a superlative place to play. Audiences are warm and the sound system is first-rate and there’s a raised stage (which I helped build!). The house seats 175 and we had 110 in attendance, not bad for poetry. My dear friend and radio co-host, the late Kenny Davern, and his wife Elsa were there. Elsa helped me with my costume. You can hear Kenny’s gravelly laughter on the recording. And Todd and Barbara Moore were there. Tommy asked Riha Rothberg, the abstract expressionist, to cook us dinner, wow. Tommy is Tom Guralnick who’s the boss at the Outpost, and a good guy. A wise guy. My wife Janet’s shoe store, Sole Comfort, was a concert co-sponsor along with New Mexico Literary Arts and the Outpost. JB Jeff Bryan was emcee and said some terribly nice things about me while I stood in the wings and shouted, “Tell ‘em more! tell ‘em more!” Gawd dammit. He said something about how this particular bi-coastal group could only happen via Mark Weber because Mark Weber is the only poet in America who knows these musicians. (On a related note, I have a warm spot in my heart for JB, how he came to my defense when one of the local maniac poetesses was attacking me and my radio show for playing “all that old music,” and JB said: “Mark’s so avant-garde that he popped out the other side.” True, so true. As Kenny used to say: this is a living music.) I’ve known Michael Vlatkovich since the when he played a metallic-blue trombone. He is the guy who tugs at the reins of the crankiest camels in the caravan. He almost always gets where he is going.

William Roper is 33 miles of blacktop road called 395 in the Mojave Desert in 1957. Phosphorescent Joshua trees yucca to 70 feet on that stretch.

Bill Payne is a box of magnetite, all attraction, his clarinet was used to map the lost Saraswati River where yoga grew from the orange trees. I told Kenny Davern that Bill was a real clarinet player but he had to see for himself, and after the concert Bill and Kenny were thick as thieves, Kenny just loved him.

Richard Tabnik by any other name would be the guy who sat next to Beowulf and said: We can take on that monster, bring him on. Richard’s saxophone spits fire in the face of all grand illusions, keeps only what it can eat that day. I am Mark Weber and this is where I get off. In victory and dreams. (19aug09)

“More like a series of dreams than poems.” —Todd Moore

Download listen to the Mark Weber Poetry Band | you are not finally dead

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METROPOLIS

mark weber | the bubbadinos | my country band

Ken’s Bubbadino Story

Bubbadinos: More than what Bubba D knows

Set In Our Ways

Up, We’re Beating A Dead Horse

The Band Only A Mother Could Love

We’re Really Makinbg Music Now

Ready As We’ll Ever Be

mark weber | joe somoza and the other

In summary:

Yesterday. Tomorrow

Something I thought sounded interesting yesterday, now sounds hollow.

Now I don’t need to say “now” any longer.

“Any longer” doesn’t sound as long as it did yesterday.

Yesterday. Tomorrow. If I can’t pontificate any more, I can at least procrastinate.

Declaration

Squeak

Joseph Somoza Reads

Joseph Somoza

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mark weber | pismo beach

Essentially, we all drift through life

floating

Like a dream . . . . aaeven as much as we intend to direct ourselves, oh, in the many endeavors, that seem to require aaaaaaaaaour attention

Yes, a dream, as I get older it all seems like a dream

It’s not as if I remember everything . . . after all, our lives are a mist, the gossamer curtains gentle breeze . . .

The 1970s for me, it seems I was drifting continuously . . .

This photo of Pismo Beach I find in a box, more dreamlike than real . . .

California used to be full of these little fog-bound coastal towns lost in time there were sand dunes at Pismo, you could sleep there among the dunes lay there watching the stars and listening to the ocean

Staring out in space once more trying to fathom the conundrum that the universe never ends . . .

lawrence welsh | a savage refinement: the art of bill rakocy

Lawrence Welsh’s

mark weber | the judson crews I know

MANY ISLANDS

I never said that summer was a sword I never said that all the soldiers would be dead

The moon rises in summer as in winter no bayonet yet has spiked it for long

Oh our season, our season, prismatic as time our time pragmatic as love. The moon

Left debris in its wake on many islands on many islands the soldiers lie

They lie in the arms of the memory of mercy they lie as if smitten with the memory of love

But it was not the memory that did it here nor was it the summer’s cruel sword

In Texas we got persimmons

This is what she said, standing in water just at her breasts — those tiny

Little boobs. Thirteen you might think she was, but eighteen was more like it

They are up there until the frost turns them to sugar. I know, I said

What you got in Texas. Man and boy I was Texan for three

Decades. This was at Llano Quemado the Taos hot springs. Likely, the first

Time she was ever naked in front of a stranger. Texas. Girls, girls

Some of them are girls forever, no matter how they grow. The leaves are gone

She said. And they are sweet as sugar – but you have to shake them down

It’s waking. You aaaaaaawoke me. It’s bright

Sun. And as far as the eye can see it’s a wedding day. Not to a bride

To the earth’s birth. To birdsong to the rainbow in a cloudless sky

Epithalmia. You are hissing in my deaf ear — dreamer, dreamer, dreaming

So it happened aaaayou got a wood-tick

Imbedded in your genital pelt. You never noticed, till he was sucked full

Of your blood, and began to hurt — that loathsome thing black as a blueberry

How ashamed you were and loathing as if he were an unchosen rival lover

Leeching upon your intimate self I screwed him out, careful not to

break off his head in your tender flesh and make a festering sore

It was only after I threw him and shattered him and splattered your blood

Upon a rock — that I knew my true feelings. Then I observed

For days that dark star, and questioned

myself, Am I not he

It’s not that she led me on

I was a fool for asking, where are we going — we were gone. We?

I was there alone. I could tell you the awe I felt, the vista and all

Its mystical receding planes but it’s not so — I was numb

My wonder was a deeper wonder why was I brought here

How will I seek a way of turning back

If the gods were weeping it is for

Themselves they weep. How many days did Noah prepare an ark

And provision it — with slugs and bumblebees, diverse untoward

Creatures. And a few casks of old wine – Has one of us yet

aaaaaaaaaaNot waded ashore

mark weber | nuances

NUANCES

I’ll venture a line, a sort of speculation, spectacular, sepulchral, purely a set of words that caught my ear

And call it an opening gambit upon which to improvise, or as we say in jazz: to riff

Not to be confused with riffs, those infamous background taunting phrases from a Kansas City horn section

Something I thought
sounded interesting yesterday,
now
sounds hollow.

Now I don’t
need to say “now”
any longer.

“Any longer” doesn’t sound
as long as it did
yesterday.

Yesterday. Tomorrow.
If I can’t pontificate
any more, I can at least
procrastinate.

Essentially, we all
drift through life

Like a dream . . . .
aaeven as
much as we intend to direct ourselves, oh, in the many
endeavors, that seem to require
aaaaaaaaaour attention

It’s not as if I remember everything . . .
after all, our lives are a mist, the gossamer curtains
gentle breeze . . .

California used to be full of these little fog-bound coastal towns lost in time
there were sand dunes at Pismo, you could sleep there among the dunes
lay there watching the stars and listening to the ocean

Staring out in space once more trying to fathom the conundrum
that the universe never ends . . .

I never said that summer was a sword
I never said that all the soldiers would be dead

The moon rises in summer as in winter
no bayonet yet has spiked it for long

Oh our season, our season, prismatic as time
our time pragmatic as love. The moon

Left debris in its wake on many islands
on many islands the soldiers lie

They lie in the arms of the memory of mercy
they lie as if smitten with the memory of love

But it was not the memory that did it here
nor was it the summer’s cruel sword

This is what she said, standing in
water just at her breasts — those tiny

Little boobs. Thirteen you might think
she was, but eighteen was more like it

They are up there until the frost turns
them to sugar. I know, I said

What you got in Texas. Man
and boy I was Texan for three

Decades. This was at Llano Quemado
the Taos hot springs. Likely, the first

Time she was ever naked in front
of a stranger. Texas. Girls, girls

Some of them are girls forever, no matter
how they grow. The leaves are gone

She said. And they are sweet as sugar
– but you have to shake them down

It’s waking. You
aaaaaaawoke me. It’s bright

Sun. And as far as the eye can see
it’s a wedding day. Not to a bride

To the earth’s birth. To birdsong
to the rainbow in a cloudless sky

Epithalmia. You are hissing in
my deaf ear — dreamer, dreamer, dreaming

So it happened
aaaayou got a wood-tick

Imbedded in your genital pelt. You never
noticed, till he was sucked full

Of your blood, and began to hurt — that
loathsome thing black as a blueberry

How ashamed you were and loathing
as if he were an unchosen rival lover

Leeching upon your intimate self
I screwed him out, careful not to

break off his head in your tender
flesh and make a festering sore

It was only after I threw him and
shattered him and splattered your blood

Upon a rock — that I knew
my true feelings. Then I observed

I was a fool for asking, where are we
going — we were gone. We?

I was there alone. I could tell you
the awe I felt, the vista and all

Its mystical receding planes
but it’s not so — I was numb

My wonder was a deeper wonder
why was I brought here

How will I seek a way
of turning back

Themselves they weep. How many
days did Noah prepare an ark

And provision it — with slugs
and bumblebees, diverse untoward

Creatures. And a few casks of old wine –
Has one of us yet

I’ll venture a line, a sort
of speculation, spectacular,
sepulchral, purely a set of
words that caught my ear

And call it an opening gambit
upon which to improvise, or
as we say in jazz: to riff

Not to be confused with riffs, those
infamous background taunting phrases
from a Kansas City horn section

No, I mean riff in the sense
of taking a joy ride into a subject
and experiencing along the way
all of the conjunctions the words
bring up, surprisingly

Pure invention, even then is nearly
impossible given the freight our words
have gather’d over centuries, ghost
meanings that loom behind
the scenes, making language

Such a deep mountain lake, what
do they call those in Utah? a cirque?
crystal clear lakes in the high
altitudes, dark reflecting a blue sky
or frozen solid, say

As starchy as the dowager battleship
who decides to sing at table in
a Marx Brothers movie

You wince, you look for
an exit, and there’s a tip-toeing Harpo
showing you the way out

Maybe at this point you crumple
the page and toss it
into the fire, decide to put
on Sonny Rollins Lp CONTEMPORARY
LEADERS, which
is loaded with inspiration, maybe
some
of it will rub off?

How many times have I lookt up a word
in the dictionary only to find myself thinking that
the lexicographers missed something, that
there’s a nuance still lurking in
the shadows

An ancient penumbra surrounding
a word, like fire, or maybe smoke is the more poetic
descriptor?
nuances still lurking in the shadows, cackling
like one of Steve Richmond’s gagaku demons

There are 3 things I can say
about that last stanza:
1) Strunk & White quite correctly advise us
to avoid the word “really”
2) yoga also is not an end in itself, even
as much as it could be, generously
3) this poem is becoming much too long

And then, what about inspiration?
Well, presumably that’s the fuel you run on
and
when it fizzles out, you
stop
or maybe draw funny squiggles on paper
and send them to Klaus to adorn the margins
of this poem

Sure, Mark,
you, your poetry and the lands through which you move did it.–JEff

BB is beautiful,

Jeff