pt at large

Mr. Persip

January 4, 2022

While exploring memories of childhood on Coltland Drive, I remembered watching “Mr Persip,” as we knew him, striding purposefully across the field in front of our house, ramrod straight, lean as a rail, wearing his garrison cap and U.S. Army uniform jacket. I didn’t have the word in my young vocabulary yet but distinguished, dignified, and proud come to mind.

His home on Pomeroy Avenue was within sight of 7 and 15 Coltland Drive, the only two houses on the dirt road, where Sammy Colt and I lived.

Sammy Colt and I were the "eddieandbill" of Coltland Drive. From kindergarten to 6th grade, we were inseparable. We walked to school together, were safety patrol "officers" holding red flags to halt motorists when kids crossed the street in front of the school. We found endless ways to entertain ourselves...yet another story to unpack.

One day when we were playing marbles on the dirt road in front of our houses, 7 or 8 year old Sammy and I got invited to visit Mr. Persip's home.

We didn't know it but we were about to be introduced something we'd never seen before, probably the reason Mr. Persip invited us, a large macaw parrot, housed in a big wire cage in the living room, with shimmering tropical hues of green and gold on its feathers that made it appear regal.

We were transfixed to watch its herky jerky movements, the way it would watch us with its head cocked, one eye turned our way.  Its giant scary looking beak that gobbled sunflower seeds made us keep a safe distance from its cage.

On the day it actually talked, we were gobsmacked…”Polly want a cracker” I swear it said. 

From that time forward, we would wait every time we visited to see if it would reward us with those words.

I can see Mr. Persip chuckling to himself. He enjoyed watching our youthful rapture while looking up at that big golden wired cage every time we visited, waiting for that miracle to happen again.

To us, he was Mr. Persip, happy to be known as a kind neighbor by these two little kids.

Recently I learned that he was the grandson of Civil War veteran Charles Hamilton of the famous all black Massachusetts 54th Regiment. Looking back, I know he felt the connection with his grandfather and that it was reflected in the dignity and pride in the way he moved, behaved and likely he entered the army.

I had no idea about his charitable work and suppose it does not surprise me. I am wondering what it was in his chemistry that pushed him to act with such empathy and kindness. I speculate that being a man of color, he was not always afforded the respect he showed to others as he did his charitable work. Maybe ‘calling’ is a better word to describe what he did.

He did some of his charitable work mentioned in the news clipping below at the former Union Railroad Station, a hundred yards from my immigrant great grandfather's store on West Street… another trove of memories for another time.

How I’d love to talk to Mr. Persip today.

Image courtesy of Dave Laczak, senior assistant, Local and Genealogy Department
Local History & Genealogy Department
Berkshire Athenaeum
One Wendell Avenue, Pittsfield, MA 01201

 

POST SCRIPT

A charter member of the American Legion Post 68 since 1919, his 151st Depot Brigade took part in the Meuse Argonne offensive in WW I. He was district Sergeant At Arms for 25 years and Post Commander in 1956. He never missed a Memorial Day or Veterans Day parade that I watched every year as a kid. He was, in fact, known as "Mr. American Legion." He made 92 trips to Union Station with the legion color guard to give local draftees a proper send off. A story in his obituary that I love; for 12 years, he led collections at movie theaters for the March of Dimes, Jimmy Fund, Will Rogers Fund and Multiple Sclerosis Funds. He collected about $75,000. When he was presented with a purse of $500 at one of the many testimonials for his activities, he turned around and gave it to the hospital for which he had been raising money. To a man living on what I assume was a small military pension,  he could have used it to pay for food and utilities for a long time.  He was a giver. It just did not square with his nature. His service, let alone the grace with which he lived his life, is a shining example of America's  "greatest generation".

Beverly Cleary: An Appreciation

Beverly Cleary

APRIL 12, 1916 — MARCH 25, 2021

I thought of her as she was included in To those who departed in 2021: A look back at the notable figures who died

Whether by pictographs in caves or the printed word, we as a species are hard wired to tell and listen to stories. Beverly Cleary was a story teller who had an uncanny touch to reach her audience.

As a fourth grade teacher at the John Pierce School in Brookline, MA for 34 years (1970-2003, an era in which an iPhone was not carried along to school with lunch), I chose Cleary's book "Ramona The Pest" to  join the ranks of many books I read aloud to my students. Cleary was the one of the subjects of "Making The Grade,"  a column I wrote for the Brookline TAB in the last two years of my career.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2016/04/beverly-cleary-turns-100.html

April 11, 2016

Beverly Cleary turns 100 today. The Oregon housewife wrote some of the most popular children’s books of the twentieth century. Amazingly, the books still have standing…and popularity today.

For years, books like “Ramona The Pest” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” were a feature of my reading/writing program at the John Pierce School in Brookline. Cleary’s books were great read-aloud stories. The author had a canny sense of how to portray children navigating bumps that are part of the process of growing up.

I often chose “Ramona The Pest” as a first class read-aloud. From my point of view, the lively discussions and writing responses were a first step in establishing a bond, a shared experience, that shaped a class identity that fostered empathy, cooperation, teamwork and a positive work ethic .

My fourth graders, at nine years old, were old enough to be able to look at Ramona Quimby’s questions and actions in the rear view mirror. They were several years older than Ramona in her first few months of kindergarten, could feel quite a bit more grown up and empathize with her behavior. They really got it when Ramona was told on her first day of kindergarten to "sit here for the present" and she does, waiting for her present.

Cleary kept it simple but Ramona’s questions and dilemmas were universal and her character indelibly drawn. Cleary’s cast of characters usually involved Ramona’s older sister Beezus (Beatrice), her parents, especially her mother, and her friend Henry Huggins, but Ramona was the axis around which the stories were told.

Beverly Cleary captured a child’s universe with a charming economy of style and keen observation. Ramona was no angel. She had trouble paying attention sometimes, and once was sent home for gently pulling the hair of the girl sitting in front of her because it looked so much like a spring and out of curiosity she wanted to see if it worked like one.  My fourth graders chuckled when Ramona called herself a “kindergarten drop out”. And they reveled in their blooming maturity when Ramona talked about singing the "Dawnser song" in her first days of kindergarten, her interpretation of "The Star Spangled Banner.

I liked Beverly Cleary’s books because, in a non-preachy format, her books offered a platform to talk about values, character, and issues like sibling rivalry, being picked on, a father losing his job, unfairness in life... described by the author with a forthright but tender touch. Some of the discussions we had about what made Ramona tick resurfaced later in the year as we read other books or dealt with real life situations.

Peel back the personas of many teachers and you’ll find an entertainer… that certainly applied to me from 1974 to 2004. Sitting in the chair next to my cluttered desk, with twenty nine-year-olds sitting on the carpet in front of me, adopting voices for each character, pausing for effect in dramatic moments, using a little body English to embellish, making eye contact with my audience, I wanted the stories to come alive. If it involved theatrics, all the better. And I loved it.

Cleary published her first book, “Henry Huggins,” in 1950. Between 1955 and 1999 Ramona was featured in eight books and published in 20 different languages. The fact that she still has adoring fans, and still has a wry sense of humor, is remarkable. Her response to the question about the secret of living to be 100 sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Ramona Quimby.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Photo of Cleary and fans by VERN FISHER/MONTEREY HERALD VIA AP/ FILE

https://www.beverlycleary.com/

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2016/04/beverly-cleary-turns-100.html

Top Five Beverly Cleary Books by Lynn Lobash, Manager of Reader ServicesMarch 26, 2021

• #1 Ramona the Pest (1968)
• #3 Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) NOTE: Cleary said she began the novel after "two little boys who didn't know one another asked me to write about a boy whose parents were divorced. And I had never thought about it, but I said I'd—give it a try." Kirkus review said this.
• #4 Ribsy (1964)

Joan Didion: A Moment With The Author

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2002/10/on_reading_joan.html

In 2002, I took my first writing class, held at Cambridge Center for Adult Education. A first assignment was to read an excerpt from a Joan Didion essay.

Joan's response to this essay is below this story.

On reading Joan Didion for the first time
by Paul Tamburello

Why I write.
That was the title of the first article I was required to read in the first writing class of my writing career. After reading Joan Didion’s essay, I feel compelled to write a sequel:
Why I don’t write.

I don't want to write any more because Joan Didion just killed me. She killed me with her intellect, she killed me with her imagination, she killed me with her keen sense of observation, and she killed me with her ability to structure a piece that, like a Charlie Parker solo, started off with an expressed idea, hurtled off into impossibly twisting and turning tangents, and then miraculously landed on its feet where it started. The murder weapon had the fingerprints of “voice” smeared all over it.

How could she do that? Or more to the point, how could I ever in my lifetime even come close to writing like Joan Didion. I just don't have the required tools.

Joan wonders about everything. Joan sees a woman walk into a room and she gets an idea to write not just an article on, say, the effect of exotic perfume on bystanders, but an entire novel. And it’s not like she sees some broad outline, but she nails descriptions, details, and a whole chapter. I look at the same woman striding into a room and see hips, legs, arch of the back in relation to arc of the bosoms. Hopeless. Joan wonders “why she was in the airport and why Victor didn't know”. I wonder what’s her phone number. Hopeless.

I don't mind that Joan admitted that she stole the title of the essay from George Orwell. All writers steal, they’re an incestuous lot. I should know from my other career. I'm a teacher. We steal ideas from each other regularly, then, like blue jays homesteading in the nests of other birds, we transform them into our own. I also get ideas from reading the news, columns in the newspaper, listening to the radio, and looking out the window. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Nothing’s new under the sun. Writing something worth reading...well, that’s another matter entirely. Even if you do it with a purloined idea.

Joan says writing is an aggressive act, “an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” Then she unleashes a dazzling display of literary firepower, leaving a trail in my writer’s mind like a tank rolling through a corn field. Her writer’s voice is as strong as a nuclear reaction. If Joan Didion were a country, George Bush would be declaring war on her for creating a weapon of mass destruction, causing developing writers to shrink back to their intellectual borders and not even think about penning a piece of literary journalism and signing it.

And I'm not fooled by that Brutus-like disclaimer that she drops on page 18, saying that she doesn't consider herself a writer because she doesn't think in the abstract. About ten words after that, she tosses off a phrase like “I found myself contemplating the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.” The lady doth protest too much. Since when do you cite Hegel to prove you’re not an abstract thinker? I felt like she flipped me her literary middle finger and smirked.

She says she never took drugs but when she says she wanted “to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast it would scarcely exist on the page at all.”, I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, right.” I can just see her in her tiny Berkeley apartment, toking up on some really good “tops” from Nepal, and riffing with her classmates about “a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page”, and seeing the really deep and connected nature of the universe. She’s just one of the lucky ones who could wake up the next day and actually remember those riffs with enough clarity to write them down.

Whatta grandstander. If she were a football player she’d be spiking the ball into the end zone abut every fourth paragraph. Take the bevatron for example. When she first gratuitously drops that name in the fourth paragraph, I thought it was something you sat on to get yourself cleaned up up after going to the bathroom. Is there any good reason why a bevatron should show up in this essay, other than to embarrass the rest of us with our ignorance of the contraption, whatever it might be.

Just about the time I decided to get up and leave the class, having had my vote canceled by the sheer virtuosity of the first three pages of this essay, I read the sentence “It took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.”

It dawned on me that Joan might not be trying to kill me after all, but was offering to rescue me from giving up my desire to pound on the keys. By the time I finished the essay, I realized that Joan was telling me, with extended metaphors and her intellectual “A” game, what I knew from reading Donald Graves, Don Murray, Annie LaMott and others who have the compassionate habit of writing in plain English, that writing “tells you, you don't tell it” . And that you learn to write better by writing often. And probably taking a class and getting ideas from other fledgling writers.

So I guess I won’t drop out of class and sign up for cooking. I’ll keep writing , even though I know I have a ‘shaky passport” when I put my fingers on the keyboard. I’ll just keep plunking along so I can, like Joan, find out what I already know. But please, someone show me the door if I so much as breathe anything about a bevatron.

October 2, 2002
I handed my essay to Joan when i met her briefly after she spoke at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts not long after I wrote it. Here's her response.

JOAN'S NOTE
Dear Paul Tamburello,
Thanks for giving me the "Why I Don't " piece. Needless to say, it pleased me! RE the bevatron, it was a major presence on the Berkley campus, everyone's symbol of (hard to decipher) up the hill. All my love, Joan

Billy Conway: An Appreciation

It didn’t take a lot for drummer Billy Conway to make a big impression

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/22/arts/it-didnt-take-lot-drummer-billy-conway-make-big-impression/

Billy Conway, 1956 - December 19, 2021

The appreciation is a start, but the youtube below is a philosophical riff, wide ranging, with elegant off the cuff metaphors and similes that make it sing. Responding to the interviewer, Conway strings together exquisitely specific responses that, like his intuitive, spare drumming, are never showy and always in service to shaping the narrative that his interviewer is seeking to elicit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm9XIETEzBo

Billy Conway, a totally engaging human being...erudite, humorous, perceptive, self-reflective...this is a master class in music, bands that produce it, and a musician who lived it and left a singularly defining legacy when he died, a legacy that will shape the next time I listen to live music.

As a cancer survivor, I am in awe at Conway's response to the interviewer's question about his cancer diagnosis. Conway's response is so inexplicitly dispassionate,  matter of factly describing  his spreading cancer and the ravages of chemo on his body with nary a trace of self pity. His slightly hoarse,  charged voice evokes vitality, wisdom and a sly charm.

A quote I read recently, "Pain is inevitable, suffering is not," comes to mind.

Conway, 1956 - December 19, 2021

By his example, I've had a clue how to engage life when my next battle looms over the horizon. Thank you, Billy. Losing you is a blow to every man, woman, and child who has ever been in, and felt, your sage, gentle presence.

Christmas 2021

December 24, 2021

 

Looking out the landing window at the top the stairs tonight, there will be the spirit of a seven-year-old boy residing in the body of a grown man, certain that any minute now he will see a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer streaking through the midnight sky, destined to land gracefully on the roof, the Jolly man in the red suit and iconic cap with white trim climbing down the chimney to distribute gifts I have yearned for all year long, staying just long enough to fortify himself with the plate of cookies I have left by the fireplace, then continue on his mission to deliver joy and a welcome bit of normalcy to the world, if only for a few hours.

Noel…

Merry Christmas!

 

Ramble In The Mist

December 2, 2021

12:30 AM

42°F, clear skies at 1:27 AM after persistent rain showers had abated, the smell of damp earth and decaying leaves redolent in the chill air, the urge to ramble strikes. I am out the door.

Down the porch steps to the road… Go left? Go right?

Resolved by some internal whimsical compass, no matter how many times I venture down a familiar path, it is never the same, the quality of light, the dome of the cosmos overhead, the time of night, the season. Familiar sites become mischievous changelings, surprise me, the nocturnal rambler.  My mind wanders to the thought of a woman applying a foundation to highlight the subtle makeup she will apply before a night on the town with me, accessorizing with hues subtle but noticed by a rambler accustomed to her appearance and her ways.

A rambler's shoes and photographers eye - roof lines and architectural elements compete for attention with the patterns of a crosswalk, the sheen of rain reflected by streetlights in brilliant granular black and white.  Overhead the aesthetic beauty of a huge electronic transformer stationed regally atop a telephone pole, its throne an elegant geometric design befitting a powerful deity. 

Every ramble serves up a surprise and an image I could never anticipate... a walking jack-in-the-box ramble.  I look with my eyes then through the lens in my camera. The ramble shifts from physical to aesthetic, from seeing to noticing. When I drive to do errands, my eyes are blinkered like a New York carriage horse seeing only what is straight ahead. Practical, safe, and life preserving.

Rambles? No blinkers. 360° beckon.

Every object has a personality that blossoms in the dark. Carefree on the open road, I feel the energy and joy of a Walt Whitman, seeing beauty in unexpected quarters. Having left my travails at the door, I engage myself with the joy of the open road. Expectations are not part of the process. I will see what I will see. It’s all already out there.

Seeing as a survival skill. Noticing adds aesthetic joy to my rambles.

Tonight, Christmas lights begin to adorn houses, black macadam pavement reflects street lights with granular precision, the chill air gives my ramble a seasonable envelope, crisp air amplifies the colors, architectural and arboreal, as I navigate the route of the ramble.The irony of familiar sites showing small eccentricities, some small detail I had not noticed before, a little prank on the  rambler. 

Everything is the same. Everything is different.

Paradoxical. True.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Midnight Ramble In The Mist

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Music, Emotion, Well-Being and Why You Choose It

The past 20 months of living with a  pandemic changed everything. 

Listening to music has been my safe, soul stirring, dancing in the kitchen source of joy. Every culture has a musical outlet, social, secular, spiritual, and I'll bet each of them uses music as a buffer.

What's with that?

Well,

• musical pleasure (think dopamine, same effect as food, sex and drugs)

• musical anticipation (whether expected or surprising)

• refined emotions (stimulate emotional processing of different parts of your brain)

• memories (the durable power of music triggers connections and creates associations)

• action tendencies (wanting to shake your booty)

• emotional mimicry (can make you feel sad or happy)

• consumer behavior (background music)

• mood regulation (refuge from cares of the day)

• time perception (pleasant music seems to tends to mitigate thinking about your shopping list and cares of the day)

• and identity development (popular music reminds us of memories or future anticipations) are in the mix.

All in all, a positive alternative to a cup of coffee to diminish fatigue or a sip of your favorite beverage to buoy you up. Free, legal, and morale boosting.

SOURCE

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/science-choice/201908/music-emotion-and-well-being

Nietzsche on Music and other quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche was my kind of guy. He stretched his definition of  'dance' like silly putty to consider matters philosophical, whimsical and practical. His thinking pre-dated psychological studies like this one .

Consider this collection...
"I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' "

"Without music, life would be a mistake... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance."

"Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?"

"Real dancers are the ones who can hear the music in their soul."

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."

"At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me."

"Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing."
 
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

No wonder I feel like I'm in an altered state every time I'm on the dance floor.

Quotes like this are tossed about often, usually without knowledge of the man who coined them.

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

 

Marcus Roberts: "Gershwin For Lovers"

Coffee Series servings...notes scribbled while listening to my CD collection as I enjoy my first cup of coffee...

MARCUS ROBERTS, Gershwin for Lovers, Columbia, 1994

This album - piano, bass, drums - is the penultimate classic jazz trio collaboration. Roberts interprets Gershwin as swing, a subtle rumba, and jazz infused ballads. He mixes it up with gorgeous lightly struck chords and arpeggios that nail the personal groove he stamps on Gershwin songs.

I’ve heard Gershwin 100 times. This is one of the most refreshing. Swing, sly Latin, a soft hint of blues, all three musicians in the same groove, point and counterpoint. Percussion soft sweet and definitive, the arrangements are inventive and totally in spirit with the Gershwin intent that can be performed buoyantly, or as a ballad, or soft or lazily swinging.

Roberts finds the groove between fresh and traditional. Upright bass of Robert Veal and fresh riffs by drummer Herlin Riley take off in flight that is always in the vapor trail of Marcus Roberts lead.

A Foggy Day

The Man I Love

Our Love Is Here To Stay

Summertime

Someone To Watch Over Me

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Nice Work If You Can Get It

They Can’t Take That Away From Me

How Long This Been Going On?

But Not For Me

Produced by Marcus Roberts

Executive Producer Dr. George Butler

A Nocturnal Ramble

October 12, 2021

Nocturnal ramble up Palfrey Street and beyond. 

 

A perfect cloudless autumn evening, dusky dome of the universe overhead, Jupiter presiding in regal resplendence, this is a night for rambling and ruminating.

 

Trees lining the street, not yet yielding their chlorophyll, exhale the oxygen I am breathing in by the lung-full on an inspired march up the 45° incline of Palfrey Street.

 

The organic olfactory rush of just-cut grass, freshly laid down mulch covering gardens and flowerbeds, the uncomplicated quality of it in the still of the night, catches me by surprise, transports me to my earliest memories of autumn evenings when I was a kid. 

 

I’m overwhelmed by nostalgia, grateful for the time travel to a simpler, less complicated world, one in which the biggest choice that I  pondered for the whole month of October was how would I make a really fun costume, one in which my mother would perennially come to my rescue.

 

The Halloween lights and decorations along Palfrey Street, eye popping or subtle, a welcome tonic showing home owners having fun in these days when we’re grateful to be reminded of a sense of normalcy. 

 

Feet propped up as I sit on my front porch, I'm satisfied with an invigorating march around my neighborhood  with surprising reminisces from the past and an aromatherapy session to boot.

Watertown from one of the highest elevations in town.

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

CVS Orchestra Al Fresco

October 10, 2021

Phil, also known as Dutch (not Doug) Is bringing the joy to the quiet parking lot behind CVS on Main Street in Watertown.

This man is no amateur. He got his affinity for music by listening to his mother’s piano playing and singing when he was a kid. After learning music theory at the Berklee College of Music, he joined a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll music bands , one of which opened for Ray Charles (not sure where or when). Star struck, he and his mates got to watch Ray perform from the wings at the side of the stage.

Today, situated behind the back door of CVS on Main Street, Watertown, there’s always lots of foot traffic. Street musicians and buskers have to have a specific frame of mind to perform. They go through stretches of time where people pay more attention to the parking meters or their phones than to them and their music.

Buskers like Dutch Phil (not Doug, as I refer to him in the video) are here because they they need to play, sort of like they need to breathe.They may pocket a few dollars to cover gas money and a meal or two. When they perform solo, they’re playing for their muse and to feed their psyches with the creative process that, like a songbird in its cage, needs the freedom to stretch its wings and explore the world before returning home.

There is a lotta magic that Phil coaxes from his Yamaha electric keyboard - powered by a cord attached to the battery of his car a few spaces away from his makeshift bandstand strategically set up across from the exit of CVS.  Musicians like Phil have a vast library of standards tucked away in their memory cells. It amazes me that he can switch from blues to the American songbook to swing to rock ‘n’ roll at his own whim or the request of a passerby.

His sense of phrasing and tempo is elegant. His spontaneous riffs and quotes from other songs appear then disappear back into the main frame of the song like the beams of the headlights disappear after passing his bandstand.

His curly gray hair poking out from under his baseball cap, he is totally present. Nevermind this is a bland concrete parking lot. This man is a commanding presence with the improvisational spirit of a Keith Jarrett. Who cares if the audience is a bunch of empty cars and the occasional shopper at CVS or visitor to the ATM machine at the bank next-door. My guess is that he's imagining playing for a full house at the Chevalier Theatre in nearby Medford, MA.

He doesn’t appear to have a definite schedule. He does have an unshakable presence and a remarkably nimble style that that samples music from every genre he’s ever heard..he's a one man mood elevator, as powerful as a prescription you just got from CVS.

This rollicking video of "When The Saints Go Marchin' In" is Dutch Phil in full, with impressive keyboard panache in his over the top concluding riff.

 

Video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Apologies, this it Dutch playing, not Doug.

 

 

 

Hanging Out To Dry

Hanging out to dry...a rare sight, colorful, reminiscent of a time BD...before dryers.

And memories of watching my grandmother take clothes from the washer, squeeze water from them in a hand driven wringer attached to the washing machine then take them outside to dry on the clothes line... in all seasons.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

An Autumn Nocturnal Ramble

A nocturnal ramble up Palfrey Street and beyond...

 

A perfect cloudless autumn evening, dusky dome of the universe overhead, Jupiter presiding in regal resplendence.

 

This is a night for rambling and ruminating.

 

Trees lining the street, not yet yielding their chlorophyll, exhale the oxygen I am breathing in by the lung-full on an inspired march up the 45° incline of Palfrey Street.

 

The organic olfactory rush of just-cut grass, freshly laid down mulch covering gardens and flowerbeds, the uncomplicated quality of it in the still of the night, catches me by surprise, transports me to my earliest memories of autumn evenings when I was a kid. 

 

I’m overwhelmed by nostalgia, grateful for the time travel to a simpler, less fraught world, one in which the biggest choice that I  pondered for the whole month of October was how would I make a really fun costume, one in which my mother would perennially come to my rescue.

 

The Halloween lights and decorations along Palfrey Street, eye popping or subtle, a welcome tonic showing home owners having fun in these days when we’re grateful to be reminded of a sense of normalcy. 

 

Feet propped up as I sit on my front porch, I'm satisfied with an invigorating march around my neighborhood  with surprising reminiscences from the past and an aromatherapy session to boot.

Jupiter, a luminously present, nearly upstaging the moon.

Watertown from one of the highest elevations in town, Palfrey Street.

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Terrence Blanchard: From New Orleans To The Met

The murder of George Floyd, captured on video for the world to see, was an inflection point in America.

In tandem with or a result of the ghastly sight and evolving Black Lives Matter consciousness, companies began to realize that black people were consumers. Commercials for clothing, electronics, insurance, cars and trucks, home repair products, are pitched by black men and women and interracial couples. The abrupt change would not have  happened before George Floyd. Rational talk about racism are becoming a  regular feature on radio and TV.

Not everyone may be thrilled about that. But the persistent  history of neglected acknowledgement of contributions of creative black talent is being registered.  Much is written about how immigrants, which most of us were at one point, enriched America. Black people, to state the obvious, were transported here and became enslaved people. The effects on them and on us are rippling through our culture this very minute.

Black writers, singers, dancers, actors, actresses, film makers have occupied a sub-strata of our culture for decades. No longer.  Think about the singers and  songs seared into memories of your teenage years, songs that were the backdrop of your romancing and dancing. And remain embedded there with everyone from Aretha, James Brown and their successors to this day.

This is more than entertainment. It shaped our culture.

Tine to give due respect to the creative talent, inventiveness, with which they enrich our lives. I have listened to Terrence Blanchard play at the annual Satchmo Summerfest in New Orleans. 

Terrence Blanchard's creative juice was obvious at Sculler's Jazz Club in 2010.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2010/09/terence-blanchard-trumpeter-and-trio-at-scullers-jazz-club-1.html

But I'll bet no one in the audience would have guessed his genius would be in full bloom at another stage, nearly another planet away culturally, The Metropolitan Opera in October 2021.

Seeing his work at the Met is a huge step forward, an eye opener, a reminder of the depth of the pool of black talent and its pervasive influence on me and generations of white folks before me and after me. I am watching an inflection point become a cultural shift that affects all of us.

FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES, TERRENCE BLANCHARD,

 

 

Willie Nelson singing for his supper...

WHAAATT!?

C'mon, Willie...

I was startled then downright dismayed...two seconds into a commercial break on CNN, here you come singing "You Were Always On My Mind." for a Fed Ex commercial…."Willie Nelson x FedEx | Delivering for Earth"

What are  you thinking?

Your voice belongs in lots of places, from Farm Aid that you founded in 1985 to Honky Tonk road houses, but this Fed Ex business is a bridge too far.

The only damn thing that will make me feel at all better is if every penny Fed Ex pays you goes straight to the United States Revenuers to pay for your federal taxes this year. We all remember what happened in 1990 when the IRS raided your home, seized your  possessions and auctioned them off to pay a $16.7 million dollar tax debt.

You've never been short on telling us what's on your mind. I'm not entitled to do anything but listen to your vast and adventurous catalog of songs but I sure would like to know why oh why you agreed to hitch your wagon to Fed Ex.

You support environment causes and farmers who depend on a stable environment.

The Fed Ex commercial touts its commitment to reducing its carbon imprint  but hey, FedEx had more than 200,000 motorized vehicles in its fleet in 2019. To its credit it added 2944 electric vehicles that included delivery trucks, forklifts and airport ground service equipment.

Fine and dandy, but FedEx's airline cargo division boasts a huge fleet of 691 aircraft, twice as many as Ryanair, Europe's largest airline, and nearly three times as many as British Airways.as of 2017. In 2018, it's estimated that global aviation – which includes both passenger and freight – emitted 1.04 billion tonnes of CO2. This represented 2.5% of total CO2 emissions in 2018. Aviation emissions have doubled since the mid-1980s. That ain't hay.

As my dear readers have figured out after watching tons of hours of TV since March 2020, the songs pitched to sell product aim for our hearts then make a break our our wallets or try to improve our opinion of the aspirations of the corporation.

Hearing a song by Willie or Smokey Robinson transports us to the first time we heard it, who we were with, what we were doing, and the world in which we were living at the time... a cagey strategy to co-opt our buying choices by playing on my emotions.                       

Corporations began to capitalize it in 1926 when they knew most of America was tuned into their radios. Since March 2020 most of us have been glued to our TVs. Branding by using songs deeply embedded in our consciousness is a sneaky, powerful soft sell. Not fair. But effective on TV.

Willie, maybe Fed Ex delivers your monthly supply of weed.

For god's sake, grow your own.

PS

Amanpour & Company interview shows Willie's amazing memory

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/legendary-musician-willie-nelson-his-letters-america-nie80g/

 

 

 

 

 

John Prine - Angel from Montgomery

John Prine - Angel from Montgomery

Simple, Direct. Poetic. Imagery that made John Prine one of the great songwriters of all time.

If these first eight lines don’t duck you under the water to get a John Prine baptism nothing will.

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child who's grown old
If dreams were lightning
And thunder were desire
This old house would've burned down
A long time ago

I’ve listened to this song for years. And assumed that an “Angel from Montgomery” was some form of miraculous visitation that would carry the lonely woman off to another kitchen filled with rich conversation and a partner who made her feel alive.

Prine says that “I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better; the more they become part of the song, and they fill in the blanks.”

He relished the idea that your idea wasn’t the same as what had in mind.

I always thought that Angel from Montgomery would transport the old woman to a life rich with relationships and things that mattered..

One of the blanks I filled in…
An "Angel from Montgomery" refers to a pardon for a prison sentence from the governor. It is also used to refer to a last-minute pardon from the death sentence. The phrase originated in Alabama where the capital is Montgomery. I thought she was praying for a pardon from a loveless marriage that would set her free to find her cowboy. I think that John would appreciate that one.
https://www.jpshrine.org/lyrics/songs/trivia/angelfrommontgomery_t.htm

Once he wrote the line about a cowboy, he got obsessed with finding an image to hang it on. He rooted around till he found the cover of a book of Grand Ol’ Opry posters. Lo and behold one poster shows a man atop a bucking bronco with the title “Angel From Montgomery.”

Serendipity meets creativity.

The first time I heard Bonnie Raitt sing it, those words pouring out of her heart, I assumed she wrote it. No idea it was composed by a man. Prine is probably the only male who could think of writing it as a woman and pull it off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toJ3ZYWRh24

And Raitt performing it with Prine in 2020

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/10/830101087/watch-and-weep-john-prine-and-bonnie-raitt-perform-angel-from-montgomery

John Prine wrote a three-minute song that captures a lifetime of living.

XXXXXXX

"Angel from Montgomery" written by John Prine, originally appearing on his self-titled 1971 album John Prine.

Lyrics

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child who's grown old

If dreams were lightning
And thunder were desire
This old house would've burned down
A long time ago

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

When I was a young girl
Well, I had me a cowboy
He weren't much to look at
Just a free ramblin' man

But that was a long time
And no matter how I tried
The years just flowed by
Like a broken down dam

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

There's flies in the kitchen
I can hear 'em there buzzin'
And I ain't done nothing
Since I woke up today

How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Then come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOg7mAkrKJw

tiny desk in march 19, 2019 , also shows Prine's puckish sense of humor

Prine's tongue in cheek song, "Jesus, the missing years.." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suoJ6mLVBlU

and his last recorded song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L21Tc_DtL6M

John Prine died of Covid related illness in April 2021

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/john-prine-obit-253684/

 

 

 

Gerard's Sky High Priced Pies

May 1, 2021

By the time you pass the hand painted sign in white chalk on a black piece of plywood, the one that reads, “HOME MADE PIES” it’s probably too late. Doing about 50 mph eastbound on busy Route 2 you are passing Gerard’s Panetta’s Farm. Unless you have very quick reflexes, you’ll have to wait till next time to see how good those homemade pies might be.

Last year a house guest brought a Gerard’s Pie for dessert. It made an impression on my taste buds.

Today, the farm stand is the last stop after a stroll down Main Street in Concord. As soon as I saw the first sign, I was on a landing path to the quirky farm stand. It looks like countless other such stands in the area. Except for the giant refrigerator packed with those pies that dominates one side of the store. 

 I am about to buy two large 9 inch pies till my travel companion tugs on my sleeve, pointing to this sign... "Fresh PIes Daily LG $27.95, SM $17.95"

After recovering from sticker shock, I settle for a 4-and-a-half-inch strawberry rhubarb pie at $17.95 and head for the counter nearly hidden by a wall of bric-a-brac.

 “We’ve been making pies for 26 years,” says Amy. Her husband is the real deal Gerard.

“Once we began selling more and more pies, we outsourced the baking. Companies gave us great samples. Once we got into production, the quality went downhill and didn’t match what our pies tasted like. We decided to make our own pies.”

Judging by her age, they must have started in their young twenties.
They’re doing something right.

“50% of our customers are loyal frequent buyers,” Amy says. “Last week one of them gave a pie to a friend in Westborough. Two days later, the recipient drove here to buy some of her own.”

There are over 50 pies in the giant cooler.

I have a friend who makes the best pies, crust, fillings I’ve tasted since the days my grandmother’s pies ruled the earth. Gerard’s don’t compete with those but are some of the best non-homemade pies around.

They taste real good…but $27.95 good? I don’t think so.

  

Aside from the range of classic farm stand products, those two refrigerators against the wall are filled with a Pillsbury inspired gold mine.

The rest of the offerings at the farm stand are in line with those of other stands in the area. The small strawberry rhubarb pie? I'm still scratching my head at the price but give credit to Gerard and Amy for having a sense of supply and demand and the power of their reputation.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Loretta Lynn: Still Woman Enough...at 89!

And, according to this interview with Raina Douris, she still is.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/23/990217558/loretta-lynn-transforms-classic-songs-on-still-woman-enough

No way you'd ever guess the woman belting our these songs on this album was anywhere close to her age. She's got the pipes, the attitude, and the overwhelming desire to let those vocal chords and coal country lungs loose. I don't believe she can spend a day without singing any more than she can spend one without breathing.That Kentucky twang and her emotional grounded-ness in the hollers around her is as deep as those coal mines a few miles from where she  was born. Her natural beauty has been enhanced by modern day face lifting...vanity, commercial necessity? Who knows.

Nothing artificial is necessary to alter that piercing, achy, proud, pure tone of voice with pitch perfect tonality she's had no inclination to cap since she was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky on April 14, 1931.

"She became a part of the country music scene in Nashville in the 1960s. In 1967, she had the first of 16 No. 1 hits, out of 70 charted songs as a solo artist and a duet partner.^[10] Her later hits include "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)", "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)", "Fist City", and "Coal Miner's Daughter".^[11]

Lynn focused on women's issues with themes about philandering husbands and persistent mistresses. Her music was inspired by issues she faced in her marriage. She increased the boundaries in the conservative genre of country music by singing about birth control ("The Pill"), repeated childbirth ("One's on the Way"), double standards for men and women ("Rated 'X'"), and being widowed by the draft during the Vietnam War ("Dear Uncle Sam").^{[12]" Wikipedia}

^{During the interview, Lynn says "Tell the truth in your songs."}

That's exactly what she did, in subjects so far ahead of public taste that some radio stations refused to put then on air.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/still-woman-enough-mw0003469057

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loretta_Lynn

Personal aside: a photo of Loretta Lynn before she had all that youth culture work done on her face would be a master stroke against ageism that apparently equates age and appearance with ability ...or even worse, your relevance.

Is it too hard to equate what your ears are hearing with this lovely aging face taken a few years ago (much more appealing than the plastic face she acquired more recently?)  C'mon, Loretta, your face right there is inspiring for young singers to grow into and for your contemporaries to be proud of.

 

The Ice Panda

 

February 26, 2021 

He appeared this morning  . On a small patch of snow. The only remnant of the 2 feet of a snow bank, now evaporated,  that had lined my street for the past 10 days.

Upright. Indomitable. Inscrutable.

A mystery, a miracle, a little soldier of fortune

He was about a foot away from where my snowblower would have shredded his poor furry body. And another foot from where a giant snow plow would have relocated him Lord knows where and how far away.

He scared a neighbor who thought it was a deranged overgrown possibly rabid chipmunk to be avoided at all costs earlier in the morning.

Close inspection revealed he must have been a well-loved object of affection by a child somewhere within plowing distance of the front of my house. Its gray matted down and soaked weight and the fact its tiny feet were frozen to the ground helped him maintain an upright posture, looking alert, perhaps a sentinel guarding against other marauding soaked toy animals with malicious intent.

Three hours later, after a trip to Home Depot to buy supplies, there he was, not having moved one inch. By nightfall, his island of snow had totally disappeared and there he stood watching, waiting for something to happen.

An act of kindness was in order, A gesture, a salute, recognition of a minor miracle. I lashed him to the top of the fire hydrant a few feet from where he had been keeping watch to give him a better view of the surroundings. And elevate him to the safe throne he so richly deserved after all his travails.

Sometime in the coming days he may be seen and retrieved by his owner. In the meantime there's a glint of satisfaction in his two tiny black eyes. Against all odds, he has prevailed and has a future.

POSTSCRIPT

His nickname was suggested by a friend who recalled the discovery of Otzi the "Ice Man" found in Italy's south Tyrol mountains in 1991, although not with a copper ax in in hand!

First appearance of the Ice Panda after a warm windy night evaporated the  remainder of a snow bank in front of my house.

Vigilant night...

and day...

The Icc Panda appeared after a major ice melt of the snowbank over a week of unseasonably warm temperatures.

Photos  by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

"Virus’s long reach imposes a heart-wrenching isolation on all of us...

... imposes a heart-wrenching isolation on all of us."

March 28, 2020

The story resonates today in different forms and still animates the way we live our lives on earth these days...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/28/metro/viruss-long-reach-imposes-heart-wrenching-isolation-all-us/

These are the kinds of stories I need to read these days, kaleidoscopic scope and breadth about the young, the old, and the in-between, how we are navigating roiled waters, managing our dreams, aspirations, callings, making peace with them in a disorienting present, uneasily, but resolutely.

Luminous details, small brush strokes, bore right down to the bedrock of who we are and connect us in unexpected ways...all important reminders of our shared humanity usually overshadowed by the surface tension of what used to be daily life.

PT

Opening Day at Fenway Park - Covid19 Vaccinations!

February 1, 2021

https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/01/30/coronavirus-vaccine-fenway-park

Phase 2 of the Massachusetts rollout of Covid vaccine began yesterday, February 1 at Fenway Park in Boston.

 

The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) hit a Grand Slam..

No Fenway Franks, no hawkers tossing paper bags of peanuts up ten rows in the grandstand with better accuracy than some of the pitchers on the mound,  no guys standing on milk crates in the concourse selling programs, no sound of a full house crowd cheering on the Sox - something waaay better - the first round of vaccinations in Phase 2 in Massachusetts.

The concrete concourse inside the 112-year-old diamond in the rough known as Fenway Park (or 'Paak' depending on where you grew up) had a lineup of volunteers and professionals who worked together with the efficiency of the crew that covers the entire infield in five minutes flat when the rain begins to fall during a ball game.

Today demanded that kind of efficiency - a nor'easter was on the way. In a blast email from CIC, everyone with an appointment after 2 PM was urged to cancel or report in the morning. I was in the lineup at 10 AM, my friend Susaan at 3:30 PM. We rolled out to Fenway at 9 AM. Beat the storm, maybe even beat the crowd. We did beat the storm. Beat the crowd not so much - lots of people had the same idea we did.

Not to worry. The CIC logistics managed the plan like a veteran manager would pencil in his lineup for a big game. This huge set up with hundreds of moving parts from entry at Gate A on Jersey Street to the exit on the same street. It was flawless.

Show your confirmed appointment at Gate A. Enter the concourse. Read the signs inside the door. Stay on the circular 6 foot decals. Get a little loose about compliance and a floor manager points to the decal. You sheepishly stand right on it. When you reach a row of desks separated by plexiglass, show your insurance card,  sign a form confirming normal temperature and no contact with anyone with Covid19 symptoms and you join the line ahead.

The line snakes way up the concourse to a destination unseen as yet. Every 30 to 90 seconds follow the person in front of you to stand on the next 6 foot decal. After half an hour, notice the 15 minute waiting area in which people are sitting after being vaccinated. You're getting close.

Ten minutes later see a row of chairs, tiny desks and a nurse or medical student vaccinating those ahead. One raises her hand. I'm walking from the on-deck circle to the plate.

I am inexplicably nervous for a moment then full of anticipation. Amanda greets me, has a sealed vaccination needle of Pfizer–BioNTech COVID‑19 vaccine ready. Which arm?  Take off shirt. Right arm. A quick alcohol rub to clean then a shot i barely felt. WOW...DONE!

Amanda fills out a COVID-19 Vaccination Card with my DOB, Product Name,  Manufacturer and Lot Number on one side and "Reminder! Return for a second dose! with 2/22/21 she's inscribed on the reverse side.

Another card she gives me - "Important Next Steps" has  an address cic-health.com/Fenway and a QR code on one side and "Please remain in the observation area until 11:07 AM on the other side.

I am directed to a chair by a volunteer who checks the time. A few minutes later another volunteer with a laptop on a rolling cart greets me. "Would you like to schedule your second dose?"

"Yes indeed!" Then and there I officially sign up for my second dose on February 22.

While waiting for the next 15 minutes I peruse the "What to Expect after Getting a Covid-19 Vaccine" brochure.

What seamless planning and execution! Fenway Park is easy access by public or private transportation, the whole shebang happens undercover and indoors so no worries about weather.  Semi-trailer sized space heaters keep the concrete and steel interior warm. It is 32 degrees F outside.

A first dose of vaccination is not a magic bullet. I still need to mask up, wash my hands, keep a small social bubble. I'll do the same after the second dose. I'm doing what's necessary because some day down the road I want to go dancing, head to my favorite eateries, and visit my friends in Lafayette, LA.

Everyone here today has hopes, dreams, and anticipation for a future without Covid. Some have had losses so much deeper than mine, losing friends, parents, businesses. I am healthy enough. My friends and families have not been savaged by Covid 19. I am mindful and grateful for that.

I'm in that crevice between grieving for what's lost and hoping for what can be recovered. Time and again i remind myself of the words of the poet Antonio Machado as he considered the 600-mile pilgrimage walk  El Camino Real -  "There is no road, walking makes the road."

I'm walking.

XXXXXXX

Start at Gate A on Jersey Street

 Line up, sign up

Follow the line...

My turn !

Make an appointment for second shot while in recovery area

 

Photo opp on the way out...

Who knew the most important event this year at Fenway would have nothing to do with baseball!

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Helpful sites

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/coronavirus/public-to-get-first-glimpse-of-fenway-mass-vaccination-site/2288562/

https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/01/30/coronavirus-vaccine-fenway-park

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-vaccination-locations

or Google "how long is the california el camino real"

 

 

 

Photo Essay Draft: Tuscany

TEST TEST TEST

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Tuscany

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Joan Baez: A New Stage

December 28, 2020

20/12/28 Joan Baez/Stacey Abrams

Joan Baez: A New Stage

When 79 year-old Joan Baez announced her farewell tour  ending her public singing career I assumed she was sailing over the horizon and anchoring at some distant island of quiet retirement. Wrong.
https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/joan-baez-fare-thee-well.html

Today my friend Myke Farricker dropped in to deliver a Christmas present.

From the size and shape I could tell it must be a photo, perhaps one of the historic fundraising bike rides we have done for the ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)s) cause . Wrong again.

The bold and beautiful limited-edition portrait of Stacey Abrams stunned me.

“Check the name of the artist,” Myke says. Another shock.

Joan Baez.

It’s not a far leap to know that Baez as always had a social activist streak.

Now instead of using her one-of-a-kind immediately recognizable voice she is using color and canvas to make her point.

I don’t know whether artistic ability comes from the left brain or the right brain or the heart. All I know is that her drive to put her shoulder and talent to the wheel of social justice is unrelenting. Never happy with the status quo of politics in general, the past four years have been a car-crash affront to her political sensibilities.

She is pushing back.

To her, music has always had a point.In her politically framed songs, she knows that her sentiments can be a driver to raise consciousness...and money.

Painting has become her new voice, she is a force to be reckoned with. This may be the most important stage in her life.

Case in point: 100% of proceeds pledged to Abram's "Fair Fight" PAC

 

 

• DETAILS
• Handmade

 

• Height: 15.5 inches
• Width: 11 inches

Description

 

Limited edition (250) archival pigment prints of the Stacey Abrams portrait painted by Joan Baez titled "Georgia on my Mind." Printed on Moab Entrada natural paper, these prints measure 11" x 15.5" including a one inch deckled border. Each print has been personally hand-signed and numbered by Joan Baez and comes with a certificate of authenticity. Prints are $200 each. Shipped in durable triangular tubes.

 

Another portrait ...sent to me by Susaan Straus...a friend  just tried to  purchase...SOLD OUT!

This photo from  Joan Baez website

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Winter Holiday: Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa: American Routes Radio

The vapor trail from Santa's sleigh heading back to the North Pole may be dissipating but the music in his wake is still ringing in my ears thanks to American Routes...

LISTEN right here...http://americanroutes.wwno.org/archives/show/1200/Winter-Holiday-Solstice-Hanukkah-Xmas-Kwanzaa

This week's edition of American Routes - Two hours of Americana that celebrates a whole range of songs for the season.

Tune in and feel the pulse of the season in as many flavors as you find in a fruitcake - rhythm & blues, blues, ballads, country and rock, in as many tempos as the number of ornaments on your Christmas tree, Hanukah bush or colors on your Kwanzaa candle holder.

Spitzer is the equivalent of a Santa Claus with a bag of gifts that satisfy the soul thirsting for seasonal sentiments only quenched by voice and instruments. Not to mention that a few of them are played as universally as Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.

From the first selection to the last, Santa Spitzer dispenses gifts he has shopped for all year long, hidden in his closet, and gleefully stuffed in the bag he opens for us today.

The first hour features several artists you'd never hear on your radio and rock or croon righteously. The second hour is loaded with familiar artists moved by the spirit of the season and deliver chestnuts disarmingly recast from the original versions. Eartha Kitt, Chuck Berry, Willie Nelson, Otis Redding, Herbie Hancock with Corinne Bailey Rae, John Coltrane all slide into the program as easily as the big man with the round belly slides down our chimneys.

The second hour is more dedicated to songs celebrating Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas and New Year. Opens with lyrical Andy Statmam's Klezmer clarinet solo "Old Brooklyn" followed by a marzipan collection of Carole King (Hanukkah songs), New Birth Brass Band, Chuck Berry, Willie Nelson, Otis Redding,  Herbie Hancock with Corinne Bailey Rae, Bruce, John Coltrane, among others. 

Spitzer doesn't just drop presents under the tree. While you open his carefully wrapped gifts he tells you stories of where he found them and how they fit so synchronously with the other presents. After Chuck Berry's bluesy "Merry Christmas Baby" ... "Berry is covering in 1958 the original that Charles Brown made famous in 1947. Other covers were made by Elvis, Otis Redding, and Mae West..."

After the first of John Coltrane’s two compositions," This is a 1963 take on 'Greensleeves,' the old ballad from 1580 with Coltrane joined by his legendary quartet, piano McCoy Tyner, bass Reggie Garrison, and trumpet Freddie Hubbard."

I love this. Music has roots, songs and interpretations have antecedents. Every week Nick Spitzer digs in and tells us about them on American Routes.

"With Kwanzaa upon us, we'll close with music from the Georgia Sea islands, Lord Invader and his calypso composition Father Christmas," Spitzer says. Up comes West Indian singer Lord Invader joined by playful saxophone, drums, hand cymbals and hand clapping  followed by the Georgia Sea Island Singers "Join the Band" with an up-tempo penny whistle and hand clapping song that carries the message just fine.

My memories of Christmas past evoked by this day's American Routes is as intense my memory of incense wafting over the pews at Midnight Mass at Mount Carmel Church when I was a kid.

Listening brings home to me that the grip these secular songs have on me is as strong as any traditional or religious songs recalled from my youth. And reinforces how deeply embedded the contributions of Black musicians and singers are in our Christmas songbook and culture.

 

Frank Morgan: Listen To The Dawn

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

Frank Morgan: Listen To The Dawn, 1993

Frank Morgan, alto saxophone; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Grady Tate, drums and a young Ron Carter on bass, for 5 of the 8 tracks.

First track,"Share The Dawn," a Kenny Burrell composition - rarely have sax and guitar shared the same bed with such easy intimacy. Their take on Rogers and Hammerstein's chestnut "It Might As Well Be Spring" is as fresh as a daisy. The trio of Morgan, Burrell (three originals),  drummer Grady Tate and, for 5 of the 8 tracks, a young Ron Carter (one original composition) on bass are on a groove of intuitive repartee.

Soft swing with Morgan's signature bop inflected solos flights are underpinned seamlessly by Burrell, Tate, and Carter. A dawn to dusk mix of spritely,  one touch of sly Latin (Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You," and tender melancholy are stirred and not shaken. Morgan and Burrell finish where they started on the last track, "Goodbye."

 

 

 
 Frank Morgan (1933-2007) learned from and played with the best. He also fell into a drug habit, as did many of the best including his mentor Charlie Parker, but clawed his way back for the last set of his career. He persevered...not many musicians have a stint in San Quentin on their resumes.

OF INTEREST

https://www.michaelconnelly.com/extras/sound/

Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story is an absorbing documentary about a gifted alto sax player and Charlie Parker’s protégée, Frank Morgan

AND

>Harry Bosch – had a particular affinity for the saxophone. Its mournful sound, like a human crying out in the night, was what he was drawn to. The detective saw the worst of humanity every day on the job. He found solace every night in the sound of the saxophone."

Harry Bosch,  a fictional character in a series of Connelly's books, is a veteran police homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. Connelly weaves together his complex, layered character over several books.

Michael Connelly asked Morgan to compose beginning and ending solos and between chapter clips for one of my favorite Connelly audio books, The Overlook.

Connelly drops names of musicians and songs in every book he's written...impressive.

I had to go to google when he dropped the name of. trumpeter Tomasz Stanko , one of Harry Bosch's favorites.

 

Noel Ramble

December 21, 2020

'Tis the season...and a perfect night for a pre-Christmas ramble in the neighborhood illuminated by holiday displays and the light of a waning Beaver Moon.

 

Noel Ramble

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The Benny Green Trio: That's Right

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

A very together trio - Benny Green, piano; Christian McBride, bass; Carl Allen, drums, 1992

Dexterous piano riffing, inventive, swing to bop, creatively arrangements, cool ensemble work throughout. No wonder this seems familiar even though it's first time I've played it in years. Ideas from playing for 4 years with Betty Carter and 2 1/2 with Art Blakey and  listening to the likes of Bud Powell, Tad Dameron, Erroll Garner, Horace Silver, John Coltrane and Miles Davis ( "Something I dreamed Last Night") have percolated and informed his style and approach to each cut on the album.

Elements of shuffle, stride and swing - they're all in there. He plays "Cupcake", a Green original (there are 4 originals here), in a really cool swing beat.

In the liner notes, Leonard Feather comments on Green's 'double handed chording' that learned from listening to George Shearing and played on "Me And My Baby" and that "Hoagie Meat" is played in 24 bar blues in 3/4 time -  that tells me  how little I know about the structural elements that are embedded in the music I love and how much all forms of music have antecedents.

This album is gonna get lots of play. I'll feel quite proud of myself if I can pick out those 24 bar blues in 3/4 time and realize where else I've heard it used. The list of songs in 3/4 time above surprised me.

Nearly an  hour's worth of music to enjoy and learn from.

Harvard Square: A Sunday Uplift From The Grips Of A Pandemic

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Manna from heaven comes in many forms during these months of pandemic. A Sunday afternoon jaunt to Harvard Square ranks right up there with the miracle of the fishes and the loaves of bread. Since March, only places I have frequented are the market, Home Depot, CVS and my favorite restaurants to pick up takeout food at their doors. For those of you keeping count, that’s 9 months.

Lately, I have been beset by maddening intractable technical issues on my desktop. A trip to one the most iconic places in metro Boston is just the ticket. If my computer can’t reset, I can.

Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon is a destination known around the world. Battle scars from the pandemic are obvious. Some of the stores that have anchored the square for generations have been shuttered. Some have moved to another part of the square when their rents were jacked up, others have reestablished themselves in other neighborhoods. Some sadly will never reopen. Despite the economic toll the square is still a drawing card of the first order.

There is enough meat left on the bones of the place to give old timers like me a sense of continuity on this circumscribed patch of Cambridge that has drawn locals and visitors to it for generations. 

The emergence of free and fabulous street entertainment in the past 15 years - jugglers, magicians, pantomimists, acrobats, goofy and dog and pony shows without the ponies and hallelujah – music - is a huge draw. 

You’re not tripping over them as you walk from store to store, the city regulates where they can entertain. The most coveted place for entertainers is the section smack in the middle of Brattle Square, at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and John F. Kennedy Streets

On warm summer nights, spectators by the hundreds make a beeline there to be thrilled by some of the most original street acts in any town you’ll ever visit.

Heading down Brattle Street from what used to be Nini’s Corner (forced to move after decades), we hear the strains of a righteously ramped up cover band. Whatever else was on the to do list is immediately scratched. Live music, talented musicians, outdoors in the fresh air, real dance music, totally fabulous, oh yes, we are heading there right now.

Most people are tapping their feet or swaying to the music or wiggling their butts. A few are free styling  the music by themselves. All wear masks.

I have absolutely got to dance right now. I have not partner danced since March. This feels like the oasis I have been dreaming about for months. 

“Baby, we’re going to dance,” says I.  

My shopping companion, the one who came up with this idea, is quite the rug cutter at her Arthur Murray Dance Studio and knows the steps to just about any dance known to man. She and her teacher compete in routines they’ve practiced with total sang-froid in front of tables of judges and loads of spectators. 

She is hesitant to dance outside her familiar territory of polished oak floors and nattily attired cohorts.

I flunk at memorizing a routine. I intuitively follow the beat and channel it into dance…with style, joy, and absolute confidence that I can make it work no matter my partner’s level of expertise.

We step out of the crowd.

After so long a time without live music and a place to dance, I feel like a lemming inexorably heading toward the cliff. A sense of the preordained in play, I’m positively certain that when I reach it, I’m going to defy gravity, soar, and take her with me.

Partner dancing fills a place in my heart and psyche that has not been fed since March. For the next 15 glorious minutes, my partner relaxes, erases her habit of dancing to a creative routine she has mastered and goes with my flow.

I am in an altered state and have no fear of being arrested for it. My troubles and cares have dissipated in 4/4 time. A vital part of my life has been a resurrected like Lazarus. No drugs, no alcohol. Just following the stylings of fabulous singer Lois Lane and The Daily Planets. Christmas has come early. 

I lead. She follows. It is as simple as that.

Heading down Brattle toward the action in Brattle Square.Everyone wears a mask..it's the law.

 

Teen band in front of new Harvard Coop; on the way down Brattle Street

 

Harvard Yard across the street; original Harvard Coop on corner of Brattle and Massachusetts Avenue. Everyone wears a mask.

Lois Lane and band cover the classics...first rate mood elevator...Lois Lane and The Daily Planets

SIDEBAR

"Lois Lane and the Daily Planets are a mainstay in the Boston area music scene. Specializing in R&B, funk, soul, jazz, rock and pop, Lois Lane and the Daily Planets are sure to satisfy even the most demanding audiences! Once the crowd is on its feet they do not sit down.

Lois Lane herself, is a phenomenal singer and a natural entertainer and is known for getting and keeping the crowd on their feet dancing and laughing. Gifted with outstanding people skills, Lois reaches out and touches the heart of everyone from nine to ninety! You are guaranteed to have a great time listening, dancing and celebrating to this great entertainer and band.

Backed by a powerful rhythm section in guitarist Peter Fedele, bassist Lee Lundy and drummer Cliff Goodman, the show is always energy-packed experience to remember!:

https://www.reverbnation.com/loislaneandthedailyplanets

Up and comers...snag a place between the two Harvard Coops and their own echo chamber

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/01/arts/introducing-pair-14-year-old-harvard-square-buskers-with-sound-beyond-their-years/

Photos and videos by Paul  A. Tamburello, Jr.



 

Keith Jarrett: The Köln Concert

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

 

His left hand pounding with vigor and occasional rhapsody, right hand trilling like a lark with occasional riffs reminiscent of a choir at a distant white clapboard church,  is an acoustic balm to ease soul and body in troubled times.

A reader told me about Keith Jarrett's current health, his penchant for perfectionism, and stand-offish relationship with a  live audience. .https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/arts/music/keith-jarrett-piano.html

The 1975 recording is of sweepingly surpassingly in the moment lighting caught in the bottle.As of now, the bottle may be capped forever.

 

Horace Silver: Songs For My Father

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

 

1963,1964

The first cut on this album, "Songs For My Father," John Tavares Silver, who happens to be the nattily dressed man on the album cover, is still today the most recognizable Horace Silver composition. All but one of the ten cuts were composed by Horace at the piano.

Blue Note has a great catalog of jazz from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, one of the richest periods in jazz history. Horace gives his side men plenty of space to play around him, from rich solos to subtle underpinnings to his 88 key center of gravity.

 

Sarah Vaughn: The George Gershwin Songbook Volume 1

The morning coffee series:.listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...
December 7, 2020

Sarah Vaughn’s voice and phrasing take a backseat to the strings and intrusive orchestration in much of this album but… the last three songs with snappy big band arrangements mercifully without strings give us full throttle Sarah without the clutter. Gershwin and strings were never a natural combination.

reply by fellow jazz enthusiast who sends me this

"Ain't  Misbehavin" by Foe Pass on Oscar Peterson show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_kUJa1PueM

 

 

 

 

 

 

NPR: COVID-19 Hits Hard For South Louisiana's Cajun Musicians

On Nov 28, 2020, at 4:25 PM, Bernard Ussher sent:
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/938574647/covid-19-hits-hard-for-south-louisianas-cajun-musicians

My reply to my good friend Bernard who lives in Lafayette, LA.

All  I have to do is look around my own city to see the economic effects of the pandemic. Many of my favorite family owned restaurants shuttered,  maybe for good. Having eaten at their places so  often, I know the owners. I feel their loss and and grieve for lost connections to them...my favorite bars, dive bars, small dance venues, my own barber shop all closed. Some are gone for good. That hurts. 


Practically having a second home with welcoming friends with whom I've stayed in Lafayette for years, what's happening with economic scene in Lafayette is what's happening in my own home town except on a broader scale
.

The ubiquity of music and the merriment of dancing is crumbling as fast at the chunks of ice falling into the sea from icebergs at the poles of the earth. Music and dancing have been embedded in this culture for generations, from  farmers and fishermen to everyday folks. For as far as they can remember, they've relied on it to ease everyday tensions and, as they say down there, "laissez les bon temps rouler"...Let the good times roll. No more.


Some readers of this blog live there. Some of you were born there. Hundreds of people from around America head to SW LA for the sole purpose of joyfully dancing to the music in those parts. 


You've all experienced the dancing, the music, and the inner glow of emotional sustenance that lights us up like two-stepping Roman candles when we partner up on the dance floor. There's the manifest joy of dancing in the dust, in parking lots, muddy fields, dance halls with floors old enough to remember Prohibition, and the camaraderie between dancers and musicians that’s as natural a combination as red beans and rice.

The pandemic hurts musicians in the pocket book and in their own hearts. I’ve danced to so many bands there that I feel like those musicians are part of my family. I know they’re not giving up. It's not in their DNA. Sure they can find a job to put food on the table. Their hearts will still beat but not in 4/4 time. They'll breathe the oxygen but it won’t have whiffs of sweat and BBQ and beer-soaked wood dance floors.


My last trip to Lafayette was to visit Bernard and Rubia on the last days of February and first few of March 2020.  If not for the pandemic, I’d have been down there for festivals and any ‘ol weekend of good company and rousing music a dozen more times. I can still dance in my kitchen. I worry about the people in Lafayette who struggle like my people here.

I worry about the musicians who animate the culture, give it a common rhythm, and don’t get paid to play in their kitchens and don’t make very much on Zoom performances.

Men and women in SW LA miss their Cajun and Zydeco music. Music in this part of the country is not just a weekend thing. And it’s not only a night-time thing. Dancing begins right after your first cup of coffee on Saturday and Sunday mornings and happens every night of the week, and at weddings, public parks, and BYO house parties. Most of the musicians who played on Saturday and Sunday mornings played somewhere the night before, If you think you’re tired, think about that…then leave a good bunch of folding money in their tip jar and buy their CDs.

To me, the gift of music is a survival mechanism. Listening to it juices me up, takes me into an orbit high enough to put the pandemic into a far away box.

John Burnett's NPR story that I read ended with the words "Music — like seafood and family — is the nucleus of Cajun culture. It's not going away. It's just gone virtual.”

Honestly, I doubted that the music and musicians could rebound…until I listened to Burnett’s story with the music embedded inside it.

That’s when I began to believe that, like the crawfish that begin to emerge from the mud of the rice fields that are flooded every autumn, Cajun and zydeco music will survive until the pandemic is controlled enough and then re-emerge to resume all over SW LA.

In the meantime, think of the money you have not spent when flying to Louisiana, staying at motels, dining out, renting cars, paying to enter the dances. Find out a way to send money to the musicians you love and have danced to.

THE BIG PICTURE...
Like looking through binoculars to see in detail, turn the lens around to look at the big picture.


The story is way beyond Lafayette. This is a coast to coast story. You feel it wherever you live. And you can do something about it.

Whether it's musicians who've raised your spirits, mom and pop stores or locally owned eateries or dive bars that are on your weekly glide path, find a way to pay forward your gratitude.

Keep ordering that take out food. Find a local source for what you found on Amazon. Let's transform  "Let The Good Times Roll" to "Let The Pecuniary Gratitude Roll". You can do this.


Give the kind of love that will ensure that all your local faves will be there when the coast is clear and you need them to feed the hole in your life that has become deeper and darker than you'll admit.


Louis Armstrong is said to have signed his letters “Red beans and ricely yours” .
I follow suit,
Red beans and ricely yours,
Paul Tamburello
 
 

Birth Of The Cool; Miles Davis

Morning coffee series...

November 8, 2020

Recorded in 1949, 1950. Big band sound produced by a small classic core of musicians that give it an air of intimacy as if produced in a dimly lit room with a cloud bank of cigarette smoke obscuring the cramped stage. Listen closely enough and imagine the sound of ice cubes swirling around in tumblers of scotch.

 

 

Marcus Roberts: Gershwin For Lovers

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

A surprisingly versatile and imaginative take on George Gershwin

 

Mini Pre-Midnight Ramble: Halloween Treat - Blue Moon and Mars

October 31, 2020

I bought a couple of bags of candy but not one trick or treat kid came to the door tonight.  Not surprising considering the pandemic now have enough chocolate to snack on for a month.

When it was clear that the streets would be empty for the night, I took a brief walk in search of he full moon I had read would be rising up there somewhere.

A minute later, red tinged Mars showed up to join the 'Blue Moon', a pretty neat trick on Halloween.

“Once in a blue moon” explained…

The Oct. 31 full moon also happens to be a "blue moon," a designation for the second full moon to occur in a single calendar month. Blue moons are relatively rare as well, occurring on average just once every 2.5 years or so. Blue moons are relatively rare as well, occurring on average just once every 2.5 years or so. It won't happen again until 2039.

By then I will have consumed all that candy.

Whoa, from my history of  Midnight Rambles, I recognize that reddish planet.

Surprise...Mars in the clear sky!

Photographs by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster

First cup coffee series...listening to a reorganized  collection of CDs while enjoying those first sips of rich coffee...

October 27, 2020

Recorded November 3/December 2, 1959

Ben Webster was reputed to have been a  very difficult, angry man.

His music was a 180...says David, my knowledgeable friend of 50 years.

 

 

 

 

I Voted!

Cross every T and dot every Y...my vote's gonna count

Aiming for a new tomorrow...

Photo by  Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

American Routes: Sounds Of Solace

October 18, 2020

Nick Spitzer, host of weekly program American Routes on WWNO, is the most eclectic curator of music of  the American musical landscape. His weekly two-hour program  serves up helpings of blues, country, soul, Tejano, Cajun, zydeco, jazz and surprises in between.

Every so often, he surprises me with an out of left field choice. This week's out of the gate opening selection, "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," by Charles Mingus (Blues and Roots, Atlantic Records) is straight ahead jazz with a different feel.

I'm thinking how the heck does Charles Mingus's jazz composition fit in here...then recall the title of this week's program.

Nick is a master of identifying a theme and finding music and musicians to build a subtle playlist that holds it all together. Every week he knits a musical and cultural quilt. By the time he's done, you feel the warp and the weft of American music and the backgrounds and histories of men and women who made it.

His intro for this week's program he's titled 'Sounds of Solace'.

"We reflect on these difficult times with sounds of solace and uplift to see us through solitude and the unknown. From Blue Skies and the Milky White Way to down home and earthly struggles with Mavis Staples and Elvis, Bill Monroe, and Louis Armstrong."

What ensues is a tapestry of  what Spitzer describes as "memory, hope, uplift, and contemplation" ...ballads, folk,  blues, country western, rock 'n roll, jazz, and pop from artists with household names and a few you've never heard of but fit the bill perfectly.

http://www.americanroutes.org/archives/show/1190/Sounds-of-Solace

Spitzer unleashes a calming musical frontal attack on the pandemic. Each song is introduced with dates, record labels to set time and place, and he digs in.

No pedant, he's the drum major, twirling stories introducing each song with palpable energy and contained enthusiasm that reinforce why the song belongs in the today's theme, Songs of Solace.

American Routes began 90 minutes ago as I was listening to WUMB, Boston, on my desktop. I'm still in my chair, now in the midst of  Bonnie Raitt's 1974 cover of  John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery." 

Songs of Solace is  delivering the goods.  Music is a balm, a solace, and Dr. Spitzer is making a virtual house call.

 

 

 

 

Concert for Rebecca

September 19, 2020

Al fresco concert for Rebecca...

No matter from whence it comes, music lifts the spirits.The right music at the right time sprinkles ethereal fairy dust that for brief sparkling moments ever so softly and subtly temporarily neutralizes  pain and the shadows of mortality. It can happen in churches, temples, dive bars, back yards and warm kitchens. It happened here today. Erin Harpe, an RW fave, provided the musical groove that called down the spirit.

That spirit came down and sat beside us as soon as it heard Harpe's robust, Piedmont blues dexterous finger picking, a perfect match for the songs in her repertoire. Obvious in the videos below. And her stage (lawn?) patter that introduced songs that often had a distinct ragtime rhythm with a bluesy twist. The style was sourced in African American songs that gained popularity from the mid 1920s to the the 1940s. If you've ever heard a Josh  White song you feel it.

Contemporary artists like Keb Mo, Ry Cooder and David Bromberg carry on the tradition. And this afternoon, Erin Harpe gives us a front row seat and treat with her deeply felt Piedmont picking and stylings. Once you listen to the style, you can hear traces of it in other regional styles that veer into the style with string  bands and ragtime.

https://www.erinharpe.com

Erin Harpe and Jim Countryman, aka the Country Blues Duo. Jim Countryman provides the bassline the way a cement foundation  supports the frame house above it,  not flashy,  certainly essential and occasionally playful.

 

 

 

 

 

The Kazoo is an  unexpected surprise in Erin's musical grab bag...what a hoot!

More KAZOO on this jaunty swing gem.

A terrific cover of John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery."

We need angels today. This is more than a lawn concert. It is a wish of a woman to fill her heart and ears with sounds that make her happy, stir neurons that palliate and cast rays of sunshine down roads with vanishing points that we as her invited friends cannot imagine staring into.

A dark undertow runs under the rich melodies, vocalizing. and presentation. Reflexively I am loving the music. And can't shake the reason I am siting here with a woman I have shared so much with. Her days are numbered.

She has invited a handful of us because she knows we are kindred spirits, transfixed with the same kinds of music that lifts, cradles, sends us into corners in our psyches and onto dance floors real and imagined in which we dance with passion, effervescent energy in the immediacy of now.

She wants us here to share this now with her. It is all we have. 

Videos and photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Dancing at Chez CVS

August 25, 2020

6:00 PM, dusk fading to evening

LIVE MUSIC!   I haven’t heard live music since the Ides of March, 2020. No matter that it’s coming from a masked bearded guy in a white cowboy hat playing an electric keyboard powered by a cable he runs from his car to his outpost on a slab of concrete at the end of a row of parking meters. The music is a merry mix of American Songbook, Blues, and Rock ‘n Roll. And it’s good!

I haven’t danced anywhere but my kitchen for months. I’m Fred Astaire wishing a masked-up Ginger Rogers would detour from heading for CVS or the  Bank ATM machine across the parking lot and join me in a Covid inspired lead and follow from six feet away.

Show time. I chivalrously extend my hand. In a virtual twinkling, there she is, in heels, a glorious smile of approval on her face as I lead her through a series of swing, fox trot and a rumba routine, brilliant and spontaneous. Just the kind she likes. She’s missed a live connection too.

Phil, “Dutch Phil” he says, Is bringing the joy to the quiet parking lot behind CVS on Main Street in Watertown. He got his affinity for music by listening to his mother playing piano and singing when he was a kid. After learning music theory at the Berklee College of Music, he joined a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll music bands.

“Early on, we got a gig to open for Ray Charles. After we finished, they put us in the wings at the side of the stage. I’ll never forget watching him and the Raylettes perform.” The word starstruck comes to mind,

Situated across from the back door of CVS on Main Street, there’s always lots of foot traffic.

Street musicians go through stretches of time where people pay more attention to the parking meters than to them and their music. Guys like Phil need to perform in parking lots because Covid has dried up all their gigs. A few bucks in the tip jar is good, might pay for their dinner but won’t satisfy their jones to perform.

When they perform solo, they’re playing for their muse and to feed their psyches with the creative process that, like a songbird from its cage, needs the freedom to stretch its wings and explore the world before returning.

 

There is a lotta magic that Phil coaxes from his Yamaha electric keyboard. All the more incongruous that it’s powered by a cord attached to the battery of his car a few spaces away from his makeshift bandstand.

Musicians like Phil have a vast library of standards tucked away in their memory banks. It amazes me that he can switch from blues to the American songbook to swing to rock ‘n’ roll at his own whim or a request from a passerby.

His sense of phrasing and tempo is elegant. His spontaneous riffs and quotes from other songs appear then disappear back into the main frame of the song like the beams of the headlights that disappear after passing his bandstand.

An improbable sight, his bushy gray hair poking out from under a white cowboy hat, slouched in a faded saggy camp chair, he is in his own universe, playing for an unseen audience he clearly feels. The gray concrete parking lot is Phil’s proscenium.  This man is on stage with the improvisational spirit of a Keith Jarrett. The audience is a bunch of empty cars and the occasional shopper at CVS or visitor to the ATM machine at the bank next-door. If that bothers him, he doesn’t show it.

As for me, this is the most fun I’ve had on a dance floor since March 15, 2020.

Song Of The Day: "Don't Be Cruel" - Reinvented

Whooeeeee, never thought someone could, or would, take this song by you know who, turn it upside down, let the sound of the coins falling from its trousers produce a song track, utterly its own, groove heavy, emotionally convincing, reeking of the 1950s ... voice, phrasing, backup singers, and tight band that makes every note count. And a bass line running through it like a freight train with a metronome in the firebox. I don't remember dancing to the original but this version begs you push the chairs back in the kitchen. And is that an organ introducing the song? Oh, my. This song has it all going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-STFyfsdoVA

I Voted!

August 24, 2020

Creative dropbox located between the Watertown Free Public Library and Town Hall, Watertown, MA...return your books or return your ballot!

A sad, and scary, comment on the uncertainty that ballots sent through the USPS may not reach their destination on time. I'm taking no chances. My ballot was mailed to me August 13, 2020. My ballot was tabulated at Town Hall the day after I put it in the drop box. No worries about recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, businessman and Republican Party fundraiser,  messing with my vote.

I never thought the day would come when I would question the safety and sanctity of my right to vote.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

FLASH...UPDATE!

I tracked my ballot at www.TrackMyBallotMA.com

9/1/2020 State Primary

Ballot Mailed: 8/13/2020

Ballot Received August 25, 2020

Status: Accepted

My ballot was scanned and accepted at Town Hall. The ballot was transported to my voting precinct location, scanned and counted.

I will receive a ballot for the November election soon. I will complete the ballot and return it to the same drop box and track my vote the same way. As in the primary election, my ballot will be transported to my voting precinct location, scanned, and counted.

I am horrified that the president is casting doubt on the election process.

Postmaster DeJoy's meddling with the systems of the country's drop boxes and the internal systems of sorting mail, including mailed ballots efficiently, is an assault on citizens' right to have their ballots received  and tallied on time.

NB: Read and follow instructions, especially where to sign and date. Ask your town hall if you have questions. Melania Trump's vote was disqualified because she did not sign where required. Pay attention!

PLEASE VOTE and VOTE EARLY!

Mid-Day Ramble: "We Can Do It!"

 Oh boy! I smiled when I noticed them on a Midnight Ramble. The smile on my face was as bright as the noonday sun when I read the inscriptions on the stones today. The colors on the stones outdid the flowers nearby. And the messages? See for yourself.

This has to be the mail deliverer's favorite stop of the day. For everyday passersby, it's a shrine.

In times of flux, social change and uncertainty, words matter. They mattered when, in 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote these words inscribed on the base of The Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” words inscribed on the base of The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Today we are masked masses, eager for the day we can breathe free again, who can appreciate a momentary uplift by reading the messages painted on these petra-petunias arranged on the steps.

We're learning to see through our masks and connect through our eyes, our laughter, and our attitude.

YES we can!

Easier some days than others...that's why we need those messages on the other stones!

That's when the fun begins...

The best rock garden ever!

and you can see it all the way down the street.

FLASH...I just learned that these artistic rolling stones were painted and captioned by the homeowner. She recently painted messages honoring women's rights...stay tuned for a photo update.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.biography.com/writer/emma-lazarus

 

 

 

Midnight Ramble: Firefighter Memorialized

August 15, 2020

Midnight - Mars rising as I head down Oliver Street. I never know what might be revealed on the ground during a Ramble. Overhead, I can count on bright Jupiter, as close to a neon sign you'll ever see, dominating the cosmos, along with Saturn, the Big and Little Dippers, Polaris, and a host of constellations that became more visible after Covid-19 closed the state down and emissions from automobiles cleared away.

Tonight's Ramble has a target - drop off my Water/Sewer quarterly payment, due today,  into a drop-box next to Town Hall.

Pieces of Watertown history are abundant on the way to Town Hall.

Even before Covid-19, death can visit suddenly as it did with this beloved 20-year veteran of the Watertown Fire Department. Cemeteries aren't the only place to memorialize the departed.https://patch.com/massachusetts/watertown/2-alarm-fire-watertown

On Main Street Rt 20, a virtual gravestone...

reminds citizens and firemen alike that the call of civic duty has hazards...

that need to be acknowledged.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

George Washington: Good Trouble in Watertown, MA

August 3, 2020

If you'd been standing around this corner, a main thoroughfare not far from the Boston Post Road, in the spring and summer of 1775, you'd have seen a who's who of American history riding through the streets of Watertown, MA.

When passing through Watertown, George Washington spent the night at Widow Dorothy Coolidge’s tavern. The tavern was located at the present site of the MBTA Bus Terminal landing next to the Charles River.

“We lodged in this place at the House of a Widow Coolidge near the Bridge, and a very indifferent one it is.”

High rating for historic significance but Widow Coolidge's lodgings get a pretty poor rating on Ye Olde Trip Advisor.

What was really on the menu was what the late Congressman John Lewis would say was getting into 'good trouble'...plotting to overthrow the British Government and embrace self-rule.

TO BE CONTINUED WITH FURTHER RESEARCH

MANY THANKS TO NEIGHBOR AND HISTORIAN MARILYNNE K. ROACH FOR INVALUABLE INFORMATION ABOUT ALL OF THIS!

 

 

 

 

Collaboration, Complicity, Enabling, Resisting

A long read. A call to action. Find the levers that work for you. Act now.

Download Collaboration Anne Applebaum

 

Epic Beethoven ‘Ode to Joy’ flashmob...

July 22, 2020

If banks across the world paid homage to their founding and made a subtle commercial for themselves while they were at it, this would be the great grandmother of all of them...in Sebadell, Spain, May 31, 2012

 

Surprise and a sense of joy on the faces citizens from 7 to 70 is a universal response to emotive music...contagious, too. I cheered.

"We will be back."

They intend to come back? Hope? A coping mechanism?

Whatever it is, it's the spirit that we call up every day in the midst of living with the pandemic.  Here they are, in living rooms, kitchens, offices, keeping their chops sharp, virtually connecting with their colleagues while their families make dinner and their children dance in the kitchen. 

They don't know how or when it will happen.

Not the point. A musician at the 2:16 mark is wearing a surgical mask, playing through the reality of a global pandemic. The point is they intend it to happen.

Lord knows, we all need something to look forward to, even if it will happen in a way we don't yet comprehend.

Embrace uncertainty...and be ready to perform when the time comes!

 

Willie Nelson: Willie Nelson: National Treasure, World Class Composer/Musician/Singer, Iconoclast, Weed Lover

Willie Nelson: National Treasure, World Class Composer/Musician/Singer, Iconoclast, Weed Lover

Featured on World Cafe interview with Raina Douris, July 8, 2020

10 ET - 11 ET

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/08/889063221/willie-nelson-inhabits-the-songs-of-others-on-first-rose-of-spring

For my money, Willie Nelson is the Voice Of America. Born April 29, 1933, he learned to play guitar from his grandfather and at the age of 10 was performing at local dances. The Voice Of America began broadcasting in 1942, a year before Willie got a band going. They both represent America in their own distinct ways. Willie is probably better known and listened to more often.

Nelson is a man of few words. Whether consciously or not, he's the laconic cowboy, his mind in the saddle, heading to a destination that will unfold as he rides. You're more likely to learn what he's thinking by listening to the verses in his songs. In conversations with a well-prepared interviewer like Raina Douris, he makes his words count.

Willie inhabits a song as naturally as he breathes. A couple of lines into one his songs and you instantly recognize the voice, high pitched, vaguely nasal, and beautifully in tune. A few more bars and you recognize the sounds he strums from his trusty guitar "Trigger." No one picks a guitar like Willie, a mix of south of the border riffs he heard growing up in Abbott,Texas, punctuated by licks inspired by Django Reinhardt.

Raina Douris, host of World Cafe, sets up the first 20 minutes of tonight's show.

"Willie Nelson’s 70th studio album, First Rose of Spring, came out last Friday – And just a few days before its release, the country music legend spoke with host Raina Douris. Willie shares about following his instincts when choosing songs to record, the advice he gives his kids Lukas and Micah as musicians, and how he feels about growing older in country music. Plus, we’ll hear about the new memoir he’s working on with his sister, who was Willie’s music teacher as a kid, and we’ll listen to some of the songs from First Rose of Spring.

She's interviewing Willie by phone because of the virus. He's on one of his ranches outside of Austin where his 47th annual July 4 party will be live streamed online. "If we musicians don't play, we go a little crazy so we really needed to do this."

Willie's songs have been sung by countless others. His ballads about love range from wistful, melancholy, tender, vulnerable, personal and universal, often within the same stanza. There may be a handful of people in America who have not heard Patsy Cline sing Nelson's "Crazy." Raina chooses it to get the show going on solid footing.

"First Rose of Spring," released on July 3, is Willie's 70th, gulp, album. He's only written a few songs on it, the rest are covers of songs he loves. Douris cues up the title song, "First Rose of Spring."

Here's Willie sing-talking, his guitar strumming to underpin the emotion of the song, a man recalling a first moment with a woman, a softly poignant memory Nelson is so good at exploring. From Willie's first words, you intuit emotionally that it's going to touch your heart so you just surrender and lean into the song. Fragments of memories of my past float to the surface. The beauty of Nelson's songs is that his lyrics always leave a space for us to add our own.

"I like songs that tell stories," he says. 'Don't Let The Old Man In,' written by Toby Keith is one of  those."

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8490429/toby-keith-clint-eastwood-inspired-dont-let-the-old-man-in-the-mule-interview

"There's a line in there that really floored me. 'Many moons I have lived, my body's withered and worn, but ask yourself how old you'd be if you didn't know the day you were born.'"

Douris plays the song. Willie's voice is steady and true. His trademark guitar licks shine like a neon light that marks the entrance to the roadhouse you've been looking for after a long haul on the highway.

I love "Don't Let The Old Man In." I'm not too many years behind Willie. We know we're closer to the end of the trail than the beginning. The affirming lyrics are a map with signposts reminding people getting on in years how to blaze the trail. I can't sing a lick but Willie and I are on the same page. That old man ain't gonna be darkening our doors any time soon.

This is a man comfortable in his own skin, no pretension, an introspective man who taps into his experiences with a memory sharp as a tack.

Raina Douris sets up the next thread. Willie's writing a memoir with his sister Bobbie, two years older, who taught him to  play the piano "as soon as my legs were long enough to touch the floor. I listened to her play Stardust, Moonlight In Vermont, Down Yonder and all those great songs... and learned to play music from her."

"We're going to write it together and make an audio book, maybe make some money from that," says Willie, ever the one to keep an eye on the bottom line.

"Me and little sister are old friends, we take care of each other. She learned music before I did and taught it to me."

"Is there a song you both like that we could put on next?"

"Down Yonder, an instrumental, is one of her favorites, she plays it at the end of our show every night,"  says Willie.

Raina was ready. In five seconds comes a rousing rollicking instrumental, Bobbie pounding  those keys. probably keeping time with her feet. You can find it on Willie's 1975  'Red Headed Stranger' album. I could just about see it being played on a dilapidated saloon piano. That album changed the course of country music.

https://www.wideopencountry.com/the-fascinating-story-behind-willie-nelsons-red-headed-stranger/

"What are your sons up to?" asks Raina.

"I tell them to follow their art, follow their instincts, if someone tells you you can't do it, that's a good reason to show them that you can." Sounds like the Red Headed Stranger to me.

"Lukas is making an album of Roger Miller songs, Micah and I have helped him cut a couple of tracks already. Micah has a band. It's great to be working with your kids, especially when they're good," says Willie.

Raina heads back to the "First Rose Of Spring" album.

"I want to play 'We Are The Cowboys' by Billy Joe Shaver in 1981. Nelson cut the song with Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Shavers in 2002. Why did you want to put this song on  'First Rose of  Spring'?"

"I love the song and I love Billy Joe and I thought it was an appropriate song to do in these times," Willie replies.

"Why?"

" 'Cowboys are average American people, Cowboys are Texicans and Mexicans, blacks and Jews,' that line that covers a whole string of people. Cowboys have the same mentality. We like wide open spaces, like to sing and pick for folks, Billy Joe feels the same way."

"It's  been 40 years since it was recorded. What is the cowboy in 2020 America?"  asks Douris.

"In this particular time, there's a line in there 'we can get the job done'. I think that applies to all of us, cowboys and cowgals. We're all doing what we can to help our country and make it better."

Hard to tell if his audience will interpret that line the way he does but no denying that he's reading the news, thinking about what's ahead for the country, and that we’ll get the job done.

LYRICS

Texans are gathered up in Colorado
The kid with a fast gun ain't with them today
The cowboys are riding tall in the saddle
They shoot from the heart with the songs that they play

There's a right handsome woman on up around Boulder
They got slick hardwood floors and a pot belly stove
She swears I am someone she can believe in
She's the best Colorado gal I've ever known

We are the cowboys the true sons of freedom
We are the men who will get the job done
We're picking our words so we won't have to eat them
Were rounding them up and then driving them home

Cowboys are average American people
Texicans mexicans black men and jews
They love this old world and they don't want to lose it
There counting on me and there counting on you

The world will breathe easy when we stop the bleeding
The fighting will end when all hunger is gone
There's those who are blind so we'll all have to lead them
It's everyone's job till we get the work done

We are the cowboys the true sons of freedom
We are the men who will get the job done
We're picking our words so we won't have to eat them
Were rounding them up and then driving them home
Were rounding them up and then driving them home.

I smell sagebrush, smoke wafting from a pot next to a chuck wagon, and cool breezes rolling across the prairie as night falls.

"There seem to be two themes in this album, getting older and beautiful love songs," says Douris.  "I wonder if you  would talk about 'Love Just Laughed'".

Willie quotes the first lines.

'She said, "Please don't let me go"
I said, "I gotta let you go"
And love just laughed.'

"That's pretty much the whole story. Love does what it does, it doesn't ask us what we want."

Willie's a deft impressionist painter with words. His purposeful brush strokes strike a chord with moments we've lived, emotions we've felt, people we've loved and maybe lost. Love just laughed. No judgement. Just a fact.

Douris plays the song.

Last question. "Music today trades on youth. Do you think you've been able to grow old with country music?"

"Well, I don't know how other people feel about it but I'm tired!" says Willie with a chuckle. "I like to do what's easy. Music is easy. Playing with my boys is easy. The everyday living and breathing, sometimes that can be difficult."

Douris defuses that admission. "Well, you don't seem tired," and laughs with surprise.

Willie's answer was revelatory. He now appears more comfortable riding in the corral than on the prairie and acknowledges it in a lighthearted but telling exchange. It's part of Willie's charm. He'll tell you what he's thinking, no filter necessary.

"I'd like to finish with 'I'm The Only Hell That Momma Ever Raised'."

Willie's raspy chuckle tells you he's good with that.

"It's one of my favorites on the album. It was written by some Nashville writers several years ago. Johnny Paycheck had a big hit with it. I've always loved the song and decided to put it in the album. During our last tour, I ended each show with the song... I  thought heck let's record it."

The song is a clone of Merle Haggard's "Momma Tried, " an anthem that Willie's Texas crowd loves.

World Cafe's interview is coasting to a close. The Red Headed Stranger still rides tall in the saddle.

 

Midnight Ramble: Full Buck Moon waxing

July 2, 2020

Full Buck Moon Waxing with company of Jupiter, Saturn

Officially full July 5, 2020 12:44 AM EDT

When the new antlers of buck deer push out from their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, thunderstorms being now most frequent. Sometimes this is also called the Full Hay Moon. 

"Hey, Pardner,"

First thing I do as I walk out the door, hail Jupiter in the southern sky. Stunningly brilliant. Right up there in lights from about half hour before midnight until dawn. The latest, well, earliest, time I've seen its headlight in the sky was about 3 AM on a really really late ramble. We've become walking buddies, chat about our neighborhoods, how his neighbor Saturn, dimly visible nearby, is doing, and ask what the old boy thinks about the goings on down here.

We're an unlikely duo, me at moving along at three miles and hour and my pal orbiting the earth at around 29,236 miles per hour. He's the only one looking over my shoulder every night. I miss him when he's taken a powder behind cloud banks. Before March, business as usual down here meant that there was a cataract of pollution dimming the view of him and his neighborhood. 

I'll bet I'm looking at Jupiter and Company in the same deep blue, see-through dome overhead as George Washington and George Washington Carver viewed it back in their day

I need company these days. Round midnight, Jupiter's out there waiting for me.

Tonight, he's sharing the stage with a waxing Full Buck Moon and Saturn, farther away, smaller, dimmer. He doesn't mind sharing the stage. He has about 21 of the 30 days of the week all to himself. And all of them with me, one of his biggest boosters on this planet.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Full Buck Moon July 2, 2020

Splendid Jupiter, Saturn to the left, dimmer, way more distant, a treat when not obscured by cloud banks.

Changing Of The Guard: 8:05 PM - 9:03 PM

June 26, 2020

Changing Of The Guard: 8:05 PM - 9:03 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8:05 PM - Waxing crescent moon...

8:10 PM My perch in the front row...

8:12 PM no movement,  no sound... porch sitting... a centering meditative experience, undisturbed, deeply satisfying, a sound/no sound environment, trees breathe, leaves flutter with the sibilant rush of a lover's silk robe slipping willfully from shoulders, draping in slow motion to the floor.

8:25 PM except from Fred Robin, frequent visitor and earthworm miner who visits every day...cocks his head  in a silent salute as I quietly greet him then goes about his foraging. Fred the kingdoms spokesman for the evening, a foraging robin becomes a winged zen master showing me the way of the universe.

8:54 PM  Arturo Ui stationed  behind me never misses activity outside his door....

9:02 PM absorbing the enveloping evening in a silence beyond all comprehension. Jupiter, mute and massive, shuffles into its slippers, surveys us from a safe distance.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.