Sing, Sing, Sing
I'm not a singer. But I sing.
A singer grabs a microphone and belts it out. A singer makes records or performs for a paying audience. I don't do any of these things. Instead, I go to our church every week and sing with 25 or so other people like me. No audition necessary. You just have to be someone who loves to sing.
I am a musician. I read music. I play piano. I never sang until I joined this choir. In high school I loved playing piano for singers: choral groups, school musicals, soloists at concerts. But I never sang myself and rarely even thought about it. I remember playing for the actor playing “Sister Sara” in our production of Guys and Dolls. Her song "I've Never Been in Love Before" ends with a nice harmonized duet with Sky Masterson, her character’s love interest. Rehearsing one day, I sang Sky's part while I played. I remember thinking, “I like singing. I should find a way to do more of that.”
Forty-five years later, I did.
I owe my courageous leap into the vocal void to two people. The ever enthusiastic Jack Forbes Wilson, once a frequent performer in town and a music director of our church, encouraged me to accompany him in a Dave Frishberg song at one of our services, Dave Frishberg’s “Listen Here.” Then he strongly suggested I sing a few of the lines. I did.
Around that time, I also heard an audio essay by Brian Eno, part of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series. Despite being one of the musical pioneers of our age, Eno didn’t spend much time singing. So he started a weekly group of friends who got together to sing. In it, he says this:
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
Sold. So I joined our church choir.
Eno likes to sing traditional and popular songs with his friends: “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “If I Had a Hammer.” He encourages people to find harmonies on the fly. Our chorus sings four-part arrangements. Some of us read music. Some don’t. We rely on our music staff to help us learn our parts. And despite the skill and generosity of the talented professionals who lead us, we don’t always get the notes exactly right. But as Eno suggests, it is powerfully satisfying to work toward that goal. And when it works, when all of us are blending in a rich chord—full-throated and fortissimo—it makes my spirit soar. There is nothing like it.
The Writing on the Wall
Idris Khan.
Opening this weekend at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Idris Khan: Repeat After Me is the artist’s first solo show at a major U.S. museum. It’s a definite “get.” His work is conceptually rich, meticulously crafted and shimmeringly beautiful.
The show divides the trajectory of Khan’s work over the last 20 years into clearly articulated transformations—each one both surprising and inevitable. His journey begins with photography, but his work quickly grows to embrace printing, sculpture, music, text. For me, the most fascinating idea in much of his work is its attempt to embody the flow of time in a single, fixed object. (Click on each image for information and to enlarge.)
His early works collapse slightly different iterations of an idea into a single image. Bernd & Hilla Becher’s series of photographs of spherical gas tanks are superimposed into an figure that vibrates with energy and history. Eadweard Muybridge’s pre-cinema studies of bodies-in-motion merge into ghostly genre paintings. Entire books and music scores are reproduced in monumental photographs in which every page is layered into a single image. The music for Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas becomes an abstraction of ominous dark bars spread across a page. But when you look at it, you are literally seeing every note of this body of work, a representation of ten hours of transcendent music in a single photograph.
Idris Khan, The Seasons Turn, 2021
As you progress through the show—and Khan’s career—words and notes continue to be the raw materials of more recent work, while color bursts into his previously grayscale palette. A turn into the next exhibition room overwhelms with iridescent blue. Simple geometries evoke Mark Rothko and mid-20th century color-field painters, but a close look reveals that the darker tones are actually densely layered text and music notation. Other works layer sheets of glass exploding with starbursts of text. One room is devoted to a single work, The Four Seasons, a series of 28 images in oil and watercolor that vibrantly suggest the seasons of the year, each one a collage of Vivaldi’s score. It’s a visual journal of the pandemic year, when Khan’s family moved out of London into the countryside. The final room, created for this show, continues the artist’s interest in color. Five iconic historical paintings—including the MAM’s beloved St. Francis of Assisi in His Tomb by Francisco de Zurbarán—are deconstructed into their essential palettes, represented in colorful wall-sized arrays of squares and rectangles. It’s quite a departure from the ghostly grays of Khan’s early work. It makes me eager to see what the next 20 years holds.
Vertamae
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.
I remember Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor from National Public Radio, where she was a regular contributor from 1980 to 2010 (she died in 2016). Born into the Gullah community in South Carolina’s Low Country, she was an anthropologist and a dazzling storyteller. She talked often about food, but I didn’t know about her classic book, Vibration Cooking, until Dwight Garner mentioned it in his own food memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. At a time when cuisine has reached heights of complication and exoticism, her thoughts about food and her recipes are as refreshing as a cool glass of sweet iced tea. Here are her thoughts on “so-called okra.”
If you are wondering how come I say so-called okra it is because the African name of okra is gombo. Just like so-called Negroes. We are Africans. Negroes only started when they got here. I am a black woman. I am tired of people calling me out of my name. Okra must be sick of that mess too. So from now on call it like it is. Okra will be referred to in this book as gombo.
In Vibration Cooking, you’ll find recipes for pecan pie, Uncle Zander’s corn muffins and Rastafari meat patties. If you’re looking for a “How To” style cookbook, be prepared to use your own cooking common sense. For crab salad, for example, this is the entire recipe:
“A little bell pepper, a little celery, fresh mayonnaise and chopped onions. Mix with the crab meat and add cayenne to your taste.”
You’ll also be privy to “down home” classic recipes for squirrel, “Stewed Coon” (“It’s best to use young coons!”), and “Betty’'s Barbecued Gator Tails.”
In between the recipes are stories and anecdotes from a generous and extraordinary life. It’s a great addition to your cookbook library, but keep a copy, too, with the books you read for their wit and wisdom.t
A Violin’s After-Life
If you’ve attended a Frankly Music concert, you know that Frank Almond can tell a good story. The Milwaukee violinist invites top-notch musicians for chamber-music concerts and prefaces each performance with interesting stories and anecdotes about the pieces and composers. But few of the stories he tells rival the one about the incident which put him in the national news spotlight.
Ten years ago, Almond was walking to his car after a concert when a man approach him, pulled out a Taser and fired. He took his valuable violin (the “Lipinski Stradivarius”) and bolted. The FBI recovered the undamaged violin nine days later and arrested two men. Almond wasn’t seriously hurt.
The incident understandably drew national media attention, which didn’t go away. As Almond told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 2021, “It sticks around.”
It’s still sticking around. The storytelling collective, The Moth, just published its fourth book of collected stories, A Point of Beauty. His is among the 50 stories included in the book, including tales by Elizabeth Gilbert and Lin-Manuel Miranda. You can hear Almond tell the story himself on The Moth’s website.
Tokyo Blues
The Art Institute of Chicago has a large collection of woodblock prints. To prevent damage and fading from protracted exposure to light, the museum organizes a small sample into a display that focuses on a particular artist or theme. By the Light of the Moon: Nighttime in Japanese Prints, curated by Janice Katz, is currently on display (through April 14th). Among the several dozen works, you’ll find prints by Kawase Hasui, a master of Japanese landscape painting with a particular penchant for nighttime scenes. Here are some examples of his work (click on each image to enlarge).
Have a good week.