Belltown Bent

Line of sight

Some time has passed since the Bent considered Mountains, murmurations, and Mortimer to tell a story about European starlings. Right around the time we further mangled alliteration with Luke and Linnæus in an attempt to better describe clouds, or not. But not a day has passed without many moments spent gazing out the windows of Bent HQ.

Which brings us right up to last week (wasn't that easy), and this serendipitous capture of clouds and unanticipated chaos. An attempt to compose (yet another) sunset over the Olympics went slightly askew when I was startled by, yes, starlings! Thousands of them. They hadn't even been in my line of sight.

This serendipitous event prompted me to revisit the many resources which informed my brief essays, as well a a few others. Like Stephen Cordifi's concise article on the colors of twilight and sunset, which explains the glorious colors are not caused by pollution. Re-informed, and reassured, the beauty of this Pacific Northwest sunset was all the more enjoyable. It's good to have access to so much information.

But it's even better when other people gather it for you. If you share the Bent's interest in sustainability, economic, and social news pertinent the Northwest, you'll appreciate the team of editors who meet early each weekday to digest over 40 newspapers from around the region and deliver it in the Sightline Daily, a service of Sightline Institute. Even better, you can subscribe to daily, or Weekly Score email updates, and they'll just show up. Kind of like the starlings, only more predictably.

Subscribe by Oct 29, and you'll have a chance to win a (car-less) three-day, getaway train trip for two to Vancouver, and a chance to check out the Olympic Mountains from the other side. It's good to have things come into your line of sight.

Buddy's view

It was Buddy Catlett day in Seattle two weeks ago - February 21st, 2008. I was at City Hall to recognize Buddy, along with my friend Robert Wade, and to celebrate all he means to the city's jazz history and ecosystem. I listened, I watched, I shook his hand, and I photographed him. But I didn't write about it. I didn't share it on the Bent. Like so many people, and things, since last August, it didn't make it to the Bent.

There have been plenty of pictures, and plenty of thoughts. Even occasional hit-and-miss attempts at writing. And for six months, nothing has made it the Bent. They'd slip a day or two, or a week, until they didn't seem like news. And so it went. Or not.

But I kept thinking about Buddy. Out there week after week. Playing gigs with Clarence Acox's Legend Quartet at the New Orleans in Pioneer Square, or with Brian Nova at the Pampas Room in Belltown. He's played with Louis Armstrong, and Quincy Jones, and Cal Tjader and on and on. He just keeps playing. A long time ago. Tomorrow.

I remembered this blog is not about news. It's about the view from here. It doesn't matter if it's a day, a week, or a year old. It's just the view. Thanks Buddy.

More pictures of Buddy and Friends from Buddy Catlett Day in Seattle.

Lionel Loueke: long trip, short stay

I'm always fascinated by the paths which lead musicians to my neighborhood jazz club. Born in Benin, West Africa, Gilles Lionel Loueke moved to Côte d'Ivoire to attend the National Institute of Art and study music for four years.

He aspired to play the music of American jazz guitarists like Pass, Montgomery and Benson, so he applied and was accepted to the American School of Modern Music in Paris - four more years of study.

Then came a scholarship to Boston's Berklee College of Music for a degree in Jazz Performance. Next he was awarded a full scholarship to USC's Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance where he started to play and record with musicians like Terence Blanchard (seen here in 2005 at Jazz Alley) and Herbie Hancock. Now NY, NY is his base and he has signed with Blue Note Records, after releasing a few albums on small indie labels.

This (17 years of formal training, touring, and recording), apparently, is what it takes to be nominated by the Jazz Journalist Association as "Up & Coming Musician of the Year"*. It's also what it takes to begin playing clubs like Jazz Alley as a leader, which brings us to his short stay (two nights) here in Seattle before his band heads to L.A. and he joins Herbie Hancock for an east coast tour.

His current working band of fellow Berklee and Monk alumni is the namesake trio from his Obliqsound release GILFEMA, Gilles Lionel Loueke, Hungarian percussionist Ferenc Nemeth, and Sweden-born Italian bassist Massimo Biolcati, recently in town with Ravi Coltrane's quartet. In the words of Phil DiPietro at All About Jazz, you can expect, "World music, maybe — world-class, definitely!"

* Anat Cohen, born in Tel Aviv, and another world traveler who passed through Berklee, was the winner.

Silas makes his point

I'm still thinking about John Szarkowski, and his gifts to the world of photography. Especially his notion that photographers are pointers. They want to show you what they saw, asynchronously. First, capture the moment. Then, find the memory in the image. Finally, share it, and make one three-hundredth of a second seem timeless.

This is Silas, stealing the sidewalk show. And making a point. He stopped me in my tracks, and stopped time in the process. As the ad hoc leader of Red Brown and the Tune Stranglers (Red didn't make the date), Silas stepped up big time, and drew the crowd in for the rest of the band, delivering some of the finer moments at 2007's NWFL Festival.

While there was no doubt he was working it, was he actually playing the violin? Can't say, really. Did he have the best moves on the entire Fisher Pavilion promenade? Absolutely. Was he flat out fronting the band. For sure. Sometimes it just doesn't matter. There's more here than meets the ear, much less the eye. And that's Silas' point.

Thank you Mr. Szarkowski

Photographers see things. We walk around with invisible brackets before our eyes, constantly framing most anything which falls within our view. We are consciously aware of patterns and lines defined by light and dark, color and texture, physical objects and negative space. We see things we want to capture. Things we want to show other people.

John Szarkowski called it pointing. “One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing,” Mr. Szarkowski wrote. “It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.” We aspire to be pointers. We strive to make our observations interesting.

Mr. Szarkowski, curator, educator, author, photographer, passed away on Saturday. His contribution to the world of photography, to those who capture images and those who gaze upon them, is respectfully chronicled in Philip Gefter's column in The New York Times. He curated some 160 exhibits of photography while at New York MoMA, and exposed the world to visionary photographers like Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. As Gefter says, he was "a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art".

Chris Rainier, a National Geographic staff photographer, told Alex Chadwick on NPR's occasional series Photo Op, Szarkowski, "maybe more than anyone else, created the notion that photographers are not merely technicians or observers -- they are artists."

From the perspective of one photographer in Belltown, it seems John Szarkowski helped create a generation of people who are willing to look, think about, and respond to what photographers want so much to share. They are willing to see.

Thank you, Mr. Szarkowski.

Have a nice yesterday

Looking out the window this afternoon brought the pleasant reminder that this upcoming weekend presents one of the Bent's favorite opportunities to go back in time.

The unmistakable lines, the perfect pace, the gentle roll of the bow wake, and the gorgeous glow of pampered bright work - not unlike this Lake Union Dreamboat, photographed on a Bent cruise through BC's Gulf Islands. I pinched myself. I wasn't dreaming.

A pre-war wooden motor yacht was making it wondrous way down Elliot Bay for Bell Harbor and the annual Rendezvous of the Classic Yacht Associations Pacific NW Fleet, one of several such events scheduled for this summer.

Saturday and Sunday, June 16-17, the harbor will be a solid slip to slip dreamland of lovingly restored and maintained wooden motor yachts, displayed up-close and touchable, many open for boarding, and all worthy of the awe and admiration they inspire.

If you're anywhere near the downtown waterfront, make your way to Pier 66, check out the classic cars on display up top, then make your way down the gang-plank to a rendezvous with boating's past, and thank the skippers for keeping it present.

A Saturday Double-Header

Double-headers don't come around every weekend. And if you've going to see one, you pretty much know what you're in store for.

But Saturday, about 2 miles north of trackside Safeco Field, and several hours before the Mariners hit the field, visitors to Belltown's Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park were treated to a double-header of another sort. Most of us were caught by surprise.

Sporting bigger numerals than you'll ever fine on a baseball jersey, numbers 844 and 4449  double-headed right past Calder's Eagle and through the park, whistling away in a cloud of steam. Union Pacific 844, the last steam engine delivered to Union Pacific, in 1944, pulled lead on the northbound leg of the Puget Sound Steam Special from Tacoma to Everett, a benefit for the Barriger Library of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation. After decades of pulling passengers and freight, the 844 now serves as Union Pacific's goodwill ambassador, and remains the only Class 1 railroad steam locomotive never to be retired.

A few hours later, on the southbound leg of the excursion, the 4-8-4 configured locomotive Southern Pacific 4449 had the honors of pulling lead back to Tacoma. Built by Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, Ohio, 4449 began its interesting history pulling SP's premier passenger runs in California, including the Coast Daylight, and was one of two locomotives to pull the American Freedom Train during the United States Bicentennial.

More: video (6:05) | recollections of a railroader - Bill Virgin's P.I. column | 4449 and 844 pix on flickr

Unfamiliar territory

Just as Edward found himself checking out his strange, stylized and fantasized fifties suburban setting, so did a handful (well, four fingers worth) of newer world photobloggers, including the Bent's resident shooter.

We all (Edward and the four of us) were in the comfortable confines of Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre for a reason. Mr. Scissorhands to make an entertaining spectacle of himself The four photogs to capture the first 30 minutes (more pictures), as unobtrusively as possible.

The occasion was the opening night of the Seattle run of the Edward Scissorhands North American Tour, Matthew Bourne's adaptation of the Tim Burton film - a musical play without words best described (video) by Matthew himself. A dialog-free music and dance adaptation of a film is somewhat experimental, at least in my experience. Our hero, Edward, was the loving experiment born of tragedy, in his grieving father's lab. And the invited presence of of photobloggers was a experiment in viral marketing of mainstream theater. This entry is a lab result. You have become part of the experiment.

The show, as evidenced by a sustained standing "O", was wonderfully, and somewhat unconventionally, entertaining. The audience, save those few who wondered where the words went, loved it. Real critics felt 'Edward Scissorhands' - "wins some, looses some" - R.M. Campbell, P-I Dance Critic, and "makes the cut as a hybrid of dance and drama" - Meisha Berson, Seattle Times Theater Critic.

As for the marketing test, it remains to be seen. It was a welcomed opportunity and seems well suited to our new media landscape. In both cases, the Bent says, "Two blades up!"

At the window with Luke and Linnæus

It's difficult to pull away from the windows at the Bent, particularly when the sun is low and there are clouds in the sky. The winter light and the forms it reveals are almost beyond description. I constantly grab my camera in an effort to frame, capture and share mutable compositions which will never, ever, occur again.

On August 18th, 1783, overlooking the Windrush River in Oxfordshire, England, eleven-year-old Luke Howard stared into the evening sky. He was captivated by the dramatic palette of colors created by volcanic dust spewed into the atmosphere over much of the northern hemisphere by violent volcanic eruptions in Iceland and Japan, and the fiery flight of a meteor across the western European sky. His observations of this "constant fog" inspired a lifelong avocation of studying the skies, especially the constantly changing and little understood clouds.

Howard went on, as an amateur meteorologist, to be the first to study smog, the first to observer the "urban heat island" effect, and one of the first to understand the concept of weather fronts.  But, on the subject of clouds, not much had changed since 1600, when Shakespeare described them as creatures, morphing from one to another in the course of conversation.

Hamlet:    Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius:   By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet:    Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius:   It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet:    Or like a whale?
Polonius:   Very like a whale.
          - Hamlet, Act iii Scene 2.

Two hundred years later, most people still thought of clouds as "essences", short-lived, misunderstood, and difficult to describe. But Luke Howard was preparing to change that. In 1803, in a paper he presented to his fellow Askesian Society members in London, Luke introduced a lasting solution to the problem of naming these transformational mysteries. In a stroke of brilliance Luke followed the lead of  Swedish taxonomist Carl von Linné, better known as Linnæus. Yes, Luke applied a simple, structured nomenclature to confidently describe these constantly changing forms, and he chose Latin to do it, simply because, "the reasons for having recourse to a dead language for terms to be adopted by the learned of different nations are obvious". (I must refer you to the fascinating essay(s) by Hank Heatly, Linnæus, Son of No Man! or, this one. They both helped me understand.)

Ever since, all over the world, clouds have been named by Luke. Cumulus (Latin for 'heap'), Stratus ('layer'), Cirrus ('curl') and Nimbus ('rain'), or some combination, like cirro-cumulus, cirro-stratus, cumulo-stratus, have served us all well. But here at the Bent, despite his lasting contribution to describing the indescribable, going to the window with camera in hand will continue to be the best I can do.

Learn more: h2g2 | The Cloudman | Luke's drawings | The Weather Dr. |

Celebrating youth at 86

Clark Terry was carefully pushed through the crowd to the edge of the Jazz Alley stage in a wheelchair. From there he was helped, step by cautious step, to his stool at center stage. The audience cheered him as he climbed up, and settled in. He looked up, the crowd went quiet, and with a grin he said, "old age sucks."

We all laughed, relieved of our concern, charmed by the indomitable spirit of the man who has been climbing onto bandstands for more than 60 years, sharing them with the likes of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Peterson, and influencing great players like Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, and so many more along the way.

He's been knighted in Germany, named to the French Order of Arts and Letters, recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master fellowship, received fifteen honorary doctorates, and was the first black musician at NBC leading to 10 years as a spot light musician in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The story goes on and on, just like Terry (I mean that in the most respectful way.)

He possesses an invaluable historic perspective on jazz, its culture, and its characters, and he shares it freely, like when he reminisced last December about Thelonious Monk at a Jazz Museum in Harlem speaker series. When NPR's Jacki Lynden asked how he kept going, he responded, "It's young people, they keep you honest, they're gonna ask you questions. You better have some answers." After the interview, he took the stage with young lion Roy Hargrove, a half-century his junior.

Today is Mr. Terry's 86th birthday, and thanks to him I'm quite convinced that old age can swing. Happy Birthday man! We'll see you at Jazz Alley in January.

More: Clark Terry | St. Louis Walk of Fame | 07 April 05 pictures - Jazz Alley