Cold water

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald; Gordon Lightfoot, guitar and vocals

On a warm sunny day last week, I took off my shoes and waded into the clear blue waters of Lake Superior on the north shore. I could only stand it for about three minutes. My feet had never been so cold in my entire life. I cannot fathom the trip to the watery grave encountered by the valiant crew of the famous SS Edmund Fitzgerald.

Any personal story I have to tell about this song pales in comparison to the story behind the song itself.

Records kept of Great Lakes nautical history claim that at least two-hundred-forty ships, between 1816 and 1975, have been lost in the Whitefish Point area, the place where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. It also tells of nearly six thousand shipwrecks on all of the Great Lakes between 1878 and 1897 with a loss of one thousand, one-hundred sixty-six lives. The gravest number of all represents the estimated loss of life over the course of three hundred years of navigation on the Great Lakes: Twenty-five thousand. Woof.

The Edmund Fitzgerald is the most famous of them all, more than likely by virtue of this amazing song. Composed in B Major, with a melody roughly twenty-one notes long and repeated twenty-eight times. Without even knowing what this song was about when it came out thirty-four years ago this month, the music, itself, has haunted me over the years.

My friend Eric S. corrects people who use the term “very unique”, claiming, rightly so, that, by definition, something or someone can only be unique; there are no varying levels of uniqueness. If, however, I were given license, I would apply the term “very unique” to this song. I have heard none other like it.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes

When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

Wow.

Credits: To Gordon Lightfoot, for an epic song.

The Treniers and Joe Williams

Presenting Joe Williams and Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, The Jazz Orchestra; Joe Williams, vocals

In August of 2003, I played with Sam Butera for a two week run at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was a show designed to feature acts reminiscent of the “old” Atlantic City and “old” Vegas lounge acts. Included in the billing were 1950’s entertainer Freddie Bell and a group called The Treniers.

Twins Claude and Cliff (Heathcliff) Trenier started their own musical group in the late 1940’s that played a cross between swing and early rock ‘n roll. Influenced mostly by swing, they incorporated a thumping backbeat that gave their sound a lot of energy. Their song titles often used the words “rock” and “roll”, like “Rocking on Sunday Night”, “It Rocks! It Rolls! It Swings!” and “Rockin’ is our Bizness”. Mix all of that up with vigorous choreography, lively on-stage acrobatics, humorous antics and facial features on fire with flashing grins and infectious smiles and they had themselves one of the hottest acts in the early 1950’s club circuit.

They held stylistic sway with their contemporaries Bill Haley and his Comets and the British group The Shadows. In May of 1954, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis brought The Treniers to the Colgate Comedy Hour, marking one of the first times that rock and roll appeared on television. Over the years, other brothers and family members joined the group. Cliff passed away in 1983 and when the group reformed to play the show with Sam in 2003, only the twins’ nephew, Milt, was left to share the stage with Claude. During our two-week run, I never missed an opportunity to watch The Treniers from the wings. It was a sight to see every time.

Claude passed away three months later. He was eighty-four years old. Sam went to the funeral and told us a fascinating story the next time we saw him. It seems that Bill Cosby, a life-long fan of anything with a jazz, blues or swing groove, absolutely LOVED The Treniers while he was growing up and eventually met and became friends with Claude and Cliff and the group. Out of respect for his friends and the passing of Cliff, when it came time to select a name for his character on “The Cosby Show”, he chose “Heathcliff” or “Cliff”.

Bill Cosby again exhibited his passion for jazz when he invited the legendary jazz singer Joe Williams to play his father-in-law on the show, Al Hanks.

Isn’t it funny that the most of the great jazz singers are women? Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald receive the lion’s – excuse me, lioness’ – share of the accolades and come to mind easily when anyone utters the words “jazz singer”. I can only think of three male singers that didn’t venture away from jazz: Kurt Ellington, Mel Torme and Joe Wiliams.

When my friend Jay showed me around Las Vegas on my first night in town, he drove past the Sunrise Hospital, just a few blocks away from the house where we stayed. “Joe Williams passed away only a short distance from this hospital. He had admitted himself for a respiratory ailment two days before, and, after feeling better a couple of days later, he went for a walk and never made it back.”

Death, death, death. That seems to be all I can talk about today. I’ll try be more upbeat tomorrow.

Credits: To Bill Cosby, one of the most genuinely funny men in the entertainment industry. I saw you make Jack Benny laugh once. For that, I doff my chapeau to you.

Surprises

The Concert Sinatra; Frank Sinatra

I got two wonderful surprises last week both within a minute of each other. As we pulled out of Betty’s Pies, 1633 Highway 61 near Two Harbors, Minnesota, on the north shore of Lake Superior, (Surprise #1 in 4 … 3 … 2 … ) Mom said, “I’d like to listen to some Frank Sinatra.”

WHHHAAAAAAAAAATTT?!?!?!?

I thought you didn’t like Sinatra. “Well, I haven’t heard him in a long time. Do you have any on your iPod?” Well, certainly, I do.

Before heading out on my vacation, I had installed an interface that hooked up with my Sirius XM Satellite Radio connection on my radio. Now I can listen to my iPod through the Bose speakers in my Chevy Trailblazer.

I quickly wheeled through my albums to find “The Concert Sinatra”, the classiest Sinatra album of them all, in my humble opinion. I started the first track, turned to my niece, M., in the back seat and said, I’m sorry about the old folks music. (Surprise #2 in 4 … 3 … 2 …) “That’s okay. I like Frank Sinatra.”

WHHHAAAAAAAAAATTT?!?!?!?

My niece’s stock increased immediately, by approximately sixty-five percent. When I was her age, I think I had HEARD of Frank Sinatra. I weep for the younger generations just a little bit less because of her casual remarks.

I always figured that the nickname “Chairman of the Board” referred to Frank Sinatra as the eternal big shot. But, as it turns out, when he started his own recording label, Reprise, in order to allow more artistic freedom in his recordings, Sinatra was, truly, founder and “Chairman of the Board”. How ‘bout that? You learn something knew ….

Nelson Riddle, Sinatra’s frequent arranger and conductor, considered “The Concert Sinatra” to be the finest album from the Reprise years. I concur.

Credits: To Nelson Riddle, orchestrator extraordinaire. Great charts, man. And to Betty's Pies. MMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm. Pie.

Breaking the rules

An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea In Concert; Herbie Hancock, piano; Chick Corea, piano

I was never really a rule-breaker. Two days ago, I boarded an Amtrak train in Chicago, coach class, bound for Minneapolis. After I ascended the stairs of my destination car, I saw that there was plenty of room and took advantage of two seats in the front. I sat there for a full sixty seconds before I noticed the sign in the aisle above the seats: “Reserved for parties of two.” Rats. I picked up my stuff and went toward the back of the car. Every pair of seats that didn’t have that reserved sign above it had a passenger or passengers. So, finally I just took one of the reserved seats in the back, but I was uncomfortable all the way to Minneapolis, concerned that, at any minute, the car attendant would, all of a sudden, notice the sign above my seats and make me move. I don’t like breaking the rules.

We all learn to how to print letters in first-grade, or maybe even kindergarten. About the time that we hit third grade, we start to learn cursive writing. From that time forward, our teacher told us, “We expect you to write in this fashion, and so does every instructor from now on.”

I’ve never had good penmanship. It was legible but that's about it. I had too much to say in a short amount of time to be careful with loopy lines and curly Q’s. In retrospect, you would think that I would have easily taken to this artsy aspect of drawing in writing – shaping that perfect “M” and that elegant “L”. Nope. I was a little boy. Any time spent doing something school-related was time away from TV and the piano.

One day, in the autumn of my seventh grade year, the rebel in me rose out of the simmering fire. “You don’t want to write in cursive anymore, do you?” I don’t want to write in cursive anymore. “You can print much faster and neater than you can in cursive, can’t you?” I can print much faster and neater than I can in cursive. “You want to scream at the top of your lungs, punch in all the lockers, bust down the double doors and set the building on fire, don’t you?” No, I just want to print from now on. “That’s all?” Yeah. “Chicken.” ~Sigh~ Yeah.

So, I held my breath, printed my assignment for English class and waited to get called into the office. But I never got called. Not that day, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next ten thousand nexts. I shut the door on cursive writing on that day and never looked back. I don’t even remember how to do it.

Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, on the other hand, LOOK for rules to break when they play two-piano concerts together. The great Gershwin/Gershwin tune “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away)” is a bouncy, catchy little tune, and, indeed, that’s where Corea and Hancock begin. But by the fourth time through the tune, “Liza” is beyond recognition, becoming more of a caricature of herself with each pass through the form, shedding melody, harmony and rhythms. And, yet, each chorus is interesting, exciting. By the end, “Liza” has her act back together again and chases those clouds away just as effectively as in the beginning

Both Mr. Corea and Mr. Hancock played in Miles Davis’ quintet in the 1960’s, often times simultaneously, one playing acoustic piano and the other on keyboards. In the late 1970’s, they set up a tour of concerts where two Yamaha concert grands would be fitted together so that the jazz masters could face each other. Playing compositions by both pianists and other composers, the duo took turns accompanying the other while they soloed, traded whole, half and quarter choruses with each other and played at extreme reaches of the piano, one in the bass and one in the treble, yet keeping virtually constant eye contact with each other in an effort to “read” what the other will try next.

I haven’t broken many rules since my peaceful uprising from the cursive writing. I think I once sneaked some M&M’s into a movie. And I added cinnamon to a brownie mix, one time, when the recipe didn’t call for any. But I like to follow the rules. Unless they frustrate my evil purposes. Then I crush them like a bug.

Credits: To Amtrak, for keeping the trains alive, and making train travel fun.

The night I knew

Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18; Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 43; The Cleveland Orchestra; Vladimir Ashkenazy, conducting; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano

One day, in the early summer of 1982, Mom happened to see an announcement in the monthly publication of the American Lutheran Church (ALC). Concordia College in St. Paul, Minnesota, was sponsoring an organ camp for young organists between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. It was the first of its kind offered in the ALC and young people at all levels of organ-playing competence and experience were welcome to attend the five-day, camp-like event. “I think you should go,” Mom said. Okay.

So, we sent camp registration off in the mail, bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Minneapolis and called Uncle D. to see if he would pick up and drop off a nephew from and at the bus station downtown. “Yup,” he said. “Just let me know what time.” We had to wait about twenty minutes at the bus station in Brookings, South Dakota, for another bus coming from Watertown. The agent kidded the anxious bus-driver about being twenty minutes behind all the way to the Twin Cities. “Oh, no,” said the bus driver, a particularly animated and charismatic African-American woman. “I’m gonna’ make up that time, buster, because I’m going boogieing with my sisters immediately after I park my bus.” I had a very fast ride to Minneapolis.

The powers what be at our camp kept our days filled with lessons, masterclasses, choir rehearsals (we had just enough for a choir), personal practice time, repertoire sessions and field trips to area churches with outstanding pipe organs. I know, you’re right, it sounds pretty geeky, but when you are an organist in your teen years, you’ve already calibrated a relatively low fixed point on the universal scale of all that is hip, phat, funky, fly, happenin’, tony, now and groovy. So, you might as well revel in it. We had a blast.

Oddly enough, though, they didn’t think to plan things for the evenings and they mostly scrambled at the last minute to find ways to entertain us. One night they set up a projector and showed us Mel Brook’s “The Producers”. On another night they took us to the Como Park to visit the zoo. We had heard rumors of a Twins game, but that never materialized.

Instead, on Thursday night of that week, we boarded a bus for a trip to Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis to hear the Minnesota Pops. I was excited. I had never heard a professional symphony orchestra before. They gave us our tickets, sat us down at our tables and gave us our programs. That was when I saw the guest conductor of that evening’s performance: Mitch Miller.

The program started with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and moved to a suite from Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”. After the intermission, they rolled a Steinway concert grand out in front of the orchestra and a young pianist named Moses Hogan emerged from the wings with the Maestro to perform the first movement of Peter Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 23, and then the final movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18.

At some point, during those forty-five minutes of majestic pianism, underscored by lush orchestrations, a light bulb came on and never went off. This – this – make no mistake – THIS – was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Before this evening, music was a fascination, a hobby, a special talent that I could run to when activity slowed and I needed amusement. But, this, … I knew that I had found my calling and vowed, right there and then, to step everything up about twenty degrees hotter and fifty gears faster.

My favorite question to other musicians: When did you know? Where were you and what were the circumstances when you figured out that music was the answer to virtually every vocational query put to you? Almost every musician I’ve asked, even if they’ve never received the question before, knows the answer and replies with a twinkle in their eye.

At the end of the concert, Maestro Miller led the audience in a ten minute long sing-a-long. It was a grand evening.

Credits: To Mitch Miller, for your unique connection with your audience: the old fashioned sing-a-long. R.I.P., my friend.

A Heavy Day At The Beach

Heavier Things; John Mayer

I attended Sunday Services at the YMCA near CCM at the University of Cincinnati. The University Lutheran Center (ULC) held worship there every Sunday morning. The hall in which we met had the ambience of a Renaissance Period banquet hall with the tall gothic windows, a huge fireplace and a raised platform on one end where the kind would sit. It overlooked the UC campus and the CCM grounds.

In the March of my first year in graduate school, the ULC sponsored a spring break trip to Florida. A state park at the end of a peninsula close to Panama City, Florida, had three large cabins only a hundred yards or so distance away from the white-sanded beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. The sand was so white and clean that it squeaked when you walked barefoot in it.

I had worked pretty hard on my studies and on some challenging repertoire for three months and I felt that I deserved a little time off. So, I signed myself up for the trip and became one of twelve or so that boarded two vans on Friday evening bound for Florida.

We had quite a mix in our group as far as majors and interests were concerned: a few engineers, a math major, a nurse, a sports medicine major, etc.

One day, out on the beach, one fellow from our group, B., an architecture major, began building tiny sculptures with material he found in the sand. What are you doing? “Just messing.” He used sticks, twigs, shells, seaweed and stones to make three-dimensional figures. After he had made about four of them, he dismantled the second one he had created and started over again. Why did you take it apart? “It wasn’t the way that I wanted it.” I thought it looked nice. “But it didn’t match the image that I had in my head.”

It was a moment of departure for me. Up until that very moment, I had relied on other people, teachers, friends, colleagues, Mom, Dad, whoever, to tell me whether what I had created, reproduced or simulated … was indeed good. Or good enough. I realized that I had never approached music from the standpoint of a pre-conceived idea. Meaning, first I have the idea, then I create or reproduce the music.

In classical music, a musician has a responsibility to the composer. He or she must bear witness to the tempos, phrasing, dynamics … road signs, essentially … that the composer has taken pains to indicate. After those elements have been considered, the musician then can begin to make the piece his own, hammering away here, chiseling away there, taking time, highlighting, picking up the tempo to generate more energy and so forth.

During that hour on the beach, I awakened to a new artistic consciousness; or awareness. It was no longer sufficient “just to make it through the piece”. Nor could I any longer rely merely on the execution of the composer’s notes to “carry the piece”. I had to retrain my ears to listen for things to bring to the surface, retrain my eyes to discover hidden melodies among the visible. I had to learn to think six to eight measures ahead when playing jazz, to make sure that what I play sounds like I thought of it yesterday and that I spent the night honing it down to an elegant refinement.

It was a mind-boggling day at the beach, for sure. And it took me a while to figure out exactly how this insight would impact me and my craft. But, the way I approached the piano, and music, changed that day. I grew up. A little. It was a day to ponder over … Heavier Things.

Credits: To my friend, B., and other artists who can transfer elements of their talent to other imaginative venues. Bravo.

New Churches

Faure ~ Debussy ~ Franck: Violin Sonatas; Joshua Bell, violin; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano

On a cold, stormy Sunday morning in January of 1969, I was a three-year-old munchkin in a Sunday School classroom. A blizzard was on its way and Mom and Dad figured that they could better prepare for the fury to come if they skipped church and sent the kids to Sunday School with the neighbors. After Sunday School, R. and E. H. took me and my sisters home and everyone else at the church hit the road to make it home before the storm, leaving the church dark at about twelve o’clock.

At one o’clock, the church caught fire and burned to the ground, in an unlikely, yet synergistic web of leaping fire, soot-caked snow, fierce heat, unbeatable cold and a howling wind. The furnace had exploded in the room directly beneath the Sunday School room I had sat in only ninety minutes before. Many brave souls stood at a distance to witness the demise of a ninety-year-old church. At one point during the raging tempest, as he observed the surreal goings-on, Pastor Sponheim glimpsed, then caught, a single renegade page from the Lutheran Hymnal as it escaped out of the blazing arms of the firestorm before him, and he held it up, the next Sunday, before the congregation when it met at the school gymnasium.

“Here,” he seemed to say, “right here, with this paper, on this day and in this place, we begin our journey, the hand of God in the hand of his church in Bruce, to rebuild, not the church, for that is who we are, but to rebuild our place of worship and continue the work of His kingdom, here in His royal and holy realm of Bruce.”

On the morning of October 30, 1969, just down the street from the site of the old burned down church, only ten months distance from the fire, the congregation of Grace Lutheran Church stood in the brilliant sun outside of the edifice in front of them to say a sound and stalwart prayer of dedication, committing the building’s structural integrity, its beauty and its purpose, simply and pointedly, to the Glory of God. A worship service of thanks and praise ensued, inside the building, with nineteen pews, a choir loft, a Baldwin piano, a Baldwin organ, eight big globed lights, five tall stained glass windows, an altar, an altar rail and a biiiiiig pulpit.

One year ago last June, Wallace Presbyterian Church finished its long sojourn in the desert with a resplendent house of worship, complete with a seven-sided sanctuary, over four hundred seats, a cupola, a steeple, a handsome wooden platform with a lectern, two multi-media silver screens and a nine-foot Steinway D concert grand piano. In July of that year, we dedicated the piano to the service of the Lord with a simple but sincere prayer and a recital. Our performances included songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Aaron Copland, Antonin Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81, and Cesar Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major (1886) with a flute player, and his flute, standing in for the violinist, and his or her violin.

On a warm, calm Sunday morning in March of 1969, a horse-drawn single mouldboarded plow, one that tilled the land on our farm more than a hundred years ago, broke the ground for the new church building in Bruce. One of my favorite spirituals:

Keep your hand on the plow, hold on

If you want to get to Heav’n I tell you how

Just keep you hand on the Gospel plow

Keep your hand on the plow, hold on

If that plow stays in your hand

Land you straight in the Promised land

Keep your hand on the plow, hold on

Credits: To Pastor Sponheim taking the healm of a crew with no ship, pointing in the direction of the Almighty and saying, “There!”