Last Night on the Scene

Vince Larson's piece drew me in.

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock you probably noticed that this week has been Duluth/Superior's (DuSu) 14th Annual Homegrown Music Festival, with 175 bands in countless venues around the Twin Ports including the relatively high profile Trampled By Turtles, just back from a stint on Letterman.

If you've got a day job it's hard to take in so much night life, so I relegated myself to catching as many of the art openings as possible, which had more reasonable hours. I believe this was the first year the Homegrown Art was linked to the Homegrown Music, and it made sense. The bands played later hours, so nearly any night of the week you could take your date to a nice dinner, catch some art and have the rest of the evening for dancing, be-boppin' or jiving. What's your pleasure?

Tonight's officially the last night, if you're not worn out yet, an eight-day week. Still not too late to catch some action. Head to www.duluthhomegrown.com to see what's hot.

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Nancy Miller's Dylan is a big "Yes!"

Friday night I was able to catch the openings at Ochre Ghost and Washington Galleries before heading down to Cirque Du Soleil. After the circus, a spectacular event about which much more could be said, we tried to get in to Tycoons to see Uprising. The place was over capacity and we decided to get some rest instead, getting home near midnight anyways. From what I hear we missed a great show.

At the Ochre I met Vince Larson, an artist who has also been part of the ad agency scene like myself. He had a striking piece on the back wall. Nancy Miller's mosaic Dylan is yet another fabulous addition to her eye-catching Dylan tributes. Last year during Dylan Fest her bust of Dylan was featured in the window of this same gallery.

I also had two pieces on display here, Episode 34 and my portrait of Mingus. In the front of the space there were three very small pieces by Robert DeWitt Adams that I liked and this other very interesting tryptich with echoes of Rauschenberg.

Echoes of Rauschenberg were evident in this tryptich at Ochre Ghost.

Saturday night the PROVE Gallery featured another great collection of Homegrown Art curated by Jeredt Runions and team. The show included works by Tara Stone, Adam Swanson, Tara Lynn Austin and many others. It was nice to see the gallery so packed, with many new faces checking out the scene. The regular gallery hoppers were there as well. You could hardly turn around without bumping into an artist, musician, writer or fan of the arts.

The PROVE is such a wonderful space for art. Part of it is due to the fact that they have a different mission. Unlike many of the other local galleries that cram paintings into every available space, the shows and events here feed plenty of breathing room for each piece. The collective has done an admirable job of refurbishing what had once been a run down basement space into a showcase for artists and their works. Last night's show was called Saturday Morning Cartoons, and many of the pieces were as whimsical as the show's name. This picture here of a young woman looking at Adam Swanson's work struck me funny because it looks as if one of Swanson's animal characters has leaped from the painting onto the woman's shoulder.

Two pieces by Lindsey Graskey were back on the left. Graskey is another young independent artist whom I was unfamiliar with. She explained, "I'm just getting back into it. Here collage/mixed media pieces created a striking impression, again perfectly suited to this show's theme. Kudos to the curator.

Many of us lingered for quite some time, but the crowd thinned in order to begin attending music venues.

When I arrived at Sacred Heart, in the company of friends, I found a full house entranced by the music of the Marc Gartman's Fever Dream featuring Gartman, Steve Garrington and Alan Sparhawk, who seems to be really getting around this week.

At the back of the room Mayor Don Ness seemed to be actually glowing. (Maybe that's the way he always is when he's out on the town with Laura.) The Homegrown Music Festival draws out such a large amount of community involvement. Perhaps it was the music or perhaps the ambience of this very special place, but there's no denying the atmosphere tingled a bit.

I asked Mayor Ness about his interest in music. "I never played in a musical band," he said. He noted that he was the only one in his family without a gift in music. "I really appreciate the talent here and see it as my role to promote and support it."

Ness went on to say, "We've made a lot of progress in the arts. It's a different city than it was. You can really see the broader community embracing the arts."

I mentioned one of my own new interests and asked his opinion about restoration of the Armory. "I think people aren't opposed, but they're a little cynical about it. There's been a little progess," he said. It's a great building and needs to be saved."

For what it's worth I'll throw in this plug for the Scarlet Rivera concert coming up May 18 at Weber Hall. All proceeds go to the restoration of the Armory. Scarlet, whose thrilling violin is the spice that gave Bob Dylan's Desire album such flavor, will be accompanied by Gene Lafond and the Wild Unknown. You can purchase tickets for Desire In Duluth here at Ticketworks.com.

The night was still young when I began heading west toward home. Most of those at Sacred Heart wove their way to other venues for yet more music at Sir Ben's, Carmody's, Roscoe's, Pizza Luce, Tycoon's, Lake Avenue Cafe, Rex, and a host of other great spaces for music and entertainment. I myself dropped into the Powerhouse in Proctor to catch the Centerville All Stars who were working up a sweat and playing the hearts out. Way to go. Dance floor was active, lots of smiles on faces. They really know how to rock.

Meantime, life goes on. I managed to get home before turning into a pumpkin. Lights out. And much more to look forward to.

Sacred Heart after dark. Sparhawk, Gartman and Carrington.

PLEASE CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THAT YOU MIGHT ENJOY THEM MORE FULLY.

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

While in college I had some good friends who introduced me to jazz. A world opened up and my musical horizons expanded considerably. Names like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane had meant nothing to me before that. They introduced me to a vast array of new sounds of which I had previously been unaware. Some of the names were uttered with a measure of reverence by these guys. One of these was a guy named Mingus.

Jazz fans greatly rejoiced in the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the history of jazz. As I watched the series it unearthed forgotten memories and led me to pick up a few new CDs. To help with making selections I looked at a list of the top fifty jazz albums of all time. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue was #2 on that list and I accidentally purchased two so that we have a "his" and "hers" copy. Great album.

Number one on this particular list was Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I purchased it soon after.

It had been a long time since I listened to Mingus and the strangeness of the sound was initially off-putting. I gave it a chance and then just couldn’t get into it. For more than a year, it may be two now, I had that CD in my car without giving a second listen. Till yesterday, when it blew me away.

Under the Volcano

It may have been twenty years ago I first picked up Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, in part because its setting was in one of my favorite cities in Mexico, Cuernavaca, and also because it was on of the top ranked books on the Modern Library's list of 100 Best Novels of the 20th century. Because the book is dense, convoluted, and not easily accessible I set it aside after two or three chapters.

A couple years later, I again picked up the book, beginning at the beginning. I did not do much better the second time either. But after yet another year, it seemed that when I picked it up a third time, I was transported. I understood the characters, and seemed to grasp what Lowry was striving to achieve with this tragic story.

My point is this. Whether it be music, art, literature, don't draw "conclusions for a lifetime" just because your first encounter with something original or different was jarring. (The same probably applies to people and cultures.)

For some reason, yesterday, when I slid The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady into the CD player in my car, I was mesmerized. I could see plainly that this was a work requiring significant arrangement, that it was rich with the variety one finds in a Beethoven symphony, a symphony of jazz both evocative and remarkable.

THE FOLLOWING EXCERPTS were extracted from the Wikipedia entry on Mingus in an effort to give a brief intro for those unfamiliar with his life and work.

Charles Mingus, Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.

Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music. Yet Mingus avoided categorization, forging his own brand of music that fused tradition with unique and unexplored realms of jazz.

Charles Mingus was born in Nogales, Arizona. He was raised largely in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California. His mother's paternal heritage was Chinese and English, while historical records indicate that his father was the illegitimate offspring of a black farmhand and his Swedish employer's white granddaughter.

Mingus developed an early love for jazz, especially the music of Duke Ellington. He studied trombone and later cello. Much of the cello technique he learned was applicable to double bass when he took up the instrument in high school. He studied five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with Lloyd Reese.

Mingus often worked with a mid-sized ensemble (around 8–10 members) of rotating musicians known as the Jazz Workshop. Mingus broke new ground, constantly demanding that his musicians be able to explore and develop their perceptions on the spot. Those who joined the Workshop (or Sweatshops as they were colorfully dubbed by the musicians) included Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson and Horace Parlan. Mingus shaped these musicians into a cohesive improvisational machine that in many ways anticipated free jazz. Some musicians dubbed the workshop a "university" for jazz.

In 1963, Mingus released The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a sprawling, multi-section masterpiece, described as "one of the greatest achievements in orchestration by any composer in jazz history."