Edison State, 2–Portrait of a Song

Edison State–1: A garden of sound

Soundgarden
4.25" x 5.5"
ink on paper, 2013

Maria van Boekel is a Learning Resources Assistant at the library of Edison State College, Charlotte Campus, and is responsible for monthly revolving displays at the entrance of that library. The topic of January's display was music. Beside an awesome display of books about music, she invited visitors to the library to write down their favorite song onto a whiteboard. While more and more people added songs to the list, she and I made illustrations to go with each one. These are simple small portrait drawings executed with pens and markers on paper. I was asked to execute the drawings in blue and yellow, the colors of Edison State. About 30 portraits are accumulated and it is still growing. The display has received enthusiastic responses and will be extended well into February. The respondents are students, library employees, and everyone else who would walk into that library and is inclined to respond. As you have gotten to know me by know; I'm no stranger to such projects. What I always resisted, until now, was to draw those musicians that were someone's favorite but not mine. It always felt like a concession, a betrayal of my Top 100 series, to exploit the concept. But now I'm excited about this—I'm making the drawings of mostly mostly popular musicians without any discrimination and I find myself able to treat those I really don't care for with the same respect as for those who I regard highly. If it weren't for my own list entry (John Coltrane – My Favorite Things) there wouldn't have been any musician that in the last 20 years made the Top 100 list, and save for Coltrane and Led Zeppelin, not a single musical act I had drawn before. So here I am, making portraits of R Kelly, The Little River Band, Bruno Mars, Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, and you name it, with a joy of a schoolboy having been told for the first time in his life he had talent.

Hank Williams

Hank Williams
11" x 8.5", 2013
ink, watercolor, pencil on paper

The world of a music fan, like myself, is like the universe: ever expanding. With accelerating pace I discover new music and start to like music I didn't like before, while it rarely happens that I dislike music, a musician, style, or period I used to like. The Top 100 just isn't big enough to do justice to the thousands and thousands wonderful recordings and musicians that are out there deserving the pedestal. That certain musicians that used to be regular contenders in the Top 100 haven't been there anymore is not because I don't like 'em any more but because I haven't heard them. From the millions and millions of recordings out there available for me to play, I tend to play those things I haven't heard before. And when a certain music, musician, style, or era, suddenly makes a comeback, it is by chance. I may have found a new record I hadn't heard yet, a movie may have highlighted some music I hadn't heard in a while, or some musician may suddenly re-enter the limelight (because of the inclusion in a movie, because another musician may have played his or hers music, or because he or she died). Hank Williams was on the shortlist for inclusion in the 100 Greatest Recordings Ever that I compiled to celebrate 30 years of list keeping with his classic I'm So Lonesome I could Cry but was only edited out at very last moment. It's was a while since Hank Williams make the list (the last inclusion was in 2008, the year I found his Luke the Drifter in a thrift store) so when his music was featured in the Moonrise Kingdom movie, I didn't have to think long about his nomination for this year. I singled out Ramblin' Man, another of Williams' classics to be part of the Top 100 2012. It simply may be that the stars of the Top 100 have a cycle in which they shine bright every so many years. Some stars are more distant than others, Hank Williams' is pretty bright.

Nieves Quintero

Nieves Quintero
11" x 8.5", 2013
ink, pencil, watercolor on paper

Manuel "Nieves" Quintero was born in 1931 in Nací en Corozal, Puerto Rico. He was still alive in 1999 when the biography Nieves Quintero was written. A master of the cuatro (a lute like instrument that looks like it was taken out of a 17th Century Dutch master's still life painting), he was living in Bayamón then, still playing his instrument. I would have never learned about Nieves Quintero were it not for the purchase at a thrift store of a record of Cuban lucumi music. Turned out that there was no Cuban lucumi record inside but in stead I found Santos Cantados con Nieves Quintero y Su Conjunto (Canta Luz Celeni Tirado) Y Coro inside. I was a bit disappointed not to have the lucumi record (especially after I found out it would sell for $185 on line) but then I came to like the substitude record as well, and now after learning more about Nieves, I wished I had had the cover for the Santos Cantados record. It's a lovely record indeed but Nieves Quintero on YouTube is where it's at. The video I found there of him performing Linda Campesina is simply magnificent. With so many Puerto Ricans living in the United States I knew at some point I would run in some traditional music records from there in some thrift stores here. The Nieves Quintero record was the best of seven from my haul last week.

Hirut Bekele

Hirut Bekele
11" x 8.5", India ink on paper, 2013

There's just no chance I can get all 100 musicians for the Top 100 painted in oils in time. There are still almost 60 musicians to be painted and time is running out (the usual mid-March deadline). The solution to this problem is simple: I resort to ink drawings on paper. So in the next month there will be an onslaught of such colorful ink drawings as the one above, published here. The portrait of Hirut Bekele was made to test the materials I have in mind for finishing the Top 100 2012. I think I like my new bottles of ink. Hirut Bekele, by the way, is an Ethiopian singer who recorded in the 1970s in Addis Ababa. The 1970s was the golden age of "Ethio-Jazz". Music from that era has been Top 100 material for many years now largely because of the release of the multi-volume series Ethiopiques. Hirut Bekele is not represented in these series as far as I can tell, but that doesn't mean she wasn't a star. If you go by the amount of videos on which she can be seen on YouTube, she certainly is a big star. The track in the Top 100 isn't quite like any of the YouTube videos though. There's no jazz band to back her up, instead you hear a simple and sober accompaniment of organ and krar (said to be an ancestor of the banjo) that allows Bekele to fully exploit her mesmerizing voice. Thanks to Brian Shimkovitz who posted the music on Awesome Tapes from Africa from an original cassette, and at the same time, introduced me to it.

Bosavi Rainforest Music

Bosavi Women Lamenting
(after a 1966 photo by Edward Schieffelin)
12" x 12", oil on masonite, 2012

Consider the lives of Papua New Guinea natives living in the Bosavi rainforests for a moment. Just for the sake of reflection you should try to imagine what it would be like to live a life like they do. Imagine not to know any of the things you learned in school, imagine that most everything you do is guided by tradition rather than by reason. What a different life they live compared to that of ours. All of their days turn into music, their most sacred as well as the most profane moments of their lives are accompanied by a song, by humming, or by drumming. Me? I can't even remember the last time I sang a song. I don't even sing in the shower anymore. My most musical moments are when I'm in my car waiting for a traffic light and I tap my fingers on the dashboard to the rhythm of my left turn signal. My most sacred moment? I can't even conceive the meaning of that word anymore, as all days and every moment are profane, mundane, and secular. And yet there they are, in my back yard, a group of six Bosavi women whose weeping in front of a deceased relative turns into the most wonderful of songs. And yet it is music that colors my days...but it's the idea of music rather than the experience of it.

Kel Hamza

"Kel" Hamza Şenses
12" x 12", oil on masonite, 2013

Kel Hamza, one of the three singers that are featured on the CD Master Musicians of Urfa, might be the least colorful one of them (and therefore the least likely to be included in the Top 100) but ends up making the most of an impression on me. Hamza's appearance and sound are relatively polished. He was literate, well dressed, and a gentleman. The song Kışlalar Doldu Bugün, one of the songs featured in an article in the blog Bodega Pop, went straight into the list of my "100 greatest songs heard in the year". When the article appeared in April last year, all three singers (the others are Mukim Tahir and Bekçi Bakir) were raking in the points in my ranking system, and the CD is found high in the list of albums for the year. Urfa (or Şanlıurfa) is a city in Southern Turkey near the Syrian border famed for it's rich musical traditions. It's also known for its conservatism, which probably helps if it comes to the survival of old traditions. (One of the many contradictions of my life that make up the character that I am is my love for conservation while in social life and politics I favor the opposite.) Kel (meaning bald) Hamza Şenses was born in 1904 and died in 1939 as a result of a fall after being beaten in a brawl. 

The Blues (cont.)

Abner Jay with unidentified girl
12" x 16", oil on masonite, 2013

Twenty years ago I moved to the United States, the biggest lure for me were the blues. It was that music that were the origins of all the music I was interested in as a teenager. I played guitar in a rock band. I was 16 and Eric Clapton was my hero, but I wasn’t all that good. Coming in contact with the blues songs that were the blueprint for much of the music I admired, rendered my belief in rock music as the meaning of life...futile. That, together with the realization that the music I was involved in was so commercial, and the realization that I was better with a pencil than with a guitar pick, made me quit the band. I didn’t lose faith in music altogether, but the balloon wasn’t made out of lead after all. For a while after that the only music I was interested in was the authentic Mississippi folk blues. But I could never be a true blues musician, I could only be a listener, a fan.

But I didn't really expect to encounter the blues in the US when I came. I figure I'd come across a mere vestige of something that happened in history. I was surprised to learn that there are still pockets of isolated areas in the south where the tradition lives on (although these are disappearing too.) Abner Jay, who died in 1993, was one those few musicians who played the blues from a local tradition that hadn't changed. He was from Southern Georgia, a stone throw away from the location of the annual Florida Folk Festival in White Springs, and just a few hours up the street from where I'm at. The above painting is modeled after a photograph of Jay (the unidentified girl is possibly Jay's daughter Brandie) taken at that festival which I am plan on attending this year. Both Abner Jay and the girl are seen singing and playing bones. Jay's recordings have been reissued by the Mississippi label, and the song in the Top 100 is My Middle Name is the Blues from a record called Last Ole Minstrel Man.

The Blues

Junior Kimbrough
oil on wood, 2007
Eisenberg collection

Some people say the blues is age old. Some people say the blues came from Africa. Some people say that there wouldn’t have been any pop music without the blues. Some people say that Robert Johnson learned to play guitar after signing a pact with the devil. There’s probably a grain of truth in every myth. The blues came into being around 1890, originating in the hill country of northern Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, southern Texas, and possibly in other southern US locations as well. The blues were an oral tradition. The first published blues was WC Handy’s Memphis Blues of 1912. It was first recorded in 1914 but it was really a jazz tune. The first blues recorded (albeit with a jazz orchestra) was Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues in 1920. Both these examples of blues songs are far removed from the origins, the solo voice with guitar performances, that could be heard in the towns of the South and that to a certain extent still exist in the rural hill country of Mississippi, to this day. How the blues in its purest form initially must have sounded can be heard through various field recordings starting from the 1920s. A field recording that was made around 1910 is regrettably lost.

Some people find the structure of the blues too rigid but it’s that aspect that intrigues me the most. It is a characteristic the blues has in common with other traditional music as well as with other forms of oral poetry. The structure itself is like a language, when growing up with it, its use comes naturally. The vocabulary is available to all native speakers. It is in such traditions nearly impossible to establish the exact authorship of a certain phrase, verse, or a certain song. That is not to say that the performers within such traditions are not creators. On the contrary the constructions of the traditional frameworks allow the performers to freely express or communicate. When the form is established on the onset of a work, the performer doesn’t have to formalize, and can go directly to the heart of the matter. With every performance the blues musicians re-create their songs. Composition is improvisation.

Even though blues musicians are only a small percentage of all the musicians I have painted over the years, I feel a great affinity with the blues in my art processes. By separating the conceptual structure from the actual activity of painting I find myself able to move freely within the canvases, unburdened by the considerations of concept and validity. The structure is the Top 100, a concept that I put to use while still a teenager exploring music in the early 1980s.

But it’s not just with the issue of moving within a pre-circumscribed framework that I feel the affinity with the blues performers, what’s more important yet is the attitude—to paint with a blues feeling—the circumstances of the blues. I adopted the mindset of the traditional blues performers perhaps unconsciously. Or perhaps according to some universal law. The blues feeling has to do with fate: “in the long run there’s no change, so that there’s nothin’ else to do but what you’re doin’...and sing the blues.” I like music over art. There is more harm in harmony than there is pain in painting. My paintings are like blues songs that are contradictory and inconsistent, that “reflect both the struggles and the difficulties”, are regressive and conservative, from a vantage point of an outsider that could never become an insider. It’s a prerequisite of traditionalism that things don’t change. “It’s only when people think that things can or are getting better that the blues begin to lose their appeal.” Some people think that the blues is out of date, that it’s become stale.

What has become out of date is perhaps the reliance of the blues (and oral traditions in general) on subjective experience in a time where human existence is conditioned by objective empirical reality. Experience becomes more and more irreconcilable with knowledge. What we experience is at odds with what we know. In our experience the sun sets while everybody knows all too well that it’s not the movement of the sun but the rotation of the earth causing the sunset. People will think you’re a lunatic if you proclaim the world is flat, yet most everybody will experience it that way. Knowledge is omnipresent and it comes at the cost of losing touch with experience. The quickly disappearing cultural traditions of the world could well be symptomatic for the decline in subjective expression in general.

What will be left after every myth is busted?

Kimya Dawson

Kimya Dawson
12" x 12"
oil on luan, 2012

The 2012 top 100 year is coming to a close and I'm wrapping up the list in the next few weeks. There are about 8 or 9 more paintings to complete in order to have the first 50 all done in oils. They're either 12 inch square or 1 x 2 feet. The last 50 then will become watercolors at 8.5" x 11". There still is a lot of uncertainty who those last 50 will be as I select them from almost one hundred songs that gathered 10 points in 2012. The paintings that still need to be painted from numbers 1 through 50 are either additional songs by musicians that were already in the list (and painted) or by musicians that are anonymous or without an available photograph to paint from. Kimya Dawson clearly belongs to the former category. The painting of her that I did before, was the first one for the Top 100 2012 series back in April, followed by a portrait of her daughter Panda a few days later. Then I painted Dawson together with Adam Green for the 100 Greatest Recordings Ever series in the Summer. I had not heard of Kimya Dawson or the band The Moldy Peaches (Dawson and Green) before the the year started but since then I've gathered most of their recordings. Dawson will probably appear 5 times in this year's list (more than anyone else), twice with Adam Green in the Moldy Peaches, and three times solo. Two of the three solo tunes come from My Cute Friend Sweet Princess. This painting then is dedicated to the song Being Cool from that CD (2004).

Pounding Maize

Girl pounding corn meal with 
pestle and mortar
24" x 12", oil on luan, 2013

The song Canto para Pilar Maiz was recorded by Francisco Carreño and Miguel Cardona on El Margarita Island in Venezuela in 1949. It was part of the collection of Venezuelan folk and aboriginal music edited by Juan Liscano that appeared a few years later as volume 9 of The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music under the auspices of Alan Lomax. It's a beautiful series of records with great music, lots of texts, and beautiful photographs. The photographs in this particular album are not credited. Typically they were made by the same person who did the recording or else by another member of the expedition. I really should give credit to the photographer providing the source material for this painting. Not often am I as enchanted with a photo I use as a source, as I am with this one (typically I opt for the most casual, least professional photo available for a certain musician.) The photo illustrating the corn grinding song is really a great image, great composition, I could not go wrong. I substituted the large cross in the background in the photograph for a setting in my back yard.

Kathleen Hanna

Kathleen Hanna
24" x 12"
oil on luan, 2013

I can't remember the precise circumstances but Kathleen Hanna appeared in a dream I had on New Year's. The only other time that I remember a musician appearing in a dream was about twenty years ago when the Belgian-French composer Cesar Franck took me for a ride on a moped. All I remember about the Hanna dream was that it was situated at a party and she offered me something to eat, but I grabbed a beer instead. Kathleen Hanna came to the forefront in my 2012 music year several times. She was an outspoken supporter of the Russian group Pussy Riot in their controversial trial versus the state, and lauded their music in the process. Earlier in the year I had watched a La Tigre documentary film and earlier yet I brought the CD The Singles by Bikini Kill with me on a long drive traversing the country. I don't play that CD too often anymore but on the rare occasions that I do I play it loud and enjoy every second of it. New Radio, a single from 1993, produced by Joan Jett, was the song that stood out most on the occasion. It was in the top 100 before but that was 12 years ago. Tobi Vail, Billy Karen, and Kathy Wilcox, were besides Hanna the other musicians on this recording. Bikini Kill was a pioneer of the riot grrrl movement. The band is from from Olympia, Washington, where they formed in 1990.