World Music Releases: Neotolia, Janka Nabay, Nie Project, Rakkatak

 

Jazz can be too complex for its own good and come off more as a personal pursuit than something for mass consumption. But when it’s good, it’s transportive. Turkish-born/Boston-based vocalist Nazan Nihal and pianist Utar Artun are amazing in their own right, and when they join forces with world musicians from places such as China, Iraq, Finland, the USA, and the Near East, they are spectacular. Neotolian Song mixes Turkish song, originals, and jazz in an ethereal West-meets-East brew of everything from piano, cello, violin, guitar, and drums to Chinese flute and erhu (two-stringed fiddle) to Turkish ney (flute), oud (mandolin-like lute) and qunun (zither). Nihal’s vocal range is so wide that on the title track her high notes approach the pain threshold. By contrast, “Manastir T” is as delicate as a glass figurine, and her take on an ancient melody in “Lydianic” is bird-like. Thoughtful arrangements abound. The strings in “G + El Kuruttum” cry out like a muezzin over Artun’s rain-like piano notes. “Pendulum” swings like its namesake, with dancing vocals, pulsing instruments, and big cascades of piano; “Rondo Afro Turca” mixes vocal thrums and scat with a tune reminiscent of breezy Latin jazz; and “Degmen Benim” scurries with the suggestiveness of a tune chasing itself. This is a triumphant release. ★★★★★

@nazannihal #utarartun

Do you want to dance? Ahmed Janka Nabay fled the civil wars of Sierra Leone and now lives in the United States, but he’s still the foremost modernizer of Bubu music, which began life as ritual witchcraft music for the Temne peoples, but now beguiles in a different way; it’s played during Ramadan! Nabay takes it to the party on Build Music. Although songs like “Sabonay 2016” bear serious messages such as women’s empowerment and peace, the instrumentation would be more at home in a discotheque. Traditional Bubu melodies use bamboo flutes and blown metal pipes, but Nabay’s band mostly uses Casio keyboards. In fact, most of the album consists of three or four repeated notes that sound as if they could have been made on a child’s melodic. Add consistent beats and Nabay’s voice, which is at turns growly, polished, or winsomely sexy and is backed by a female chorus. “Santa Monica” is another that touches on weighty matters—his harassment by local police—but has a sunny feel. Most of the album is even lighter—“Bubu Dub” with its repeated lines “My baby loves to dance/she likes to sing… all she does is jump and dance;” or the Caribbean-like “Stop Jealous” with decidedly non-poetic lyrics such as: “Oh my baby, I really love you… Baby I love you… I love… My baby I love you.” Okay, so don’t look for a Nobel literature prize, but if you want to sweat and shake, this one will answer. ★★★

#bubugang

The world needs more folks like the dozen musicians in The Nile Project. Their new album Jinja is a follow-up to 2013’s Aswan and like it, seeks to unite and educate peoples who live in the eleven nations along the 4,258-mile-long Nile. The group brings together musicians from Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda, sings in six languages, harmonizes voices, and blends various lyres, harps, flutes, and guitar styles. The sound is, at heart polyrhythmic and the percussion a complex marvel. That such things happen amidst songs that at first listen seem simple is testament to the musicianship. The harp on “Mulungi Munange” is so light that it evokes a balalaika, but suddenly electric instruments intrude with a big bump and female ensemble singing powers a piece in which the percussionists pound through, across, and into the melody. Later a male voice is added, but it’s like a knife slicing into the mix. The result is edgy, filled with nervous energy, and pop-like in feel without being like any pop you’ve ever heard. All sorts of modes emerge: the North Africa ambience of “Allah Bagy” with its trance-like and praiseful lyricism; the improv horns of “Tenseo” with a dramatic male voice that would be operatic were it not for its microtonal slides; the kora/saxophone/guitar/vocal conversations in “Biwelewle” that create a hooky melody; and the emotive vocals and muscular instrumentation of “Ya Abal Wuha.” Another amazing piece is “Uruzi Nil,” which is quick-paced and scurrying and its flute/electric mix reminiscent of Jethro Tull in places, yet is also jazzy and free-spirited. Kahlil Gibran once said that, “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” The Nile Project is certainly doing its best to make that true. ★★★★★

@NileProject

#thenileproject

The term "fusion" often fails to live up to the hype. In the case of Toronto-based Rakkatak, though, it's appropriated and appropriate. The goal is to take Indian classical music, give it a contemporary twist, and knock down a few barriers along the way. The music is built around the tabla playing and occasional raga vocal scales of Anita Katakkar, and the dreamy bass of Oriana Barbato. Two women fronting an Indian music ensemble is just the start—Katakkar's heritage is Indian/Scottish/Canadian and Barbato is Chilean. Featured sitar player Rex Van der Spuy is of South African and Indian extraction and, when not manning the sitar, is a video game designer and prolific tech author. Small Pieces, Rakkatak's third CD, is as advertised—music designed to lull you into submission rather than impress through volume or showiness. "Medley" fuses a hypnotic groove with a segued cover into The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" and, like all nine tracks, takes its time in developing. Much Indian composition is built on the concept that music should "color the mind." To that end, "Dreaming" is a somnambulant stroll and "Thoughts of You" is drifty and introspective. My favorite piece is "Rain After Fire," composed in response to Western Canadian wildfires. Bass and tabla lurk in the background with quiet drama, with the sitar evoking on again/off again showers that spurt, drip, and fade to mist. Those who want a splash of loosely structured jazz should sample "XYZ" with its atonal flirtations, or the creative noodling of "Riffing on 9." ★★★★

#rakkatak

@rakkatak

#smallpieces

Rob Weir

 Note: YouTube footage and album tracks often vary in presentation stye.

Christina Baker Kline's Triumphant Look at Christina's World

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A PIECE OF THE WORLD (2017)

Christina Baker Kline

William Morrow Publishing, 325 pages.

★★★★ ½

A weathered frame house and farm buildings sit atop a timothy-covered slope, but our gaze is diverted to the lower foreground, where we see the back of a spindly dark-haired woman twisting her way up the hillside on thin arms and unmoving legs. Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is among the two or three most famous American paintings of all time, but what do we know of its subject: Christina Olson (1893-1968)? A quick search reveals that she was nearly immobile by the time Wyeth completed the painting in 1948, a victim of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, a form of muscular dystrophy. But who was Christina? What was her family life like? What did she think and dream?

Christina Baker Kline snared me with this early passage in her subject’s voice:

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn’t. Not really. He [Wyeth] wasn’t even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house from an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It’s not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He did get one thing right: Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I’ve spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me.

This lovely passage sets the tone for the life that lay beneath Wyeth’s canvas—one marked by history, family, longings, lost opportunities, and seized relationships that give Christina Olson a breathing subjectivity that not even as draftsman as skilled as Wyeth could capture.

We learn about the house—built on Hathorne* Point, Maine by Captain Samuel Hathorne II in 1743, and remodeled by generations of Hathornes, all descendants of Salem witchcraft judge John Hathorne who fled to Maine to escape the ignominy of that surname. Christina’s mother, Katie, bore Hathorne blood, though her feisty nature might have gotten her in trouble had she been born in Salem 200 years earlier. It was probably fated that she’d marry a man whose name changed from Johan Olauson to John Olson. The Olsons would have been just another big farm family with its joys and tragedies had not Andrew Wyeth arrived in 1939—a dozen years after Katie died and four since John’s passing. By then, the only Olsons left in the house were Christina and her devoted brother Alvaro.

Kline fleshes out the deeper family histories in ways that remind us that frozen images are lies. The inherent sadness of a self-sacrificing brother caring for his crippled sister in a remote part of Maine tells us nothing about the various turns in people’s lives that led to one path being chosen rather than another. MD is a progressive disease. Christina had a hard life; she fell down a lot, but she didn’t always emulate a crab to move from place to place. As we learn from the novel, she even fell in love with a summer visitor—and it wasn’t Andy Wyeth, twenty-three years her junior, whose presence in Maine began with his courtship of a different Cushing local: his future wife, Betsy James, who knew the Olsons. Andy emerges as Christina’s kindred spirit—a young man who had been sickly as a child, understood Christina’s plight, and befriended her as an equal, not an object of pity. He spent thirty summers in Cushing, coming and going as he wished to a makeshift studio in unused second-floor rooms of the Olson house.

A Piece of the World is a novel that imagines dialogue, discussions, and circumstances, but it hews closely to what is known of its subjects. Kline hails from Bangor and knows Maine life too well to sanitize it. Her prose is lovely, but it’s not rose-hued—more like the somber earth tones Wyeth used. There is something inherently honest about this, with the joys shimmering brighter in contrast to the sorrow and the lonely family cemetery beyond where Christina is posed in the painting. It is a triumphant novel which, ironically, Christina’s World was not until much later. Wyeth called it “a complete flat tire,” and the Museum of Modern Art purchased it for just $1,800. Today its value would be in the millions. Wyeth’s relationship with Christina was a greater treasure, though; when he passed in 2009, per his will he was laid to rest in the Olson graveyard.

Rob Weir

*You will find various spellings of this name, including Hathorn and Hawthorn. Colonial spelling was not standardized.  

#christinabakerkline

#bakerkline

New Stuff: Edward + Jane, Treehouse Sanctum, Steve McComick, Mark O'Connor, Dreadnaught

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Edward + Jane are actually Timothy and Emilie Carpenter, two folks who were born in Ohio, went to college in Chattanooga, married, stayed in Tennessee, and overcame the relocation blues by building an intentional family of friends. As Family We Gather is testament to the success of their endeavor. This is small gem EP in the best Americana tradition. Normally that’s just a label for those running from the term “folk music,” but in this case, it describes a music that’s a not quite folk, bluegrass, mountain music, or country but has echoes of each. It is a lovely harmony-driven EP that’s both intimate, but has a big sound. The latter is because of all those friends who now feel like family. You’ll hear lots of instruments in “We Will Meet Again,” but nothing gets in the way of their perfectly balanced harmonies. This is wholesome, energetic, goes-down-easy music. On “Days” they sing: There are things you don’t understand yet, but your family gets. And family is both who you are and who you find on the way. ★★★★

@edwardandjanemusic

Treehouse Sanctum tells about a different Jane. In "Jack and Jane" this six-piece Denver-based folk rock band personalizes the age-old question of whether boy + girl = good pair, or bad match through a catchy tune, robust instrumentation, and the sharp-edge/soft-edge vocals of Sam Rymer and Danya Lynn Uptegrove. It's one of eleven amazing songs on Vivere, which means "to live" for those of you whose Latin is as lousy as mine. This band is new to me, but now that I know, I can't get them off my playlist. You name it and they do it right—splashes of trumpet of "Chacala," punchy 1-2-3 vocal combos, a magic moment, and shifts accurately described as "hush to howl." Rymer is a gifted singer in the sense of really knowing how to use his voice effectively. On "Rest of Me," for instance, he puts one in mind of Van Morrison without channeling him. It's the way Rymer uses his voice to punch through a big mix and then let it ride with the sequencing. About those big mixes, I mean rolling Hammond B-3, brass, and percussion-enhanced big. The title track uses the tale of Paul on the road to Damascus as a foil for the moment when life takes a 180-degree turn and, if you have any doubt about this band's IQ, some of the lyrics are indeed in Latin. The way in which the song builds is a marvel, with power chords, crisp drum beats, swelling sound, and mighty vocals marking the conversion. It's the sort of song that would called "signature," were it not for the fact that they top it with"Pilot and Crew," which recounts the true tale of a World War II crew of ten shot down over Germany that endured ten months of a POW camp. Check out what they do with snippets in the opening and close, and how well they evoke an aerial melee. Want more? "Shelby" is a bluesy jazz piece built around big-production piano. This CD is a dazzler. ★★★★★

@treehousesanctum

Steve McCormick is one of those versatile "How 'ya want it?" musicians. Maybe it's because he's spent a lot of time doing sessions work in LA cranking out tunes for commercials, writing movie soundtracks (Felicity, Jack Frost), building high-end microphones, and collaborating with big name producers. Or maybe he's just eclectic. His new Noisetrade EP The Tripping Years showcases his many moods. He puts on detached hipster garb for "Say a Prayer for New York City," which unfolds to blue horns, robust bass, and attitude: Say a prayer for New York City….don't you dare show no pity…. At the other end of the spectrum is a country/pop cover of Townes Van Zandt's "At My Window," and a take on Lucinda Williams' "Fruits of My Labor" that milks emotion from keys and blue-eyed soul. In between lies the Delta/Chicago blues fusion of "Lying on the Bottom," which features grit, spit, grungy guitar and gospel-like female backup singers. Flip it again for "Hello, Hello," which is simultaneously melancholic and inviting—literally so with lyrics like: Come into my life my love/Don't you be alone. This is a really strong body of work that proves that McCormick can command the mic on his own. ★★★★

@itsmccormick

Anytime you see the name Mark O'Connor you want to pay attention. At this writing, O'Connor is about to drop Coming Home, a live CD that features his own genre-defining fiddle work with additional string work from his wife Maggie and his soon-to-be daughter-in-law Kate Lee, plus mandolin from son Forrest, standup bass from Geoff Sanders, and flat-picking from Joe Smart. How good are they? Three sample tracks told me all I need to know. "Those Memories of You" is a live track that leaves the station on a high, lonesome note and arrives with a full head of steam that needs to cool down after one of the best covers of “Johnny B. Goode” you’ve heard in ages. Among the passengers: sizzling fiddle work, newgrass jazz licks, bold slap bass, vocals delivered auctioneer-style, and sold-my-soul mandolin virtuosity. "A Bowl of Bula 14" unfurls with quick mando runs and five minutes later, you'll find yourself gasping for breath. Instruments break across each other's bows and wakes like they're in a mad dash to make it to harbor first. Do I even need to tell you that O'Connor paterfamilias is pretty damn good? "Macedonia" impresses in a different way. Forrest O'Connor uses his mando to set up musical conversations within a melodic structure punctuated by breakouts and swells. I've not even heard the rest of the album yet, but I'm already thinking five stars!

#duoviolin  

 

 Since 1996, New Hampshire's Dreadnaught—not to be confused with an Australian metal band of the same name—has cranked out what it calls “experimental prog-Americana.” It’s latest effort, Hard Chargin’, will be hailed as inventive by some and a big mess by others. I’m somewhere in the middle. Imagine a heavy metal band with the weirdness of Frank Zappa and his serious forays into jazz, and you’d get something like this. “Have a Drink With Dreadnaught” is like heavy metal cowboy music fused with pop. By contrast, “Mummies of Cobboseecontee” is a blender full of soundscapes, electronic pulses, jazz, and metal. “Bo-Leg-Ba” is both the title of a track and its entire lyric, and “Takin’ a Ride With the Fat Man (Fatta Fattta Puck Puck)” isn’t a whole lot more verbose. This one left me perplexed, as it struck me as an intriguing departure from the ordinary at one moment, and just an excuse to make loud noise the next. ★★

Wind River One of the Year's Better Films

WIND RIVER (2017)

Directed by Taylor Sheridan

Weinstein Company, 111 minutes, R (violence, rape, language)

★★★★ 1/2   

Taylor Sheridan, who penned the Oscar-nominated script for Hell or High Water, is no stranger to gritty drama set in wide-open spaces. In Wind River he tries his hand at directing and serves up a first-rate murder mystery set in the namesake mountain range and Indian reservation of central Wyoming. It is an awe-inspiring setting, but of the variety that is equal parts beautiful and terrifying. It takes a self-contained person to live amidst such isolation, bone-jarring winters, and soul-sucking poverty—the kind that knows how to suit up for subzero temperatures and dash across high altitudes in a snowmobile.

Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is a laconic U.S. Fish and Wildlife official whose tracking, hunting, and wilderness skills make him a modern-day mountain man. That handle also fits because he's not nearly as adroit in people skills and has an Indian ex-wife named Wilma (Julia Jones) to prove it. He tries to be a good dad to his young son, Casey, and a good neighbor to everyone, but he's more the kind of guy you admire than love. We suspect he's psychologically scarred, which ironically makes him one of the few Anglos that local Indians and mixed bloods respect.

Wind River is built around Lambert's discovery of the body of 18-year-old Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Chow), the daughter of Martin (Gil Birmingham) and Annie, a Native-American couple whom Lambert has known for years. It's clear from Natalie's gashed forehead and bare feet that she has been murdered, but several technicalities—including the 'official' cause of death and the part of the mountain in which she was found—cloud the investigation. Is this a matter for the tribal police—basically its chief, Ben (Graham Greene) and part-time deputies—or the feds? Not even the FBI knows for sure, which is why they send a single agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), and she's a Floridian by birth. Basically Ben and Banner are left to sort it out and both know they will need Lambert to aid them.

I mention this setup because, at this juncture, Wind River could have become a cookie cutter film. You know the type—people from differing backgrounds cooperate, learn to respect each other's differences, and beautiful relationships blossom. The fact that none of this happens in Wild River is among the things that makes it a really fine film instead of a string of high-altitude, high-toned clichés. Another is that its characters don't—if you will—break character and become snow-suited versions of Mr. Rogers. There's stuff in the back-story that won't reduce to formula: the (often warranted) distrust between locals and outsiders, the crushing despair that can break those who lack purpose or opportunity, deep wounds that might never heal, and the incompatible pulls between tradition and whatever the hell modernity means in a place so remote.

Despite its grisly scenes and forays into violence, this is a gorgeous film to watch. Sheridan uses Wyoming's grandeur to do far more than provide a pretty frame. There is the palpable sense that people such as Cory, Ben, Wilma, Martin, Annie, and others are close with their words because the land reminds them of their ephemerality. In this sense, Renner's performance is tone perfect, and Birmingham and Greene are just a half note behind. Olsen is competent as FBI agent Banner, though l longed for an ineffable something that I imagine a young Jodie Foster would have brought to the role. Truth be told, the bad guys are presented with a heavy hand that plays out too much like a Western, but Sheridan redeems himself with a memorable and satisfying vengeance scene.

Perhaps the biggest rap against the film is that Sheridan doesn't have a very good sense of timing. This film, like last year's Hell or High Water, hasn't gotten the audience it deserves. Weinstein, the film's distributor, initially backed out and then reconsidered. This pushed the film into summer release, a time in which it's hard to gain traction amidst all the mindless blockbuster-at-the-mall hype. Wind River has garnered film festival accolades, but it's in limited theater release and is easy to overlook. Don't make that mistake; this is one of the year's best films.

Rob Weir  

Cotton Mather: August 2017 Album of the Month

Has someone been boiling yew twigs, eye of newt, goat gall, and hemlock roots? Or is it just a coincidence that two books and my favorite album of the month have Salem witchcraft associations? Let’s go with coincidence, but I’m not afraid to admit that I was totally beguiled by an in-progress sampler of The Book of Too Late Changes from an Austin-based band called Cotton Mather. The historical Cotton Mather was the 17^th century minister and theologian whose treatise on the admissibility of spectral evidence had tragic consequences. The rock quartet from Texas is much more fun and no one in it actually bears the surname Mather.

The band originally formed in 1990 and made four records, including Kon Tiki in 1997, which won fandom from Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Cotton Mather broke up in 2003 and then reformed in 2012. Guitarist/vocalist Robert Harrison fronts a group that also consists of guitarist/vocalist Whit Williams, bassist Matt Hovis, and drummer Greg Thibeaux. Talk about an ambitious re-launch—Cotton Mather is now halfway through an eventual 64-song collection inspired by the Shang Dynasty’s King Wen (1099-1050 BCE). In brief, Wen sought answers from 64 I Ching readings and tossed coins to divine them. Given that gods don’t appear in the I Ching, Harrison interprets this to mean that human outcomes such as love, loyalty, betrayal, greed, etc. are more random than fated—perfect fodder for rock n’ roll.

If all of that sounds too esoteric, you could just enjoy the music, which is simultaneously evocative and fresh. You can mentally conjure swirling color projections dancing on a sea of oil in “Close to the Sun.” Harrison’s voice and the song’s ambience bear eerie resemblance to John Lennon in his LSD days. There is an acid rock/surf rock mash to “Girl with a Blue Guitar,” and Lennonesque vocals stand cheek by jowl with—and I kid you not—the punk mariachi flavors of “Life of the Liar.” There are other Beatles echoes as well, but from a different era. Both “Candy Lilac” and “Fighting Through” have the thwacky guitars and verve of the Beatles in their youthful innocence, though the dreamy pop groove of the latter is perhaps more Hollies-like. One of the really cool things about Cotton Mather is how the band reminds us of others but welds influences together in unique ways. If Devo went to a carnival and played arcade games with John Lennon, the result might be a song like “Better Than a Hit.” Infuse a heavy metal hair band with a higher collective IQ and its energy, robust power chords, and machine gun drum sprays might come out as “The Book of Too Late Changes.” The music is so much fun that it’s easy to overlook the lyrics linked to the aforementioned musings on the human condition: regret, habits of the mind, change, remembrance…. But that’s okay too. You’ll hear these things eventually as these songs are likely to be on your playlists for quite some time.

Rob Weir     

   

#cottonmather

https://www.facebook.com/CottonMatherATX/

Let's Not Trash History with Robert E. Lee

Maybe this isn't a good idea

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania souvenir shops do brisk business selling a Confederate flag t-shirt that bears the slogan, "If this flag offends you, you need a history lesson." It's hard to say which is worse, the implicit racism or the woeful ignorance of civics that equates traitorous rebellion with American patriotism. Yet, even as monuments to the Confederacy topple in the wake of the recent tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, I am troubled by the potential danger to the historical record. There's not a damn thing redeemable about the Confederate States of America, but what is lost if we obliterate its memory in favor of historical amnesia? Wouldn't it be better to repurpose these monuments rather than trash them?

The study of history must be the servant of evidence, not fashion. Let me remind you that when a statue of Abraham Lincoln appeared along Richmond, Virginia's Riverfront Canal Walk in 2003, it was routinely defaced and unrepentant protestors paraded with placards proclaiming, "Lincoln killed my ancestors." Back then, many of the same voices now demanding we tear down Confederate statues demanded protection for Old Abe. The Lincoln defamers were just as wrong as today's Confederate flag wavers, but liberals can't have it both ways. If we view history entirely through a lens of what is safe or deemed a community standard, Lincoln would have come down. And there's the matter of Richmond's famed Monument Avenue devoted to such Confederate icons as Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. In 1996, one honoring black tennis star Arthur Ashe joined them. Guess how many people wanted to blast that one from its pedestal.

Only naïve (and stupid) people believe that history is one continuous and glorious march from darkness to enlightenment. History unfolds through conflict and we are all better served when we present those tensions rather than replacing one historical monologue with another. Today's monument smashers are too uncomfortably akin to yesterday's book burners for my taste. Luckily, there are intelligent ways around this conundrum.

The first lies with repudiating both conservative and liberal censors. It's unfathomable that anyone today would pretend that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, that bondsmen were simply "workers," or that those who led the Confederacy were the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers. Moreover, it's unsustainable in a nation that in 2020 will become a minority-majority nation in its birthrate. Conservatives can either get on board with an honest reappraisal of American history, or it will be the history books—not Lincoln—that kills their ancestors. But liberals need to do some soul searching of their own. They act with equal stupidity when they wish to remove anything that upsets their delicate sensibilities. Worse, they fuel conservative causes when they ask that Woodrow Wilson's name be removed from all things Princeton because he was a racist, that they not be forced to learn about Andy Jackson because of his deplorable behavior toward Native Americans, or that history should be sanitized to conform to today's politically correct values. A major purpose of history is to show how we got to a point where we find it unsettling that white people routinely owned slaves, degraded women, mistreated workers, and held a host of other unsavory values. We should learn about this, but we cannot hold those from the past to the same values.

National Historical Battlefields offer another way to do history. When I visited Gettysburg as a kid, it was all guns, guts, and glory in what was interpreted as little more than a very bloody family spat: brother against brother. The word "slavery" appeared nowhere. That all changed after 2005, when Congress gave battlefields new marching orders: present all sides of the conflict and all interested parties, or lose funding. There's still much room for improvement, but now multi-perspective discussions hold forth at places such as Gettysburg.

We should do the same with Confederate monuments. Richmond's Monument Avenue could become a laboratory in which visitors are informed that the pro-Confederacy statues arose between the years 1890 and 1913, when Reconstruction had collapsed and Jim Crow reigned supreme. They should leave with at least a rudimentary understanding of what this means—just as they should understand the importance of the civil rights movement in making sure Ashe got to swing his racket in defiance of racism.

Any exceptions? Yes. Confederate flags and monuments should have no presence on public properties that serve the entire public. There are three Confederate monuments on the state capital grounds in Austin, Texas, for instance; these should be relocated to a museum where other aspects of the war are discussed. Can we even imagine placing swastikas on government property? How about signs that say, "Death to white people?" It's indefensible to color the general public in monochromatic racial, cultural, or religious hues. It is, by the way, why we don't have prayer in public schools or crèches on town greens. And it's why we shouldn't have sanitized history books. Like personal therapy, national healing begins in dialogue, not a lecture.

Utah Phillips: The Little "Caboose' That Did

I was shocked to find it was still there: the flanger where Utah Phillips lived when he recorded four records for Philo Records. On a rainy July day, I slogged across a muddy North Ferrisburgh, Vermont field populated by bemused llamas to pay my respects to an accidental mentor.

Sometimes we choose our mentors, sometimes they choose us, and sometimes it just happens. With Utah, it could only be the last of these. I don't think there's an adequate word in the English language to capture his special blend of spontaneity, eccentricity, cantankerousness, charm, and free-spiritedness. He could get organized, but mostly he preferred not to. I wouldn't say we were friends—more like casual correspondents who occasionally met at folk festivals and concerts. I suppose he must have planned his touring schedule and I know he had a few publicists, but it always seemed as if Phillips blew into town—even back in 1979, when first we met in Burlington and he was living in that old railroad car about 40 minutes away. This was my introduction to his colorful tales about the "Wobblies," members of the Industrial Workers of the World. 

Much as Samuel Clemens performed Mark Twain, Duncan Bruce Phillips (1935-2008) inhabited the persona of U. Utah Phillips, "the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest." Nice moniker for a guy actually born in Cleveland! He was a master storyteller because his life—though not always easy—was so rich and varied he never lacked for material. At turns he worked in a vaudeville house, did a stint in the military, organized for the Wobblies, and was a hobo of the jumping freight trains variety. He also struggled with alcoholism and nihilism for a time, which turned out to be a good baptism of fire. He eventually drifted into Salt Lake City, where he met Ammon Hennacy, an anarchist activist with the Catholic Worker Movement. Hennacy allegedly asked Phillips if he intended to do something worthwhile or be a cynical bum his entire life. Phillips ended up helping him run the Joe Hill House, a combination shelter, settlement house, and community center. All of this was great stuff for a gravely voiced guy honing his guitar skills, building up a repertoire of hobo and labor songs, and discovering that humor was a more effective weapon than cynicism. By most accounts, Rosie Sorrels (1933-2017) encouraged Phillips to take up the folk music circuit and the two became lifelong friends. 

Sometime around 1968 or 1969—rolling stones seldom circle things on the calendar—Phillips made his way to Vermont, paid $500 for an old rail car from the Central Vermont Railroad, and hauled it into the side yard of what was then Philo Records. It looks like a caboose, but a flanger is actually a retrofitted boxcar. Rolling stones don't tend to collect a lot of excess gear either. Although Utah's flanger has been empty since the 1980s, it never had much in it: clothes, a small wood stove, two berths, a bookshelf, odds and ends….  I always intended to visit him there. When I told him I was most of the way through an MA back in '79 but had never heard most of the stories he related about the Wobs, he volunteered to tell me more—as long as I promised never to call him "Mr. Phillips" again as long as either of us lived!

You know how it goes. Because it could happen anytime, it never did. I learned lots of stories from Utah, but at the aforementioned concerts and festivals, by U.S. Mail, from his records, and (later) email. I was busy as a high school teacher, he was on the road, I was probably a tad too shy, and good intentions never paved the road to North Ferrisburgh. We both moved from Vermont in the 1980s and I simply assumed his "caboose" was long gone. Then I heard of a campaign to raise money to have it moved to California, where his son Duncan hopes to convert it to a Utah Phillips museum. This time I had to see it before it was gone for good.

About the mentor thing: Utah impacted me several ways. As a historian, I learned from him the enormous power of a good tale. Unlike the born-to-embellish Phillips, I tried to make mine true, but I'm not above strategic improvements upon reality. This is especially the case when it comes to using humor. I've had lots of people who taught me more about the discipline of being a scholar, but none who made it as much fun. What's more fun that someone who ran for political office on the Sloth and Indolence ticket? Phillips made me see that those tales, songs, facts, and small struggles that seldom make the history books tell us more about what actually happened in the past than airbrushed official narratives. I wish I had Utah's knack for being simultaneously cranky and funny but, to date, I mostly do them one at a time.

I do not exaggerate when I say that he was one of three people who made me into a labor historian. I've done some things that might be remembered but in my mind, one of the coolest accomplishments is that that both Utah Phillips and Pete Seeger read a chapter of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe that's not much, but—to use the title of one of Utah's records—I'm glad I saw the old flanger and told this tale because "the telling takes me home."

Rob Weir