Wild River State Park -- No Floods

For a casual weekday overnight, you can hardly do better than Wild River State Park, not much more than an hour north of the Twin Cities. Don't believe the Star Tribune reports of flooding. (News thrives on disaster.) Hilary and I spent a delightful 24 hours there yesterday, hiking the trails (almost entirely dry), listening to the birds (44 species) and sometimes spotting them through the leaves, and tending the evening fire made up  entirely of charred pieces of wood Hilary  gathered from neighboring fire-rings.

Yes, the St. Croix River is high, and the dock at the boat landing has been dragged up on shore for safe keeping. Good idea. Yes, the dumping station is closed due to a damaged pipe. But I think it's been that way for months. (And to be honest, I don't actually know what a dumping station is.)

On the park website I read:

Ponding water has provided excellent mosquito habitat. Screen tents are recommended for camping, and don't forget your bug spray!

Mosquitoes in Minnesota? Unheard of. What next? Killer bees? And has anyone manufactured tents without screens since the days of Nessmuk and the baker tent?

Nessmuk

It's gorgeous at Wild River, on the river and in the woods and across the prairie fields. Birds are singing everywhere, though at this time of year you don't often see them through the leaves: ovenbirds, wood thrushes, yellowthroats, bluebirds, orioles, catbirds, sapsuckers, peewees, kingbirds, vireos. Out in the fields we saw hoary alyssum, butterfly weed, hoary puccoon, false indigo, leadplant, and all kinds of unnamable grasses. Regardless of the names of individual plants, the patterns and textures are stunning.

We ate a fantastic dinner of Subway sandwiches we'd picked up in Stacy, accompanied by a kale salad-in-a-bag from CostCo and some Old Dutch Mexican Street Corn tortilla chips that I bought on sale at the grocery store, without bothering to read the fine print at the bottom of the bag: "flavored with a special blend of paprika, garlic, & lime."

As evening drew near, I noticed a fawn lurking in the grass ten feet from the edge of our site. A welcome guest. Mom showed up an hour later and lead her child away.

After "dinner" we tended the fire for an hour, adjusting the scraps of wood to take advantage of changes in the draft. This is a full-time activity, perfectly suited to a vacant and meditative evening.

A barred owl hooted several times. (The whippoorwill came later.)  Three cyclists—two adults and a teen—appeared out of the woods from the trail leading to the amphitheater and whizzed off into the gloaming.

The next morning we hit the trails again early. Cool air, dew in the grass.

The hop hornbeam are flowering. But are these hop-like growths flowers or fruits? In either case, magical times.

Three Shades of Blue:: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

Jazz is a world unto itself, a world of oral traditions, insider knowledge, nightclubs, drugs, and the constant struggle to earn a living playing music that very few people like—but some people adore. The Golden Age of the art-form stretches from t  he Swing era, when Broadway musicals, movies, dance bands, and ballroom orchestras flooded the theaters and radio waves, to the small-group scene that followed, during which the most gifted of the musicians who had cut their teeth in the big bands formed small combos within which they could "stretch out" and "strut their stuff" in more intimate environments.

In 3 Shades of Blue James Kaplan has chosen the ideal form for exploring this world, drawing on established narratives, interviews, and previously unpublished oral histories to convey the uncertainties, inspirations, marketing challenges, personality clashes, and dumb luck, both good and bad, that fueled this remarkable burst of creativity. He defends his chosen point of focus in the introduction as follows:

Other categories would follow, but I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created, in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all of the jazz I want and need.

That's not a good sentence grammatically, but it conveys the author's personal enthusiasm, and that's what keeps the narrative rolling.

Kaplan relishes the gossip, the stories, and he knows how to milk the material. For example, he offers an extended quote by trumpeter Wallace Roney about how Miles got Coltrane to come back to his band. At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Here is Roney's version:

One night he comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, as Miles later tells the story to Roney, “Wally—Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

But the spirit of the legend is intact in Roney’s telling. Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," lie told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....

Kaplan not only loves the stories and the music, he also possesses the technical smarts to explain, in layman's terms, what was novel about the new paths these musicians were charting. For example, he makes an effort to explain what the shift from "playing the changes" to modal jazz was all about by a brief reference to Miles' tune "Milestones."

The tune was the first full example of the change in musical direction Coltrane referred to in that 1960 interview, Miles’s moving to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. “Milestones” is based on just two changes, focusing on modes rather than chords: the heart-racing opening section, with the three horns puffing its familiar staccato four-note figure, bop-bop-BOP-bop, is in G Dorian (you can find it yourself by playing a white-keys-only scale from G to G on a piano); the tune then shifts to A Aeolian (white keys from A to A), then back to Dorian before repeating the progression.

No one else in jazz was doing this then.

I'm not sure how interesting any of this would be to someone who isn't already familiar with the music, but Kaplan does the reader a favor by devoting a good deal of his time to a single LP, Kind of Blue, widely considered to be the greatest work of the post-bop era. That album is unquestionably great, and very easy to like, because all of the tracks are slow, quiet, moody, and brilliantly executed. But due to that very fact,  it doesn't really exemplify the era, which spanned from hard bop and bossa nova to dreamy West Coast cool. Then again, no single LP possibly could.

I had the good fortune to take to jazz at an early age, and I heard the second legendary Miles Davis Quintet--the one that included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter--twice within the intimate confines of the old Guthrie Theater. But by this time, the late 60s, Miles and his band were well down the road into edgy modal compositions. Sure, I liked Kind of Blue. But I liked Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro better.

Which raises the question Kaplan presents in the subtitle of his book. "The Lost Empire of Cool." One of his themes is that jazz lost its audience because it got too far out, too cool, too something. You could no longer dance to it.    

Well, every book needs a one-line "hook," I guess, as a gift to reviewers and publishers' reps. Kaplan spends little time defending it. He toys in one chapter with the phrase "Jazz Died in 1959," but  neither he nor anyone else believes it. No one could listen to pianists Red Garland or Wynton Kelly today, for example, without being reminded of how much Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea brought to jazz in the 1960s. 

Kaplan himself obviously loves the music of the era he's describing and he wouldn't have it any other way. Maybe Jazz died in 1970, when Miles released Bitches Brew? 

Well, no one paints like Giotto these days, either.

Out of the Past

Minneapolis was recently ranked as the happiest city in the United States by the London-based Institute for the Quality of Life. It's hard for me, or anyone, to say for sure if that's true, but it brings to mind the slogan that was briefly popular when the eyes of all baseball fans were turned toward the Twin Cities during the 1991 World Series. "We Like It Here."

I prefer this slogan, anodyne though it is, to the more recent saying associated with the Timberwolves playoff run, "Bring y'ass," which was even embraced briefly by the people at Explore Minnesota. How times have changed.

But sometimes the days and weeks slip by, with remarkable events occurring so often that you hardly remember them. Here are three that I wouldn't want to forget:

A few weeks ago we paid a visit to the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear the Oratorio Society, with some help from the University of Minnesota Chorus and Orchestra, perform a massive work called The Three Holy Children. I'd never heard of it, nor of the Anglo-Irish composer who wrote it, Charles Stanford. It was only performed once, in 1885, and considering its obscurity, I would have taken it to be a hobby-horse of the Oratorio Society's talented and energetic director, Matthew Mehaffey—appealing to archivists and fanatics but not the general public—except that a friend of ours who sings in that choir assured us it was worth a listen. She was right.

During a lengthy but informative spiel before the concert, Mehaffey explained that an archival discovery did underlie the performance, and went on to describe the painstaking work that was required to turn the score into serviceable singing parts. But if the piece is so great, why was The Three Holy Children performed only once before vanishing from view? Because oratorios were a dime a dozen in those days, and very costly to produce. There was little motivation to do the same one twice, and by the turn of the century the genre was dwindling in popularity.

Final question: Who the heck was Charles Stanford? Turns out he was an eminent composer, conductor, and educator in his day, and numbered Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams among his pupils. A dyed-in-the-wool Brahmsian, he found little to like in the modernist tendencies stirring at the time, and the younger generation, once fledged, seldom gave him a backward glance.

Though lengthy, the oratorio was, in my view, richly varied and uniformly splendid. It was like listening to a long-lost companion piece to Brahms' Requiem, gentler perhaps but hardly less rich in melodic and harmonic interest, and free of the weird and ghastly swoops and ostentatious harmonic clashes that mar so much modern liturgical music.

The three holy children mentioned in the title, in case you're interested, are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were tossed into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian Captivity. It's one of the few Old Testament stories that kids like. Bing Crosby, Louis Prima, Sonny Rollins, and many others recorded a different version of the tale that ran to two minutes rather than two hours. That version was introduced in the 1930s. Here's a video of Louis Armstrong doing it in 1951. But with all due respect, the Oratorio Society does it better.

A few weeks later we stopped in at a photo exhibit called "Portraits: Past & Present," at a smallish gallery called Praxis in the Seward neighborhood. The pictures were taken by students of retired Star Tribune photographer Richard Sennott at a commercial photo studio of Gust Akerlund in Cokato, a small town roughly an hour west of Minneapolis on Highway 12. 

The studio first opened its doors in 1904, when people in London might still have been humming snatches of The Three Holy Children—though probably not. Gust Akerlund retired in 1950, but the studio is still open for business, still using natural light, and still equipped with some of the original backdrops. The Cokato Museum in now in the process of digitalizing many of the 14,000 negatives Gust took during his long career—workers, salesmen, carnival performers, funerals, weddings, family portraits.

In 2009 Sennott did a photo shoot at the studio for the Star Tribune. He recently took a group of students out to photograph some of the same people, fifteen years later, at the 74th Cokato Corn CarnivalIt struck me as a relaxed, warm, friendly, and good-natured show. I enjoyed chatting with the director of the Cokato museum, Johannah Ellison, sharing with her how much I enjoyed the exhibit of canned corn labels at her museum (it's true!), and also the stuffed bobwhite in the wildlife diorama. It was also fun to chat with Cokato's long-time professional story-teller Bob Gasch. Half a century ago I heard Bob recite "The Cremation of Sam McGee" at a training weekend when I was a canoe guide.

I eavesdropped on two old codgers—probably from Cokato—as they discussed the recent drought, the price of corn, and whether the gigantic ball of twine on display in Darwin, a few miles down the road from Cokato, is really the largest in the world, or only the largest one made by a single person.

And Hilary and I especially enjoyed running into her cousins Laura Sennott and Dan Olsen. Dan's wife and two daughters had flown south to a Caribbean meditation retreat. Dan wasn't in the mood, and decided to come west instead from his home in Boston to do some fishing with his sister and brother-in-law up on Cross Lake. Good idea.

A third event anchored in the past comes to mind: a performance by La Grande Bande at the Black Forest of cantatas by Bach and Handel and shorter pieces by Corelli and others. It was billed as "Summer and Songs" with a meal provided by the Black Forest. We went with friends, and also enjoyed talking with the two young university professors who joined us at our table, but the opening peroration read from a sheet of paper by harpsichordist Michael Thomas Asmus was somewhat boring, and one of the violinists—there were only two—was slightly out of tune for much of the performance. It didn't help that to get a beer you had to leave the room and walk through the courtyard to the bar, then wait for the bartender, who seemed to be new at the job,  to tend to your order.

But the voices of soprano Catherine Sandstedt and baritone Andrew Kane saved the day.

Le Grande Bande is based in Gaylord, an hour southwest of town, though many of the musicians in the troupe are from the Cities and elsewhere. The size of the group varies with the repertoire being performed. The pieces we heard were memorable--especially the one featuring a hunting horn--but I think we'd have better luck with a larger ensemble.

Twilight of the Idols

For the past two decades men's professional tennis has been dominated by the Big Three—though I should say the sport "had been" dominated. The rivalry between Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, three athletes similar in talent but wildly different in style and temperament, had been an unavoidable centerpoint of tennis conversation. Who would end up with the most grans slam championships, which of the three was the greatest of all time, when would a new generation assert itself? Contenders would occasionally surface to nab an individual Grand Slam title—Murray, Cilic, Thiem, Wawrinka. Then Roger or Joker or Rafa would return to form and reassert control.

The quarter-finals of this year's French Open will be the first in twenty years not to include at least one of the Big Three. For most of those years, Rafa Nadal not only appeared in the quarters, but won the tournament.  

This year Rafa bowed out in straight sets in the first round to Sasha Zverev. That would have been a shocking result a few years ago, but no surprise this year, considering the injuries Nadal has sustained recently. It was more of a shock when Djokovic withdrew from the tournament a few days later with a torn medial meniscus in his right knee.

The remaining field is uniformly top-notch. Medyedev has been ranked number one and holds several grand slam titles, while Zverev has been hovering on the brink of a breakthrough for years. The Scandinavians Rune and Ruud put on a good show, and two young upstarts, the Italian Sinner (upon Djokovic's exit now ranked number 1) and the Spaniard Alcaraz, have both exhibited tremendous resilience and shot-making élan.

It's likely that Djokovic will be back later this year, but Federer is fully retired and Nadal probably ought to throw in the towel soon. We're now at a position of looking back at the two decades of the Big Three with a degree a nostalgia as an unparalleled Golden Age of stellar tennis, as we launch tiresome arguments about which of the three was the greatest and whether the new generation will ever be able to measure up. 

Tennis is about beautiful shot-making, and also about grit and personality. There have always been "bad boys" and machine-like perfectionists, hot heads and cool operators. For myself, I was a fan of neither MacEnroe nor Bjorg, preferring Edberg or Agassis, though my old tennis buddy Steve Herrig would be shocked to hear me say so. I don't care much for Tsitsipas--maybe it's the hair--and Zverev always seems to have a petulant scowl on his face. Djokovic is disliked by many. Sinner hits remarkable shots without indulging in the histrionic ape-like shouts that have become so popular. I also find Medyedev's droll and quirky personality appealing. 

But we all have our favorites, I guess.