karl gallagher

♣

acrylic on canvas and French Arche paper
1993 and 2014

 

“ The quartet’s engagement at New York’s Five Spot club from 1959-1960 was one of the seminal moments in jazz history . . .  “Some people didn’t understand what we were doing and they were afraid because they’d never heard anything like that before —“ 

= = =

Charlie Haden, jazz bassist with Ornette Coleman and his own groups, dies at 76

By Charles J. Gans July 12    The Washington Post

Charlie Haden, a Grammy-winning musician who helped change the shape of jazz more than a half-century ago as the bass player with Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking quartet and who liberated the bass from its traditional rhythm section role, died July 11 in Los Angeles. He was 76.

His publicist, Tina Pelikan of ECM Records, confirmed the death. Mr. Haden had been struggling for several years with complications from post-polio syndrome.

Mr. Haden’s career was marked by the triumph of beauty over suffering. He turned to the bass after losing his singing voice to polio as a teenager, when he was performing with the Haden Family country band. The onset of post-polio syndrome in 2010 forced him to stop performing publicly, although he played at home to his favorite recordings as well as with visiting musician friends such as guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Alan Broadbent.

During his career, Mr. Haden’s lyrical bass playing could be heard in a variety of musical genres, including jazz, country and world music.

“I want to take people away from the ugliness and sadness around us every day and bring beautiful, deep music to as many people as I can,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press in 2013, shortly before he received a Grammy award for lifetime achievement.

The Grammy recognition — as well as being named a Jazz Master in 2012 by the National Endowment for the Arts — was a far cry from the reception Mr. Haden received in the late 1950s as a member of Coleman’s revolutionary quartet.

The quartet’s engagement at New York’s Five Spot club from 1959-1960 was one of the seminal moments in jazz history, as musicians heatedly debated the group’s new music dubbed “free jazz,” which challenged the bop establishment by liberating musicians to freely improvise off the melody rather than the underlying chord changes.

“Some people didn’t understand what we were doing and they were afraid because they’d never heard anything like that before — so we dealt with it the best we could,” Mr. Haden said in the 2013 interview.

Mr. Haden found a kindred spirit in Coleman, whom he met after relocating to Los Angeles in 1957. The quartet, which included trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, released the aptly named album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” in 1959.

“I wanted to play on the inspiration of a composition rather than on the chord structure,” Mr. Haden said in a 2006 interview with the AP, “and every time I tried to do this, the other musicians that I was playing with would be upset with me. The first time I played with Ornette, all of a sudden the lights were turned on for me because here was someone else who was. . . doing the same thing I was trying to do.”

But even as a member of Coleman’s quartet, Mr. Haden drew on the harmonies and melodies he learned playing country music as a child.

Mr. Haden saw the common link between jazz and country. Both are poor people’s music related to “the struggle for independence, identity and to be recognized,” he told the AP in 2009, after the release of his first country album, “Rambling Boy,” on which he played songs by the Carter Family and other traditional country musicians.

He recorded the 2009 album with his wife, Ruth Cameron; son, Josh; triplet daughters, Rachel, Petra and Tanya; and son-in-law, actor Jack Black, as well as Elvis Costello, Vince Gill and Rosanne Cash.

“My roots have never left me,” Mr. Haden said in 2009, “because the very first memory I have is my mom singing and me singing with her.”

The album included Haden’s first recorded performance — an excerpt from a 1939 Haden Family radio show on which 22-month-old Cowboy Charlie yodels on a gospel tune.

Charles Edward Haden was born Aug. 6, 1937, in Shenandoah, Iowa, and soon began performing with his parents and siblings as the youngest member of the Haden Family band, which had its own radio show and was popular on the Midwest country circuit.

But polio weakened his vocal cords and ended his singing career at 15, leading him to focus on the bass while attending high school in Omaha. He became interested in jazz after hearing saxophonist Charlie Parker perform with Jazz at the Philharmonic.

He headed to Los Angeles to study music and began performing with such local musicians as pianist Hampton Hawes and saxophonist Art Pepper before meeting Coleman.

After making a series of groundbreaking recordings with Coleman’s band, including the double quartet “Free Jazz” in 1961, Mr. Haden and pianist-composer Carla Bley formed the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969, which blended experimental big band jazz with world folk music, including songs of the Spanish Civil War.

Mr. Haden occasionally performed with Coleman, including the 1995 recording “Song X” with guitarist Metheny, with members of the original Coleman quartet.

“Charlie could always find and illuminate the essential meaning in every musical moment no matter what the setting,” Metheny said in an e-mail to the AP. “His unique presence as a player and broad perspective of what music can offer the world allowed him to define in sound the fundamental feeling of what it is to be human.”

In the 1980s, Mr. Haden formed the Los Angeles-based Quartet West with saxophonist Ernie Watts, pianist-arranger Broadbent and drummer Larance Marable. The group played mainstream jazz inspired by the film noir world of the 1940s.

Mr. Haden won three Grammy Awards, including best jazz instrumental performance for his 1997 album with Metheny, “Beyond the Missouri Sky,” and best Latin jazz album for “Nocturne” (2001) and “Land of the Sun” (2004), both featuring Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba.

Mr. Haden founded a jazz studies program, in which he emphasized the spirituality of improvisation, at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982.

Last month, ECM released “Last Dance” from the same 2007 duet session with pianist Keith Jarrett that produced the Grammy-nominated­ 2010 album “Jasmine.” The recordings reflected the two musicians’ shared love for standard ballads.

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links


the 1959 album that changed the sound of Jazz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxbkUA5BiSw

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6449431

Lynne Savitt

Layers of meaning and feelings by a writer who makes it look easy.
Images iridescent as seahorses sometimes found among the smells
and clumps of ancient seaweeds washed up on beaches after storms.
Savitt's writng is essentially about love, its pleasures and pain.
karl gallagher.
                                                                                                          

“6 Meditations Toward an Appreciation of Lynne Savitt”

A recent review by poet and translator Art Beck  

"As the poem progressed, its language seemed to slow and double back on itself. It forced me to pick up each word like a pebble in a trail, something familiar leading me forward in the work. This was poetry as well as sentiment; language coming alive and talking back to her . . . :

…say it wasn’t all
bad those black, humid
nights we traveled to
the planetariums in our
heads exploded with
dirty release & it wasn’t
shame
our last meeting
didn’t go as soft as the
day you asked me to
marry a man who
wasn’t a good father
is something I just
couldn’t we meet some
where dreams touch
& you wake in a sweat
of recognition for something
lost goodbye, michael
at last the tears
3 a.m. months later.

This level of subterranean dialogue . . . [I]ts opacities were still too clear and its emotions too upfront for LangPo or academia. Its metrics were too quirky and un-retro for the Formalists. You could call it Confessional—but there’s a level of control in its wildness, a sense of comfort with its own skin . . .

“One thing that Savitt brings to the discussion of lust is female freedom. Desire and bodily fluids are there for the sharing, but ownership is off the table. Savitt is no stranger to marriage and many of her poems reflect day-to-day domestic life. There are sincere, filial dialogues with parents, children, grandchildren. There are poems about care-giving, illness, accidents, death, and dementia. Savitt is a loyal daughter, and a fiercely loving mother. But domesticity as an institution is viewed guardedly, sardonically:

the tiny lump you discover
under your right breast
while powdering
the perfume line
he’ll nuzzle moments before
the plunge…

Savitt’s romantic forays take place in excursions away from the marriage bed.”

The full review can be found here:  http://criticalflame.org/

Relics of Lust New and Selected Poems

by Lynne Savitt 264 Pages, 5½ x 8½ ISBN:  978-1-935520-82-5 Publication Date:  02/14/2014 Cover Art:  Reflections by Noelle Crough http://books.nyq.org/title/relicsoflust#.UxHn_z2mpQk.email   CASUALTIES talking about college, him coming from kansas, ex-wives, husbands, the kids, the time we’d spent in l.a. & he asked “what happened to your first husband?” “a marine, “ i answered, “he died in vietnam in ’66” he started to shake & blacked out, saliva gathering in his mouth, i turned his head to keep him from choking, he babbled twenty minutes about vietnam horrors & when he came to, said, “i’m sorry, i’d better go.” i took his hand & led him to my bedroom where the wars had ended and a flag lay folded in the drawer. BLONDE BACKLIT BY THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE at 7:03 saturday morning yr wife called to tell me you’re dying to see me unfinished business haven’t spoken in six teen years ago you stole my heart forgot yr voice once made me crumble like bleu cheese yr smell captured me like a pirate i couldn’t escape my husband yr wife called to tell me you’re dying to see me cry at the sight of you hooked up to intravenous tubes yr eyes half closed you whisper “blonde i can’t forget you backlit by the brooklyn bridge’’ i take yr hand & yr fingers grasp mine the way an infant does instinctively i want to tell you it wasn’t me by the bridge but you smile teeth missing trouble breathing say again, ‘’blonde i’ll never forget,’’ oh how i adored you broke my heart remembers who do you have me confused with my name say it i say in my head but not out loud living & you are going quietly yr wife enters the room tells me you’re tired unfinished business remains i hear you mutter ‘’backlit blonde’’ as i leave sunday night 11:14 yr wife calls, ‘’he’s dead, ‘’ she says it’s finished but now not for me on my last afternoon of breathing i will remember you glistening on yr norton atlas teeth white as supermodel chicklets forearms like a popeye cartoon you are backlit in bayville it was you, wasn’t it? i will say yr name PRISON POEM #32 ‘’To love without role, without power plays, is revolution.’’                                                                           –Rita Mae Brown i drive the long, dangerous journey you shower, put on your clean clothes & wait for us to arrive with books, sometimes vegetables, depending on what we can afford this month i wait on line with all those other women who work to keep home together long hours raise children strong as the bars in this cold prison after we’ve walked through the four electric gates our men will enter one at a time we’ll be blossoms soft and perfumed and bring them coffee, honey, sandwiches they will warm the food, set the table in a blur stealing intimacies i touch you touch she rubs he sighs robbing smells textures to last until the next visit sometimes i bury your head in my breasts you find comfort me in your arms all is well no roles in this love, my darling all the pins have been pulled from the grenades no matter how long we must wait we will continue the revolution ♣ ♣ ♣ where to purchase: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/relics-of-lust?store=book&keyword=relics+of+lust http://www.amazon.com/Relics-Lust-New-Selected-Poems/dp/1935520822/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&keywords=9781935520825 &linkCode=ur2&qid =1392182664&sr=8-1&tag=poetscraftcom-20 On this site: http://fitzroydreaming.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Lynne%20Savitt

Kaddish . . . for Naomi

I think this poem is maybe Ginsberg's best . . . I love it.

If 'Howl' was a howl of  adolescence , and I think it was,

then 'Kaddish' is that of the mature reflective man, though only five years

lies between when he started working on Howl and when he finished Kaddish.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =  

Allen Ginsberg

Kaddish

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on

   the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,

   talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues

   shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--

   And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing

   how we suffer--

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,

   prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-

   swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--

Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-

   lypse,

the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom

   Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--

like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--

No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,

   trapped in its disappearance,

sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-

   ping each other,

worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it

   lasts, a Vision--anything more?

It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,

   Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-

   dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and

   the sky above--an old blue place.

or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side

   --where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the

   first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock

then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward

   Newark--

toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice

   cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,

   and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light

   on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the

   sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward

   the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty

you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved

   thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,

with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on

   the street, fire escapes old as you

--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--

Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with

   us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever

   every time--

That's good!  That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,

   torture even toothache in the end--

Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,

   in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair

   and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,

   braintricked Implacability.

Ai! ai!  we do worse! We are in a fix!  And you're out, Death let you out,

   Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with

   God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure

   --Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the

   world--

There, rest.  No more suffering for you.  I know where you've gone, it's good.

No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more

   fear of Louis,

and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,

   loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--

No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you

   killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart

   --But Death's killed you both--No matter--

Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and

   weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-

   ity, Chaplin dance in youth,

or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar

   --by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital

   ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,

with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts

   pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and

   laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920

all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to

   have husbands later--

You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and

   will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill

   --later perhaps--soon he will think--)

And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now

   --tho not you

I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came

   first--to you--and were you prepared?

To go where?  In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the

   Void?  Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream?  Adonoi at last, with

   you?

Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull

   in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-

   head with Halo?  can you believe it?

Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,

   than none ever was?

Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Tri-

   umph,

to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the

   ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,

   shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth

   wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.

No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the

   knife--lost

Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost

   thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old

   roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric

   irons.

All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,

   shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into

   hospitals.

You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later.  You of

   stroke.  Asleep?  within a year, the two of you, sisters in death.  Is

   Elanor happy?

Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over

   midnight Accountings, not sure.  His life passes--as he sees--and

   what does he doubt now?  Still dream of making money, or that might

   have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-

   mortality, Naomi?

I'll see him soon.  Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't

   when you had a mouth.

Forever.  And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses

   --headed to the End.

They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own

   life they cross--and take with them.

 

   Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-

ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.

   In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under

pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.

   Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,

Father in death.  Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm

hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore

   Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not

light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--

   Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some

of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death

   This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-

derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping

--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect

Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!

 

II

   Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written your

history--leave it abstract--a few images

   run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years--

remembrance of electrical shocks.

   By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your

nervousness--you were fat--your next move--

   By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you--

once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my

opinion of the cosmos, I was lost--

   By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of

particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)--

   But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and

spied a mystical assassin from Newark,

   So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat

and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,

unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered--

   and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask

against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma--

   And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of

the gang?  You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to New

York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound--


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the above is maybe 25% of the full poem, however, the full text of Kaddish
can be read here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179391