LOGAN, Ohio – The Columbus Washboard Company here, the only factory in the U.S. still making these manual laundry-cleaning tools, is benefiting from a growing interest in washboard tourism.
It will reach its peak with next weekend’s (Thursday evening through Saturday) ninth annual Washboard Music Festival, which brings in washboard performers – soloists as well as those playing in groups – from around the continent for free shows on downtown streets. It has become a Father’s Day weekend tradition in Logan.
The small central Ohio city is an ideal place for a day or weekend trip in general, as it’s near the scenic natural attractions of the Hocking Hills.
Festival performers include Cincinnati’s Robin Lacy and DeZydeco, featured at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, as well as (on other days) Sadie Green Sales, which plays turn-of-20th-Century Mississippi jug-band music; Canada’s Fiddlers3, a family band with dad on spoons and washboard, mom on accordion, and the three children wailing away at violin, and many more.
The outdoor festival, primarily held along a closed-down Main Street, will also have street vendors and free rides for kids, plus factory tours until 8 p.m. each night. The main-stage area seats 1,000 – there are also secondary music venues.
Washboards, often worn around the neck, have a long history as an inexpensive percussion instrument in various international folk, blues, and vaudeville musical styles. They are especially prevalent in Cajun-zydeco, a rural-Louisiana tradition that has seen resurgence in recent years.
Meanwhile, there has been a slight but discernable uptick in business because of rising green consciousness and energy conservation, says Jacqui Barnett, Columbus Washboard’s manager and co-owner.
With those trends has come a demand for year-round tours of her factory. To visitors, washboards are seen as a slice of bygone Americana that have survived long enough to maybe prosper again. The company offers tours 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday and by appointment on Saturdays.
“We have tours from all over the place, mostly booked by tour companies,” Barnett says. “A lot are senior citizens, and we’re a great mystery tour site for groups.” Among the others who have visited recently are a Columbus-area YMCA, a Red Hat Ladies chapter, and visitors from Ohio’s Amish country.
Visitors find the company interesting to see since they can watch the five employees assemble the galvanized-metal and stainless-steel washboards in three sizes. (The company also makes glass washboards, but doesn’t allow visitors to watch, since it involves working with molten glass.)
Tourists also like the factory’s homey touches. Squeaky the cat wanders about; there’s a display of related items such as washtubs and a wooden ironing board, and there’s a washboard gift-shop area with T-shirts. And the staff gives a washboard-and-kazoo sing-along performance at the end of the 45-minute tour.
To assemble the washboards, employees use machinery so old it qualifies as historic. There are signs up by the machines, explaining each one’s history and use to visitors.
The building itself, a former shoe manufacturer that sat vacant for several years, looks like a redbrick Rust Belt relic. But its exterior is distinguished by a giant washboard – 12 feet long by 24 feet high – affixed to its side. Barnett says it’s the world’s largest.
“The whole factory is like a museum,” Barnett says. “We have a wall of antique washboards that I’ve collected, to display what we used to make as well as what we make now.”
Barnett, her husband Bevan, and a third partner moved the company to Logan, where they lived, from Columbus after buying it in 1999. It had started in 1895 and patented its first washboard in 1907, and lasted until ownership announced it would close due to declining sales in the wake of the washer/dryer era.
It made sense to Barnett to help start a festival in Logan, both for her company’s benefit and the town’s. “I was in a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, talking about whether to have a festival in town and thinking of a theme. I said, ‘What about trying music, because I have come to know a lot of washboard-playing friends.’ The next year we started up.”
And since then, Logan has been awash in washboard tourists every Father’s Day weekend. And, increasingly, the rest of the year, too.
If You Go:
The easiest way to get to Logan from Cincinnati is to take Interstate 71 north to I-270 east (just before Columbus), and then take U.S. 33 east toward Lancaster. Take the S.R. 93 exit into Logan. It’s about 150 miles from Cincinnati and takes 2½ hours. For a schedule of Washboard Music Festival performers and other activities related to the event, such as an antique tractor show and the festival queen ceremony, visit www.washboardmusicfestival.com or call 1-740-380-3828. To tour Columbus Washboard Company at 1400 Gallagher Ave. in Logan, call the same number. For lodging, visit www.1800hocking.com or call 1-800-HOCKING. For meals in Logan, try the Sandstone, 117 Main St., which has a 1948 wall mural of the Hocking Hills region, painted as if on a stretched animal skin held by two Native American women. Also of architectural interest for visitors is the unusual Crown of Thorns-shaped bell tower atop the domed First Presbyterian Church a 2 W. Hunter St. downtown.
(Editor’s note: This is a 2015 story that I’m posting because Cincinnati Art Museum just put up Marioni’s “Red Painting” in its new acquisitions gallery — SR)
By STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI CITYBEAT / MARCH 3, 2015 ISSUE
Marioni is a purist — a painter’s painter whose quest to make art isn’t about being decorative or interpretive, but rather is a search for light — Liquid Light, as his show is called.
Joseph Marioni, the Cincinnati-born, New York-based artist who is showing relatively recent paintings at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, does not consider his single-color-dominated, non-representational canvases to be “monochromatic” or “abstract.”
And he certainly doesn’t refer to the work as pictures. They are paintings, and he finds it unfortunate that word and “picture” have become interchangeable when talking about art. Because “picture” implies that a painting depicts something. “Abstract” even implies it’s a stylized visual interpretation of something — from a tree to a state of mind.
As Marioni says in a written statement that’s part of the DAAP show’s wall text, those are straightjacketed views of art. “The function of the paint itself is not to present some other thing; it’s to carry pigment,” he says. “And pigment divides light. So, in one form or another all paintings are fundamentally membranes of divided light.”
As might be guessed from this, Marioni is a purist — a painter’s painter whose quest to make art isn’t about being decorative or interpretive, but rather is a search for light — Liquid Light, as his show is called. His method is to layer acrylic paint on stretched linen until he knows he’s done.
As such, it marks him as an untrendy artist. Born here in 1943, he attended DAAP’s architecture school and the Art Academy of Cincinnati before going to the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1972, he made New York his home. (Today he also has a studio in Pennsylvania.)
“I’m a throwback,” he says in a recent interview at DAAP’s Reed Gallery, while surveying the installation of his show. “I’m an old guy in terms of what the new modern kids think. I make a medium-specific modern art form. Kids today don’t want those labels put on them. They want to be able to say anything can be a painting. But there is some fundamental, intrinsic essence to each [art] form, and I’m working in painting and the natural boundaries that I see.”
This exhibit, consisting of 10 acrylic paintings on stretched linen, came about after Aaron Cowan, DAAP Galleries director, presented the abstract paintings of William McGee in 2013. Assistant art professor Morgan Thomas, who co-curated this show, suggested he display work by Marioni, who had never had an exhibit in Cincinnati devoted to what DAAP refers to as his “mature work.” He has a large 1970 work in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
It’s easy to see why Marioni’s work so often is considered monochromatic. Each painting looks all of one evenly applied color, at least at first (and even second) glance. And the titles of these 10 paintings reinforce that impression: “Green Painting,” “White Painting,” “Yellow Painting,” “Red Painting,” “Turquoise Blue Painting,” “Ochre Painting” and so on.
But looking closely reveals there is far more to the works — a couple of which are very big at eight feet — than meets the superficial glance.
The first place to look is at a corner. For instance, on 2008’s golden “Ochre Painting,” paint stops just short of an edge and reveals a hint of red sneaking out from underneath. If you then follow that upward, you can see the shadows of the darker color underneath the ochre. And with a little distance, you see the ghosts of drips underneath.
But there is more. The way that light shines on and from a finished work — as it does on, say, 2001’s large “White Painting” — adds an entirely new presence. There is magic here in the way Marioni’s paintings make light seem three-dimensionally real.
To paint, he prepares a color blend — usually one of the primary colors or a variation — and applies it as a base to his canvas. For this, he uses a roller.
Then comes a body color, usually more translucent, and on top goes a transparent glaze to build a surface light. The process is a physical one as Marioni uses brushes, fingers and small tools to move paint around. You can see the evidence of that movement if you take the time to look deeply.
“I’m trying to present the personality of the color in all of its richness so it’s not just a flat plain color,” Marioni says. “It has nuances, volume, and movement in terms of the spectral shifting of its light. So the final object on the wall is an image of the color.”
Songs Of Freedom promotional shoot, May 2008. By Davey Wilson.
By Steven Rosen
(This ran in 2008 in Cincinnati CityBeat, I think)
For Chip Taylor, becoming an eminence gris of Americana/contemporary folk music has been a long, strange trip worthy of a Grateful Dead song.
And, he says in a telephone interview to mark the release of his latest album on Train Wreck Records, the topical New Songs of Freedom, he owes it all to Cincinnati’s influential but long-vanished King Records.
“If it wasn’t for King, I wouldn’t be here,” he says.
He grew up as James Wesley Voight (his one older brother is actor Jon Voight; another, Barry, is a noted scientist) in Yonkers and the New York City area, the son of a professional golfer. He was born either in 1940, according to several published sources, or 1944, according to his Website. Despite the urban upbringing, as a boy he loved listening to country music on a long-distance radio station out of Wheeling. He began to think of a career in music, as well as one in golf.
After first forming a high-school trio, Wes Voight and the Town and Country Brothers, he recorded country-tinged songs to little success in the late 1950s/early 1960s. But with support from Chet Atkins, he turned to fulltime songwriting – and penned such rock ‘n’ roll classics as “Wild Thing,” “Angel of the Morning,” “I Can’t Let Go,” “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” and “Anyway That You Want Me.” In the 1970s, he had some success as a country singer and (especially) songwriter. Then in the 1980s, he gave up music to pursue life as a professional gambler.
When he returned to music in the early 1990s, he started recording solo, sometimes-political albums for small labels, becoming – as All Music Guide to Country put it – “the philosopher of country music, not to mention its social historian.” Early this decade, he met the young singer/violinist Carrie Rodriguez at a South by Southwest confab in Austin. The irresistibly good-natured albums they made together, beginning in 2002, were unexpected Americana chart toppers.
With Rodriguez now signed to a major label, Taylor is once again pursuing a solo career. New Songs of Freedom, which includes the re-release of several songs from his obscure 2001 disc, Black and Blue America, combines songs and stories in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness fashion about American life and politics.
So how does King – that great Cincinnati-based post-war R&B label that was home to James Brown, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Little Willie John, Freddie King and others before fading from view after owner Syd Nathan’s death in 1968 – figure in this? Way back in 1956, when Wes Voight and the Town and Country Brothers were shopping demos around New York, their guitarist Greg Gwardiak knocked on King’s door. They didn’t know anything about King, or if it would be interested in songs Taylor now describes as “speeded-up Ricky Nelson – but not as good.”
The office was run by Henry Glover, a King vice-president and an African-American producer, arranger and songwriter who had helped the label develop some of its first R&B hits. Glover, who originally had been in Lucky Millinder’s big band, brought its singer/saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson to King to record “I Love You, Yes I Do” – cited as the first R&B song to sell a million copies. He produced John’s classic “Fever” and worked with Ballard, Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett and many other King black artists.
To Gwardiak’s surprise, Glover loved the demos. (Glover also liked country music and also produced country acts of King’s early years, like the Delmore Brothers, Moon Mullican and Cowboy Copas.)
“Greg got on the phone first and said, ‘Hey, Wes, I’m at King Records and Henry Glover wants to speak to you,’” Taylor recalls. “And then Henry got on the phone and said, ‘Kid, you’ve got yourself a deal. We want you on the label. This is exactly what I’m looking for.’ He didn’t talk to me about it being country, he talked to me about it being soulful.”
Taylor – still Wes Voight at that point – never went to Cincinnati while on King. But he learned from Glover that label head and founder Nathan had big plans for him, possibly seeing him as a rockabilly/rock ‘n’ roll breakthrough for the label. “He (Nathan) had a young daughter and she liked me a lot,” Taylor says.
Nathan told Glover to spare no expense recording Voight. That meant going for a more polished, professional sound than the Town and Country Brothers – Gwardiak and drummer Ted Daryll – could provide. “I remember Henry telling me, ‘Wes, I love the way these demos sound but Syd wants to make sure I get the best musicians for you I possibly can,” Taylor says.
Top R&B session players Mickey Baker (guitar) and Panama Francis (drums) filled in on the recording sessions. Over the course of three years, 1957-1959, Voight released two singles for King’s DeLuxe label – “Another Guy’s Line”/”Midnight Blues” and “I Want a Lover”/”Little Joan” – and two on King, proper, “I’m Moving In”/”Everything’s the Same” and “I’m Ready to Go Steady”/”The Wind and the Coal Black Night.”
Nothing much happened. Toward the end, King sales/promotional people suggested maybe the problem was the name – Voight didn’t sound showbiz enough. Eager to do anything to break through, he came up with an alternative: “Chip Taylor.”
“My nickname was Chip from golfing,” he says. “My short game was really good and in some big match I chipped a few in. So when somebody suggested changing my name I mentioned that. And ‘Taylor’ sounded solid.”
He never actually released anything as “Chip Taylor” on King, but did for his next label, Warner Bros. In 1962 a song called “Here I Am” had just enough success – he was able to tour with Neil Sedaka – that he kept the name. Soon after, his songwriting career took off.
As varied and successful as Taylor’s music-business experiences have been, he maintains a special respect for his years as a teenager on King Records. “I’m still proud to have been on the label, and so proud it’s in my background,” he says. “The only thing I regret is not sticking it out longer, because they were such a bunch of great people.”
By Steven Rosen / Cincinnati Magazine / December, 2023
The new Contemporary Arts Center Executive Director arrives to inject life and energy into the iconic Zaha Hadid–designed museum in time for the building’s 20th anniversary.
New Contemporary Arts Center executive director Christina Vassallo.
When I first interviewed the Contemporary Arts Center’s new executive director, Christina Vassallo, she’d been in town for just a few weeks, having started on March 20. “I sit here less than a month into the job,” she cautioned at the time as I set up the tape recorder in the lobby of the museum’s iconic Zaha Hadid–designed downtown building.
She could have avoided answering questions about future plans and current challenges, citing her newness to the city and to the spectacular building that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary as one of Cincinnati’s architectural gems. Before coming here, she’d been executive director at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum since 2020 and, before that, was executive and artistic director at the Cleveland alternative arts venue SPACES.
But, to her credit, Vassallo knew the CAC needed someone to immediately address a number of concerns. The non-collecting museum had been operating on a reduced budget, prompted by lost revenue during the worst of the COVID pandemic years. In 2022, then–Interim Director Marcus Margerum (currently chief business officer and deputy director) had told me the CAC’s annual operating budget slipped from a pre-pandemic high of $4.4 million to around $3.8 million, resulting in staff furloughs and salary reductions.
Further, it had been almost two years since the organization’s previous leader, Raphaela Platow, moved to Louisville for her new job as director of the Speed Art Museum. The CAC’s senior curator, Amara Antilla, moved to Portland, Oregon, and was working remotely. Even the place where Vassallo and I met in April—the café space in the building’s lobby—signified a problem: Independent restaurateurs had struggled there, including the sophisticated and well-regarded Fausto, which closed at the end of 2022. The CAC needs the revenue, as well as the lobby traffic, such a busy space can contribute.
But Vassallo wasn’t deflecting. She was already working on those issues and more and was willing to give her preliminary assessments. For instance, she said, a locally based curator was a top priority. She was also willing to offer a new topic for discussion: the benefits of the CAC and other arts and cultural institutions receiving funding from the city of Cincinnati or, possibly, some kind of Hamilton County tax levy.
“I personally think the CAC can be in the foreground of those kind of conversations,” Vassallo said in April. “All of us help make the city more livable and exciting. Why would employees of a global corporation like those we have situated here want to come? Because there’s a lot going on here. The arts help make the city more livable and exciting.. So I think it would be a really interesting discussion to have with our elected officials.”
After bringing it up, Vassallo cautioned that the topic was “one thing I care about, but it’s not why I’m here. It’s not why I was selected to run the CAC.”
Redefining and advocating for the arts’ role in the larger community—and doing so in a positive, approachable manner—is something she’s been adept at her entire professional career.
Christina Vassallo is 43, lives downtown, and is private about her personal life. Otherwise, she’s happy to share her story: growing up in New York City and northern New Jersey, getting her graduate degree in nonprofit visual arts management at New York University, and starting her career in the Big Apple. She projects a joyful casualness in person and via Zoom, smiling and laughing in her interviews and expressing herself with knowledgeable positivity about not just CAC’s future but the importance of art in enriching lives.
Additionally, she has an indirectly inspirational physical presence with her arch-shaped curly dark hair, reminiscent of photos of Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian advocate for human rights and women’s rights who recently received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. Among other restrictions, women are required to wear headscarves in public in Iran. Hair equates to freedom for many.
Vassallo likes to think outside the box creatively to engage the community. As executive director of New York City’s Flux Factory in 2013, she co-curated and moderated Flux Death Match, a series of debates on topics of interest to artists as well as to the general public, such as how to confront the concentration of wealth and power within the nonprofit world.
One of her presentations at SPACES in Cleveland was 2018’s A Color Removed, in which the gallery collected donated objects containing the color orange and then staged an exhibition. It was a pointed response to the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot by police who thought his toy gun was real because its orange safety tip had been removed.
“The question we posed to Cleveland was, What happens if we remove that symbol of safety,” says Vassallo in a Zoom interview in early October. “Would we all be safer, or would none of us be safe, or would we still experience safety at different levels? That was a really exciting project. I often think of exhibitions as a thought exercise: What kind of possibilities get revealed when we work with artists in new ways?”
Vassallo had a strong impact on the people she met in Cincinnati even before she formally began her job. Or, for that matter, before she even had it. You might say that in those early interactions people were hearing her “love language.”
“The first thing everybody notices about her right off the bat is her energy,” says Gale Beckett, president of the CAC’s board of trustees and a member of the search committee that recommended Vassallo. “It comes off the written page, it comes off in a phone call, it comes off in a Zoom meeting, and it certainly comes off in person. She really loves to collaborate, and that’s not always the case in the arts world. During one of our interviews with her, she used the words, Collaboration and partnerships are my love language.”
Beckett says Vassallo has made an effort to meet every staff member and most of the board members, community leaders, artists, industry professionals, and educational professionals. “She just really thrives on getting to know people and finding connections in new ways,” says Beckett. “That came through in examples from her previous roles, and it’s certainly proving true now.”
That show of enthusiasm impressed Cal Cullen when she was still executive director of Camp Washington’s Wave Pool, which considers itself a contemporary art fulfillment center. (Cullen is now program manager for the Haile Foundation.)
“The week before she offcially started at the CAC was when the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts held its convention here, and it was an insanely busy and amazingly entertaining week for the arts in Cincinnati,” Cullen recalls. “Christina came to Wave Pool for the opening reception we had for our three new exhibitions. She made an effort to introduce herself to me and the other staff members and artists and to really be out in the community and building relationships. That’s so important for the Contemporary Arts Center.”
For my Zoom interview with Vassallo, she was in New York City to see museum exhibits, including the Whitney’s Henry Taylor: B Side, featuring distinctive portraiture by the Los Angeles artist whose subjects mostly include African Americans. Taylor, she says, had served as artist-in-residence and had an exhibition at her Fabric Workshop and Museum earlier this year.
Vassallo certainly has jumped into her new role in Cincinnati, and the institution that hired her is reaping the benefits. CAC trustees were in a forward-looking mood when they announced a $4.7 million working budget for the fiscal year that started in September, projecting a nice recovery from the pandemic dip, and started a strategic planning process to map out the next several years.
Vassallo also announced the achievement of her top priority, hiring a full-time curator. Theresa Bembnister, who started at the end of October, had been at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock since 2020, first as associate curator and then as curator. Before that, she spent five years at the Akron Art Museum, reaching the title of curator of exhibitions. Bembnister will live here, which Vassallo says is critically important.
“I surveyed the staff and asked them what we needed in a new curator, and resoundingly I heard they thought it really required and deserved someone who is going to live in the city and help forge the connections with the artistic talent in the region,” says Vassallo. “Our curator is really going to be tasked with not only bringing an international and national perspective to our programming but also understanding the local talent pool and incorporating that into her work.”
Meanwhile, Antilla—who served as curator-at-large after moving to Portland—has relocated to the Washington, D.C., area and transitioned into a guest curator role. She curated a show at the CAC that opened in November and runs through April 14, 2024: Tai Shani: My Bodily Remains, the first U.S. solo museum exhibition for the British artist. It features a new site-specific installation and a feature-length film.
But the year’s biggest show, which remains on view through January 28, 2024, celebrates the 20th anniversary of the CAC’s Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art at the northwest corner of Sixth and Walnut streets. Titled A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid, it was guest-curated by Madrid-based Maite Borjabad, who previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and was curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s also a trained architect.
The show is a tribute to the Iraqi-born and London-based Hadid, whose CAC building was her first in the U.S. and the first U.S. museum designed by a woman. Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times called it “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War.” Hadid parlayed its success into an inspiring superstar career. She died of a heart attack in 2016; her firm remains active and has been in the news lately for its rendering of the 1,082-foot-tall Discovery Tower on a mountaintop in Saudi Arabia.
The CAC building which was designed by Zaha Hadid 20 years ago.
For the CAC exhibit, Borjabad commissioned seven new Hadid-inspired works from Middle Eastern and European artists and received loans of seven fascinatingly futuristic artworks by Hadid. One of her pieces is a 1977 graduation project that envisioned a 14-story hotel on London’s Hungerford Bridge over the River Thames that looks like it’s in outer space.
The show’s title derives from a 2011 ode to Hadid written by Lebanese-American poet and essayist Etel Adnan. The passage at its heart was reprinted in a 2016 issue of Artforum magazine: “Hadid is a poet of forms and of the materials that give presence to these forms; one must admire them close up and from afar to discover, in this woman who built on solid rock, a permanent nostalgia for departure. Everything she made seems to always be the day before a departure, a permanent invitation to the imagination and to the imaginary.”
Hadid wanted the glass-windowed CAC lobby to serve as an “urban carpet” that—according to her architectural firm’s website—“lets pedestrians into and through the interior space via a gentle slope, which becomes, in turn, a wall, ramp, walkways, and even an artificial park space.” And the current Hadid exhibition has a wonderful tribute to that vision. Turkish artist Hera Büyüktasçiyan allowed six narrow strips of carpet, with brown tones and very subtle patterning, to cascade down a gallery wall to the floor, like a waterfall. It’s a sacrosanct memorial to the building’s creator and her goals for the CAC building. I wish it could stay there permanently.
Ipersonally love the building’s urban carpet. I imagine myself gliding gently from the front doors to the sloped rear interior wall and then climbing right up, defying gravity. I’ve even tried to walk up it a couple of times. And the stark blackness of the stairway that is the lobby’s centerpiece commands attention and demands to be climbed upward to see the art.
But not everyone feels that same magical pull. They need specific reasons to step into the CAC lobby from the street, especially if they’re not already headed to shows in the upstairs galleries. And they may soon be getting a new café, another top priority for Vassallo.
The organization posted on the ArtsWave jobs page in October for a manager to run a space that would be owned and operated by the museum itself. “We’ve decided to take the operation of our café in-house,” says Vassallo. “We did a lot of research on this topic, and we’ve learned it’s nearly impossible for a third party to really make a good profit in a museum café space, especially as American downtowns—where we are and where many museums are located—continue to rebound from the effects of COVID. Not everybody is working on a five-day office schedule anymore, so that has an effect.”
She understands a café is a visitor amenity that doesn’t need to make a big profit on its own. “We just want to better serve our visitors and make sure they’re comfortable and can have some refreshments,” she says. In the meantime, a CAC employee sells coffee and snacks in the former Fausto space.
Vassallo has also been finalizing the CAC’s exhibition schedule for next season, putting another stamp on the institution’s future in a tangible way. Shows will include Jayson Musson: His History of Art, a showcase of recent MFA graduates from DAAP and Miami University, and a CAC Staff Art Exhibition. “The new season will include major thematic group shows and solo exhibitions by living artists, some who live in Cincinnati and some who are setting foot [here] for the first time,” she says.
The iconic interior staircases of the CAC.
In her spare time, if any exists, Vassallo continues to envision a better-financed and more stable future for Cincinnati’s arts sector. She believes the pandemic revealed major fault lines in terms of how nonprofits operate and thrive. “This interview isn’t really about my political soapbox, but I think it’s an important conversation to be having,” she says. “We’re still not out of that COVID trench of financial pressure, right? I think there’s a lot more work to be done.”
Vassallo acknowledges the importance of ArtsWave’s longtime work to fund-raise for the region’s arts organizations—its 2023 workplace giving campaign brought in $11.9 million for 150-plus organizations, projects, and artist commissions—but says other cities where she’s worked have used a variety of public funds to support their arts groups. Cleveland organizations receive funding through a Cuyahoga County tax on cigarette sales, and for a time the money was distributed by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. That city recently added the position of senior strategist for arts, culture, and the creative economy.
Philadelphia has an arts, culture, and the creative economy office within City Hall. While working in that city, Vassallo had been appointed by city council to serve on the then-new Arts & Culture Task Force to develop recommendations to uplift disadvantaged communities through the arts and culture sector, especially in the aftermath of COVID.
The city of Cincinnati doesn’t have a dedicated office, department, or staff member for assistance to the arts, though a “leveraged support” process—with an arts category—offers direct financial support to nonprofit organizations with strong local impact. “No specific dollar amount or percentage of overall funding is assigned to each category [within the program],” says Ben Breuninger, deputy director of communications. “Rather, we’ve identified these areas as important for city investment and ask leveraged support applicants to identify which category best defines their work.” ArtsWave’s Black and Brown Artists program recently received $75,000 from this fund, and ArtWorks received $150,000.
That type of one-time funding is appreciated, says Vassallo, but isn’t the same kind of year-after-year support that dedicated, ongoing public funding provides. “I believe if we had [public funding], it would make the job of every director in the cultural sector easier,” she says. “Creating an atmosphere where there is an appetite for funding like this to exist is definitely a product of my main job running the CAC.”
As the CAC tries—and needs—to grow revenue by attracting post-COVID visitors to its downtown site, it should continue to feed off of the challenging creative and visionary edge that Zaha Hadid gave its building and that inspires its artists and curators. Vassallo assures me she will as she works to grow its audience for shows and other activities.
“I don’t see challenging work as being in direct opposition to also being welcoming,” she says. “Creating a buttress of support around an exhibition, which our education department does, gives people entry points into a show. What I love about museums, especially contemporary art museums, is visitors have the opportunity in one building to be exposed to so many perspectives. Museums allow us those access points. That’s what I think is so exciting about this kind of work.”
Corinne Bailey Rae’s new album “Black Rainbows” releases September 15.
Because Corinne Bailey Rae’s September 12 concert at Memorial Hall comes just three days ahead of the release of her Black Rainbows, attendees will get a preview of a musically inventive and daring album that the British singer-songwriter hopes will be a conversation starter about race in America.
Bailey Rae is best known for her expressively jazzy voice; with its seemingly relaxed fluidity, she turned 2006’s “Put Your Records On” into an international hit. For Black Rainbows, the Grammy winner’s first studio album since 2016 and just her fourth overall, she has collaborated with Theaster Gates, one of the U.S.’s most important contemporary artists. Gates is well-known for the Stony Island Arts Bank, his museum and library in Chicago’s South Side that houses archival collections related to Black history.
“I had never heard of him before but I saw a photograph of this Black man staring out, and around him were his objects of contemporary art,” Bailey Rae says during a Zoom interview.
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She remembers well her fascination with the collection of objects around Gates: a pile of bricks on the floor; a shaggy goat that, instead of having legs, had spindles and was going around a circular train track; a big store sign for Harold’s Chicken with a chef chasing after a chicken with a meat cleaver.
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“He was staring at the camera with this confidence and calm self-possession as if saying, Yes, this is my art,” she says. “And I thought, I don’t understand this work; I don’t know who this man is. So, I looked into him.”
When she played Chicago in 2017, she invited Gates to attend the show. He, in turn, invited her to see the Stony Island Arts Bank and, after her initial visit, spend more time there. She was fascinated by its various collections relating to Black culture—books and periodicals from Johnson Publishing Company, owner of Ebony and Jet magazines for the African American market; the 5,000 or so vinyl records collected by Frankie Knuckles, a champion of Chicago’s dance-oriented house music, and the stereotypical and racist images collected by Edward J. Williams.
“I was inspired especially by the narratives of enslaved people, and thinking about my own history,” she says. Although born in Leeds, England, her father was from Saint Kitts and his father from Antigua—both of which are islands in the West Indies where the British enforced slavery.
All this influenced her music when it was time to start writing and recording the 10 songs on Black Rainbows. She’s excited by what she created while working to translate her thoughts and feelings about Gates’ Arts Bank into her own compelling vision.
The opener, “A Spell, A Prayer” builds slowly with spare, isolated chords interacting with hypnotically methodical rhythms that sound like footsteps. She starts singing slowly, softly; her voice cushioned by back-up support. Tension soon develops as other instruments join the mix and start to convey a spacey feeling. Then the band chimes in with it a triumphant punch.
“It was inspired by my reading in the Johnson Publishing library, especially the narratives of enslaved people and thinking about my own history,” she explains. “I thought, what would it mean to remove the pain or trauma from a particular ancestral limb—what would it mean for the descendants of those people?
“I thought I’d write a song about the extent that a person held in captivity could experience freedom. I thought for enslaved people there must have been transcendent moments, and those were things that kept them hopeful. I think that idea sustains me when I think about the trauma and suffering.”
The mid-tempo “Red Horse” is tender, with Bailey Rae’s voice conveying empathy for the song’s subject. The gorgeous melody, holding steady amid a wash of synthesizers, builds toward reverie as voices repeat, “You’re the one that I’ve been waiting for.”
“That came from a photograph I saw of a Black girl wearing a white dress and she had on a straw hat,” she says. “She’s with a family, a white family, and the mother, I think, is sitting on a horse and has a baby in her arms. They’re a pioneer family going west just before the Civil War. I thought about their lives and I was looking at the weight of responsibility on this little black girl. She’s going to be looking after a one-year-old and she herself is 13 or 14 or 15. Who will she meet on this journey? I was imagining a sort of romance for her.”
“New York Transit Queen” is a departure from some of the more lushly arranged and produced Black Rainbows songs. It’s a rush of fast-paced, clangorous excitement. As her voice shouts the lyrics, the sound comes close to being pure slamming punk.
“That came from a specific moment looking at Ebony Magazine,” Bailey Rae says, explaining that in 1954 it ran a photo of a black woman who held that title. “I researched Miss Transit and I found out that Miss Subways was a beauty competition run by the New York Subway and these Doris Day types were winning. It wasn’t open to Black women. So the Black workers in the transit authority got together and made their own competition, and this is what Audrey Smaltz won in 1954. She was 6 feet tall, in a bathing suit, hanging off the back of a fire truck with a fireman’s boots on.”
Finding and interviewing Smaltz, who’s now in her eighties, Bailey Rae came to realize the woman’s 1954 photograph set the tone for the “incredible” life that followed, and tied in with part of her past, too.
“I saw from [the photograph] that she was just this rebel girl and a hellraiser, and it really made me think of the Riot Grrrl sound,” she says. “In the 1990s, I was in an indie band called Helen and they would often use these cheesecake images on a poster and put a feminist slogan on it inviting you out to an all-girl band night.”
This interview occured before Bailey Rae’s Black Rainbows tour started, but wants the songs to sound different live than they do on the album, and has already planned out how to do so with the four other musicians joining her on tour. “We want the show to be expansive and cosmic and improvisational, as well as to play elements of all the songs on the record,” she says. “We’re working to include some technologies so you get to hear strings, and get some things that start with Beatboxes or use prayer bowl or choral arrangements. Of course, we want it to be live and to be able to stop on a sixpence and repeat something or do extra choruses. We want to make it grand but also make it fluid.”
‘Rain Man,’ the Film that Propelled Cincinnati’s Film Industry, Turns 35
In Cincinnati at the time, the film won the enthusiastic support of a local populace thrilled to not only see Greater Cincinnati sites on the big screen, but also to have a major hit movie with a script specifically set in Cincinnati.
Portions of Rain Man were filmed in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Sept. 6 print edition.
When Fathom Events — the presenter of special cinematic screenings in North American movie theaters — announced its upcoming 35th anniversary presentations of Rain Man,it didn’t mince words about the 1988 film’s legacy.
It’s worth remembering as a “Powerful and Poignant film,” the media alert says. Fathom Events and co-presenter/film distributor Park Circus bring it to theaters on September 17 and 20.
Directed by Barry Levinson, Rain Man stars Tom Cruise as a fashionable but financially imperiled and hot-tempered Los Angeles car dealer who discovers he has an autistic savant older brother in Cincinnati poised to inherit their father’s substantial estate. Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt comes here to intervene by leading Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond through unusual encounters in Greater Cincinnati and on the road to L.A.
Released as a prestige title in December of 1988, it won four Academy Awards for that year, including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay (by Ronald Bass), and Best Actor for Hoffman’s memorable performance as a man who can’t meaningfully interact with the outside world, but is a veritable genius with numbers and esoteric facts.
In Cincinnati at the time, the film won the enthusiastic support of a local populace thrilled to not only see Greater Cincinnati sites on the big screen, but also to have a major hit movie with a script specifically set in Cincinnati. It also increased local (and national) awareness of autism.
And it helped set in motion the city’s establishment of a film commission which, over the decades, has lured such notable movies as Traffic, A Ragein Harlem, Carol, The Fits, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Ides of March, Miles Ahead and Dark Waters to be at least partially filmed here.
“It is what prompted the need for a film commission,” says Kristen Schlotman, Film Cincinnati’s executive director, of Rain Man.
According to her, Levinson and his team had gotten in touch with Ohio’s head for film production, Eve Lapolla, and asked for a local contact to see Cincinnati. “She got in touch with (the late) local television producer Lori Holladay and asked if she could help tour these filmmakers around Cincinnati,” Schlotman explains. The Greater Cincinnati Film Commission was established in 1991. “It was the first film office to be incorporated as a 501(c)(3) anywhere in the country,” she says.
In a way, Schlotman says, the film commission has come full circle from the huge boost it got from Rain Man. Levinson recently completed filming here of Wise Guys, starring Robert DeNiro in a dual role as warring mobsters. “It is the largest budget feature film to ever come to Cincinnati,” she says.
There were quite a few significant local sites used in Rain Man — St. Anne Convent in Melbourne, Kentucky, served as Wallbrook, the care facility that was home to Raymond; also seen are the Roebling Suspension Bridge, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and more.
But there are two particular scenes in Rain Man that have come to be regarded locally as iconic. They both involve beloved Cincinnati institutions: Newport’s Pompilio’s restaurant, which serves old-fashioned Italian food; and Oxford’s WOXY FM radio station, which in the 1980s had a pioneering modern rock sound that it famously called The Future of Rock and Roll.
In the film, Charlie and Raymond stop in for breakfast at the gracefully aged front dining room of Pompilio’s — which dates its history back to a saloon called Kettenacker’s that started in 1901 at the corner of Washington Avenue and E. 6th Street. A server, trying to find toothpicks for Raymond, spills a box on the floor by the handsome wooden bar. To her and Charlie’s stunned amazement, Raymond almost instantly counts the number, revealing how brilliantly swift his brain can compute.
Today, Pompilio’s still has framed memorabilia from the film in the room where the two Hollywood stars sat. And, on a wall is a colorful mural with sculptural elements depicting aspects of the film. People still come to see where a key Rain Man scene was filmed.
Photo: Aidan Mahoney
The phone booth in Pompilio’s featured in a Rain Man sceneThe second iconic Rain Man moment for locals is a spoken one-liner as much as it’s a colorful scene visually, while Charlie and Raymond are in a beautifully preserved 1949 Buick Roadmaster along Columbia Parkway. Charlie’s radio, tuned to WOXY, plays a station promo (or liner) that goes: “97 X…the Future of Rock and Roll,” There is a short synthesizer sound between the two parts.
Raymond quickly repeats it, adding a “Bam!” between the parts, and then starts repeating his altered version on the spot. As soon as the station learned that scene would be in the film, it made the promo its official ID, say both Doug Balogh, the station’s former co-owner (with his wife Linda), and manager Steve Baker in separate interviews. (There is also an account of the promo’s creation in Robin James’ recent book, The Future of Rock and Roll).
Baker had originally recorded the promo and it is his voice on it. Though WOXY as a modern rock station is long gone, that station ID and its Dustin Hoffman-created variant remain a powerful symbol of Cincinnati life in the 1980s. “I still run into more people who remember me for that than for the Miami University football and basketball calls I’ve been making for 35 years,” says Baker, the school’s assistant athletic director and director of broadcasting.
After the movie came out, Doug Balogh got an Ohio custom license plate that said “97X BAM” and drove it with pride. After selling the station and eventually moving to California, he wanted to get a new one there. But there was a surprise.
“I was trying for 10 years and somebody had it,” he says. “Finally, my daughter said to try to get it with two Ms rather than one. So, I ordered that and I’ve now had it for about three months.”
He wonders if that somebody who has a California 97X BAM license is Hoffman, and if they’ll ever run into each other at a streetcorner. But he’s happy with his BAMM plate. And he knows he’s doing his part to keep alive WOXY’s modern rock legacy, which Rain Man played a key role in creating.
“It really looks cool with the colors black and yellow,” Balogh says of his license plate. “And I have a dark gray car, so it looks really nice on there.”
On Saturday, September 9, the first Cincinnati Music Book Show and Sale will occur from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut Street, 11th Floor, in Downtown Cincinnati. Admission is free and open to all
The event will feature authors with a local/regional connection who have written books about Cincinnati and Ohio music history as well as books about music in general.
Titles include two books about Cincinnati’s legendary King Records, one about the rebels and underdogs who have made Ohio’s rock history so extraordinary; one about the pioneering Richmond, Indiana jazz label Gennett Records; one that is a very readable encyclopedia of Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim’s storied life, and much more. Authors will be present to talk about and sign their books.
Here is a list of the scheduled participants and the books they are featuring, although many will have additional music books they wrote available, too.
• Brent Coleman, Cincinnati Characters: The Unknown, Unappreciated, Unhinged: Brent Coleman worked as a local writer/editor in newsrooms for 37 years, 26 of those with The Cincinnati Enquirer. Always interested in American history and architecture, he blended the two near his career’s end, publishing more than 250 home stories plus 50 local history articles. They are the basis of his Cincinnati Characters: The Unknown, Unappreciated, Unhinged, a fun and educational book that reveals the fascinating lives of more than 35 diverse men and women who impacted the Queen City’s development in the 1800s and early 1900s. These included two significant music figures: Conservatory of Music founder Clara Baur and outlandish stage actress/recording artist Libby Holman.
• Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America’s Musical Grassroots: In a piano factory tucked away in Richmond, Indiana, Gennett Records produced thousands of records featuring obscure musicians from hotel orchestras and backwoods fiddlers to the future icons of jazz, blues, country music, and rock ‘n’ roll. From 1916 to 1934, the company debuted such future stars as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, and Hoagy Carmichael, while also capturing classic performances by Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Uncle Dave Macon, and Gene Autry. While Gennett Records was overshadowed by competitors such as Victor and Columbia, few record companies documented the birth of America’s grassroots music as thoroughly as this small-town label. In this newly revised and expanded edition of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, Rick Kennedy shares anecdotes from musicians, employees, and family members to trace the colorful history of one of America’s most innovative record companies.
• Randy McNutt, King Records of Cincinnati:
Randy is a locally based historian of popular music and in Cincinnati music history and has written numerous books on the subject.
• Rick Pender, The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia: This book — now available in a paperback edition — is a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive reference devoted to musical theater’s most prolific and admired composer and lyricist. Entries cover Sondheim’s numerous collaborators—from composers and directors to designers and orchestras—key songs—such as his Academy Award winner “Sooner or Later” (Dick Tracy)—and major works—including Assassins, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and West Side Story. The encyclopedia also contains information about Sondheim’s mentoring by Oscar Hammerstein II and his early collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, and profiles the actors who originated roles and sang Sondheim’s songs for the first time, including Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters. Featuring a detailed biographical entry for Sondheim, a chronology of his career, a listing of his many awards, and discussions of his opinions on movies, opera, and more, this comprehensive resource will attract musical theater enthusiasts again and again.
Rick Pender grew up near Cleveland in Northeast Ohio. He fell in love with theater as a teenager in the 1960s: His first LP was the soundtrack of the motion picture of “West Side Story” with lyrics by 26-year-old Stephen Sondheim. In 1980 he moved to Cincinnati and a few years later he began to write about local theater. When CityBeat, the city’s alternative newsweekly, was launched in 1994 he became a regular contributor; in 1998 became joined the paper’s editorial team as its arts and culture editor. In 1997 he began to provide freelance features and reviews for The Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine. He became its part-time assistant editor in 2002, and from 2004 to 2016 he was The Sondheim Review’s managing editor. In 2017 he launched a website, EverythingSondheim.org (now hosted by Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia). In 2002 and again in 2017 the Society of Professional Journalists named him Ohio’s best arts critic.
• Garin Pirnia, Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll: From Cleveland to Cincinnati and everywhere in between, Ohio rocks. Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll takes readers behind the scenes to the birth and rise of musical legends like the Black Keys, Nine Inch Nails, Devo, the Breeders, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and many others who started in garages and bars across Ohio. Through candid first-hand interviews, Garin Pirnia captures new, unheard stories from national legends like the Black Keys and slow-burn local bands like Wussy from Cincinnati.
Garin Pirnia was born and raised in the rock-and-roll city of Dayton, Ohio. She has written about music for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Mental Floss, The Wall Street Journal, Cincinnati CityBeat, and many more publications. She is the author of The Beer Cheese Book and the screenwriter of a couple of award-winning weird short horror comedies.
• Brian F.X. Powers, A King Records Scrapbook: Brian works at Cincinnati Public Library as a reference librarian and has done extensive research and presented public programs and exhibits related to Cincinnati Music History.
• Christopher M. Reeves and Aaron Walker, The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia: In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of John Cage, Gavin Bryars, and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the primary requirement for membership specified that all players, regardless of skill, experience, or musicianship, be unfamiliar with their chosen instruments. This restriction, coupled with the decision to play “only the familiar bits” of classical music, challenged the Sinfonia’s audience to reconsider the familiar, as the ensemble haplessly butchered the classics at venues ranging from avant-garde music festivals to the Royal Albert Hall. By the end of the decade, after three LPs of their anarchic renditions of classical and rock music and a revolving cast of over one hundred musicians—including Brian Eno and Michael Nyman—the Sinfonia would cease performing.
The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, is the first book devoted to the ensemble
Chris Reeves is a Chicago based creative researcher, educator, and art historian. He received his PhD in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021 and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Aaron Walker is an artist and programmer living in Atlanta whose projects often spring out of an interest in self-organized, artist-run culture. They both grew up near and eventually lived in Cincinnati — Reeves got his BA & MA from University of Cincinnati; Walker got his BFA there.
• Steven Rosen, Lost Cincinnati Concert Venues of the ‘50s and ‘60s: From the Surf Club to Ludlow Garage: Cincinnati in the ‘50s and ‘60s offered a stunning array of live music and entertainment venues. Although many of them no longer exist, their memories live on. Fulfilling an obligation to mobsters, blues crooner Charles Brown played a residency at the Sportsman’s Club in Newport. Incendiary comedian Lenny Bruce performed at the Surf Club on the city’s conservative west side. Jim Tarbell’s short-lived but iconic Ludlow Garage became a major stop on the national ballroom circuit that grew up around rock ‘n’ roll as it matured into its progressive, experimental era. Signaling an end to the ’60s, Iggy Pop created a sensation at the 1970 Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival at Crosley Field. Join seasoned journalist Steven Rosen on a tour through historically heady days in the Queen City’s music scene.
Steven Rosen has worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer, Denver Post, Cincinnati CityBeat and other newspapers. Among his assignments, he served as the Arts & Culture editor at CityBeat and the art and film critic (and a music writer) at the Denver Post. He also founded National One Hit Wonder Day and started a music fanzine called One Shot: The Magazine of One Hit Wonders. He is a founder of the Cincinnati Vinyl Club and the Rock & Read Music Book Discussion Group.
• Jeff Suess, Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline: This book presents the pivotal events in the history of the Queen City, including the key musical moments from the origins of May Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Opera, and Music Hall, plus King Records, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Stephen Foster, the World Choir Games, and more.
Jeff Suess is a history columnist and librarian at the Cincinnati Enquirer and the author of several local history books, including Lost Cincinnati, Hidden History of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Then and Now, Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline, and (with Rick Pender) The Cincinnati Bengals: An Illustrated Timeline.
Despite his association with “Free Jazz,” Peter Brötzmann is not fond of the phrase.
Since emerging from Germany in the 1960s, Peter Brötzmann has become one of the titans of avant-garde Jazz. A tenaciously forceful master of saxophone, clarinet/bass clarinet and tárogató (a Romanian or Hungarian woodwind), over the years Brötzmann has played with American explorers of often-improvised new Jazz like Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Sonny Sharrock, Anthony Braxton and Andrew Cyrille.
The website discogs.com lists Brötzmann as a participant in 115 recordings and videos, as soloist and bandleader or as part of various groups and collaborations. Machine Gun, a 1968 release by his octet, is cited as a classic for the way it captured — in furious Jazz form — the political tumult and tension loose in Germany and Europe at the time.
At age 75, one might think Brötzmann has found his comfort zone and has earned the right to define a groove and stay with it. But that’s just not him — he takes his legacy of being devoted to the “new” very seriously. For one of his most recent collaborations, Brötzmann teamed up with Heather Leigh, an American born-and-raised/ Scotland-based pedal-steel guitar experimentalist, for the new album Ears Are Filled With Wonder. It’s strange and beautiful music — you wouldn’t expect these two very different musicians, both playing with their own distinctive improvisatory style, to fit together so well. But they do. On the album, Brötzmann plays tenor sax, bass clarinet, B-flat clarinet and tárogató.
“I met Heather about two years ago in Glasgow and we talked together,” Brötzmann says by phone, shortly after arriving in Orlando for a pair of North American tours (prior to the duo dates, his quartet with Jason Adasiewicz, John Edwards and Steve Noble performed several concerts). “About a year ago, (Leigh) invited me to play at a Glasgow festival, and that was our first gig. I had no idea about her instrument, but I think both of us agreed it was working very well together.”
Last year in Poland, the two musicians recorded Ears Are Filled With Wonder, which Brötzmann proclaims is “quite a good piece of music.” He says of the experience of playing with Leigh, whose solo work twists elements of Folk music, showed him to another way of playing.
“I’m used to drums and bass and the usual Jazz traditional thing, but she is really a challenge for me to discover other areas of music,” he says. “I’m very happy about that.
“I see my life as a way of learning,” Brötzmann continues. “That is still what I want to do, and I am very grateful I found Heather or she found me.”
Brötzmann is aware that he is at an age where the rigors of his vigorous playing style, so demanding of his concentration and stamina, can start to take a toll.
“I’m not a young man anymore, but whenever I go onstage, I have to give all,” he says. “And that’s what I’m doing, even if the bones the next morning ache. It’s not easy, but being on stage, you just do it.”
Brötzmann’s original interest in Jazz was stoked by a love of Blues, and also by seeing American Jazz groups play Europe, where they sometimes were embraced more heartily than in the States. He met Eric Dolphy in 1964, several nights before the brilliant musician died in Berlin from a diabetic condition that was never diagnosed. He saw John Coltrane groups, including ones with Dolphy and Cannonball Adderley. And he attended multiple shows by one of his greatest influences, innovative saxophonist Albert Ayler.
“If people ask me what I’m doing, I tell them I’m a Jazz musician in my own way,” Brötzmann says. “I’m not an American — I’m not a black American — I’m a European. But I learn a lot from all these guys from Jazz history, and from Albert and Coltrane.”
As he started playing and developing his style, Brötzmann found an unusual supporter in video artist Nam June Paik. Brötzmann studied art in Wuppertal, Germany, where he became interested in Fluxus, the then-new international movement that explored performance, music and multimedia as integral components of visual art. It had a strong following in Germany.
In 1963, the Korean-born Paik had his career breakthrough at Wuppertal’s Galerie Parnass with a show that used magnets to distort TV images. He and Brötzmann became acquainted.
“He widened my view and I learned quite a lot from him, too,” Brötzmann says. “When he stayed in my hometown for his exhibitions, he’d always say, ‘Hey Brötzmann, do it!’ At that time not many people liked me (as a musician), so it was good to have his support in my young years.”
The word most often used to describe Brötzmann’s music — and improvised music like his — is “Free Jazz,” with its connotation of anything happening at any moment. But the term is not one the musician embraces.
“ ’Free Jazz’ for me is related to the years in the 1960s where it had not only a musical meaning but also a political one,” he says. “We in Europe had our fight with the establishment, and especially me as a German, (with) the after-war political dust from the old Nazi times. That was a time when the word ‘free’ had meaning — to get rid of what was and find something new.
“But if you destroy the old forms, you always find new forms. I think I developed my language over the years, and Heather in her relatively young years has developed her own, too. So we’re trying to find a new form each night. It’s a kind of instant composing, but the word ‘free’ is wrong.”
Reflecting on when he first started playing music and developing his own language and approach, Brötzmann says he and his generation were “young and foolish” for believing that things like music could “change the world.” But he continues to believe that music has the power to affect individuals.
“It was a kind of illusion (in the ’60s) — you don’t make revolutions with music,” he says. “But you can reach people, you can open their minds and put other ideas in their heads, and that’s what we still are trying. That is what the music is about.”
JD Souther returns to the studio and stage after 24 years
By Steven Rosen on Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:06 pm/ CINCINNATI CITYBEAT
Cincinnati CityBeat
IF YOU were asked which “lady or gentleman of the canyon” — the iconic 1970s-era singer-songwriters of Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon — had recently delivered a late-middle-age masterpiece, you’d probably guess Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Don Henley, CS&N … basically anyone but JD Souther.
That’s partly because Souther, 64, isn’t that well-known, despite having written or co-written such classics of L.A. Folk and Country Rock as The Eagles’ “Best of My Love,” “Heartache Tonight” and “New Kid in Town”; Linda Ronstadt’s “Faithless Love” and “Prisoner in Disguise”; and his own (with James Taylor) “Her Town Too.” He also had a solo hit, the Roy Orbison-influenced “You’re Only Lonely,” in 1979.
It’s also because Souther stopped recording for 24 years before releasing If the World Was You — the album that’s winning such acclaim now — in late 2008. Even then, the Great Recession struck just as the album came out on the small Slow Curve Records label.
But, slowly, he’s been capitalizing on strong reviews and increased touring to get the word out, including a stop in Fairfield Saturday playing solo (with just guitar and piano).
The solo show means one aspect of what makes If the World Was You so strong won’t be heard live — the sometimes-modal, Cuban-influenced Jazz arrangements that Souther and his group recorded (mostly) live-to-tape in a Nashville studio. But the album’s many other strengths will be heard: Souther’s voice is supple yet tough, capable of a high-pitched sweetness but also as earthy and lonesome as the Texas plains where he grew up. His songs show his knack for exploring that space between major- and minor-key melodies (think “New Kid in Town”) is undiminished.
Souther didn’t stop writing songs for others during his long recording layoff and he also did a lot of traveling and even some acting. But he lost interest in furthering his own performing career (or writing for himself) after releasing Home By Dawn, his fourth solo album, in 1984.
“I just stopped making records and touring,” he says by phone from Nashville, his current home. “I didn’t feel like working, and I don’t think I was crazy about what was happening in music as the MTV period got in full swing and became the primary way of connecting an audience to music. It was a little less satisfying to me. I took Sonny Rollins as an example — when people began to question his playing, he’d just retire and go practice for a few years.”
His songwriting/performing ambitions were rejuvenated by a 1998 trip to Cuba.
“That lit the fuse again,” Souther says. “ I was there a little over a week and the music was so infectious and so wonderful and reminded me so much of music I liked as a kid, because I was a Kazz drummer growing up. I always played Jazz. I was a tenor player, too.”
Born in Detroit — his grandmother sang opera and his father a big-band singer — the music-loving John David Souther moved to Amarillo at a young age where he loved listening to everything, from the Great American Songbook to Texans Orbison and Buddy Holly.
“And after that I discovered Ray Charles and felt like I found a new world,” he says. “I think he’s the dominant musician of the late 20th Century in America.”
In Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Souther and another Detroit-born aspiring musician — future-Eagle Glenn Frey — became close friends and formed a duo called Longbranch Pennywhistle. They quickly became immersed in the city’s burgeoning singer/songwriter culture and released an album.
When it went nowhere, David Geffen, then a Rock manager starting his own label called Asylum Records, bought their contract.
“I think David suggested to Glenn he put together a band,” Souther says. “I was filling in as a drummer for Linda Ronstadt — she was my girlfriend and needed a drummer — so I played, but I really didn’t want to do that. I would rather have been home writing.
I had just bought a piano, had a little cottage across the courtyard from Jackson Browne, and we were just writing furiously. Glenn wanted more people in our band, I wanted less. I just wanted to stay home and write. So The Eagles grew out of (Ronstadt’s) back-up band.”
As The Eagles became successful, Geffen thought he could do the same thing with Souther, and he put together the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Richie Furay of Poco. They had a hit with 1974’s Furay-penned “Fallin’ in Love,” but the band lacked the chemistry of The Eagles and soon fell apart. Their second and last album was aptly named Trouble in Paradise.
Today that band is viewed as an egregious example of record-industry hype of the period: a “manufactured” supergroup.
“I’m not sure what’s manufactured and what’s not,” Souther says, pointing out The Eagles, too, were put together at Geffen’s suggestion. “When David suggested the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band to me, I thought, ‘Yeah, that might be a good idea.’ But I think I held back a little bit. Richie and Chris thought I was sometimes giving my best songs to The Eagles rather than bringing them into our recording sessions, and it may have been true, but probably the reasons are obvious. They were already selling records and I had no doubt about the way they were making records.”
Now that he’s resuming his career as a singer/songwriter (he’s already working on new material) in his 60s, Souther acknowledges there are creative challenges.
“As you get older, luck comes in smaller batches,” he says. “You tend to get really big splashes of color just by chance when you’re young, because you haven’t had that much experience and your senses are more untouched and, consequently, not so calloused over. Now you have to constantly keep hitting the refresh button, making sure the snow we just had here, for instance, is every bit as beautiful and mysterious as it was years ago.”
Let’s Try to Break the Death Spiral of Declining Information About and Interest In Indie and Art Films
BY STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI MAGAZINE / APRIL 7, 2023
(From film A Thousand and One)
Upon leaving his position after 23 years as co-chief film critic for The New York Times, A.O. Scott recently took stock of the state of current movies and the theaters showing them. He was especially addressing “specialty” or “indie” / “art house” movies and the more personal, neighborhood-oriented theaters and other alternative (to megaplexes) venues that screen them:
“The current apocalypse is that streaming and Covid anxiety are conspiring to kill off moviegoing as we have known it, leaving a handful of I.P.-driven blockbusters and horror movies to keep theaters in business while we mostly sit at home bingeing docuseries, dystopias and the occasional art-film guilt trip. Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. The cultural space in which the movies I care most about have flourished seems to be shrinking. The audience necessary to sustain original and ambitious work is narcotized by algorithms or distracted by doomscrolling. The state of the movies is very bad.”
Then he quickly added, “The movies themselves—enough of them, as always—are pretty good.”
That’s the conundrum Cincinnati film fans are forced to confront: the downward spiral of fewer places showing non-mainstream movies, which leads to smaller audiences for these works, which leads to less media coverage of those genres, resulting in even less knowledge of and interest in new specialty movies coming to theaters, museums, and other venues across the region. Perhaps a monthly preview of such films showing in Cincinnati can start to break that cycle.
Why? Because it’s needed. Specialty and indie movies have sizeable followings here and elsewhere but too often tend to slip in and out of theatrical screenings without much notice. At least, without the kind of notice that benefits Marvel and DC adaptations, endless sequels, and cleverly titled action and horror movies (looking at you, Cocaine Bear). Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with such mass-appeal movies, incidentally. But some excellent “smaller” films continue to get overlooked.
Here’s a look at April highlights across Cincinnati and the region. A caveat: Things can always change in terms of a theater’s plans, so it’s wise to check websites before attending any of these screenings.
If it seems antithetical to my stated purpose to highlight a film playing the plexes, A Thousand and One is a quintessential specialty film. Its distributor, Focus Features, primarily handles those types of movies, and the Esquire is where this title would play even if it wasn’t opening elsewhere simultaneously. The wider release is an indication of everyone’s belief that this film is a big deal.
I was fortunate to see a stream of the film, from up-and-coming director/screenwriter A.V. Rockwell, as part of January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the top Grand Jury Prize for dramatic films. Not only did it deserve that honor, but it also deserves serious Oscar consideration for best film and for Teyana Taylor’s terrific performance as a woman trying to help her young child (and herself) negotiate the unfriendly, uncaring streets of New York to find some security and renewed hope. Rockwell brings great empathy and toughness to this story, and she also offers some surprising and engrossing plot twists sure to make those who see A Thousand and One talk about it afterward.
The highly regarded French director Mia Hansen-Løve recently made the English and Swedish language Bergman’s Island, in which a couple trying to write seek refuge on the Swedish island of Fårö, once the home of the late Ingmar Bergman, a master of international cinema. For One Fine Morning, she’s returned to her French roots with a challenging yet romantically steaming store of a single mom—raising a daughter and caring for an ailing father—who nevertheless has time for an affair with a married man. Says Charles Hutchinson of The Seattle Times: “When we then all look back on our lives, with these moments of strife and serenity molded together, it is this latest vision from Hansen-Løve that provides yet another glimpse of what it is that we would see.”
Noted Cincinnati film historian Joe Horine has developed a good following for his “deep dive” screenings of classic movies, where he adds his critical insights into each title’s effectiveness and impact. Audience members offer their observations and question his, resulting in a rewarding event for anyone who sees film as art. With the 1952 western High Noon, he’ll have much material for discussion. Not only did Gary Cooper win an Oscar for his portrayal of a small town’s marshal trying desperately to get citizens to help him resist a man who wants to kill him, but the film now is considered an allegorical protest against the McCarthyism of the day—when few would defend Hollywood figures unfairly smeared as communists by right-wing politicians.
As has been often said, the male pioneers of rock and roll—the founding fathers—were all wildly colorful characters: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and especially Little Richard. His string of gloriously upbeat, ecstatically revved-up 1950s hits like “Tutti Frutti,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Long Tall Sally” just may stand the test of time as well as Shakespeare’s best work. This new documentary by Lisa Cortés has fabulous footage of him in action in his prime and later. (Richard Penniman died in 2020 at age 87.) It also has a provocative premise: Little Richard established the queer roots of rock & roll, even if he could fight against his gayness and his own secular music by seeking refuge in religion.
Laurel and Hardy silent short films with organ accompaniment
Laurel and Hardy, one of the best comedian teams ever, made films from 1921 to 1951 but have remained popular ever since their careers together came to an end. In fact, there was a lovely, beautifully acted biopic about them in 2018, starring Steve Coogan as Stan Oliver and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy. On April 13, Friends of Music Hall is presenting five of Laurel and Hardy’s silent shorts from the 1920s with live accompaniment on its Mighty Wurlitzer organ—an attraction in its own right—by Clark Wilson. And film historian Joe Horine will lead a Q&A when the films and music are finished.
Just the other day my wife was asking me whatever happened to the nutty director who made that film about a tire—yes, a lone tire—that terrorizes everyone who gets near to it (Rubber). As it so happens, French director Quentin Dupieux is back with Smoking Causes Coughing, which sounds as oddball as his earlier film. There are superheroes in bizarre spandex outfits, some very strange talking animals, and a robot that blithely walks off a pier into a lake as a superhero bursts out laughing. Cincinnati World Cinema says on its website the film has a wood chipper scene that makes Fargo’s look tame, and John Waters has called this one of his favorite movies of the year … or so the film’s trailer boasts. Given the extreme put-on nature of Dupieux’s work, it’ll probably generate laughs and controversy.
Rock & Roll is filled with mysteries about why some amazing artists failed to have hits and others were mediocre talents yet wildly successful. But the mystery of Blood, Sweat & Tears is especially bewildering. How could this creative, nine-piece jazz-rock band have the Grammys’ 1969 album of the year, which spawned three Top 10 singles, yet soon be considered so square its career was essentially over? This new documentary’s director, John Scheinfeld (The U.S. vs. John Lennon), posits that the downfall started when the band went on a U.S. State Department tour of Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe. American youth did not want their rock heroes cooperating with the administration of then-President Richard Nixon, hated for his refusal to end American involvement in the Vietnam War. Will this film solve a long-lasting rock mystery and spur a Blood, Sweat & Tears revival?
A 2022 film slowly getting a U.S. release city by city, No Bears is from the lauded Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Actually, he isn’t all that lauded by the Iranian government; he’s faced criticism and even jailtime for his searching, questioning, and personal films. This one, about a director trying to make a film despite government concern, has been hailed as a masterpiece by The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, who also calls it “a commentary on movie making on a par with Day for Night.” (The latter is a 1973 masterpiece by Francois Truffaut.)
Canadian directors Nicholas Meyers and Tyler Chandler have now made two documentaries exploring the growing use of psychedelics to help those facing death from cancer ease their anxiety and come to terms with what they’ve achieved in life. In Dosed: The Trip of a Lifetime, released in 2022, the subject they profile is a mother of four seeking peace and wisdom from magic mushrooms.
Art Films galore
“Art film” is most often used to describe a genre of narrative movies, usually made for a small budget and using subtitles, that aim to provoke rather than pander to our preconceived notions. And we need more of them! But there’s another kind of art movie that seems to be getting increasingly popular: visits to major worldwide art museums and their special exhibitions, or documentaries about artists.
Quite a few are appearing this month across the region, although Cincinnati’s activity seems subdued while Louisville’s Speed Art Museum—which has a relatively new cinema with its own curator—really stands out. Here are some to check out, in order of screening dates:
Cezanne: Portraits of a Life April 7–9 at Speed Art Museum
Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition April 15–16 & 19 at Speed Museum; also at 7 p.m. April 18 at Mariemont Theatre
Master of Light April 16 at Speed Art Museum. The film’s subject, George Anthony Morton, is a contemporary classical painter who spent 10 years in prison on a drug charge and now devotes himself to art.
Hilma April 21–23 at Speed Art Museum. This is a dramatic depiction of the life of Hilma af Klint, now recognized as a pioneer of abstract art. The director is Lasse Hallstrom, a Swede who’s made such movies as My Life As a Dog, Cider House Rules, and Chocolat.
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