September October 2007 Reviews

Tanner Time
Jeannie Tanner

Jeannie Tanner - Vocals/Trumpet
Lisa McQueen - Piano
Carol Rand - Bass
Darlene Dufay - Drums
Neal Alger - Guitar
Michael Hesiak - Tenor

In a jazz scene littered with discs by singers singing the same standards with roughly the same arrangements, Jeannie Tanner's Tanner Time stands out. Not only for the songs, which stretch well beyond the boundaries of what is normally considered jazz, but also by the fine playing of an (almost) all-female ensemble.

The disc starts off in fine fashion with a nice take on "I Got Rhythm." Immediately, the listener is made aware of Tanner's fantastic voice and sense of time, pulling and pushing against the rhythm section. A tip of the hat to the jazz world continues with some fine trumpet playing on "Bernie's Tune." The rest of the disc has some straight up jazz scattered throughout, like the pretty "Tanner Time," or the "Fever"-esque "Red," but what will really grab the listener's attention on this disc, for better or for worse, will be the slow jam R&B-ish ballads that pepper the CD.

While some might see it as a bad thing that a talented jazz trumpeter and vocalist is dabbling in pop territory on songs like "One Lifetime," "My Whole World Is You" or "It Ain't Me," I have to say it is a bonus to this disc because she sounds so at home on the poppier material here. She's right in the pocket, and her band supports her well, with punchy arrangements that make these songs work. Overall, this is an interesting disc that celebrates its schizophrenia, jumping between straight jazz and jazz-influenced pop music. Jazz fans will definitely appreciate the jazz tunes, and might find themselves surprised by the effort put into the poppier moments.

-Paul Abella

Paul Abella is the Music Director at 90.9 fm WDCB Public Radio. He may be contacted at www.WDCB.org.

Organ Trio
Ari Seder

Ari Seder - Guitar
Paul Mutzabaugh - Organ
Darren Scorza - Drums

Ari Seder might be a name you're not familiar with around town, but his debut disc, simply titled Organ Trio, should put a stop to that, and quick.

Strangely, this is an odd disc to write about, because there's so much going on. Seder wears his influences on his sleeve, and it's easy to hear Wes Montgomery's sense of economy, Pat Metheny's sense of melody and Grant Green's sense of groove. Add to that the tasteful organ playing of Paul Mutzabaugh and the grooving drums of Darren Scorza, and you've got a band that can play its collective tail off.

This is a disc of all original material, so one gets a sense of the depth of Seder's writing throughout the course of Organ Trio. The tune to check out though is a shuffle about half way through the disc called "Cabin Fever." On a disc of good tunes and great playing they really took this one up a notch.

Ari's playing around Chicago quite a bit these days, and if you get a chance, go check him out. And while you're there, pick up a copy of Organ Trio. You won't be disappointed.

-Paul Abella

Stepping Out of a Dream
Andrew Distel

Andrew Distel - Trumpet, Vocals
Pete Benson - Piano, Keys
Hyosub Kim - Bass
George Fludas - Drums
Sammie Torres - Percussion
Andy Brown - Guitar
Joe Policastro - Bass
Dave Onderdonk - Guitar

Stepping Out of a Dream is the debut disc by vocalist and trumpeter Andrew Distel. It's a fine disc with a nice combination of standards and originals, and it even finds Distel singing in Spanish on a couple of occasions.

Distel does a nice job throughout, both as a singer and as a trumpeter. Of course, with a backing band as absolutely solid as this one, his job is made much easier. Heavy on the ballads, this is a nice disc for a quiet night at home cooking dinner or relaxing beside the fire. I'll be looking forward to hearing more from Mr. Distel in the future.

-Paul Abella

Unveiled
Greg Duncan

Greg Duncan - Trumpet
Dan Nicholson - Tenor & Alto Sax
Marcin Fahmy - Piano
Jeff Greene - Bass
John Deitmeyer - Drums

It's not too often that you know you're in for a treat of a record within the first twenty seconds. However, that is the case here with Greg Duncan's first release, Unveiled, on OA2 Records.

Over the course of seventy-plus minutes, this disc grooves, swings, bops and just plain rocks out. The songs are well written and well executed. Frankly, the originals are so intriguing that the three non-originals seem somewhat pointless. Not that they aren't nice. Wayne Shorter's "Sleeping Dancer Sleep On" and Joe Henderson's "Black Narcissus" provide moments of some very pretty soloing. But Duncan's writing is so hip that I would rather have heard three more of his tunes than three tunes that I've heard before. Of course, points of entry for listeners new to a musician's style are always welcome, and Duncan acquits himself well here.

On the originals side, however, there are quite a few gems to pick from. The opening track, "No Return," is a twisting and turning composition that breaks away from the usual head-solo-head mentality that dooms so many releases these days. "Tony's City" burns from the get-go, and the way these guys bounce ideas off of one another makes for a great listen.

This disc is fresh from beginning to end, and not only would I recommend it, but I have to say that Unveiled will more than likely end up in my top ten of the year. After you take a listen it will probably be in your Top Ten, too.

-Paul Abella

On The Road Turns Fifty
by Dan Ferris

It has been said that there was never more homogeneity in America than in the 1940s and '50s. Generally speaking, people drove the same cars, were of the same religion, experienced the same entertainment, whether it was movies, radio shows and, later, TV shows, and listened to the same music.

Post-war America, mostly because of the bomb, was psychologically apprehensive. In response, they sought shelter. While backyard bomb shelters represented a direct response to the threat, many Americans unwittingly turned to a safety-in-numbers lifestyle. Because for the most part American society said, did, and believed in the same things, a certain level of psychological comfort was maintained.

For some sects within society-especially artistic ones-society's reaction to their anxiety was not a satisfactory solution. To the Beats, who saw themselves as artistic rebels, the lifestyle of the average American was unacceptable. And so the Beats explored: they explored drugs, they explored subcultures, they explored the "road," music and the arts. But most of all they explored their own senses, their own passions.

Perhaps the best known of these artistic explorations is Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which turned fifty this year. Though written (or as Truman Capote sarcastically noted, "typed") several years earlier, On the Road went through a long series of problems before finally reaching publication by Viking in 1957.

As noted on the original dust jacket, "On the Road is about Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and their friends… The narrative of life among these bohemians carries us back and forth across the continent, down to New Orleans and Mexico. The characters buy cars and wreck them, steal cars and leave them standing in fields, undertake to drive cars from one city to another, sharing their gas; then for variety they go hitch-hiking or sometimes ride a bus."

Though the "Beat Generation" is a group often associated with the "Lost Generation," a band of restless Americans traveling abroad and portrayed by Hemingway and other novelists after World War I, it seems the Beats true roots are more deeply steeped in the Romantics. Historian Mario Praz claims that the Romantic Movement of the early 1800s was an education of the senses.

As a way of rebelling against an overly intellectualized culture, the Romantics attempted to reveal the true nature of man by incorporating various themes into their art, including Orientalism-the study of exotic cultures, particularly those of the Orient (today's Middle East)-ancient times and places, sex, music and the arts-especially of the sublime, which aroused a strange pleasure mixed with fear. By employing these themes, artists could reveal man stripped of his cultural coating, and, in doing so, reveal certain truths about the evils of the society in which they lived.

Similarly, Kerouac and the rest of the Beats, including notables Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, were rebelling against what they saw as an unnatural culture-one that betrayed man's inner spirit. In the same manner as the Romantics, the Beats looked for means by which they could reveal the hypocrisy of American society. In exploring what they called the Negro culture, for example, the Beats found a group of people who did not fit in with Middle America. These were the disenfranchised, the dropouts; they had a sense of community, but on their own terms. Negroes, so believed the Beats, were more in touch with their humanity, in part, because they were not allowed to participate in society the same way as the average American and, hence, were not affected by it.

Almost parallel to the Negro culture was the jazz culture. As late author and pop culture historian, David Halberstam, noted in The Fifties, "A love of jazz, (especially bebop), was almost an automatic passport to the Beats' inner circle." Why jazz? Perhaps because jazz music forms a community, in the sense of promoting individual expression within the context of a larger group. A certain harmony is created-a new standard by which to live: one that promotes individualism.

The improvisational nature of jazz is also spontaneous-of, in, and for the moment. A great jazz "blower" can extend that moment and "create" new moments repeatedly. The emotional charge created by "it," is a sort of orgiastic and orgasmic moment; the kind of "moment" sought after by the Beats again and again. Moments like these would never be experienced by someone living his life in accordance with the norms of society.

It's not a far cry, then, to appreciate the Beats' attraction to the drug culture, where one lives from moment to moment (from fix to fix). Everything in between is merely the passing of time until the next fix. And the drug culture is first cousin to alcohol and sexual indulgences, of which the Beats strongly imbibed. The Beats, like the Romantics before them, also turned to other times and places.

This is perhaps never more apparent than in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The symbol used by Kerouac to embody his American ideal is the cowboy. The image of the cowboy roaming the plains is purely an American one and reveals man unfettered by society, representing (at least romantically) freedom in its highest form. The numerous references to Road's (ostensible) protagonist, Dean Moriarty, being cowboy-like are unmistakable. And the horse has been replaced by the car, the dusty plains by an asphalt road.

There is a security, a comfort one can experience in attaching strong emotions to the past. It's safe-we know we've successfully passed this way before. The American cowboy lived life on his own terms and with an overwhelming freedom. And very unlike the Negro or jazz cultures, the cowboy was well thought of and thoroughly accepted by modern society.

But something is amiss. As readers, we wonder, How can Kerouac, the rebel, choose the cowboy to represent his superman? Well, after all, we reason, the cowboy is a sort of rebel, too. Shaking off that supercilious romanticism we come to our senses: But this is the 1950s, and the cowboy and the West are so mainstream America, so popular, so… John Wayne! John Wayne, the poster boy of the Beat movement? Never!

As On the Road develops, we realize that Kerouac has been putting one over on us. Dean Moriarty does possess freedom, but toward what end? Moriarty uses his freedom to escape life and its inherent responsibilities rather than to embrace it. That, in part, is why for him "moments" become so important. If one cannot experience the warmth and love attendant to the development of human relations, the self-satisfaction of fulfilling a dream, whether personal or professional, those "moments" are all that one has left to make life worthwhile.

The escape from responsibility-of jobs, of friendships, of love, of wives and children, of mistresses, of debts and obligations, (each an important part of the American ethic)-leads Moriarty to a life with no definition and no continuity on which to build, to progress. In this sense, his car becomes his womb-like protection.

Sal Paradise failed to find meaning in society. His odd collection of friends being his society, they create their own unspoken ethic (just as jazz musicians, the Negro community and cowboys have their own ethics that do not conform to mid-century American values), one that allows Sal to allay his despair by escaping from it.

Unlike Dean, however, who merely deteriorates throughout the narrative, we see Sal grow throughout the work by making observations-sometimes about himself, but usually about Dean-and piecing together alternatives. Eventually even being on the road creates restlessness for Sal, and his abandonment by Dean in Mexico seems to be the defining moment of truth for Sal.

Throughout On the Road, Dean's relationship to Sal evolves: from icon to a father-like figure from whom Sal can learn, or at least turn to for protection (though Dean mostly protects Sal from life's responsibilities); to peer; and in the end to a pathological child or tragic figure.

Sal eventually realizes that Dean and his lifestyle are not the answers to his own happiness. Nor is the road or Mexico's primitivism-Sal's restlessness deepens as there is no continuity on which to build a life. What Sal saw as his salvation becomes his damnation. Each chapter marks a new passage for Sal, from one state of perception to a new sensibility.

Rather than escaping from responsibility, his road trips are increasing his burdens of responsibility.

In the end, Sal realizes that he cannot turn to Dean or a car on the road for protection. In America we must be responsible for ourselves. The security and protection we seek fly in the face of freedom and independence-they don't exist; they are, like the American cowboy, a myth.

The notion that impulse and emotion are sufficient to help us get by is wrong. The reader often finds Dean's impulsive, hyperbolic descriptions to be rather silly. To wit, on two separate instances early in the novel Moriarty describes people he meets as having the "greatest" laughs, he's ever heard. Eventually Sal comes to the same conclusion about Moriarty. Sal has grown.

By showing us the "baggage" left behind by Dean Moriarty (unhappy wives, fatherless kids, unpaid debts), Kerouac seems to be saying (unlike some of his fellow Beats) that individual passion and expression are crucial to a successful life, but that one must always be mindful of the consequences. Just as a jazz musician must express himself within the context of the larger group lest the result be unpleasant, Dean's failure to consider consequences (as no mad man can) leads to disharmony and dysfunction in his life.

The character of Dean Moriarty was based on Kerouac's friend, Neal Cassady, a somewhat mythic figure himself, who had all the cars and women he wanted, could run the 100 in under ten seconds and throw a football seventy yards. Kerouac not only used the experiences from road trips with Cassady as a template for On the Road; he presciently illustrated Cassady's downward spiral-in 1968 Cassady was found passed out on a set of railroad tracks and died days later from exposure and drug and alcoholism at forty-two.

The only way Sal is able to turn his life around is by looking inward to provide him with strength, purpose and meaning-not to Dean, America, or the road. Dean Moriarty, this cowboy-like figure, who seemed to be the embodiment of the American ideal-full of life, optimism, and potential-is eventually reduced to a shell of his former self. By the end of the novel he, like Kerouac's America, is beat.