I missed this earlier this month but poet Charles Simic passed away earlier this month. A poet I admired and enjoyed. Here is an obit from NY Times:
Charles Simic, the renowned Serbian-American poet whose work combined a melancholy old-world sensibility with a sensual and witty sense of modern life, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Dover, N.H. He was 84.
The cause was complications of dementia, his longtime friend and editor Daniel Halpern said.
Mr. Simic was a prolific writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for “The World Doesn’t End,” a book of prose poems. He served as poet laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008. “I am especially touched and honored to be selected,” he said at the time, “because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15.”
His poems defied simple classification. Some were minimalist and surreal, others determinedly realistic and violent. Nearly all were replete with ironic humor and startling metaphors.
“Only a very foolhardy critic would say what any Simic poem is about,” D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in a 1990 profile of Mr. Simic in The New York Times. “In rich detail they are all filled with ordinary objects, but they tend to leave the impression that the poet has poked a hole into everyday life to reveal a glimpse of something endless.”
Mr. Simic’s subject was frequently his World War II-era childhood in Belgrade. In a poem titled “Two Dogs,” for example, he recalled German soldiers marching past his family’s house in 1944, “the earth trembling, death going by.” In the poem “Cameo Appearance,” he wrote:
I had a small, nonspeaking part
In a bloody epic. I was one of the
Bombed and fleeing humanity.
In the distance our great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great actor
Impersonating our great leader?
That’s me there, I said to the kiddies.
I’m squeezed between the man
With two bandaged hands raised
And the old woman with her mouth open
As if she were showing us a tooth.
Mr. Simic moved to the United States while in his teens. For the rest of his life he would look back on not merely his wartime childhood but on the circus of everyday life in Belgrade. His poems were full of folk tales and pickpockets and old grudges. In “The World Doesn’t End,” he wrote: “I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. / Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time.”
But he embraced American life. He wrote verse like a man who had escaped a cruel fate and was determined not to waste a moment. His urbane and sardonic poems were increasingly filled with sex and philosophy and blues songs and late-night conversation and time spent at the dinner table.
Passionate free renderings of soulful, spiritual music from a young and up and coming tenor sax player who just recently hit the scene. Recalling David S. Ware, Albert Ayler, and David Murray who she recently studies with Amba shows great promise and direction. Her stablemates are some of the best both young and old free players. Highly encouraging for all music loving people.
The 73-year-old Edwards — a percussive dynamo who has worked with free-jazz titans including Ware, Cecil Taylor and Charles Gayle across a nearly 50-year career — was struck by his musical chemistry with Amba from their first performance together. “She was the perfect partner for me,” the drummer said. “It reminds me of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, how they dance so well together.”
Sorey described Amba as a “fearless” improviser. He explained that while first-time free-improvised sessions often begin tentatively, theirs for “Bhakti” quickly reached peak intensity. “With Zoh, the way that started off — where it’s just, ‘OK, here it is. This is who I am. Let’s go there,’” he said, “that’s something that I don’t really encounter too regularly.”
For Amba, collaborating with luminaries like Edwards and Sorey — as well as the trailblazing saxophonist-composer John Zorn, who produced “O, Sun” and cameos on the record; the eminent bassist William Parker, who plays on “O Life, O Light, Vol. 1,” another of Amba’s 2022 albums; and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase — once seemed unlikely. She grew up in Kingsport, Tenn., near the Virginia border, with a single mother who had Amba and her twin brother at 18.
“Kingsport is, like, middle of nowhere,” Amba said. “We have a big chemical plant that explodes once a year. I went to a high school, 12 people in the class, very tiny, and the mascot was the Rebels; the school flag was the Confederate flag.”
Although very often Amba’s inspiration by the music of Albert Ayler is mentioned (which is there, of course), to me the influence of David S. Ware’s sound is even more obvious. Amba takes on Ware’s spirituality and his fondness of playing a melody here and there, which makes her trio/quartet’s music very accessible, even by free jazz standards. Although by no means traditional, the music’s combination of ecstasy, minimalist repetition and a penchant for drama create an almost incredible dynamic musical entity. “Altar Flowers“, the opener, begins with harsh, torn, massive and wild notes. However, Amba’s lines are also breathy and playful, while Sorey and Thomas segue into a wry, droning gospel sound (you’d pay good money if William Parker had been on bass - that probably would have been icing on the cake). What follows is an interesting tension between Amba’s vibrato-rich sound and the intricate chord voicings that Thomas uses. Sorey’s drumming is so precise, so clear, and so bright that he alone could light up the sonic space. One can imagine what this does in combination with Amba’s saxophone and Thomas’s exploding arpeggios: it’s like a bunch of sparklers burning at all ends. In the first two tracks, Amba, Sorey and Thomas keep these sparkler ends burning in a constant game of readjustment between consonance and dissonance, clustering and purposeful dissolution, especially at the end of “Altar Flowers“, when Amba mercilessly overblows her tenor using polyphonic squeals, only to have it all mound into a very tender piano/drums phase. Flitting tenor section lines combined with spiky guitar notes open “Awaiting Thee“, the 20-minute closing track. Ringing piano chords, condensed tenor screams and chopped chords are the main ingredients for the piece. Matt Hollenberg has a jazz metal background, which he definitely brings in here. The hell that the trio has unleashed in the first track is amplified by Hollenberg’s presence. What actually sounds like an impossibility is an amazing gain in timbres and dynamics, in structure with simultaneous emotionality. A worthy conclusion to a great record.
It may be an overused metaphor, but saxophonist Zoh Amba does indeed stand on the shoulders of giants. Proof of that phrase is Bhakti, a tour de force of passionate free jazz. The twenty—something artist draws on traditions born of the 1960s from artists such as Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Peter Brötzmann. Her music, like that of her mentor David Murray's early career explorations, sustains the customs of the 1960's firebrands for a new generation.
Amba's recorded releases, which have come thick and fast, attest to her talents. Moreover, her collaborators validate her talents. She has recorded with Francisco Mela on Causa Y Efecto (577 Records, 2022), Mela and William Parker on O Life, O Light (577 Records, 2022), and here with pianist Micah Thomas, drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and guitarist Matt Hollenberg.
The nearly 30 minute "Altar—Flower" opens with a conflagration of sound; Amba's tenor blasts forth with an ominous tone, joined by Thomas' roiling piano and the turbulence of Sorey's drums. After Amba ignites the flame here, the intensity never settles, even in the quiet moments. Thomas' piano is free to fly, delivering cascades of energetic notes, which feed back to the saxophone's plaintive wail. Much like John Coltrane's late career escape velocity sound, Amba taps into the same transcendent energy. Ayler's sweet temper and vibrato is mined with the opening of "The Drop And The Sea." The saxophonist, plus Thomas and Sorey then magnify the fervor by nurturing their flame into another conflagration of sound. "Awaiting Thee" adds avant—metal guitarist Matt Hollenberg to the mix. His electricity takes the trio to another level of intensity, pushing all towards a musical event horizon. In other words, Zoh Amba's sound threatens to reach said escape velocity, i.e. transcendence.
Like Umberto Eco, I think it’s worthwhile to address fascism as — borrowing from Wittgenstein — a “family resemblance” concept. As such, we can name constellations, groups, and regimes as “fascist” when they share, in Wittgenstein’s words, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” but they don’t have to all share every single feature of what we might call a fascist trait — nationalism, racism, traditionalism, chauvinism, militarism, etc. — to deserve the name. I also think that, as a speech act, when we call something fascist, we aren’t just describing something, we’re also surely calling for an antifascist response. What should that look like, in your view?
In 1938, Thomas Mann arrived in New York. Originally, he was only scheduled to go to the United States on a tour for his lecture series, The Coming Victory of Democracy, but it became impossible for him to go back to Europe, since he was in exile. He spoke at these old-style American town halls from the East Coast to the West Coast, around 15 places in all, most of the time with an audience of two, three, four thousand people.
I’m still amazed. We are talking about a man in his late sixties, a European with a heavy German accent, and you have two, three, four thousand Americans listening to his lectures. The essence of what he had to say was, “Look, who am I to tell you Americans about democracy? You’re the country of Lincoln, of Walt Whitman, you’re the country of President Roosevelt. But I have a certain experience which I would like to share with you, and which is very important for you to understand. I come from the city of Munich. I was there for more than 30 years. Mr. Hitler was there all the time. I saw the whole thing happening and growing. This fascist movement is growing all over Europe. And what I realized is that the essence of a democracy is its spirit.”
He understood that the spirit of democracy involved people’s enlightenment. That’s why his conclusion was that the essence of democracy is education. The democratic experience is an appeal to “our better angels,” and for that you need education. It’s not just an American phenomenon that we live in a society of “organized stupidity.” Goebbels would be in awe of Tucker Carlson and people like him. The propaganda machine, the conspiracy theories, and the total lack of education — that is how you create a society in which these things can happen. And, again, this is not only about America; we see it here in Europe all the time.
One great thing about the New York Times Opinion pages is that they have a highly intelligent comments section. After an article where two NYT Conservative commentators who were once closely tied to the Republican party until rercently discuss the evolution and the collapse of the traditional republican party, readers pointed out the hypocrisy and lack of memory these two sorry writers displayed in their so called discussion.
Comment 1
While the xenophobia and racism that has helped form the modern Republican Party has its roots in McCarthyism, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and Reagan's welfare queen rhetoric, the real transition to modern nihilistic Republicanism began with Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, and Rush Limbaugh. These three together understood that winning votes wasn't a matter of having attractive policy, it was a matter of good marketing and good media strategy. Atwater introduced modern emotionally-based negative advertising techniques into political ads. Limbaugh developed the provocative style that came to dominate right-wing media. And Gingrich enforced party discipline—ensuring that every Republican was always on brand and armed with the talking points that aligned with the party's messaging and media strategy.
Behind the scenes the Republicans were still serving their wealthy donors—offering tax cuts and deregulation—but the public face of the party was us-against-them marketing, that defined Republicans as true Americans and everyone else as irresponsible and dangerous interlopers. The donors provided the money to fund the ads and media strategy and, in return, they got the tax cuts and deregulation they craved—but to get votes the Republican base was fed a steady diet of fear and loathing of the Other.
Trump was no aberration. He merely dispensed with the veneer of respectability and let the rotten wood be exposed—to the glee of the Republican base and the horror of Bret and David.
Comment 2
“If you could rewind the tape to 1995, is there anything you or anyone in our circle could have done differently to save the Republican Party from the direction it ultimately took?”
This question encapsulates the problem with this entire discussion. The demise of the Republican Party commenced long before 1995. It probably can be traced to the Southern Strategy that eagerly recruited the base of racist xenophobes, to the embrace of evangelicals who reject the basic core of conservatism that requires that we keep government out of the pulpit, the bedroom and the doctor’s office and finally, heresy of heresies to these two disciples of Reagan and Milton Friedman, to Reagan’s restructure of the tax code and Friedman’s rejection of corporate responsibility to anyone but shareholders that are the cornerstones to the income inequality that laid the fertile ground for the populism that overtook their party.
I left the party in the 90s when I recognized the dog whistle racism and rejection of conservative/libertarian principles that evangelicals thrust on the party. I didn’t necessarily see the extremes of income inequality coming, but I inherently knew that it wasn’t conservative to spend more than you took in as revenue and Grover Norquist was wrong that you could starve the beast. You can’t balance a budget if the wealthiest among us are paying a lower percentage of their income than we are spending as a percentage of GDP.
The party was broken long before 1995.
Comment 3
Brooks and Stephens publicly admit their political mistakes, but they don't get to the heart of the matter. All they had to do was read the 1971 Lewis Powell Memorandum and blueprint for the Republican, corporate and 0.1% domination of American democracy to understand what the GOP has wrought on a once great nation. They never mention Ronald Reagan's 1987 catastrophic cancellation of the Fairness Doctrine that eliminated the requirement of news broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflects differing viewpoints, thereby opening the fatal giant windows of right-wing misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy and incitement that hijacked nearly half the nation into an altered state of fact-free reality. They fail to mention decades of catastrophic 0.1% right-wing 'libertarian', 'moneyed speech' lawsuits that methodically converted American democracy into a dollarocracy, a theocracy, a kakistocracy and an idiocracy. They fail to mention that the 2000 Presidential Election and Florida vote counting stoppage was a real tipping point when the Republican Party and its GOP Supreme Court publicly rejected democracy in favor of minority rule by any right-wing means necessary. They fail to mention that the GOP's only real public policy - trickle-down economics - is a fraudulent vehicle to feed the rich. The GOP has been morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt for decades and needs to file for bankruptcy.
Paul Van Nevel's vocal ensemble has been either on my record player, CD player, or MP3 player for over35 years continuously. The selection of composers and specific compositions is enlightening, year after year. And the quality of the interpretations are always very high. This years album is a wonderful selection of early vocal music that I love. More, Paul.
Paul van Nevel has been recording medieval music since 1971. This, his latest project, seems to have two purposes: to give a potted account of the development of Franco-Flemish polyphony c1400-c1550, and to show how the landscape of the local areas from which the composers came is embodied in their music.
The earliest composer here is Johannes Hasprois, who died c1428. His ‘Ma douce amour’ is an intricate work and the resonant acoustic does not help the texture, nor does the slightly lax approach to rhythm. The group is more at home in later pieces such as l’Héritier’s motet ‘Locutus est Dominus’ (c1552) the clamorous sounds of which they bring to a captivating conclusion.
The landscape angle is slightly odd. We are not talking here about how the sounds of a landscape might be replicated (babbling brooks, birdsong etc), or its musical associations quoted (folksong etc), or even how a composer’s emotional attachment might be expressed. Rather (according to van Nevel) the landscape itself replicates ‘the spirit of its culture in a powerful way’. Hence Baston’s ‘Ung souvenir’ embodies ‘misty Artois’ (though the lines are sung with great clarity), Gombert’s ‘O malheureuse journée’ reflects the desolation of the Lele Valley (though it is performed rather stolidly), and Ockeghem’s Sanctus is actually modeled in part on a work by Dufay who grew up elsewhere. Luckily some real landscaping can be heard in Hesdin’s motet ‘Parasti’ where the performers shape the form and contour the dynamics splendidly.
The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season." All of those factors are present here, with that undeservedly obscure composer Anonymous heading the list, and the ensemble makes a strong case for the large body of rarely performed Renaissance music that's out there. Listen to the gorgeous Lamentations of Jeremiah of José de Vaquedano at the end of the first disc, or the delicate but serious chanson Que null'étoile sur nous of Claude Le Jeune, otherwise known mostly for a few metrical chanson experiments that turn up in music history classes. Each piece is given a careful and often affecting performance by the veteran Huelgas Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel, and with the extraordinary sound, this release may be just the thing for listeners who want to luxuriate in some unfamiliar Renaissance music for a couple of hours.
The Huelgas-Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel celebrated its 35th birthday in 2005 with live concerts of some truly complex, multi-voiced polyphony…including the 40 part work, Ecce beatam lucem by Alessandro Striggio, which was the catalyst for a splendid piece of 40-part retaliation from Thomas Tallis: "Spem in alium", the best-known work here. The Huelgas-Ensemble has recorded both before for Sony, but heard live, these performances are less restrained, perhaps in a way that might not please the purists. But as the many polyphonic strands surround you – and here they do surround you, thanks to this hybrid SACD – you’d have to have a cold heart not to be caught up in the performances. The ingenuity of the composers is extraordinary; there’s one of the strangest and in its way most original works in the Eton Choirbook, by the late 15th century English composer Robert Wylkynson. His setting of "Jesus autem transiens" is a 13 part canon, with every voice moving within the same restricted vocal compass. And before it there’s a 24-voice setting of "Qui habitat" by Josquin in which the singers divide into four choirs, each with its own six-part canon. It has a hypnotic effect...and so does the work which opens the concert, a newly-commissioned piece by Willem Ceuleers (in 35 parts of course, one for each year), which had me fooled until some decidedly modern touches broke through the renaissance texture. It’s ingenious, but it does outstay its welcome, unlike every other work on this astonishing disc.