Mendocino
Wind Indicators
On a sailboat, they’re called telltales—”a piece of string or fabric that shows the direction and force of the wind” (Oxford/US). The following is a living list of touchstones, artists, musicians, books, performances, readings, recordings, creations, aesthetic beacons. Not necessarily with accompanying reviews, and, sometimes, personal traction can’t be ignored. Here are the sources of whatever might be loading the sail at the moment:
Rolling Admission…
Book
Maylis De Kerangal, Eastbound This physically compact novella is as relentless as the journey it describes. Like a hurtling railcar, the narrative is confined to a young Russian conscript’s train ride across Siberia. His journey to a military base intersects with a French woman’s flight in the aftermath of a recent affair. If you like great books and beautiful objects, this little publication is a heartening marriage of the two. Archipelago’s design and De Kerangal’s prose will give a reader (and writer!) hope that the physical book is alive and well. Along with great storytelling. (Archipelago also did Knausgärd’s In the Land of the Cyclops, essays). If you like as much as I do the way JM Ledgard evokes the overlapping of two lives transpiring in different worlds with Submergence, then you will devour the choreography—the containment—of De Kenrangal’s characters, their dance in the aisles and compartments of this fast-paced setting. February 9, 2024
Essay
Todd Hearon: A Salmon’s Journey, by Deborah Barlow Part profile, part personal essay, part philosophical exploration of the beguiling nature of artistic inspiration and doldrums…this piece grabbed me at the perfect time. Which is funny, because that’s what it’s about: how and when aesthetic experiences transport practicing artists. Visual artist/thinker/writer Deborah Barlow’s piece on musician/songwriter/poet/teacher Todd Hearon is heartening, a must read, and will appeal to anyone who’s grappled with the ebbing and flowing of creativity. Truth be told, it was Todd who lured me out of my personal, hermit-esque musical cave (just before the pandemic) to supply electric guitar fills at a few live shows where he was test driving his own tunes. Then came laying down studio tracks for his first album. Then more live shows. The second album is a few tunes away from full release. More live shows. I never would have predicted that my musical journey would arrive here, at performance—while I’m also continuing to cultivate (after pivoting from teaching full-time) a writing life. Guitar had always been an escape from writing, a distraction. Not a competition. Noodling with music was something to do when the muse was nowhere to be found, when she was off the grid surfing in Sinaloa or Réunion. Now, the stakes are higher; but having some small role in Todd’s endeavor has—for the time being—amped up the electricity in both vocations. Music is work (like all art that you care about), but I think I’ve finally crossed the threshold into fun, converted all that individual and group practice into something that has been more liberating than daunting…or a lazy substitute. Something generative, that (confoundingly) complements the writing. Barlow describes her topic as perennial, “…appear[ing] to be bottomless…[with its] its dual nature—the rubberbanding between exquisite euphoria and parched frustration…” For me, luckily, the back and forth seems temporarily locked between euphoria and euphoria. So I’m riding it out. “Todd Hearon: A Salmon's Journey” August 29, 2023
Performance
Shakti w/ Zakir Hussain and John McLaughlin 50th Anniversary Tour @ The Capitol Theater (Port Chester, NY) I’d seen McLaughlin with another iteration of this group (Remember Shakti) at the Beacon Theater in NYC, November 5, 2000 and emerged from the venue transformed (not unlike the experience of seeing a revival of Antonioni’s L’Avventura down the street at the Walter Reade Theater/Lincoln Center on a rainy October afternoon a few years earlier in ‘92). McLaughlin is 81 now and seems to be enjoying himself even more. He is as fluent, generous, dextrous and mind boggling as ever. Yeah, he had his share of ripping solos…but so did everyone else. This was the essence of the word “group”…and all of the necessary, inherent interplay. There was some gravitas hovering over the stage, for sure, but, again, these guys were having fun braiding, conflating, layering Indian classical music, jazz, and rock. Historic, moving, epic. But what intensifies these descriptors was John Scofield, who opened the show with an abbreviated set of his pandemic-generated solo tunes (w/looper—see below). He recounted seeing McLaughlin at the same theater in ‘70 when he was a a senior high school (w/ Tony Williams “Lifetime”, Jack Bruce, etc.), and described it as a pivotal moment that nudged him over into a lifetime of music, playing guitar. “That’s worked out pretty well, I think,” he said. His set ended, he waved to us, left, and then Shakti came onto the stage. August 19, 2023
Performance
John Scofield, Solo, @ The Dana Center/St. Anselm’s College (Manchester, NH) This concert was incredibly intimate, not only because it was pouring outside, but there was also some sort of athletic contest on an adjacent field, which devoured parking spaces. The college seemed distracted, and the auditorium was only at about 1/3 of capacity. We were one row back in the orchestra from the stage, so I had a generous view of the guitarist, especially how he manipulated the switches on his Boomerang Phrase Sampler/Looper: toes. He came out onto the stage in socks (which also made it feel like we were in his living room). This was a project inspired during the pandemic and was culminated on his most recent album for ECM, John Scofield. The eponymous title is sort of funny, given the prolific number of albums he’s recorded as a leader, not to mention as a sideman (with Miles!). He created the layers in real time, nothing pre-recorded, so it was intense, the performative demands twofold; he wasn’t just playing, he was arranging, initiating, integrating different parts. The result was compellingly beautiful, like x-rays, revealing to the listener how tunes are built, the underlying chordal rivers, how the quirks of his solos are superimposed, carried along. But I also appreciated his running us through a recitation of lyrics on occasion, which revealed the interplay of the original vocal hardwiring of songs. (He didn’t sing; rather he “spoke” the words rhythmically, before the Ibanez really took over). Plenty of inventive approaches to covers/chestnuts; “Not Fade Away”, “Junco Partner”, “Danny Boy” were among my favorites from the album, but I was especially enthralled by tunes that were not on the new record, like versions of Lennon’s “Julia”, “Blue in Green”, “Slow Boat to China”, the especially apt rendition of “Here’s That Rainy Day” (a deeply explored heartbreaker) and his return to a few gems from past ensemble ventures like the horn-sectioned This Meets That (Charlie Rich’s country classic “Behind Closed Doors”). All of them Sco-ed, burnished if not transformed, by his unmistakable voice and approach. The first time my wife and I saw him was at the long disappeared Seventh Avenue South in NYC in 1986 after he released Still Warm (and had just finished his stint with Miles Davis). Like a few other greats of his generation (Frisell, Metheny) you know it’s him after hearing one note. And here it was that voice again thirty-seven years later on a rainy night in NH, as recognizable, captivating, ambitious, persuasive and experimental as ever.
November 12, 2022
Event
My mother’s memorial service, a spectacular day in Chatham, MA. And a robust gathering of family and friends. Here’s the eulogy I wrote for my mom, Evelyn Ann Sneeden (née Fromberger), born 1927. June 16, 2022
Performance
Pat Metheny, Side-Eye @ The Flying Monkey (Plymouth, NH)— My first exhilarating foray back to live/in-person music since March 2020. What a relief. And it was fate that this return involved the musician who was instrumental (if you will) in my initiation not only to jazz and its spawn of related genres, but also going to see it in real time, in three dimensions. His album American Garage came out in 1979 and I caught him twice on that tour: once at UMass Amherst and the following week at Flat Street in Brattleboro, VT. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to see him over a dozen times in concert (mostly iterations of the evolving Pat Metheny Group), but this was the most moving and diverse of all those performances. James Francies, on keyboards, was like an octopus, the creature with a separate brain for every limb: piano, organ, synth…and “bass,” simultaneously. I don’t want to say he stole the show, but a lot of jaws were dropping in my vicinity. Technical virtuosity, sure…but in the service of melodic soul. His emulation of Jaco’s tone and technique on “Bright Size Life” was haunting. He and Joe Dyson, the drummer, inhabited (there’s no other word here) Metheny’s complicated, estuarine compositions. So good to see Pat (now 67) throwing himself into the fire with younger, crazily talented musicians. So much for the “Ok, Boomer” tribe. He’s always on to the next thing. Working with these artists to invest his older tunes with new fire rescued them from being sentimental, obligatory. And I love some of the new stuff: “Lodger” is a rock anthem, for sure, rendered on a a Strat-like solid body Ibanez, channeling Hendrix, Clapton. Who knew? For me, though, the best part was hearing Metheny play acoustic. Something for which I’ve always yearned but have always missed. Seeing him crawl inside that Manzer 42 string “Pikasso” guitar for a spin (octopus image, again) was sublime, but being a few rows back from him slaying—solo—a few numbers on the nylon-string archtop and steel string flattop she built for him was really moving. Whether “trumpeting” in some dense forest of improvisation (still deploying the Roland guitar synth!), swinging in the athletic interplay of hard bop or crouched alone in the tentative poignancy of decaying acoustic notes, he’s never been better. November 2021
Book
Alice Oswald, Dart—What a ride, or, should I say, swim…paddle…drift? I try hard not to let my own H2O-centric worldview get in the way of enjoying other people’s literary voyages, immersions. But I’m always suspicious, especially with poets, cynical (probably unfair) about their experiential credibility; you can tell when someone is writing about water as an idea or emotion, something they think they understand, but as a lyric construct without any footing in the lived reality of it. Not so with this long poem. You can’t really call it (her second book, 2002) a “tour” of the River Dart. It’s so much cooler, more multifaceted, and, yes, (wince) deeper than that, because it’s the voice of the river braided with the many voices of its cast (pantheon) of characters who are in/on/beside it, who depend on it, who are simply drawn to it, or who might be its victims. A simultaneously lyrical and narrative/sung and spoken—and convincing—journey to the sea. Whether borne on the backs of riverine creatures or spinning in the eddies of working people’s anecdotes, you’re guaranteed a bracing, haunting swim into myth and time, without ignoring the grit of the modern world. Once I put a toe in this current, I was soon up to my thighs…and then I was gone, couldn’t climb to the banks to get out. November 2021
Recording
Todd Hearon, BORDER RADIO—Playing music is drifting back to the center of my creative output/needs, and I credit this freakishly talented musician and his soon-to-be-released debut album with helping me to get my priorities in order. Just before the pandemic lockdown, I joined Todd on stage a few times (Stone Church, Button Factory) providing some electric guitar on a few tunes. Now, I’ve I had the honor of doing some studio work for four tracks on this album. It was a blast. (“Angel Wings,” “Maybe in a Blue Moon,” Bring It Home Carolina,” and “Indian Rodeo). Country Rock/Soul, Old Time, Western…hard to put a label on the genre, but the songs are fun, poignant, profane…and really catchy. Good luck trying to get some of these melodies out of your head. And since he’s a poet, there’s double the music: the lyrics have texture and range from being luminous, witty…to heartbreaking. Aug. 2021
Book
Paul Yoon, Run Me to Earth— Of course, I am biased here for many reasons (you should read everything by this guy), but his latest novel is a heartbreaker, an odyssey that evokes Sebald’s wanderings with their traumatized landscapes and characters. This writer is at the vanguard of subtlety—“quiet” (normally a euphemism for doomed in the publishing world), brutal, lyrical. He makes navigating time’s ocean seem effortless. Sept. 2020
Recording
Jacob Young, Sideways—Young’s being a good fit for ECM Records has more to do with his musicianship, the air between the instruments and the elegance of these compositions than being from Oslo (as the iTunes reviewer said about his debut Evening Falls). But what’s most inspiring here is Young’s risk with the acoustic guitar in an ensemble format (think Towner’s 12 string with his group Solstice, Metheny’s work on New Chautauqua, 80/81 and certain cuts from Rejoicing). ECM’s heroic—but true to form—inclusion of steel-string flattops since the inception of the label has kept me a loyal and passionate fan since the late 70’s, and they’ve done it again. When you hear that dark sparkle (too throaty for an unplugged archtop, I think) emerge in “Near South End”, “Out of Night”, and “Maybe We Can”, it’s like catching the first effervescent whiff of the incoming tide. The acoustic guitar has distinct longing and sadness to begin with, but especially when it is given a chance to sing in a jazz combo—especially the way Young coaxes it. He must have had some inkling about kicking this sound ahead; you can hear it on “Blue” from the preceding album Evening Falls. He’s got “the tone” (the aforementioned iTunes reviewer was right on the money with that Abercrombian “roundness”), and the sonic delicacy of his instrument demands patience and poise from the others. Case in point: drummer Jon Christensen (who died Feb. 2020) does one of the most poignant brush solos ever at the closure of “Near South End”—almost a farewell. April 20
Performance
Duke Levine @ The Lizard Lounge (Cambridge, MA)—This was the last live music I saw before the pandemic lockdown. Just under the wire. I think Duke is one of the most talented and elegant guitarists around. Period. But, this performance will stay with me because it was the penultimate time I got to hang out with my good friend Andy, who died at the end of October. For over thirty-five years, we made it our business to catch our favorite musicians, mostly guitarists, in the Boston area. John Williams, Paco Peña, John McLaughlin, Julian Lage, Frank Vignola. Duke’s “Super Sweet Sounds of the 70s” review was a ridiculously cool instrumental mashup of stuff from The Isley Brothers, Steely Dan, Quincy Jones, King Crimson, and, yes, even Barry White. There’s evidence of it on Youtube and rumors of a forthcoming album, but being there with our wives in Cambridge that night getting our ears hollowed out by Duke’s Tele and Les Paul—and our souls filled by that band—could only happen once. Andy was usually the one to initiate these pilgrimages, but this one was my call. Don’t ever hesitate to click purchase when it comes to tickets. Get over the excuses. March 4, 2020
Credits
All photos on this site by Ralph Sneeden unless labeled otherwise. Site background image: Cedar Point, midwinter, looking toward Gardiner’s Bay, Long Island.
