Thursday, March 28, 2024

Maundy Thursday: 2024


"Maundy" is an Anglo-French word derived from the Latin "mandatum," meaning "commandment." On this day , also known as Holy Thursday, Christians remember the Last Supper - likely a Passover meal - and the institution of Holy Communion, Jesus's command to his disciples to love one another as He loved them, His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and His betrayal by Judas Iscariot.


Detail, The Sacrament of the Last Supper Salvador Dali, 1953




A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

                                                                           John 13:34 NIV





Go to dark Gethsemane,
Ye that feel the tempter's power;
Your Redeemer's conflict see;
Watch with him one bitter hour;
Turn not from his griefs away;
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.


See him at the judgment hall,
Beaten, bound, reviled, arraigned;
See him meekly bearing all;
Love of man His soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss;
Learn of Christ to bear the cross.


In mainstream churches, as a symbol of Christ, the altar is stripped in remembrance of his abandonment by the disciples in Gathsemane, a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives. This action prepares the congregation and chancel for Good Friday and the celebration of the day the world changed forever.






If you are interested in learning more about Salvador Dali's surreal Sacrament of the Last Supper, go here.




Sources

Photos and Illustrations: Dali painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.


Paul Whiteman: There Was A Time When America Knew Him As The King Of Jazz

 



We've had quite a few significant musical birthdays this week. The honor today is reserved for "The King of Jazz," Paul Whiteman. A strong-willed innovator and perfectionist, he became the most popular band leader in the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties. Whiteman encouraged many talented artists and composers through his interest in fusing jazz with other musical styles. He appreciated experimental music and sponsored several concerts featuring new compositions and artists. Historian Glenn T. Eskew says this about him:

Alert to the emerging style, Whiteman pioneered standardized settings of the songs, capturing the melodies on paper and leaving room for improvisation while making jazz appear "respectable" for dancing by using symphonic arrangements. Whiteman made recordings in 1920 of "Avalon" and "Whispering" songs that inspired Johnny Mercer. By 1924, in a bid to blend the "serious" with the "popular," Whiteman conducted his Palais Royale Orchestra in the world premier of George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue,' which revealed the omnipresence of syncopation. Indeed, Whiteman's various approaches to jazz gained him his crown, for he mastered a jazz-inflected light-sweet music that while never the hot music of [Louis] Armstrong nonetheless popularized the genre in the United States. From the cabaret to the symphony hall, musicians embraced the rhythm and blues of playing as Americans consumed Whiteman's liberating jazz.

In his most notable experimental concert he asked his friend and collaborator, George Gershwin, to compose a "jazz concerto" for his series of experimental music concerts. Though faced with a short performance deadline, Gershwin reluctantly agreed. In two weeks, he completed the new piece and titled it Rhapsody in Blue. After two weeks of orchestration and eight days of rehearsal, Whiteman premiered the piece at the Aeolian Hall in New York in February 1924 with Gershwin at the piano.

Today Rhapsody in Blue enters its second century beloved throughout the world but Whiteman is all but forgotten as the man behind the music. There is a backstory here worth knowing. After all, Whiteman gave early exposure to some of the best, including Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, Bunny Berigan, Jack Venuti, Bix Beiderbecke, and Jack Teagarden. Many people today won't recognize most of these names but they should be aware that these unknowns helped shape much of the music - especially jazz and vocal pop - we hear today.

Here's an important interview with Whiteman about Gershwin and the creation of Rhapsody in Blue. It's well worth every second of talk and includes about three minutes of music:





Whiteman was quite the showman as can be viewed in this excerpt from the 1930 film, King of Jazz. The film was the first to use a prerecorded studio soundtrack "made independently of the actual filming." It was also one of the earliest Technicolor films.




And we can't let Whiteman's birthday pass without an opportunity to hear his celebrated orchestra performing the popular music that made them famous. This 1928 recording features 25 year-old Bing Crosby singing his first number one hit. Crosby would go on to shape popular singing for the rest of the century.




That's happy music. Tap your feet, did you?




Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Whiteman photo, photographer uncredited, archive.org

Text:
Glenn T. Askew, Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World, University of Georgia Press: Athens and London, 2013


Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Sarah Vaughan: So, So Sassy

 

Sarah Vaughan, 1946


The American jazz singer, Sarah Vaughan, known as "Sassy" and "The Divine One," performed for almost fifty years. She was not only a singer but also a magician who could wring a full spectrum of rmotion from a song with her warmth and three-octave range. Indeed she was a symphony of sound. The introductory paragraph of her Wikipedia entry quotes the music critic, Scott Yanow, as saying she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century." When coupled with the greatest of songwriters from 1930 on I think she could be matched only by Ella Fitzgerald for her vocal magic in popular music and jazz. Thirty-two years after her passing fans still wait for a singer who can approach her amazing voice. I must say that Jane Monheit has done a fine job of blending the Vaughan recipe with her own spices to bring us much of the magic we remember so well. Here is Sassy performing the signature song from late in her career, Send In The Clowns:






That is performance in song. It was recorded twenty years before Auto-Tune and other pitch correction and vocal tuning software could turn tone deaf studio metrosexuals and assorted hotties of any sex into so-called stars. We've come down a long way in what passes for both talent and popular music over the past generation. Of course, there are exceptions but for the most part real singing has become subordinate to other aspects of presentation, performance, and spectacle. And once more I ask the question, "Where is jazz, a genre birthed in the United States?" It is alive in many small markets across the country but it remains a small portfolio in the financial departments of our corporate music industry.

So as the Jane Monheits, Diana Kralls and others keep jazz alive let us honor the memory of one of its greatest interpreters, Sarah Vaughan, who was born on March 27, 1924, in Newaark, New Jersey. For another taste of her magic, here she is near the close of her career performing Misty.






A three octave vocal range, no Auto-Tune, singular perfection.






Sources


Photos and Illustrations:
opening photo, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Frost And Williams: A Birthday For Literary Opposites


They share March 26 as a birthday and the status of literary icons but that is about all Robert Frost (1874- 1963) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) have in common.


Robert Frost in 1941


The Academy of American Poets has this to say about Frost:

Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony
Read the full article here.


Tennessee Williams in 1964



The Public Broadcasting Service's American Masters series online biography of Williams opens with this paragraph:

He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights in American history.

The full article on Williams is available
here.


Frost left us with "The Road Not Taken," "The Gift Outright," "After Apple Picking," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "Fire and Ice," "Mending Wall," and many more poems that we heard even in elementary school.

Williams contributed The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and scores of other works. For most of us those titles were reserved for adulthood.

Today Frost and Williams are bound by a birthday and that's about as close as we'll ever find them. Together their American experience may be so broad as to admit no exception. Let the research begin!



Sources:


Photos and Illustrations:
Frost photo, Frank Palumbo, World Telegraph, Library of Congress, New York-World Telegraph and Sun Collection;
Williams photo, Orlando Fernandez, World Telegraph, Library of Congress, New York-World Telegraph and Sun Collection



Monday, March 25, 2024

Flannery O'Connor: A Southern Writer Captures Transformation On The Road To Salvation


One of the most significant writers in America, Flannery O'Connor, was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She spent her early childhood as a devout Catholic there in a home just off Lafayette Square. The square features moss-draped live oaks, colorful azaleas, and an abundance of birds, all sitting in the shadows of the towering spires of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Things haven't changed much in this beautiful space. It still has its interesting spectrum of regular visitors: fast-walking pedestrians, lovers holding hand, lunch hour diners, retirees enjoying the benches, touring families, people waiting for the bus, runners and bikers, and children at play. And every day for the last 120 years, the cathedral casts its shadow over the O'Connor home while its bells remind the people of God's grace and their obligations as His children. I think as long as you can visit Lafayette Square, say on any pleasant Sunday afternoon, you can know O'Connor well.




Her family moved to Atlanta in 1938, where her father was diagnosed with lupus, a chronic disease involving the destruction of healthy tissue by the body's immune system. Shortly thereafter they moved 100 miles southeast to her mother's family home in Milledgeville. When her father died in 1941, O'Connor moved a few miles north of town to her uncle's farm where she lived with her mother. Eventually, the farm would be called Andalusia, and it became a refuge following her own diagnosis with lupus in 1950. At Andalusia, she would raise her beloved peacocks and weave her experiences and memories of people, ethics, morals, and religion into her novels, Wise Blood, and The Violent Bear It Away, and scores of short stories published in two collections in her lifetime, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her Complete Stories appeared posthumously in 1971.


Main house at Andalusia


O'Connor's office-bedroom at Andalusia


Lupus, an incurable long-term autoimmune disease, took Flannery O'Connor from us in 1964 when she was in her 39th year. You can visit both her childhood home and Andalusia thanks to foundations that preserve the landscapes and memories she cherished. And, thanks to her, you can visit the South anytime by simply opening one of her books.

Many years ago the management at Andalusia removed scores of the offspring of O'Connor's beloved peacocks to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, a large Trappist estate about two and a half miles from our ridge top home. At that time the area was still quite rural and the peacocks flourished in and around the monastery grounds.




Thirty years ago on quiet evening when the wind was right it was not unusual for us to hear them calling faintly in the distance. Eventually, they were removed and for some years now there has been no call to break the silence. But we do remember those urgent and sometimes fearful calls in the dusk. Today the woods remain a gallery of sounds. Some we know well. Others we may not recognize so easily. Those of us who know O'Connor's work well may find it difficult to distinguish between the peacock, the author's veil, or the rich spirit world that inhabits her American South. After all, from the ancient traditions of the Catholic world the peacock is the symbol of immortality.




I think it is safe to say that while the South is significantly less Christ-centered than it was in O'Connor's time, it most certainly remains Christ-haunted. The Southerner who isn’t convinced of it is very much afraid if not haunted by the fact that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. And visitations by ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. In O'Connor's dance with the grotesque her characters and their angst cast strange shadows. The characters may fade away. Their shadows never fade away.





Sources

Photos and Illustrations:

Childhood photo, Andalusia Farm, Inc. Photo courtesy of the Flannery O'Connor Collection, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, Georgia.
House, deepsouthmagazine.com
Bedroom, photo courtesy of Emily Elizabeth Beck
Adult portrait, openculture.com


Text:

Flannery O'Connor entry, Sarah Gordon, et al, georgiaencyclopedia.org
quotation from Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, New York; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969


Charlie Russell: He Shaped Our Impressions Of The American West

 

When the Land Belonged to God                 C. M. Russell, 1914


In 2009 my wife and I made a detailed journey along the Missouri River following the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06). It took us from the mouth of the river to its headwaters at the continental divide on the Montana-Idaho border. One of our destinations was the very appropriately named city of Great Falls, Montana. The Lewis and Clark expedition reached this same series of forbidding obstacles to navigation in June 1805 and spent a month portaging around them. A century later, the city that grew up around the falls was the home to artist and writer, Charles M. Russell, one of the finest interpreters of the landscape of the American West, its Indian inhabitants, and the cowboy.


Photo portrait of Russell taken around 1900


Russell was born on March 19, 1864, in St. Louis, Missouri, and developed a fascination with the West as a young boy. It never left him. When his parents sent him to boarding school in New Jersey to overcome his obsession, he merely filled his notebooks with sketches of cowboys and Indians until his parents relented and sent him to the frontier with a trusted friend. As a participant-observer, Russell captured Montana in a brief period of perhaps thirty years when boundaries separating the sublime natural setting, Native American culture, and western frontier cowboy culture began to dissolve. In that period his work developed depth and detail and by 1910 he was well-known among art circles from coast to coast. In addition, he had a huge influence on the interpretation of western culture in print and especially in film making. For many years he was the nation's highest earning artist. When he died in 1926, he left a legacy of thousands of illustrations, paintings, sculptures, letters and other material documenting the three themes. Much of that work is displayed today at the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls. Within the museum, visitors can see the nature of the Northern Rockies and High Plains and the full range of cultures of those who lived and worked in this beautiful and challenging place. One can see and feel the full range of Russell's personality, from serious to whimsical, by exploring his home and studio.


Russell's Christmas greeting in 1914


Best wishes for your Christmas 
Is all you get from me.
 'Cause I ain't no Santa Claus— 
Don't own no Christmas tree. 
But if wishes was health and money 
I'd fill your buck-skin poke, 
Your doctor would go hungry 
An' you never would be broke.



In the last century, any boy or girl who played "cowboys and Indians," enjoyed stories, illustrations, and films and televisions programs with western themes did so  tgrough Russell's interpretation of his experience. Today, he remains a fascinating example of the reality and mythology of a man who lived his dreams, captured the soul of a vanishing culture, and planted its seeds for others to nuture in their own way. And for citizens of the United States, he is a national treasure. For Big Sky Montana, he is a beloved favorite son.









If you ever find yourself in Great Falls, Montana, pay Charlie a visit. You will not be disappointed.






Sources




Photos and Illustrations:
When the Land Belongs to God, replica, Montana Historical Society, public domain
portrait, public domain
Christmas greeting, Montana Historical Society, public domain


Text:
C. M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, Montana
wikipedia.org
C. M. Russell and the American West, An Unfinished Work, Montana Public Broadcasting Service

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday 2024




The Bible pictured above served my family well beginning in the 1890's. As one of my earliest memories I recall my parents carrying it every Sunday to Mount Calvary Lutheran Church a few blocks from our home. It's too fragile for use these days and now occupies an honored place in our family archive. The book becomes special to me on Palm Sundays. Among the near eighty years of memorabilia inside are a dozen or so treasured palm crosses from my childhood.

Today is Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday, the last Sunday of Lent, and the beginning of Holy Week. On this day, Christians around the world commemorate the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It is also a time to remember the Passion history as preparation for the Holy Week experience. Readings for the day recall the anointing of Jesus, the institution of the Lord's Supper, the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus's trials before Caiaphas and Pilate, the crucifixion of Jesus, and His burial.






All glory, laud, and honor to you Redeemer King,
To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring.

You are the king of Israel and David's royal Son,
Now in the Lord's name coming, our King and Blessed One.

The company of angels are praising you on high;
Creation and all mortals in chorus make reply.

The multitude of pilgrims with palms before you went,
Our praise and prayer and anthems before you we present.

To you, before your Passion, they sang their hymns of praise.
To you, now high exalted, our melody we raise.

Their praises you accepted; accept the prayers we bring,
Great author of all goodness, all good and gracious King.

All glory, laud and honor to you, Redeemer King,
To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring.


                                   Theodulf of Orleans, 750/760-821





On the Sunday following this Passion Week we celebrate a 2000 year-old event that changes everything.





Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
early 20th century postcards from the family archives


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