EDITOR’S NOTE: In December, we like to take a look back at albums we didn’t get around to reviewing earlier in the year. You’re the Man was released in March. This startling, odd, and sometimes beautiful album feels like […]
Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) is a veteran, award-winning arts journalist, educator and visual artist. He won The Milwaukee Press Club's 2013 gold award for "Best Critical Review of the Arts" for my Culture Currents blog "Edward Curtis Preserved America's Vanishing Race for Posterity." The Aug. 22 posting reviewed a photo exhibit at The Museum of Wisconsin Art by Curtis, who documented the passing of America's original Native American culture and society in the early 20th century.
He was a long-time staff arts writer for The Capital Times in Madison and The Milwaukee Journal, where he was lead writer of a Pulitzer-nominated Newspapers in Education project called "That's Jazz."
KL at the Blue Plum Music and Arts Festival, Johnson City, Tennessee, June 2012. photo by Sheila Lynch
Among other publications, he's written for Down Beat, The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, New Art Examiner, Rain Taxi, American Record Guide, CODA (The Canadian jazz magazine), Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, Scene PBS TV magazine (Minneapolis), Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law and the Sacred; The Shepherd Express, OnMilwaukee.com and he has been a featured blogger on roots music for NoDepression.com. He's taught cultural journalism, English rhetoric and composition (while earning half of the credits for a PhD. in American Literature), and film studies. He served as a music program host for WLUM-FM and WMSE-FM in Milwaukee. He's also working on a novel, Melville's Trace or, The Jackal. Kevin is a also a visual artist and studied jazz piano and theory at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. A recent hand disability keeps him from piano playing these days. He lives in Milwaukee.
STATEMENT: In blog writing and reporting, I strive to maintain and espouse the same journalistic standards of professionalism cultivated in over 30 years as a working arts journalist. Given the freedom of the blogosphere, misinformation compounds and spreads at an alarming rate. So, maintaining such standards is more important than ever, even as I welcome the new freedom and vibrancy.
My blogger's moniker suggests a particular hybrid quality as a cultural observer. My sense is that meaningful distinctions between fine and vernacular art blur in the cultural currents -- aside from functional genre names. I've covered and researched both realms plenty and categories help identify and clarify -- fine vs. folk vs. pop art - but there's no hierarchy of quality among genres or traditions, in my mind. As Duke Ellington said, "There's two kinds of music, good music and bad music."
"Vernaculars speak" implicitly nags the old culture-class question of, say, who's better: Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas? Pop culture poet/songwriter Bob Dylan is taken seriously today by intelligencia, of course -- almost to death. But I think that beyond Bob, and because of him, the craft and art of songwriting has spread and grown almost exponentially in many vernacular idioms, often in new hybrids. And that phenomenon is important and noteworthy.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In December, we like to take a look back at albums we didn’t get around to reviewing earlier in the year. You’re the Man was released in March. This startling, odd, and sometimes beautiful album feels like […]
Frank Kimbrough – Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk (Sunnyside) (6-disc-set) * I happened to meet pianist Frank Kimbrough last February, after a concert in Illinois by the Maria Schneider Orchestra, for which he plays piano. Affable and […]
The Best Jazz Albums of 2018 Frank Kimbrough – Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk (Sunnyside) (6-disc-set) Let that subtitle soak in. Best known as orchestra leader Maria Schneider’s pianist but a major force in his own […]
Mrs. Fun is a 30-year marriage of musical mirth and mutual creativity. On Truth, The Milwaukee jazz-pop duo documents its characteristically vast expressive range and stylistic diversity. The title, and the album cover’s darkly eloquent pyramid silhouette, suggest intent to stand the test of time. […]
Dreamland’s cloud in Blu, 23-plus stories up. This brief photo essay interprets the experience of hearing Dreamland, an imaginative and courageous ensemble which has worked hard in recent years to make much of the challenging Thelonious Monk repertoire alive […]
Dreamland’s cloud in Blu, 23-plus stories up. This brief photo essay interprets the experience of hearing Dreamland, an imaginative and courageous ensemble which has worked hard in recent years to make much of the challenging Thelonious Monk repertoire alive […]
Something ominous trails through the wind. Most everyone attuned to electronic media can feel it by now, if not wholly understand. It hovers at a crossroads in a busy city street, but for Maria Schneider it may feel like intrusion on […]
Well, its roots music, so somebody could accuse me of having my head in the ground listening to this stuff, so it took me this long to post this “year end” list. No, I wasn’t down in the ostrich […]
Charlie Parr Dog (Red House Records) The great contemporary country blues artist Charlie Parr manages a trick of sly self-portraiture in his new album. His ingenious title song emanates from a dog’s point of view. The hound objects to […]
Nicole Mitchell. Photo by Lauren Deutsch courtesy chicagojazz.net Nicole Mitchell Quartet, Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., Alternating Currents Live Series, 7 p.m. Sunday, December 10, $8 general admission, $7 student & seniors, $6 WPBC members Alex […]
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