My Brief Encounter With Musician/Historian John Cohen. RIP.

When the news of John Cohen’s death arrived last week, it sent me back to a quality visit we had five years ago. I was writing about the opening of the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, and he was there to help launch the museum with an exhibit of his photographs of Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Here was a man whose own musical history — as a member of the pioneering New Lost City Ramblers — would be impressive enough. But John’s career as a musicologist, photographer and documentary maker expanded his footprint greatly. I’d never met him before, so I am grateful to have encountered his gentle style and the wealth of his experience. Also glad to have preserved this small moment on video (below), where he talks about shooting Dylan for the first time in 1962:

A few months later John’s book including many of those pictures on display came out. Its title is more poignant now: Here and Gone. His books and music certainly are worth seeking out. I’m glad I got turned onto Amanda Petrusich’s insightful piece about him and his discovery of a noted banjo player that ran in The New Yorker a few years ago, actually the year following this video. Check it out here:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-discovery-of-roscoe-holcomb-and-the-high-lonesome-sound

I don’t know how I missed it then, but Petrusich has become my new favorite writer at the magazine. Our interests seem to overlap frequently (see her recent appreciation of the late Robert Frank).

Bringing It All Back Home: Reconnecting With Dylan and Dylanology

The World of Bob Dylan (photos above, from left): A conference poster; keynote speaker Greil Marcus; exhibits at the Gilcrease Museum include visual art works (drawings, portraits, sketches) by Dylan, and “Shakespeare’s in the Alley,” an installation of hand-lettered banners of Dylan lyrics by Skye, a Minnesota artist; Jeff Fallis, of Georgia Tech, delivers a paper on Dylan and James Baldwin; the writer Robert Polito discusses the Bob Dylan Archives with Michael Chaiken, curator of the collection; music critic Ann Powers; Laura Tenschert, a panelist and host of a London radio show on Dylan; panelist Nicolette Rohr on “Them Screamin’ Girls”; Roger McGuinn.

By Steve Paul

(c) 2019

Ninety minutes of rare concert footage. Deeply researched scholarly papers on poetry, art, song-making and mystery. Non-stop chatter on the nature of Bobness. This was the World of Bob Dylan, a symposium in Tulsa into which I immersed myself for the better part of four days.

Why? Because. Why Tulsa? Good question, but easy answer: A few years ago a broad-minded and very wealthy local foundation acquired Bob Dylan’s voluminous archives (manuscripts, photographs, recordings, etc.) and arranged a partnership with a handful of institutions to preserve them and make them accessible to serious researchers and, eventually, to the public in the form of an exhibition center still on the drawing boards.

So Tulsa, already the home of the attractive and important Woody Guthrie Center, with its public exhibitions and researchable archives, now is fast becoming the center of the Bob Dylan world, or at least that part of the world, populated by grey-bearded scholars and completist acolytes, that leads one to spend every waking hour in the mist of Dylan’s music and contemplating his vast myths and mysteries.

For as long as I’ve been listening to Dylan -- more than half a century, that is -- it was sobering to discover how little I really knew about him. He has been famously slippery about his life, creative consciousness and working methods except as they might be revealed (or not) in his work. He has been an artist of many guises — folk singer, poet-prophet, rock star, recluse, spiritual seeker, crooner, and, now, protector of his own enterprise as artist, song-writer and non-stop, touring performer. As much as I tuned my ears to his greater periods, and the formative cultural moments that helped to shape my own way of being and listening, over the years I drifted on and off of Dylan’s trail, so my grasp on the details remained tenuous at best.

So here I was surrounded by experts and obsessives who could itemize every time he altered a lyric or tell you which woman Dylan may have been singing about in this song or that or had seen him in concert, say, 67 times in the last 20 years or had thoughts about what he meant when he sang “How do you feel…?” There was the fund manager and harmonica player who could rattle off every recording on which Dylan picked up a mouth harp and how he played it. Or the young London woman, Laura Tenschert, who produces a radio show on Dylan and argues quite rightly that, first, how we think about Dylan has largely been shaped by generations of white male critics, and, second, we need to hear more from women and people of color on his work, influence and legacy.

As it happened, and not so unexpectedly, the audience for these proceedings was near totally white and predominantly male. Still, it was gratifying to hear young female Ph.D. candidates offering important takes on Dylan studies. One explored the Nobel laureate’s literary romanticism (see Emerson and Rimbaud). Another looked into pop-cultural myths about “screaming young women” and gender bias in the realm of music fandom in the 1960s. Regretfully, I missed a panel of three papers on Dylan and Native American trickster tales and discussions of the mostly overlooked role played by female African-American singers in Dylan’s gospel-influenced period of the 1980s. A presentation on Dylan and James Baldwin, who intersected once at a public event in New York, drew illuminating parallels between their respective voices in the civil rights movement, circa 1963.

Among the best-known presenters, the deep-think pop critic Greil Marcus discussed Dylan in the context of the blues. Dylan drew from that distinctly African-American source material for the album that announced his arrival as a folk singer in 1962, and 30 years later he returned to it in a haunting, evolutionary way on “Time Out of Mind.” The NPR music critic Ann Powers traced Dylan’s long career of myth-making and trend-setting through a series of self-conscious changes in his bodily image that, she maintained, reflected social movements, lifestyle upheavals and gender fluidity in the music world and beyond.

Roger McGuinn, the guitarist and co-founder of the Byrds, didn’t reveal much of substance about Dylan per se – did you know he was quite a skier? -- when he took the stage on the last conference night to talk about his own career and sing a few tunes. McGuinn’s association with Dylan dates to early 1965, when his band recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The Byrds’ version of the song became the first Dylan-written pop hit and usually is credited with jump-starting the folk-rock sound. McGuinn played on the Dylan soundtrack for the movie “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973). And two years later, Dylan recruited McGuinn to join the Rolling Thunder Revue (see the new Martin Scorcese docu-fantasy of that 1975 tour, now gloriously streaming on Netflix). “It was,” he said, “the best two-month party I’d ever been to.”

The Tulsa conference lasted only four days, and it hardly generated the carnival atmosphere that Dylan spun for Rolling Thunder. But, for me at least, it laid the groundwork for much further exploration and for living more deeply with Dylan and his music.

Going all in again with a four-day immersion among the Folk

I’m on the returning-home side of the Folk Alliance International conference in Montreal. It was my sixth annual immersion into the global music gathering, which unites an uncommonly diverse collection of people through the power of song. You can measure its value by way of any number of fronts: Discovery, preservation and promotion of cultural traditions, inventive reworkings of those traditions, nostalgia, memory and celebration of craft – be it instrumental mastery or the writing of songs. All of those things defined my Folk Alliance experience once again. 

I’d gotten hooked during the last five years of conferences held in Kansas City. I found it in part to be a place of hope and determination for hundreds of young musicians who have turned their passion for music into their life’s path. Until you walk the hotel halls late at night in the midst of a kind of musical speed dating extravaganza, you might not get the full picture. There was more than one moment when I wondered about the life-span of an emerging musician’s career. How long does it take to convince someone they have or have not found an audience for their music? I’d be curious to learn whether anyone has studied the subject. Then again, when you have the voice and the song-writing vision of some of the reigning superstars of folk, the answer is self-evident. Joni Mitchell, who, as a Canadian, was a guiding spirit in absentia of this conference, recently turned 75 and her lifetime’s work was duly celebrated in a Los Angeles concert last fall. Eric Andersen, who turned 76 here the other day, has been at it for nearly 60 years, though his rich, deep-amber voice is not always what it once was. After Livingston Taylor announced from the stage one night that he first began performing 50 years ago, I was able to tell him, that, why yes, I saw him for the first time 50 years ago, in one of the free Sunday concerts on the Cambridge Common where I fanned my folkie, guitar-picking flame. 

Some of my favorite Folk Alliance experiences, aside from the comfort of memory lane, involve discovering new sounds and ancient ones for the first time. The conference highlighted numerous indigenous cultures, including musicians from all across the vast continent. Not a day went by without a welcome message that included the acknowledgement that this piece of riverside Canada was “unceded territory” of the Kahnawake Mohawk, a gesture of an ongoing reconciliation project to amend for centuries of imperial genocide and cultural suppression. Typical of the contemporary indigenous performers was singer-songwriter Adrian Sutherland, who, along with his own songs, covers (Canadian) Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and adds a verse in his native Cree dialect (find it on YouTube). Buffy Sainte-Marie was handed an award for being who she is as a musician and political activist practicing and stirring controversy at least as long as I’ve been listening to folk. Another northern Canada surprise was the punkish trio of Josh Q and the Trade-Offs, who rocked a small hotel room packed with fans.

It seemed like an honor to encounter the world of Inuit music, which combines drumming, dance and the tradition of throat-singing from the far north. A performance by the ensemble Arctic Song was a revelation. But beyond that, hang around long enough and it’s possible to learn something, as I did in a conversation with a Canadian ethnomusicologist and during a seminar session led by two throat-singing practitioners. For one thing, the art is not ritualistic or spiritual. It seems to have stemmed from women in the culture, who had time to fill at home when their men were off fishing and hunting. For some it was body language that bonded them with their babies. It also became an aspect of play and competition, enough so that some scholars consider the music to be not singing per se but “throat games.” I can’t begin to describe the sound in words other than it combines breath, rhythmic vibrations and guttural expressions that reflect the natural and animal lives surrounding the people of the Arctic or Canadian tundra. I loved the description of one song that suggested that if one painted the sound of the wind the music would stem from that.

As if that weren’t discovery enough, it was rather eye-opening to learn that Arctic throat-singing had no relation to the throat-singing I’d encountered over the years from some Central Asian cultures. And sure enough, a throat-singing trio from Tuva in the Russian Federation was on hand to emphasize the point. Their performance was astounding and thrilling in the moment.

Folk Alliance creates community and friendships in abundance. After an evening of multiple showcase concerts, the action turns to three throbbing floors of the host hotel with poster-lined hallways and room after room of private concerts that run, officially, until about 3 in the morning, though often much beyond that. Musicians can play to an audience of one or to an impenetrable crowd, and it all ebbs and flows as players trade off every 20 to 30 minutes. Some rooms are corporately sponsored, by record labels, agents or cultural organizations. Some become ad hoc house concerts. Serendipity rules. I don’t usually feel guilty slipping out of a room when the music doesn’t move me. And it’s rewarding to come across musicians whose sound I wanted to hear more than once and who didn’t mind at all that I showed up to their private showcases like a regular. Among those now on my radar and playlists are the jazz-inflected duo of Jenna Mammina, a singer, and Rolf Sturm, a guitar phenom; the singer-songwriter duo of Freebo (the onetime bassist for the likes of Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne) and Alice Howe; Sam Lynch, a dramatically expressive young woman from Vancouver, B.C.; Melanie Brulée, a high-energy, country-fied singer and songwriter from Toronto; and the Black Horse Motel, a band from Philadelphia that features hard-driving songs fueled by dobro, fiddle and a drip-painted cello.

Jenna Mammina had never met Reggie Harris before, but her guitarist knew him and got him to join her in a song — George Harrison’s “Give Me Love.” This turned out to be a miracle photo, snapped as they sang the last bar.

More serendipity brought a stirring solo session by singer-songwriter Maya de Vitry, now of Nashville, whom I’d heard in previous years with her band the Stray Birds; a global jam session that accrued around the harp and voice of Kansas City performer Calvin Arsenia; and a totally unexpected rendition of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes” by the joint forces of two guitar trios, one from Los Angeles, one from Montreal. Yes, almost anything goes at Folk Alliance.

Other choice moments came from hearing the slide-guitar blues of John Kay, better known perhaps as the founding voice of the ‘60s band Steppenwolf, and of Rory Block. And then to hear them speak, in separate sessions, about their careers. Kay had a fine anecdote about defeating the local censors in Virginia during a performance of “The Pusher.” Block, as a teen-ager growing up in Greenwich Village, had met bluesmen like Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and the Rev. Gary Davis. But her slide playing took on new dimensions when, a few years later, she paid close attention to Bonnie Raitt. May the circle forever be unbroken.

A few more prominent spirits hovered over the long weekend. Foremost was Leonard Cohen, who hailed from Montreal. But also: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose give-peace-a-chance “bed-in” was commemorated 50 years to the day later – and in the very same hotel.

The Folk Alliance conference moves on next year to New Orleans then takes up residence again in Kansas City, the organization’s world headquarters, in 2021 and 2022. You can bet I’ll be there, ears and heart wide open.

Gallery photo captions (from left): Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm, Leonard Cohen, Sam Lynch, Emerald Rae, Marc Berger, Danny Schmidt, Alice Howe and Freebo, John and Yoko bed-in promo, Rory Block, John Kay, Arctic Song, Eric Andersen, Calvin Arsenia jam, Mireya Ramos, Flor de Toloache, Jim Lauderdale, Livingston Taylor, Adrian Sutherland, Beausolais with Michael Doucet, Alash Ensemble, Eliza Gilkyson, Montreal and Los Angeles guitar trios, Maya de Vitry, Black Horse Motel, Melanie Brulée (with cellist Desiree Haney of Black Horse Motel).

Secrets and Surprises at the Library for the Performing Arts

Those inclined – impelled? -- to a life of research tend to geek out in libraries. Gems of forgotten history bubble up from back rooms. Intellectual encounters with voices of the past arise from quaint, hand-written letters. And photographs open a deep connection with the humanity of a subject or the revealing details of a place. So it was on a recent behind-the-scenes tour of the Library for the Performing Arts, the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library. The library contains vast quantities of archives, and the back rooms seem like one of those English garden mazes, lined by file cabinets, shelved boxes, and old-school card catalogues.

I was among a small group of writers who was led around the place by three of the departmental curators, archivists responsible for music, theater and dance. Imagine getting a glimpse and a curatorial opinion of the ballet shoes worn by Anna Pavlova more than a century ago (photo). Or seeing what the curator described as the oldest known document of choreography in the West, a dance notebook from the court of the Medicis, circa 1453 (photo). The library includes the principal archives of Jerome Robbins, and we caught a glimpse of a rather rare slice of his memorabilia  – one of 24 accordion-fold diaries that Robbins crafted out of text and cultural imagery (no photos allowed of that). The library is planning on putting the diaries on display in an exhibit beginning in September 2018.

We saw Salvador Dali’s unrealized stage design for a production of “Romeo and Juliet” (photo). And another dance revelation occurred as we passed the model of a stage set for a George Balanchine production of “The Nutcracker” from 1964 (photo). The proscenium arch décor included floral bouquets that the designer, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, reportedly snipped out of Mother’s Day cards from Hallmark. When the stage set was finally realized, the painters meticulously reproduced those flowered images, and, it was suggested, Hallmark probably never received a dime of royalties.

The foundation of the library’s musical collection is classical – I mean, where else can you fawn over a lock of Beethoven’s hair (photo)? But its jazz collection is constantly growing, too. One quirky document: A feature interview of the jazz aficionado George Avakian from the Horace Mann School newspaper under the byline of ... Jack Kerouac (photo). After leaving Lowell, Mass., in 1939, Kerouac spent a year at the New York school before beginning his college education at Columbia. Kerouac was not exactly at his peak. Here’s a little exchange with Avakian, who apparently also once attended Horace Mann and wrote for the newspaper:

“Knowing that you were once editor-in-chief of the Horace Mann RECORD,” we told him, “we were wondering whether or not you would supply us with some jazz information.” This, with a sense of uneasiness.

 “Are you from the Record?” he asked, with a broad and disarming smile.

“Yes,” we replied, very much relieved.

“Well that’s fine,” he ejaculated with a smile. “Sit down.”

Offered here, with a smile.

Find the whole Kerouac article at the library’s online archive: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5ddc5f60-bbbf-0133-e670-00505686d14e

Behind the Scenes with the Dylan Papers in Tulsa

I've had a thing for Tulsa the last few years, ever since I wrote about the opening of the Woody Guthrie Center in what has become a vibrant arts district on the edge of downtown. Last year, one of my last columns before I retired from The Kansas City Star, was about the acquisition of the Bob Dylan archives, which are now being processed in Tulsa (here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/steve-paul/article65479467.html). This week, while making a Tulsa stop on my book tour, I got a chance to visit with the Dylan archivist, Mark Davidson. He gave me an introductory tour of the archives, showing me examples of their broad scope.

Scraps of paper with Johnny Cash's phone number and address. A business card for Otis Redding. Manuscript song lyrics in formation. ("Farewell, Angelina" ... ) Letters from the likes of Allen Ginsberg. A sweet note from George Harrison, here in its entirety: "Dear Bobbie, Thanks for Nashville Skyline, it is beautiful. Love to you all..." Photos from the Rolling Thunder tour-- Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave; Joni Mitchell, enraptured and looking up at Dylan from her front row seat at a concert. (I happen to be reading David Yaffe's new biography of Joni, which, of course, covers the odd vibrations of that tour.) The black leather jacket that Dylan wore during the shocking electric show at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. And, curiously, a large hand drum owned by the late guitarist Bruce Langhorne, which inspired Dylan to write "Mr. Tambourine Man." Rather than the familiar tambourine, this is a shallow drum like an Irish bodhran, but usually identified as Turkish. Its stretched leather has patches of dark wear, like an ancient rubbed object. Mark Davidson flipped it over and showed where a bandaid had been placed over a small split. The drum came from the Langhorne estate. The George Kaiser Family Foundation, which has funded much of the cultural expansion in Tulsa in recent years, added it to the Dylan collection, because, Davidson said, "It was a good fit."

The archives are open only to researchers, and I hope to return some day to work on a project. Work has begun into transforming a building into a Dylan museum just down the block from the Guthrie Center. And keep your ears open for further developments on the musical archives front as Tulsa and its savvy philanthropists build on a very good thing.

Sorry, no photos allowed. But here's an image of the Helmerich Center for American Research, where the Dylan archives are housed, and one of the Zarrow Building, which will become the Dylan museum.

Billy Bragg on the American roots of British music

It was great to hear Billy Bragg on Fresh Air this week. Some of us in Kansas City were lucky to hear much of this story earlier this year when he spent a few days at the Folk Alliance International conference. In one appearance he talked about the pivot point in the mid-1950s when a skiffle player named Lonnie Donergan began covering Lead Belly's "Rock Island Line." Without that, Bragg said, there'd be no Beatles, no Led Zeppelin, etc. Bragg elaborates on all this in a new book, which he told me about back then at a reception. I was excited to hear about it, and now that the book, Roots, Radicals, and Rockers, has just been published, I hope to get to it soon.

Here's a link to that the Fresh Air interview: http://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/538079082/billy-bragg-on-skiffle-the-movement-that-brought-guitar-to-british-radio

And here's a video I shot at Folk Aliiance of Bragg playing one of his better known tunes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCnGcsS3BU4

Sunday Morning Mind Expansion

Night Blooms Darkroom & Bookstore is the kind of little place that I would run if I ever went insane again and owned a bookstore, as I did two decades ago. This morning, Shawn E. Hansen (above) settled into the front of the shop for the second of five sessions to present an hour of mesmerizing music on an electronic keyboard in the guise of a hipster pipe organ. The music came in two halves: "Drones," which amounts to a steady rumble of trancelike atmosphere, and "Tapestries," which is an evolving, multi-layered piece with lyrical phrases, waves of celestial propulsion and loops of churning but wholly accessible textures. The latter half especially is very much in the mold of Philip Glass, an influence that Shawn readily acknowledges.

As it happens I sat at a table, browsing books, as he played and landed on a collection of poetry by Jorge Luis Borges. It was perfect text for the music, especially this: "I am the one who never has unraveled// the labyrinth of time, singular, plural,// grueling, strange, one's one and everyone's" (from "I Am," or "Soy" in the original Spanish, which I also read to enhance my recent exercises in the language).

To add to the experience, Shawn is dubbing audio cassettes to preserve the compositions (10 limited edition dubs per Sunday morning piece for $5 each). He'll be back for three more Sunday mornings in July, promptly at 10 a.m. To which I echo the photo: "Thank You." I plan to return.