2025: Humanity’s voice in jazz?

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They sang out, in voices of many echoes—airy, haunting, jaunty, imploring, wistful, lonely, spiraling, seductive and in harmonies as plummy as they were piquant.

Yes, jazz musicians in 2025 often chose to top off their ensembles with singers, sometimes the leader themselves, a bandmember or special guest. I heard it so increasingly in the last few years that it seems more than a trend, perhaps a collective cultural movement, to persuade a distracted public that this “intellectual” American sonic art form can be as human as any.

And as democratic as any. These underlying qualities persist in jazz even within another emerging trend, ensembles larger to orchestral. But these add up to another essay topic, at least.

Among the best albums I heard that carried the v for voice was a British one, Every Journey, by the 11-member Ensemble C, as transporting an album as I heard in 2025. This one, like some others, had a vocalist, sometimes wordless, as part of every tune, floating or soaring over or through the instruments. Here, Brigitte Beraha sang tales from bandleader-composer Claire Cope’s investigation of women pioneers, both in death-defying adventures and historic breakthroughs, going back several centuries.

Potently, Poignantly

Others, like my best-album list topper, This Rock We’re On: Imaginary Letters by Mike Holober & The Gotham Jazz Orchestra, uses Jamile Staevie Ayres’s voice selectively, but potently, poignantly. Here the ensemble is also the voice as are instrumental soloists. This two-CD work, lyrical and craggy, is inspired by great environmentalists (Rachel Carson, Ansel Adams, Sigurd Olson, Wendell Berry), with music and lyrics (mostly) by Holober, a previous Grammy Award nominee.

Shades of Sound by the ever-sumptuous Gil Evans Project (led by Verona WI native Ryan Truesdell), had a guest singer, Wendy Giles, on several orchestrated songs, especially on “Laughing at Life,” a fresh-breath salve for these troubled times.

Shades of Sound — Ryan Truesdell

Cover: allaboutjazz.com.

Ryan Truesdell presents Gil Evans Project: Shades of Sound

Ryan Truesdell: Photo courtesy: https://jazzdagama.com/music/ryan-truesdell-presents-gil-evans-project-shades-of-sound/

Another, Suspended in Time, a song cycle by Rondi Charleston and pianist Fred Hersch, was born of a therapy journal she began in the time-freezing pandemic, but which gradually acquired life and breadth of its own, with vocals by Kate McGarry and Gabrielle Stravelli. Another emotionally-loaded album was Breathe: Music for Large Ensembles by Peter Lenz, reflecting his ongoing struggle with lung cancer, and, yes, with a vocalist, Efrat Elony.

Charleston, Rondi / Hersch, Fred - Suspended In Time - Amazon.com Music

 

Several others announce this as a significant turn of the art form’s page. Of course, there have always been jazz vocalists, most typically women, as featured performers who sometimes trade on glamor, intended or not, even if, like Diana Krall, they also play an instrument. But this newer development of vocalists as ensemble members seems like a movement, as instrumentalists normally operate at a different level, even if an egalitarian spirit pervades.

Another woman who, like Cope and Charleston, conceived an ambitious album is singer-songwriter Lorraine Feather on The Green World. Like Holober, she explores our environmental marvels and mysteries but also plays on contemporary social dynamics between the sexes, with a wit surfacing like sly weeds here and there.

Lorraine Feather EyeShotJazz Jazz Photography Blog Archive Lorraine

Lorraine Feather. Courtesy https://alchetron.com/Lorraine-Feather

Time will tell, but a mature art form like jazz frankly needed a fresh gambit at least to rekindle general interest as competition for pervasive entertainment, much less political or cultural enlightenment, intensified in the Internet age.

Wisconsin Jazz

Brian Lynch

As a postscript of honorable mentions, I celebrate the work of Wisconsin jazz artists, a still under-appreciated species. The big name, two-time Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch (no relation to this writer), continued his authoritative brio on 7x7x7.

Soft Rock by Madison bassist-composer John Christensen proves jazz fusion still plays a distinctively electrified role in the jazz soundscape.

Pianist-composer Tim Whalen’s Trio Vol. 1, with Christensen and increasingly first-call drummer Hannah Johnson, proved as impressive a Wisconsin jazz piano trio album as I can recall in some years.

The irrepressibly swinging Johnson also drove percussion for the quartet Heirloom, on their debut album, cannily titled Familiar Beginnings, but as sparkling and satisfying as a vintage Milwaukee lager.

_____________________

Getting Away with Murder. For the Time Being…

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Small boat in Carribbean being bombed to oblivion by the U.S. miltary. Courtesy Reuters
Sometimes, if you can’t stand up face-to-face with cold-blooded evil, you gotta hit ’em where it hurts, with money in their face. Or money that’s gonna fight their falsehoods tooth-and-nail with the truth, and the fiercest legal uppercut you can muster.
Public Citizen Inc. was the activist group I dropped my financial anchor with for this effort, a deadly scenario set in the Caribbean Sea. 1
That’s the best I felt I could do as an average, outraged citizen in response to Donald Trump’s ongoing murder-spree of boats of people traveling in the Caribbean.
Time to greatly expand the Narcissist in Chief’s claim he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.” “Fifth Avenue” has become multiple seafaring corridors in the Caribbean.
Yes, he’s become a serial killer. Factcheeck.org reports that at least 63 people have been executed by airstrikes, without a whiff of due process.  And actually Trump is crowing about his blood thirst, and promising more, not covering it up.
Not only are these attacks unsubstantiated by evidence of threat, but also done with no warnings or legal explanations. Secretary of Defense (War?) Pete Hegseth stirred great outrage by ordering the second attack on one boat, to kill off two survivors hanging on for dear life. Everybody is sensing pure “war crime,” in this instance. Does Hegseth even begin to understand the history-honored concept of “Prisoners of War”?
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has asserted the media’s misunderstanding of the adminitration’s bombing attacks in the Caribbean as due to “the fog of war.” Courtesy Honoulou Advertiser 
Who is At War, and With Whom? However, The U.S. is not at war with any of what Trump terms  “narcoterrorist” entities — as most of these boats, which appear to carry no weaponry other than alleged drugs — are supposedly coming from the direction of Venezuela, the alleged primary aggressor country. According to factcheck.org, Venezuela trafficks cocaine to many locations but rarely if ever fentynal. Moreover, no attacked vessel to date was traveling directly toward the United States, rather to other South American countries or Caribbean islands.
Of course, only Congress, not the president, can declare war. UN human rights experts and other international law experts have criticized the U.S. actions, stating that the U.S. has not shown an imminent threat that would justify the use of lethal military force under international law, and that simply characterizing drug cartels as terrorist organizations does not provide a legal basis for such strikes.
Republican Senator Rand Paul and other critics have repeatedly stated that the administration has not released the identities of those killed or presented evidence linking them to specific criminal or terrorist organizations.
Trump wrote on Truth Social on Oct. 18, “It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics. There were four known narcoterrorists on board the vessel. Two of the terrorists were killed. … The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.”
Factcheck.org reached out to the White House to ask why the survivors of the boat strikes were not arrested for prosecution in the U.S., but reports “we did not receive a response.” 2
Due Process Concerns: Sen. Paul has argued that normal procedure for drug interdiction is arrest and trial, not using the military to summarily execute people without a trial or proof. He emphasized that even in a war zone, there are rules of engagement, and killing incapacitated or shipwrecked individuals is illegal.
Murdered Fishermen: Reliable reports say among those murdered point blank are fishermen simply trying to make a living, to survive. To Trump these people, who are all people of color of Latin descent, are what he calls narco-terrorsts, a horrendous tag. I call this racist homicide.
If you doubt me, let’s look at the facts as they’re objectively known, to date. Some of the bes the best reportage I’ve seen to date is from The New York Review of Books, which does regular political reportage from the field and, in this instance, well-informed legal commentary. The article by David Cole, from the review’s October 23, 2025 print issue, was simply titled “Getting Away with Murder.” It was published well before the latest Hegseth obliteration of two helpless survivors, and its criticism and implicit indictments still hold up. 3
 “ ‘To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, ‘please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.’ ”
There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The ‘war on drugs’ is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the ‘enemy.’
“The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.
“Trump has called the dead ‘narcoterrorists’ and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a ‘foreign terrorist organization.’ But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.”  4
_____________
1. Public Citizen Inc. has done extensive legal battles with the Trump’s Administration’s flagrant authoritarian dismantling of American laws and democratic norms, the sort of things our Founding Fathers worried most about. Public Citizen has often taken the fight to Trump quite successfully. I doubt that there’s any better organization doing such work. But that’s just me, though I’m only one person in a sea of legal agreements, praise, and collabrrative efforts flowing to Public Citizen.  Founded in 1971, the organization litigates public interest cases at all levels of the judiciary. Here’s their website: https://www.citizen.org/
4. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University, and former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 

Tim Whalen’s “Trio Volume 1” is as good as Wisconsin jazz piano trios get

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What starts off with the accidental-sounding title “Uh Oh” rises as a knowing “bouncing with Bud” type groove, angular but shapely, harmonical lithe. This reminds me to note Whalen’s last album was Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell, an ambitious and insightful absorption of the great bop pianist’s oeuvre, a giant who remains in the shadows of others. Another of Whalen’s primary sources is Chick Corea, whose music he performs, though mostly it’s originals.

This album secures the Milwaukee native in my mind as perhaps the root of a triad of the very best straight-ahead Wisconsin jazz pianists currently working. Moreover, it’s probably the best jazz piano trio album I’ve heard from a Badger.

Jazz pianist-composer Tim Whalen. Courtesy allevents.in

The Corea he evokes most is the early phenom of the seminal trio album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, far more than the popular “Spanish Heart” mode of later years. Whalen wields that sort of burning facility, though not like the somewhat jamming “Now He Sings.” Here he adjusts his flame to a rich range of temperaments and ideas. “For Chick” is pensive with understated dramatics. And akin to the aforementioned album, drummer Hannah Johnson evokes the great Roy Haynes, especially on a tune like “January Beginning” with a propulsive snap and crackle of cymbals and snare. It’s actually a minorish theme that seems to honor the month’s atmospheric weight but with a conscious sense of pursuing elusive New Year’s resolutions.

Corea’s “Home Universe – Eternal Child” is a fascinating, deftly assembled diptych of grace notes and deeply felt accents reminiscent of the minimalist album cover of three curving strokes of paint, signifying the trio. This also sounds like a child reaching out tentatively, discovering something on her fingertips, which she’ll grow to know. Yet this ain’t the sound of innocence, she’s already an old soul. Some of Whelan’s deep chords hoist a child to the sky. It’s sonic poetry.

Cole Porter’s “So in Love” isn’t wimpy romantic brooding, rather the sound here of a bursting heart of heady passion, with Corea-esque blazing. Bassist John Christensen’s swift walking bass drives it while Johnson’s drums flare crystalline. Elsewhere, Christensen’s solos are always quietly lyrical and intelligent.

There’s more, but it resolves with the closer “Second-Hand Caffeine,” effortless pianistic sprinting over a Latin-esque tempo and a back beat creating a buoyant tension from perhaps the most joyously bounteous local drummer we’ve heard in a long time.

____________

Tim Whalen’s album release party is tonight, Friday, Nov. 21 at The Estate. Sets are at 7 and 9:30

The trio will also play at the North Street Cabaret, 610 North Street, in Madison, at 8 on Dec. 6.

Purchase Trio Vol. 1 here.

This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/trio-vol-1-by-tim-whalen/

“The Jazz Side of Joni Mitchell” on Friday tops off a big week for jazz in Milwaukee

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The Waukesha nighclub Let it Be architecturally evokes the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles first made their name. Photos courtesy GMToday.com

A Chair in the Sky: The Jazz Side of Joni Mitchell

Let it Be, 716 Clinton Street, Waukesha

Friday, October 24. Doors open 4pm; Event is from 7:00 to 9:00PM
$15 Online | $20 at the door.

Website: Chair in the Sky

 ********

“Oh, I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on…I made my baby cry…I’m so hard to handle/ I’m selfish and I’m sad/ Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby I ever had.”

Yes, that’s vintage Joni Mitchell, her wistfully melancholy “River” from the classic album Blue, among the songs Herbie Hancock commemorated musically on his extraordinary 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, which won both album of the year and best jazz album Grammies.

And coincidentally Hancock was the big-ticket jazz show in Milwaukee this week, and he’s earned his high prices over the decades though they’re now too steep for me, a freelance writer even with a career-long specialty in jazz. So it goes.

Still, those in my riverboat (ice-encumbered) — or on my unsteady skates – might keep pressing on to Friday night — an alternative jazz experience that’s far less expensive, being a round-the-fire gathering of gifted Milwaukee-area musicians, with an ingeniously ambitious concert concept, titled A Chair in the Sky: The Jazz Side of Joni Mitchell.

Three of the musicians are known for singing: Father Sky (a.k.a. Anthony Deutsch) and Faith Hatch, both who also play keyboards, and guitarist Garrett Waite. A fourth vocalist, drummer Hannah Johnson, will likely add more harmony for some potentially rich vocal interpretations of jazz-oriented music of the sui generis singer-songwriter Mitchell. I’d argue Mitchell’s music has had some jazzical kinship going back to that album Blue, drenched in the blues, of sorts, as only Joni could.

And the “Chair” is a song title from Mitchell’s much later self-consciously jazzy album Mingus, so it’s fair to surmise that the herculean jazz bassist-composer Charles Mingus resides in the celestial chair, though her song only references long-lost “beautiful lovers” (including musical, no doubt) and the iconic bebop-and-beyond jazz club Birdland. She had collaborated with Mingus before he died in 1979. That song’s lyrics tell a striking idiosyncratic tale, which suits the peculiarly shapely sense of harmonic charges which was fairly unique to her music and a challenge, even for many jazz musicians.

So, this event could be revelatory or memory-refreshing for many listeners, unless you’re recently immersed in the music of Mingus and comparable Mitchell work. They’ll also draw from Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters album to bring the week to an ice-sparked, pirouetting full circle, of sorts.

I haven’t yet mentioned much of the musicianship involved, or the fact this will be held in one of the Milwaukee area’s most notable new music venues, now featuring a goodly amount of  jazz and related musics, Let it Be, in Waukesha, not exactly a suburb known for jazz. *

Yet the place’s name defies jazz esoterica: as Let it Be is, of course, among the most celebrated of late-era Beatles albums. At the same time, the space itself harkens to the fab four’s earliest days, with physical layout somewhat mimicking the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the (pre-Ringo) “moptops” played a lunchtime gig in 1961 and earned five whole pounds.

 

Here’s some of the Beatles motif in Let It Be.

The brainchild of owner Dave Meister, Let it Be’s walls include photos documenting the Beatles’ extraordinary saga, along with a huge Union Jack flag. The club’s witty physical stylings begin with a silhouetted blackbird perched atop the outdoor overhanging sign adorned with the club’s name.

Let It Be opens tonight in Waukesha | Waukesha Co. Business News | gmtoday.com

The entrance to Let It Be, at 716 Clinton Street, Wakesha. 

Among the vocalists of the “Chair” concept group, Father Sky sings with a depth as substantial as his epic beard’s length, having developed a broodingly echoey folk-jazz vocal style most influenced by Nina Simone. He most recerntly collaborated with the hip-hop-jazz band KASE on a live album. Further he’s one of the most ingenious pianists to emerge in the region in quite some time, with a quirky, sophisticated harmonic sense, sonic adventurousness and rhythmic attack that seem perfectly suited to do Mitchell’s work justice. (And hmm —  Father Sky, did the event’s nominal concept arise from this fellow?)

Call & Response: Father Sky — Lab Notes

Father Sky (Anthony Deutsch) will sing and play keyboards for “A Chair in the Sky: The Jazz Side of Joni Mitchell.” Courtesy bloglicense.com

In other words, he’s a soulful singer, in his way, as is Hatch in hers, so the songs’ emotional weight should carry plenty of requisite power. Guitarist-singer Waite is in the straight-ahead jazz tradition but with enough fusion overtones to capture that aspect of Mitchell’s later work.

Then there’s saxophonist Aaron van Oudenallen (a.k.a. Aaron Gardner), of the group The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken, who can deliver fusion jazz with a deep background in post Coltrane jazz tradition. Bassist John Christensen is among the region’s most versatile and in-demand bassists, who released a fusion album last year, Soft Rock, which received a thumbs up review from Down Beat magazine.

Music + Media — Hannah Johnson

Hannah Johnson. Courtesy Philip Engsberg.

Finally, drummer Hannah Johnson (above, best known with the group Heirloom) plays across the area jazz scene much as any drummer these days because she’s also so versatile and drives a group with such rhythmic elan and swinging verve as to virtually “lift the bandstand” as Thelonious Monk memorably put it, a dictum that his group achieve something that “levitates” the music.

So, this adds up to a boatload of talent which prompted this preview as much as the concert concept.

So, I’d hardly presume to suggest “be there or be square,” but you could richly round out your recent musical experiences by finding a chair in this sky-seeking affair.

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* Thanks to my old friend, jazz pianist-composer Frank Stemper, who played at Let It Be a while ago, and alerted me to its special qualities.

 

Jazz is back full-fledged at The Estate, Milwaukee’s oldest jazz club

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The Milwaukee jazz quartet Heirloom performed an album release concert at The Estate recently. Photo by Kevin Lynch

For a jazz club to survive since 1977, especially in Milwaukee, you’d
have to think it just might be haunted by cats, as in a place of nine lives,
where a tail may sway or wiggle, but typically swings and sometimes
even forms an S curve, akin to Miles Davis’s famous posture while
soloing.

The Estate (a.k.a The Jazz Estate) has never been blessed with Miles
in person. But jazz, America’s indigenous art form, is now a long, strong
international language spoken by many practitioners, including such
famous Estate performers as Joe Henderson, Tom Harrell, The Bad
Plus, Harry Connick Jr., Cedar Walton, Eddie Gomez and Little Jimmy
Scott, and Milwaukee-bred stars like Brian Lynch, Lynne Arriale, and
David Hazeltine, among others.

Cat ‘tails are a serious theme here, as current owner John Dye has
transformed the joint into one the city’s most sophisticated cocktail
hangouts, befitting hip culture, jazz or no jazz.
So the music has faded into the club’s ether several times over the
years. But give this city some props for helping to revive venue’s music.
There are reasons why local jazz singer Jerry Grillo has made
Milwaukee his own in a celebrated recorded anthem titled “My
Hometown, Milwaukee” just as he’s made The Estate his artistic and
cocktailed home away from home. The song won a 2023 WAMI Award
for “Most Unique Song” and a mayoral proclamation for “Milwaukee
Day” in May of 2022. The mayor helped cement the venue’s reputation
in Milwaukee lore, at least obliquely, like the proverbial cat standing slyly
in the bandstand shadows. Grillo’s song is colorfully celebratory and
self-deprecating, again, pure Milwaukee.

Jazz singer Jerry Grillo adds drama to one of his many performances over the years at his “home” club, The Estate. The singer will perform a Christmas show at The Estate on December 5. Photo courtesy jerrygrillo.com

In other words, this town has a still-underapprecated modern legacy of
jazz performance and radio. Think of the indomitable and peripatetic dejay Ron Cuzner, WHAD’s Michael Hanson, or WMSE’s Jim
Glynn and Dr. Sushi, or Howard Austin and WYMS programming in the
1980s and ’90s. They all helped sustain jazz consciousness and
lifebood for the sake of live events, which Cuzner frequently emceed
during his many years as the city’s pied piper of airwaves jazz. The
community of jazz that has sustained the local culture over those years
has included, along with The Estate, The Wisconsin Conservatory of
Music, The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery and its offspring, the JGCA, The
Pfister Hotel’s Blu nightclub and Mason Street Grill, Caroline’s Jazz Club, Bar Centro, Transfer Pizzeria Cafe and The Milwaukee Jazz Institute, an exemplary recent education and concertizing organization.

This is all to put one uber-cozy and eccentrically-configured East Side
club in its rightful historical context. The Estate endured nearly
devastating losses during COVID. A small miracle of persistence?
The intimacy and modest size has seemingly put it beyond the
perceived employment of many regional jazz artists who might have
ostensibly outgrown such neighborhood venues, such as renowed
cutting-edge Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark, as Dave Cornils
expained recently in an east side coffeeshop. “He told me a lot of
venues don’t invite us,” Cornil relates.

Who’s Dave Cornils? A new cat in town? He’s a 40-ish gatekeeper of
the music, the latest Estate manager and music booker. He’s actually
been a Dye right-hand man, a barkeeper par excellence who had to
memorize the five-to-six hundred drink recipes Dye requires for
Byrant’s, his showcase cocktail lounge. There’s no menu there, so
Cornils had to ask a customer what she likes, read her response and
whirl up a wizard’s brew. Doubtless his improbable acumen at this
weighty task helped Dye decide Cornils had the chops to book good
jazz and related music.

Those duties might actually be easier than all the esoteric mixology, with
some artist website assistance. “It’s been fun, a challenge for a nerdy,
encyclopedic brain,” he says with measured self-regard. How did he get
into jazz? “My parents were not a jazz family. So this was an offshoot of
rebellion. Whatever they didn’t like must be cool. I learned from records
and listening to WMSE, which was like going down a rabbit’s hole. Jazz
there is a bottomless pit, but it also keeps you humble.” Jazz guitarist
Andrew Trim enhanced Cornil’s education when he became a fellow
bartender.

The manager’s formal education and professional background is in
graphic design. “I’ve built up the club’s calender with a rotation of local
performers, a young crop of comers with drive,” he says. Those include
the sparkling quartet Heirloom, which just played the Estate for a
release event for their excellent debut album Familiar Beginnings.

Others include The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken and vocalist-
pianist Faith Hatch. Maybe the essence of the place’s straight-ahead

jazz legacy is exemplified currently by virtuoso Milwaukee trumpeter
Eric Jacobson, who performed “Joyspring”: The Music of Clifford Brown”
in early October, inflaming the the historic post-bop fire for the present.

Among compelling out-of-towners on deck include Chicagoans guitarist
and Blue Note recording artist Fareed Haque who returns October 18,

and cornetist Josh Berman on October 10, then acclaimed East Coast saxophonist-
composer Caroline Davis on November 7.

“Berman is aways interesting including the way he moves his body to his music. You can be deaf and know what he’s playing,” Cornils quips.

A stylistic wild card will be Victor DeLorenzo and Friends, on October 25. Milwaukeean DeLorenzo is best known as the original drummer for the renowned jazz-influenced folk-punk band The Violent Femmes.

Even local artists are getting their financial due. A new policy has each
set being a separate show and cover charge. “It’s the only way to to
make enough money for the musicians, given that the place seats 60
maximum.”

The Estate stage and some of its distinctive seating layout.

About a dozen choice seats are ultra-intimate with the stage
— a couple feet away. The majority of audience seating extends in two long wings on each side of the stage, one including the bar. Right behind the close-up seats is a narrow walkway and wall shelf for drinks of standing listeners, and then the
restrooms. So, improbable as it seems, a seat on one of these two
enclosed thrones can provide some of the best music acoustics you’ll
find in town.

If such musical and mixological magic can happen at the Estate, may it
live on forever.

____________

The Estate website, including detailed information on all upcoming music performances, is here:  https://www.estatemke.com/

This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/jazz-is-back-at-the-estate/

Heirloom’s debut album initiates a legacy of lyricism, hard swing, and probing form

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Album cover for Heirloom’s debut album “Familar Beginnings.” Courtesy Shifting Paradigm Records

With a jazz band’s name so lyrically titled, Milwaukee’s Heirloom shouldn’t have surprised us that their first recorded artifact is a musical objet de art. Of course, many musicians strive for art, but Familar Beginnings is the real thing. Chops-laden bandleader-guitarist Ben Dameron’s classical training helps underscore that a potent  lyricism deeply informs his calling.

The lyrical bent blooms in titles like “Eucalyptus Breeze” and the rustic “Indigo Tears,” a deep-dish slice of Bill Frisell-ish Americana. If the latter title also suggests a famous Ellington “mood,” it’s no coincidence as Heirloom digs elsewhere into the Strayhorn bounty chest with “Isfahan.” This interpretation gives a jaunty boost to saxophonist Johnny Hodges’ languid classic. Dameron’s melodic sense is fully woven into his structural form.

Heirloom (l-r: Ben Dameron, Tim Ipsen, Sam Taylor, Hannah Johnson) performs at an album release event recently at the Jazz Estate. Photo by Kevin Lynch

As for form, “Message from the Deep” appears almost “through composed” but probes depths that bring light to one’s fire. So, don’t worry about the album’s backbone. The penultimate tune drives the band around the final curve with full-throttle swinging. The piece, “Fake Block”” cagily suggests football, to me. Here drummer Hannah Johnson absolutely crackles spitfire, astride her apparent quest to become one of the upper Midwest’s best jazz drummers. Hardly undone, tenor saxophonist Sam Taylor doesn’t spare the horses he reins masterfully elsewhere.

_______________

This review was orignally published in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/familiar-beginnings-by-heirloom/

 

Ben Sidran live shows we’ve got a man in the lighthouse

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Ben Sidran – Are We There Yet? Live at the Sunside (Nardis)

You still can’t beat live jazz. Accordingly, this is as close as you can get to the way the Madison-based jazz singer-songwriter-pianist lives through his playing. Sidran has dedicated his career to “demystifying the world of jazz,” as an artist/author/public intellectual. “Jazz musicians are just like the rest of us, only more so,” he has written. Those last three little words gleam pearls of wisdom. You might say, as of existential necessity, we all improvise through life. But jazzers raised improv to an art form, becoming guideposts of adventure, and lighthouses to the shore.

Sometimes sirens of safety on the shore: “When the band shows up the mob becomes a parade,” his liner note says with a pointed sense of timely relevance. That’s why, still living and live at 82 in a favorite French nightclub, Sidran remains so vital and significant to hear.  As a singer-philosopher he can bat around metaphors and tropes like a master tennis champion, with a sweet swing and follow-through in his delivery. “You Got to Picture Him Happy” contemplates the long-suffering Sisyphus legend, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it/ There’s just the rock and that hill and that godawful sun.” In other words, you can’t give up, but strive for some style — beauty is truth? — to give power back to yourself, and others.

Happy might have a chance, but there’s nothing Pollyanna about this man. It wouldn’t be a Sidran session without a nod to his foremost influence, Mose Allison, whose “Ever Since the World Ended” contemplates The Apocalypse with tender que sera. “Ever since the world ended/ things that seemed so splendid/ don’t seem to matter anymore/ it’s just as well the world ended/ ’cause it wasn’t working anymore.”

Here’s a still from a YouTube video of Ben Sidran performing “I Might Be Wrong” from his latest album “Are We There Yet?” YouTube

Ask yourself, how true does that lyric ring?

Among his best current co-sharers is post-Coltrane tenor saxophonist Rick Margitza who solos with a sonic translator’s synchronicity with Sidran’s style. And Sidran can still play the piano like a prowling panther, perfectly befitting his funky hard-bop roots. His singing is suave and world-weary. He’s still the quintessential hipster. But not hipper than thou, just heavily laced with wry. “I’m tired of being so hip/ It’s like waiting for a ship/ that never comes in.” We’re lucky to have him still manning the lighthouse.

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This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/are-we-there-yet-live-at-the-sunside-ben-sidran/

Comedian Stephen Colbert may be the best silent philanthropist/do gooder nobody knew about

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NOTE: This Colbert story seems to be a false AI-generated one, suggesting how pervasive and sometimes deceptive online stories can be, including feel good stories that just might seem “too good to be true.” This didn’t feel quite like that to me, but closer inspection should’ve been in order. Apologies. Congrats DO seem in order for Colbert’s Emmy Award. KL

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I was gonna post a brag about the Packers kicking butt again.

But this Stephen Colbert story transcends, as a Culture hero we can feed from. He shames us “do good” talkers. And, of course, the Trump-kowtowing network that fired him.

His quiet humility is inspiring, as he has a natural bully pulpit. Imagine what Trump would do if he had something like this to “share.” Maybe he didn’t want people expecting him or others to joke about them. He understands the need for human dignity, that “Welfare queen” Reagan, and most Republicans since, haven’t.

I think now of “hillbilly elegy” hypocrite JD Vance.

You gotta love how social media has jumped on his silent band wagon and started tootin’ their horns for him.

A Pulitzer Prize for the comedian whose currents run silent and run deep? 1

I’m all in. He’s a Culture Currents hero par excellence.

I need not say much more, one footnote aside.

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1 Run Silent, Run Deep was a 1958 WWII film starring two quintessential hero-type actors, Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. But how about a same-titled sequel starring a Colbert hero? Hmm, couldn’t use either of those two, if they were around. Maybe Bob Uecker, if he was still around, or Pee Wee Herman? No, he’s gone, too.

Maybe Steve Martin with a little hair dye? I like him for this, but is he too old? Colbert himself? No, he’d probably defer. Maybe a younger, more anonymous SNL type… Thoughts?

Social Media EXPLODES: Fans Demand Pulitzer Prize for Stephen Colbert After Shocking Details Emerge! The late-night legend has secretly dedicated thousands of hours serving over 220,000 meals and raising funds to build 1,000 housing units for the homeless and veterans — INSIDE the hidden life of a real-world hero! From New York to South Carolina, the internet is flooded with the hashtag #PulitzerForColbert. Fans are calling him “the true voice of justice” — not only because of his razor-sharp satire on The Late Show, but because of the way he lives: humble, compassionate, and unafraid to stand up for the vulnerable. See the viral photos of Stephen Colbert cooking meals, serving the homeless, and changing lives — why his hands-on kindness is shaking the internet! The untold stories behind his charity work, the emotional moments with lonely seniors, and the surprising reason millions believe he deserves the world’s greatest honor. Details in comment – News

 

The Black incarceration rate in Wisconsin may defy belief, but it’s real.

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Protesters outside Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institute after the deaths of three inmates due to reportedly poor health conditions and care. Courtesy Waupun Pioneer Press.

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I count myself a proud Wisconsin native of a beautiful, bountiful state with an embattled progressive tradition. I was aware of a serious state problem of excessive incarceration, but I never realized the radical severity of the problem, which is surely fixable!

Recently in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel‘s Ideas Section, columnist Jeffrey Sommers (a political economy and public policy professor at UWM) reported that we have the highest incarceration rate of Black citizens in not only the country.

Per capita, Wisconsin’s jailing of 2,250 Blacks per 100,000 Black adults exceeds the highest general incarceration rate of any of the world’s 223 countries measured. El Salvador’s 1,659 per 100,000 was second highest. Curiously the United States general rate is “only” 541 (per 100 K). This indicates a serious problem of racial profiling in our state, which supposedly was addressed years ago.

Several sources on this confirmed the global rate information, including the World Population Review. 1

The Wisconsin writer pointed out that the alleged reason for these policies is to lower the crime rate, but the figures show they failed to produce comparably lower rates, if you determine it by people jailed.

I have never been more shocked or disgusted at my own state’s doings. We should hold the too-long Republican controlled legislature primarily responsible for this, though I haven’t heard Democrats addressing it much either.

Not so coincidentally, the next page of the same Ideas Section included Philip Klinker’s  letter to the editor bemoaning that the only way to reduce the state prison population that’s caused so many problems otherwise is to repeal petty criminal statutes. But “no politician in the state is brave enough to advocate to repeal the laws of petty criminal statutes” – a big part of the problem.

Is that true of our officials? Is it an awareness problem, blase governance? Or worse?

A couple of factors are key. Bail jumping in Wisconsin is a common petty crime that involves such innocuous activities as driving to work when the bail said you couldn’t.  If you are accused of a felony, the charge carries a six-year maximum sentence. It doesn’t matter if you are found innocent of the crime, the bail jumping charge still stands. Various factors apply depending on your case.

Then there’s too-common charge of “disorderly conduct” which evidently amounts to anything the police or prosecutor says it is.  A review of the state statutes shows that a vast array of activity or behaviors — even victimless — can be interpreted by officers as “disorderly” and result in a Class B misdemeanor. 2

Think about the fractured or destroyed lives incarceration can produce, especially for those imprisoned for an extended period, or unjustly.

A widely-disseminated 2023 news report said four inmates at Waupun’s aging Correctional Institute have died over the last four months. One death was confirmed as a suicide. The other two deaths remain under investigation. “A group of Waupun inmates filed a federal lawsuit in Milwaukee last week alleging conditions at that prison amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The prisoners allege they can’t get access to health care, with guards telling them their illnesses are ’all in your head’ and they should ‘pray’ for a cure.”

Cameron Williams. (Submitted photo) The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

One 24-year-old black man, Cameron Williams, died of a rare stroke after extended solitary confinement and deprivation which shocked his fellow prisoners, who heard his cries for help to officials and “blood-curdling screams.” He was he was serving a three-year sentence for burglary — he’d pushed a woman to take her purse.  3

All of these problems amount to moral arrogance, or at least negligence, far below this state’s history of honor.

Democratic leaders recently have written a bill to remedy crowded and poor prison living conditions. That hardly goes far enough.

Where are our real leaders on this? It may not be easy in our polarized political climate, but all the more crucial as we’re a key swing state in elections. We need voting citizens. The policies may also reflect increasingly extensive and gratuitous voter suppression efforts.

Make your voice heard, however possible. Let’s repeal these laws or Wisconsin will continue to dwell in immoral disgrace comparable to a wretched prison cell.

Kevin Lynch (Kevernacular)

Milwaukee

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A Wisconsin Day to Remember, and To Carry “Forward”

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Cathedral Square Park is jammed with an estimated 10,000 “No Kings” protesters Saturday. Photo by Mike DeSisti Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The clash of resounding, angry coast-to-coast public sentiment against self-satisfied Trumpian tone deafness thundered across real space and time on Saturday, June 14.

Yes, it was the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Military and somebody’s 79th birthday. So the Narcissist-in-Chief got his HUGE military parade – a la Communist China, North Korea and Russia, all groaning, pavement-crushing tanks, roaring overhead jets and marching troops – to pretend it was all in his glorious honor. Many troops reportedly did not want to be there.

“I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my life,” commented Esquire‘s longtime political reporter Charles Pierce. Yet Adolf Hitler’s moldy remains probably quivered in envy.

So that was the weird cocoon of Washington, D.C. adorned with its MAGA shell.

What was really happening in America Saturday?

Five million people were amassing across the nation, in “No Kings” protests fully rejecting the way Trump’s agenda is striving to endow him with monarchial, increasingly authoritarian, powers. People are protesting masked ICE agents workplace raids to deport immigrants without due process, and National Guard and Marine actions in Los Angeles, the arresting of a U.S. Senator at a press conference, the ongoing travesty of American governmental support of Israel’s self-defense-turned-genocide of Palestine’s Gaza, among a myriad of other problems with our deeply injured democracy right now.

Désirée Pointer-Mace, of Milwaukee, sings during the No Kings protest at Cathedral Square Park in Milwaukee. Carol Coronado / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported, Wisconsinites in more than 50 towns and cities took to the streets on Saturday, June 14, as part of what organizers say was the largest nationwide protest yet against President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, the stuff of tyranny running amok.

In downtown Milwaukee, organizers estimated the crowd reached almost 10,000 people, according to Alan Chavoya, a protester with the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Protestors chanted and sang in Cathedral Square Park, before marching a mile loop around part of downtown. The rally was energetic, but peaceful.

I was there and can affirm that description.

The protest’s first phase was a series of speakers who had plenty to say, some fiery, some incisive and learned, and speakers ran much longer than the planned one hour time slot. But these times are bristling with burning issues to discuss and protest from the Trump agenda, defying the law, a compliant Congress and the Courts, with immigrant issues at the top of the list.

The crowd remained attentive and patient. There were a number of quote-worthy speeches and notably one speaker who offered the shocking news that Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed, a short time beforehand. Also, Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot multiple times in the early morning hours Saturday. The anouncement prompted the crowd to a moment of silence to honor that  tragedy. (Vance Boelter was arrested Sunday night in rural Sibley County, about 50 miles from Minneapolis, as the prime suspect in what has been described as a politically motivate assassination.)

Laurie Peifer, of Milwaukee, dressed in a “Handmaid’s Tale” costume as part of No Kings protest at Cathedral Square Park in Milwaukee, June 14, 2025. he was protesting to support women’s health care. Carol Coronado / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

However, I took no notes Saturday so I’ll let one speech suffice by example. Renowned progressive journalist and author John Nichols delivered a double-whammy of a special sort. He first declared that he actually had a distant ancestor who took part in the American Revolution. But then he quickly clarified the role of dissent in our history of patriotism by noting that only white men could vote when the nation was formed. Suffrage for women and voting rights for people of color came much, much later, a long, achingly profound history we must never forget.

As another speaker said, quoting the great Black abolitionist Federick Douglass, “If there is no struggle, the is no progress.”

Then at one point, Nichols paused and said, “I just had a call from a friend of mine.” It seemed a curious disruption of the momentum of his speech. But in a few moments we understood what this meant. After a click or two, a voice came over the loudspeaker — the unmistakably Brooklyn-tinged accent of Senator Bernie Sanders. No figure but the voice was doubtless. It was a bit of old-fashioned sleight-of-hand stagecraft, updated for the cell-phone era.

Sanders gave us about five minutes of his vintage stem-winding rhetoric about billionaires screwing the countless of the 99 per cent. He also pointed out how the recent Wisconsin election of liberal Supreme Court justice Susan Crawford provided powerful repudiation of Trump and his then-right-hand billionaire Elon Musk who had contributed millions to defeating Crawford (before bowing out of his despicable position). It was just the sort of thing this crowd deserved to hear, I daresay. Nichols actually co-authored a book with Sanders published last year, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, striving to reground the left’s arguments in the new populism.

After years of political prominence Sanders may be right now — along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the two most electrifying figures on the left side of democratic politics, by virtue of their recent “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour, which has continually commanded large crowds. The pair is all the more striking for representing political figures widely separated generationally, yet brought together in resounding harmony of defiance.

Nichols, a Wisconsin native and Madison resident, closed his speech by telling us we cannot go backward into the nostalgic fictional past of the white supremacist MAGA movement. “We are Wisconsinites and Wisconsinites go forward!” he shouted, invoking the state’s motto, ever pointed to righteousness.

This was one protester among many who added wit and levity to the proceedings with his Elvis assemblage. Photo by Nancy Lynch Aldrich
Finally the protest morphed into a march gathering along Wells Street behind the speaker stage and snaking slowly east to the lakefront. Then the crowd turned south, past the War Memorial and curved west at the DiSuvero sculpture, The Calling,” in front
“No Kings” protesters march west from the Milwaukee lakefront and the iconic DiSuvero sculpture “The Calling,” and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil. Photo by Kevin Lynch
of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava addition with its flaring brise soiel sunscreen. No doubt this mass of humanity had a calling this day. It was certainly the first time I’ve ever marched up Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee’s downtown main street.
The eastbound lane was open to car traffic and many drivers honked their horns in solidarity, a few displaying “No Kings” protest signs through sun roofs.
If anything signified the transformation of Milwaukee into meaningful expression and acton it was this scene, rising from the city’s most iconic setting.
And yet, this was one of so many across the nation.
We the people have spoken. Who will hear us?
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Your blogger, Kevernacular, at the Milwaukee “No Kings” protest with his well-traveled Trump sign, modified with a “king” crown motif. Photo by Nancy Lynch