A Cool Breeze after a Hot Night

A cool breeze after a hot night is a godsend. More than that, it’s a delight. Such a remark brings up the question of whether a delight is more, or less, than a godsend.  I would say more, but I don’t want to take up the question now. It would spoil the delight.

This morning my delight was compounded by the character of the task I’d gone outside to perform. It was the most pleasurable of all gardening tasks: to divide plants we already have and rearrange them in the garden. It’s good for the garden, good for the plants … and it’s free!

Earlier this spring, as usual, I cut back quite a bit on our buckthorn forest. I suppose we should have removed it entirely a long time ago, but it has never produced berries, and it served a purpose: it supported the grape vines that emerged, year in and year out, from its shadows.

This spring I did an especially good job of entwining last year’s vines through the arch of the garden gate, looking forward to an effect similar to the faux-arbors in old-fashioned Italian restaurants. (Vescio’s. Mama Rosa’s. Mama D’s. Where have they gone?)

However, a few days ago I noticed that all the grape-vines were dead. That was bad news. I attributed their demise to a fungus that had appeared on the main stalk, Fusicolla merismoides (commonly called "deer vomit fungus"). But as it turns out, that slimy, neon orange goo is harmless.  

The good news was that the buckthorn forest no longer served any useful purpose. So I set about the task of hacking it down, sawing off the stumps and digging out the roots. It was hard work, and I’m well aware that we’ll be pulling out buckthorn sprouts for years to come. But when I was done, we had a fairly large chunk of land—maybe six feet square—to replant however we chose.

We discussed a variety of options and finally concocted a vague plan involving pagoda dogwoods, day lilies, and hostas, all of which we have in abundance, along with a hydrangea that’s been in our “formal” backyard garden even since we moved in, getting smaller every year.

New Grapes

While removing the buckthorn, I noticed that the grapes had reseeded in a few places, and I moved those feeble sprouts to the base of a metal trellis that was leaning against our neighbor’s fence. I also came upon a forsythia that had disappeared into the buckthorns years ago. It's a shapeless specimen, but we'll keep it around until we think of something better. 

I also took pleasure in handling the dead vines. Their sinuous strength is remarkable, and it’s easy to see how useful they would have been for boatmaking, goat-pen fencing, and basketry, back in the days before synthetic materials were invented.  For a split-second I thought about hunting up my copy of John Seymour’s The Forgotten Crafts: a practical guide to traditional skills. But the moment passed.

I have no recollection of what color the day-lilies are that I rescued from under the Amur maples. They never bloomed in that mediocre location. Time will tell. Maybe.

There's plenty of work still to do. But I don't call this work. And we now have a new garden zone tucked behind the volunteer cherry orchard we've been grooming. Delights of gardening! I just might bring a chair out there and enjoy an entirely new perspective on the back yard, 

Sonny Rollins and Me

Sonny Rollins died the other day at 95. I grew up listening to his sometimes tender but more often churlish and irascible sound. I liked him, but I struggled to find an album of his that I really liked.

He came to town in the early seventies to play the Whole Coffeehouse in the basement of the U of Minnesota’s Coffman Union. There might have been thirty tables spread out in front of the stage. That’s the thing about jazz: world-class talent, yet very few people actually “dig” the music. As if Placido Domingo were doing a recital at your local Punch Pizza.

It was a memorable show, especially Rollins’ highly rhythmic rendering of a calypso number called “St. Thomas.” He stretched out for close to ten minutes and would have gone farther, I think, if some idiot in the back row hadn’t shouted out “HoHoHo.”

I heard him again, years later, at the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis as part of a “supergroup” tour with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. Sure, it was good. But it’s better when the ceiling’s low, you’re twenty feet from the bandstand, and everyone in the group isn’t trying to be a star.

Throughout his career, Rollins struggled to remain creative, choosing to go out on a limb, or muddy the waters, or rough up the texture, time and again, rather than return to the familiar riffs and changes of the post-bop world—the riffs and changes that most jazz aficionados love. In this he differed from his near contemporary Sonny Stitt, who seemed to come out with a new album every three months. Rollins quit playing for years at a time, famously practicing late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, near his apartment on the Lower East Side.  

The legend I grew up with was that Rollins was freaked out by the appearance of “free jazz,” and especially by the exploratory sound of John Coltrane, who seemed to be usurping his position as “best tenor sax” in the minds of many listeners. The first album of his that I owned, East Broadway Run Down, contained a twenty-minute track with quite a bit of upper-range squealing—Rollins’s attempt to join in the movement toward “freedom” and noise. I found it embarrassing.

The album’s B-side had a twelve-minute Rollins original, “Blessing in Disguise,” full of repeated angular rhythms, and a ballad, “We Kiss in the Shadows.” Good stuff. But I'm not sure dropping the piano was such a good idea.

It’s true that Rollins’ star seemed to fade as Coltrane’s grew brighter. It’s a classic trope, though the details don’t quite fit. In his recent book, Three Shades of Blue, jazz historian James Kaplan takes a closer look at the critical juncture when trumpeter Miles Davis replaced Rollins with Coltrane in his ever-evolving ensemble.

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. Kaplan quotes trumpeter Wallace Roney:

One night [Miles] 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 told the story to Roney) “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. 

So much for the details. The fact remains that 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," he told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....”

Rollins also played with Monk. Did his music develop? I don’t know. I don’t think that playing with the Rolling Stones helped him much. I could be wrong.

When I feel a yen to listen to Rollins, I’m likely to return to his albums from the 1950s: Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, The Sound of Sonny, and a great Dizzy Gillespie album called Sonny Side Up featuring Rollins and Sonny Stitt as sidemen.

Are these his best albums? I couldn’t say. They just happen to be the ones I have.

One of my favorites among his tracks is a rendition of “My Reverie,” a boppish version of a big band number based on a famous tune by Claude Debussy. I find the restraint with which Rollins nurses the development moving, and appropriate to this solemn occasion.

You can listen to it here.

    

 

 

Doors Open Minneapolis 2026

On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.

We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D. Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse, Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.

The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement, from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.

The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”

The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the North Loop, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Lindsay Brothers Building, the jazz club Berlin, Origami, the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.

It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling. 

“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”

“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator, to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the refrigerator.”

Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a foot-wide plexiglass tube.

A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.

Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.

Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.   

From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.

The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.

The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.

Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all that easy, however.  

Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10^th Street Bridge to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.

I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.

As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!” 

The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was Clay Squared, a custom tile manufacturer fitted with electric kilns and all sorts of tools for creating ceramic tiles. Down the hall was the studio/classroom of Layl McDill, a polymer clay artist who was hand-shaping beads and buttons for an upcoming class. We waxed nostalgic for a minute or two about the Play-Dough Fun Factory sets we both fiddled around with at kids. Layl went on to make a career out of the artform.

Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, set on the hillside of a tony neighborhood the Walker Art Center. Lots of nice landscapes and prints ... but a little out of our price range. The smallish exhibition rooms were crowded, but programming director Victoria Keith took the time to draw my attention to the subtle works of plein air master Joshua Cunningham.   

A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered through an extensive display of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to spot.

"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I got it on eBay."

We took the long way home, north on Lyndale, west on 36th Street past the tulips in Lakewood Cemetery, north along the shores of Bde Maka Ska, then a meandering route up the parkway past Cedar Lake. 

We were taking our time, relishing the wonderful afternoon, and also the richness of our fine urban world.