Thursday, April 30, 2020

A Joyous Shriek



You've probably heard the shriek of the red-bellied woodpecker, perhaps not knowing what it was.

I hear it many times a day, because one of these beautiful birds has nested, along with his mate, in a hole in a tree right outside my office window.

The call sounds  like this:


Aside from being a thrilling event in itself, this shriek conveys something of the glee I often feel in the early morning when the air is cool yet inviting and the sun glances through the pines or across the grass, which is as patchy as ever but suddenly green.

Sure, I read the papers—some of the time. I know what's going on. We've been obeying the "stay-at-home" injunction to the letter. In fact, the only guest we've had in the last two months was Hilary's brother Paul, who stopped by to drop off a sewing machine so Hilary could start making masks. (She's made more than fifty by now, in several designs and many fabric patterns. )

Yes, times are bad. But at the same time, no one can deny that spring has definitely sprung, and although it remains imperative to avoid crowds and keep to a six-foot distance, that isn't hard to do when you're taking a walk in the woods.


We got out fairly early Saturday morning to Hyland Park Reserve. The sun was bright but there was still dew on the grass. And of course, people were everywhere, jogging, cycling, pushing strollers.
We did some strolling ourselves, from the nature center parking lot up over the hill and through the woods to a point from which we could see the two ospreys that return every year to the platform across the highway from Bush Lake.

Tree swallows were soaring and diving near their little houses. Back in the woods, I heard some commotion in a nearby tree and looked up to see two broad-winged hawks mating on a branch forty feet away. They sat together on a branch for a few minutes afterward, then one of them flew off.

Two broad-winged hawks 
It was quieter in the woods—fewer joggers—but the crisp, rapid-fire song of the ruby-crowned kinglets often burst through the silence. A few pinkish-white wildflowers were blooming low to the ground amid the dead leaves: spring beauty?

I was impressed with the faint haze of green as the sun lit up a few nascent leaves barely visible at the edge of the woods. All the beauty and tenderness of new life shimmering through the shadows.


A woman was standing on the path. She had a pair of binoculars around her head, and  as we approached I ventured an idle remark.

"Are you seeing the kinglets?"

"Yes," she replied. "Also yellow-rumped warblers. And there is a pileated woodpecker nearby."

"We've been hearing him," I said.

"He's nesting in one of those dead trees in the lake. There are three in a row with no bark. He's there often. You'll see him."


We found the woodpecker nest but didn't see the bird himself. But out in the open field I spotted a large hawk sitting on a branch in a leafless oak, seemingly idle. It was an immature red-tailed hawk, and he wasn't idle. He took no interest in me as I approached to take a picture, but he suddenly lifted off and headed out across the field, swooping out of sight down into the grass about fifty yards away.


We capped off the morning stroll, hardly more than a mile, with the sight of ten or twenty turtles crowding onto a log.


Yes, everyone was out.  

*  *  *  *


Two days later we made our way to the rock garden just north of Lake Harriet. Though the pools and waterfalls remained dry, quite a few flowers were in bloom. It had rained the previous day and the breeze was filled with the moist scent of evergreens.


I spotted a mourning dove sitting on a rock, with his pale blue eye-ring and eyelid, and I mistook him for a rare species. (He does look sort of special.)


The atmosphere was pristine, peaceful, and vaguely Asian in flavor, and I suddenly had the desire to have a cup of tea in front of me in a classic Mingei tea bowl, set just so on a straw place mat, perhaps.

But I don't actually like the taste of tea. Maybe green tea. Well, no one said I had to drink it.  

We strolled through the rose garden and down to the lake, then wandered west along the shore toward the bandstand. We were about to turn around, when, looking out across the lake, I saw a few distant ducks.


Ruddy ducks! Not the best sighting, but as one of them turned into the sunlight you could easily see the bright blue bill, the big white face patch, and the rich rusty feathers on the head.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Lee Konitz -- Unabashed-Lee



Jazz great Lee Konitz left us a few days ago at the age of 92. The virus got him, on top of a few other things.

Lee was a strange cat, and a "cool cat," dedicated to lyrical improvisation throughout his long career. He never wanted to have a band of his own. He just wanted to work through the Great American Songbook one more time, though he was happy to play in almost any context. Especially duets. His tone on the alto saxophone was straight and clear, tending toward melancholy in timbre. Yet his solos were typically buoyant and unhurried. He was quoted as saying that there were ten different layers to be explored in response to any given melody, and if the producer would give him time, he'd be happy to explore them all.

Critics tend to single out Konitz's 1961 album Motion as the high point of his career. And I notice that due to his death, it has suddenly shot up to #3 among Amazon jazz albums. That's too bad. I fear that many will find that trio date to be full of propulsive improvisation but too abstract to satisfy.

Konitz played on Miles Davis's seminal 1950 album Birth of the Cool--he was the last surviving member of that group--but here, in the liner notes to Motion, hardly more than a decade later, and with seventeen additional albums under his belt, Nat Hentoff describes him as almost a has-been.   

Hentoff writes: "In the past few years, as 'funky,' 'soulful,' 'hard,' and various forms of experimental jazz have nearly monopolized the foreground of jazz publicity, Konitz has become part of what Paul Desmond calls 'the jazz underground.'"

This is in 1961, mind you. Hentoff continues: 
Yet Konitz’s jazz conception is so singular and provocative that his influence is still felt, especially in Europe. Nor certainly has that influence disappeared in America. Konitz has set standards of melodic continuity and freshness of line that are respected by musicians who are otherwise widely dissimilar to him in approach; and I’m sure that as the scope of jazz improvisation continues to expand, the worth of Konitz’s continuing achievements will be recognized in retrospect and he himself will again he considered an important part of the foreground of jazz explora­tion.
Fifty years after that was written, Konitz was still going strong. Hoeing his own row. Doing what he wanted to do. 

I can't claim to have a mountain of Konitz CDs in my collection, but the few that I do have, along with Motion, might give some indication of the range of his artistry, and his curiosity.

Among Lee's early albums I would single out You and Lee from 1960, not because it's necessarily the best, but because it's the one I have. The snappy arrangements are by Jimmy Guiffre, and every track has the word "you" in the title--a reflection of Lee's playful nature. "You Don't Know What Love Is," "You're Driving Me Crazy," "I Didn't Know About You," and so on. Hence the album's title. The small brass ensemble backing Konitz, often playing with mutes, gives him the opportunity to weave and bob through the changes without taking on too much of the burden.

Then we have Motion from 1961.

Jumping two decades to 1984, Lee recorded a fine duet CD, Toot Sweet,  with the French pianist Michel Petrucciani. But here we see the perils of tireless improvisation. A sixteen-minute version of "'Round Midnight" followed by a rendition of "Lover Man" of almost equal length? The music is mostly brilliant, yes, but on occasion it flags.

It's interesting to compare this outing with some of Lee's earliest recordings, which date from the late 1940s and early 50s. They were originally released as 78s, and later collected on the 1955 LP Subconscious-Lee. The longest of the cuts doesn't exceed 4 minutes by more than a few seconds. Very good stuff. (Listen to a sample here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e66PkFEl2g

Five years after Toot Sweet we have Lee recording with Fender Rhodes keyboard, guitar, and electric bass, on Lee Konitz in Rio.  On the liner notes Lee comments, "I was thinking more of the Bossa Nova 'beautiful songs' tradition, but this has turned out really contemporary—South American fusion. I feel like I'm in the twentieth century!" In that same year he recorded a lively straight-ahead quartet date with a young Fred Hersch on piano called Round and Round, on which he even gives John Coltrane's Giant Steps a shot. 

Ten years later he's recording a live date called Alone Together at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles playing standards (what else?) with pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Charlie Haden. This is a less happy combination, because Mehldau is even more prone than Konitz to noodling himself into a dreary corner. Still, flashes of brilliance abound. (In fact, I'm listening to it now, and it sounds pretty great.)

That same year, at the age of 70 more or less, Konitz was involved in recording what I consider a masterpiece, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler's haunting, flowing, drum-free Angel Song, in the company of guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Dave Holland.

Konitz recorded 25 albums in the 21st century, but I haven't heard a single one. I did hear him play at the Artist's Quartet in St. Paul in 2007 with a local pianist he'd only met twenty minutes before the show. He sounded like Lee. Forging ahead, curious to find out what he himself would come up with. Because he and the pianist had not had time to rehearse the endings to the tunes, when things were winding down he would jump suddenly into the next standard.   

Two comments from those who worked with Konitz recently are worth repeating. Dan Tepfer, a pianist and frequent Konitz duo partner, said in a 2012 interview. “I always think of Lee as a Zen master ... There’s nothing keeping [him] from responding to what’s actually going on in the moment.” 

And tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, in a Downbeat interview, touched on Konitz’s preternatural ability to avoid the obvious by steering clear of conventional rhythmic patterns: “Phrases are never in groups of two or four or eight beats or notes," Turner said, "but in sevens or nines or fives or sixes. His lines are also very involved, long, connected, extremely lyrical.”


Unconventional, yet extremely lyrical. A winning combination? Yes.

Friday, April 3, 2020

Stepping Back from the News



Sometimes it's a good idea to step back from the news for a while.

There will always be more. And it will rarely be good.

The other day I pulled a book called Back to the Garden off the shelf and retreated all the way back to the Paleolithic. The author, James McGregor, is a kind of expert on the relations between cities and their surrounding landscape, but he's less interested in aesthetics than in agriculture. To judge from the title, we might expect him to be offering one more serving of utopian fantasy, exploring the prehistoric past in an effort to locate precisely where human civilization went wrong, and offering advice as to how we can all return to the life of easy-going egalitarian bliss that we've lost.

The book is a lot more interesting than that. McGregor has an image in mind—he calls it First Nature—of a balanced relationship between urban and rural activities, and he suggests that we've lost sight of that balance. But in his view, our lost of perspective wasn't all that long ago. To prove his point, he reexamines almost the entire history of civilization, going all the way back to the Stone Age in search of clues about how and why changes in food production came about. And for the most part, he focuses on the most recent facts he can find, sparing us a series of repetitive lectures about the evils of modern life along the way. In fact, he first makes mention of his First Nature paradigm on the last page of the introduction, and doesn't bring it up again until almost a hundred pages later.

In the mean time, McGregor spins a series of scholarly narratives about, for example, what the archeological record at Jericho, Abu Hureyra, and Çatalhöyük tell us about how agriculture developed. He rejects the theory that centralized power and vast irrigation systems lie at the heart of the story, arguing that small-scale floodwater farming played a crucial role. Carrying the point one step farther, he asserts that our widespread misunderstanding of these things is a reflection of biases ingrained in nineteenth century historiography.
"The narrative of state formation, which was a major political preoccupation of post-Napoleonic Europe, was further linked with the origins of the coercive power of the community—that is to say, with the origins of war. For theorists imbued with the thought of that era, three distinct theoretical concerns were inextricably blended together. The history of cultivation and domestication, the rise of the nation-state, and the story of warfare are distinct, but nineteenth-century historiography joined them in a way that contemporary theorists must struggle to undo."
The archaeological record tells a different story. The agricultural revolution, far from being the product of a single culture, was an accumulation of scattered practical insights bundled into an ensemble of seeds, herds, and cultivation techniques that could be, and was, adapted to a variety of cultures and habitats.

McGregor examines, and rejects, the nutritional theories of those who argue that the introduction of grains into the diet was a mistake. He finds the Neolithic revolution to be a mixed bag. People lived longer, and the landscape could support more of them, but they also suffered more often from diseases. He also finds the evidence in support of a matriarchal culture that was shattered by violent invasion to be inconclusive at best. Once again, contemporary political concerns are being projected onto the distant past.


A third fashionable argument that McGregor finds dubious is the one that pits civilization against wilderness. He writes:
"Heretical or not, there are good reasons to reject wilderness as the poster child for biological life. This is not to reject wilderness itself but only to reject its role as stand-in for the whole of nature. If we ask ourselves whether the wilderness concept, during its two-century reign, has done a good job of standing up for the natural world, the answer has to be a resounding “No!” During that short time, more damage has been done to the landscape than ever before in human history."
And McGregor thinks he knows the reason why: the concept of wilderness was the creation, not of biologists or ecologists, but of poets and philosophers. Man has no place in wilderness, by definition. Therefore, it cannot be improved. At best, it can be preserved, untouched.

One of my favorite sections focuses on water use practices in Libya during the Roman era. In those days North Africa (along with Sicily and Egypt) was the breadbasket of the Empire. Conventional wisdom has it that the Romans abused the environment, extracting from it whatever they could get to feed its urban population, and leaving behind a desert wasteland that has never recovered.
A wadi in Libya
According to McGregor, the evidence doesn't support that view. Almost the reverse. Archeologists have found olive presses throughout North Africa. Experts estimate the annual export of oil to Rome might have approached a million liters. How was this possible? It was due to a meticulous engineering of the seasonal rainfall through the wadis, which allowed farmers to increase their yields considerably and devote some of their attention to cash crops. But it required diligence to operate the dams, catch-basins, and canals and keep them in working order. Thus the conventional scheme of intensive cultivation leading to desertification must be scrapped. McGregor writes:   
"This sequence does not fit the Libyan evidence, however. Intensive agriculture there led to soil enrichment, not depletion ... Roman North Africa did not fail in its job of producing food for the regional market. Just the opposite occurred: an international market failure brought on by invasion and fragmentation within the Roman Empire made export-based agriculture unsustainable. Political change, not environmental irresponsibility, led to the abandonment of pro­ductive infrastructure in North Africa.
I have been emphasizing here a few of the unorthodox positions that McGregor advances in the course of his ramble through history, but the greater part of the book consists of the historical material itself, which McGregor presents in a clear, studied, low-key tone that makes for easy reading. His interests range from the cave paintings of the Paleolithic to the romantic theories of Goethe and Kant, from the conflicting philosophies of Empedocles and Parmenides to the physiocratic and exchange theories of the Enlightenment.

In his analysis of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, McGregor draws our attention to the central role played by money as the medium through which the "invisible hand" does its work. We take that for granted, without considering that when the theory was formulated, it left out the world of agricultural exchange almost entirely.
"Modern economics, the “dismal science,” rests on the linked axioms that money is a means of exchange and that economic systems rely not on incalculable intrinsic values but on exchange values, established by markets. We think of these statements as noncontroversial descriptions of reality, but historically the universal use of money and the acceptance of exchange value over intrinsic value required substantial intellectual adjustment and often wrenching social change. It is no accident that the seminal eighteenth-century theorist of money was not a Frenchman but a Scot."
In light of McGregor's curious and even-tempered approach to his subjects, it should come as no surprise that his concluding remarks lack apocalyptic fervor. Having spread before us a rich tapestry of ideas and practices, it only remains to connect the dots, as it were.
"Market forces and the inexorable pressures of international com­petition are held up as the demons that drive farmers to work in ways that at least some find unwelcome. But what holds for the eco­nomics of energy production is true of farming as well. When the true costs are totaled up, the economic picture becomes strikingly different. Massive government subsidies, indirect benefits in the form of infrastructure, and protective isolation from liability and health-related costs make contemporary agriculture economically viable. The cost of addressing the obesity that modern crops create would itself be sufficient to tip the balance in favor of ecologically sound practices. Without subsidies and insulation from liability, agribusi­ness would have to be reconfigured in ways that are more responsible to land, labor, and consumers."
Ain't it the truth! Yet a more insistent advocate for change might have inserted the word "only" so that the sentence reads "ONLY massive government subsidies ... make contemporary agriculture economically viable." 
  
But what makes McGregor's history so interesting isn't its conclusions so much the way-stations we visit as we follow its wandering path, from Bronze Age shipbuilding techniques to rice cultivation in the Po Valley to the Marshall Plan. It's a miniature Enlightenment compendium on the order of the abbé Raynal's History of the Two Indies, inspired by a rational concept of proper practice guided by past experience and an underlying concern for justice, both social and environmental. A good deal of it touches on agriculture only obliquely.

In fact, after finishing the book, I felt that I'd hardly gotten my hands dirty, and I turned to an old essay by Wendell Berry, "The Making of a Marginal Farm," to redress the balance.