Monthly Archives: April 2017

Clifford Brown (YGtCTO Music #50)

I’ll Remember April
Song composed by Gene DePaul, Patricia Johnston and Don Raye
Performed by Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Richie Powell , George Morrow and Max Roach

“Clifford was a profound influence on my personal life. He showed me that it was possible to live a good, clean life and still be a good jazz musician.” – Sonny Rollins

On top of everything else, we owe Brown for all the amazing music that Rollins made after overcoming his heroin addiction, if only Brown had lived to know it.

Clifford Brown

Clifford Brown was simply amazing. Before dying at 25 in a car accident, he brought together some of the greatest jazz musicians to make some of the best recordings ever. Think of Jimi Hendrix , but two decades earlier with a trumpet and without the drugs. I find his loss unfathomable and I am not alone. His death spawned at least one jazz standard, perhaps the saddest song you’ll ever hear, especially if you’ve been listening to some of Brown’s music beforehand.

I have no idea
if Brown liked baseball, but I’m going to make a left turn and take a leap here. Bill James is a baseball philosopher, writer and statistician. Over the years, he has grappled with the idea of greatness- do you measure it as a single brief peak or as the highest plateau where someone stayed for a period of time. In baseball terms, how does one player with one fantastic season compare to someone who maintained greatness for a decade?

In daily life, we handle these thoughts by deciding that someone died too young (or suffered a career-ending injury). We are right- they did stop too soon. But we’re human and like to bring order to chaos. We sort our heroes to determine who was the best, the top ten.

I started a list of 300 people and places that have influenced me because of their artistry, so I clearly like my lists. Yet, I quickly realized that sorting was beyond me. Almost halfway through, I think of so many additions that will simply not make this blog. That doesn’t matter.

Clifford Brown and Jimi Hendrix lived for however long and cast their art into the world for anyone who cared to be on the other end of their communication. The same is true for Vincent Van Gogh and Thomas Wolfe and countless others. The tragedy, it seems to me, is not that their lives were so short, but when we close ourselves off from the art that fills our world.

The question is not how do you sort your three hundred, but rather can you make a list of three hundred?

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 152 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Claude Monet (YGtCTO #147)

Water Lilies (Nymphéas)


Painting by Claude Monet

As a tweener, this painting at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh reached inside me and changed my relationship to art. Someone saw something, showed it to me, and made me look at the world a little differently. All that beauty that I saw outside did exist for someone else. Needless to say, I discovered why museums placed benches in front of certain painting. I am nowhere near the first person to adore the paintings of Claude Monet. His work has been the way in to visual art for many, many other people.

Claude Monet

Being an inquisitive youth, I learned about the Impressionists. A few years of paying attention demonstrated that I had stumbled upon an immensely popular style that drew crowds all over the world. Depending on your opinion, all these artists were masters of light or needed glasses. Either way, they loved color and let it show. They seduced the entire planet.

Now, the other thing you learn from a bunch of books about the Impressionist painters is that life varied from really sucking to sucking a little. That’s no surprise- into every life, a little rain must pour, or something to that effect. And we tend to glorify those tragedies. Vincent Van Gogh figures heavily as an icon of this mode. From Amy Winehouse through James Dean, we never stop talking about the glory of what has been lost.

So, what is a budding artist to think? The normal path must be akin to fireworks: brief and glorious. We cover the news with our dead before their time actors and musicians. That becomes the model of success. After all, where else can you look for an example of a long career lived out in relative calm?

Well, Claude Monet.

But I had no idea for probably ten years, despite those books. After all, who doesn’t just look at the pictures in art books? The words are there for some reason, but really… So, I assumed that Monet did what every other artist did, based on a careful reading of Time magazine: he painted and painted in his twenties and then stopped being useful after he got old, which would mean he turned thirty-five or so.

From 1883 (at the age of 43) until his death in 1926, Monet lived at Giverny, arguably painting his most famous works. His life had its share of tragedies before and after moving to Giverny. But he never stopped being a phenomenal painter, building on prior accomplishments.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 153 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Christopher Buckley (YGtCTO Words #49)

Thank You For Smoking

Book written by Christopher Buckley

If you were a smart aleck and had access to a television when I was young, then you probably tried to do an impression of William F. Buckley. It went hand in hand with raising two peace signs and announcing, “I am not a crook.”

This is not to suggest the slightest political savvy. Most of us were young enough that we struggled to keep track the colors and directions that signified conservative or liberal. We just wanted to be funny.

Imagine my surprise to find the name Buckley crop up later attached to brilliant satire. Granted the surprise was primarily generated by the shadow cast by the elder Buckley. The book was either Little Green Men or Thank You For Smoking, sitting among the new books at the library. The former leaves some indelible images, including a portrait of a talk show host rather reminiscent of William F. Yep, won’t ever forget that alien abduction.

Christopher Buckley

Reading Woody Allen and James Thurber as a young man, it felt like current writers had lost their sense of humor. Perhaps the 1980s just weren’t that funny. Maybe we traded all our humor to Latin America for a few years in exchange for their peace of mind. Even our comic books took dark turns. National Lampoon and Mad did their best (though not really at their best in those years), but it was not often humor that was going to make you look less like a buffoon. Basically, if you wanted good laughs, then you had to look further afield- fantasy authors tried to fill the void, for instance.

That doesn’t mean

I stopped looking. Like the definitions for pornography and science fiction, you know humor when you see it. The cover usually tries to scream “This is funny! You are so going to giggle!” Memoirs feature the author looking ridiculous, but fiction books struggle a bit to show the funny.

So, I knew that this Christopher Buckley guy promised jokes. But- was it all just going to be irony, the common mode of book humor… political irony, at that?

Let me cut to the chase. I don’t know what William F. did right, but he gave us our Voltaire, our Jonathan Swift. Before Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and all the rest, Christopher Buckley deflated the idiocy of world politics.

Satire has an expiration date, though that doesn’t make it better or worse. It just means that the jokes grow stale and difficult to parse. The palliative is to address timeless issues, ideally matters that we all wish were not timeless, but people are people, life’s a bear, etc., etc. Gulliver’s Travels remains relevant today because Swift was able to make the personal universal. Christopher Buckley does the same, placing him far ahead of my William F. Buckley impression, which nowadays requires a YouTube clip explanation beforehand.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 154 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.