Category Archives: Jacobs School of Music

05/07/2012
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al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Big Ten, Booker T & The MGS, Booker T. Jones, Earl Warren, France, Francois Hollande, Fresh Air, Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music, Khalid Sheikh Mohhamed, Nicolas Sarkozy, NPR, Parti Socialiste, Segolene Royal, Socialism, Steve Martin, Terry Gross, Valerie Trierweiler

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“”Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.” — Earl Warren

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BOOK IT — WE’VE GOT BOOKER

How cool is it that Booker T. Jones received an honorary doctorate during commencement ceremonies at IU this weekend?

Booker T.

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You know, growing up in Chicago and living within the city limits every day of my adult life until March 20th, 2007, I’d come to the conclusion — like most of my city-mates — that Indiana University was the place where Bobby Knight threw tantrums, won a few NCAA championships, got himself fired for being a jackass, and then the school went out of business.

That’s not much of an exaggeration. Of all the Big Ten schools, IU is probably the most anonymous. Perhaps Minnesota and Iowa might give IU a run for the title, but, nah, Indiana wins it.

If you can find three people in Chicago who know what town IU is in, I’ll give you a prize. I wonder if even a hundred people in Indianapolis know what town IU is in.

Northwestern is where all the future wealthy businessmen and doctors go. A few journalists, too. Illinois is known for Chief Illiniwek and the controversy of using the symbol of a wiped-out race to drum up support for its sports teams — at least it’s known for something. Purdue puts out engineers. Ohio State, Michigan, and Michigan State are sports factories. Penn State tolerates child sodomizers. Nebraska has a funny team name, Cornhuskers.

This Man Has A PhD In Cornhusking

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And Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana may as well be in Bulgaria, especially Indiana.

Chicagoans no more know that Booker T. Jones, among many, many, many other great and fabulous musicians, studied at the Jacobs School of Music than they know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait City. (In fact, many Americans assume KSM was born in the same nebulous African/Asian tribal town that Barack Obama hailed from — and for all the average American knows, all three men went to a madrahsah there.)

Booker T. gave the commencement address at one of the two undergraduate ceremonies Saturday. According to the IDS, he told the grads that he used to walk to class at the Jake every morning at 7:15.

I recall listening to an interview with him on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air show on NPR when his “Potato Hole” disc came out. He told Gross that he still practices his scales every single morning and he works on his music eight hours every day. Booker T., it should be noted, is 67 years old.

Booker T. Jones — he’s someone Indiana University ought to be known for.

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TIME IS TIGHT

This is my absolute fave Booker T. and the MGs hit, from back in 1969.

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THE PRESIDENT IS A SOCIALIST!

Looks like Obama-haters will finally get to see what an honest-to-gosh Socialist looks like now.

François Hollande beat darling of the Right, Nicolas Sarkozy in the French national election for president this past weekend. Hollande is a card-carrying member of the French Socialist Party (or Parti Socialiste, in French — the French are so bizarre, Steve Martin once observed, they have a different word for everything.)

Hollande — Ayn Rand Is Spinning In Her Grave

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Not only that, Hollande lived in sin with a woman, fellow Socialist pol Sègoléne Royal, for more than 30 years, and then the two split up in 2007 when Hollande found himself a younger tomato named Valérie Trierweiler. Oh, and Hollande is a Jew.

Trierweiler — So, What Is It With French Presidents And Gorgeous Women?

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A guy like Hollande would be as electable in these Great United States, Inc. as, well, Khalid Sheikh Mohhamed.

Now get this — the French Socialists are considered a Center-Left party in that country. Center-Left! There are, apparently, des gauches even more, um, gauche than the Socialists in France. Either that or we have lost all perspective on the political spectrum in this holy land, considering that the very word Liberal is dirty here.

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Monday, May 7, 2012

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Exhibits, “Blended Harmonies: Music and Religion in Nepal”; through July 1st — “Esse Quam Videri (To Be, Rather than To Be Seen): Muslim Self Portraits; through June 17th — “From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”; through July 1st

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — Exhibit, “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze”; through June 29th

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Arts Center — Exhibits at various galleries: Angela Hendrix-Petry, Benjamin Pines, Nate Johnson, and Yang Chen; all through May 29th

◗ Trinity Episcopal Church — Art exhibit, “Creation,” collaborative mosaic tile project; through May 31st

◗ Monroe County Public Library — Art exhibit, “Muse Whisperings,” water color paintings by residents of Sterling House; through May 31st

◗ Monroe County History Center — Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

◗ The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts — Exhibit, Daniel Lager; through May 17th

◗ Cafe Django — The Bloomington Short List variety show, featuring comedians, musicians, dancers, etc.; 7pm

◗ The Bishop — DJ Betsy Shepherd; 8pm — Arrah and the Ferns, Chandelier Ballroom; 9pm

Arrah And One Of Her Many Ferns

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03/13/2012
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al-Qur'an, Arcadia Publishing, Boardwalk Park, Book Corner, Book of Love, Buckinghams, David Ward-Steinman, Edmund Burke, Hammond Indiana, Jacobs School of Music, Madura's Danceland, Mick Madura, Mike Madura, Monotones, Patrice Madura Ward-Steinman

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Society can overlook murder, adultery, or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.” — Edmund Burke

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TEEN DREAM

Imagine being a 12- or 13-year-old in the mid-1960s and your daddy-o is the biggest music impresario in town.

Imagine being able to say to your grade school chums that you see the guys from the Buckinghams or the American Breed or Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs or the Kingsmen all the time.

The Buckinghams

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Oh yeah, you could crow, I brought them Cokes when they were waiting around to go onstage at my dad’s place.

That’s the life Patrice Madura Ward-Steinman lived until a summer Sunday morning in 1967.

Patrice’s pop owned Madura’s Danceland in Hammond, Indiana just outside Chicago.

I met Patrice and her husband David Ward-Steinman yesterday at the Book Corner. They’d dropped by to see how her book was doing. Authors like to do that: It’s as though they’re visiting their children at college. Nancy Hiller or Michael Koryta or Joy Shayne Laughter will stop in here to visit their books.

Patrice’s book is called “Madura’s Danceland,” natch. It’s part of Arcadia Publishing Company‘s Images of America series, each title of which covers a city or region’s local history. There’s a Bloomington and Indiana University title available, for instance. The books are heavy with photographs — Patrice said she had to come up with more than 150 pix for her book.

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She dug through her family’s keepsakes and put the call out to old friends and fans of Danceland for photos she could use. The book covers the history of Madura’s from its opening in October, 1929 through the day it closed.

Patrice today is a professor at the Jacobs School of Music, specializing in choral music, jazz, and jazz history. She knows her stuff.

Her grandfather, Mike Madura, had managed a roller rink on the shores of Wolf Lake, which straddles the state border with Illinois. As time went by he began to present musical acts at the rink, which held about a thousand people. A few years later he bought a dance hall that was standing on the site of the old Boardwalk amusement park in Hammond. The Lever Brothers soap-making oufit had bought the park and was planning to build a factory on the site. So after purchasing it, Mike had it moved by a team of horses to a new location a few blocks away and scheduled a fall grand opening.

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A list of the acts that played at Madura’s reads like a who’s who of American pop music for the four decades it was in business. There were the orchestras of Paul Whiteman, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Dorsey, Tex Beneke, Russ Morgan, Guy Lombardo, and too many others to recount here from the big band era. Conway Twitty, Bobby Vee, and Bobby Goldsboro played there in the ’60s.

The place once drew a crowd of some 7000 for a dance broadcast live on Chicago’s WIND radio. Couples glided over a “spring-cushioned” dance floor.

Mike’s kid, also named Mike but more commonly referred to as Mick, worked as a radio announcer in his early 20s. Mick, who was kidnapped by mobsters in 1934, eventually took over Danceland. Mick put his whole family to work in the place, including his youngest kid, Patrice.

The whole operation came to a halt when a bolt of lightning during a summer storm started a fire that destroyed Madura’s Danceland on July, 29, 1967.

Patrice has photos of that sad day, too. They’re all in the book.

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GOD’S HIT MEN

We are a weird, weird species, no?

A few weeks ago, some knuckleheaded American soldiers burned copies of al-Qur’ān and tossed the identifiable remains in the garbage can outside Bagram air base near Kabul, Afghanistan.

I call them knuckleheaded because they should have known doing such a thing would turn Southwest Asia’s religious zealots even more goggle-eyed than they already are. As if on cue, Islamic protesters took to the streets to express their outrage over the incident.

Dozens of people were killed in the ensuing “protest.” The festivities even spilled over into neighboring Pakistan.

Flash forward to this week. An apparently lunatic US soldier snuffed out the lives of 16 townsfolk in a couple of villages in southern Afghanistan. The soldier’s killing spree also has ignited protests. And, again, many Pakistanis are getting into the act.

But here’s the weird, weird part: this week’s reaction has so far been remarkably muted compared to the al-Qur’ān burning bloodfest.

I suppose the message the protesters are sending is that they’re saddened and outraged by the killing of innocents.

But they’re mortified — hell, they’re driven mad — by the desecration of a book that, by the way, can be purchased at any bookstore or mosque in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or, for that matter, any country in the world. Hell, Barnes & Noble sells al-Qur’āns right here in good old Indiana. al-Qur’an is available for free on the internet.

With more than a billion adherents of Islam populating this funny world, it’s a safe bet that there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of copies of the text in circulation.

Those 16 men women and children that a so-far unidentified US Army sergeant is alleged to have murdered each were unique — except, of course, in the eyes of a man driven mad by war.

In the wild world of religious zealotry, though, a mass-produced, bound stack of papers is far more dear than 16 human beings. Hell, it may mean more than every living soul on Earth.

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BOOK OF LOVE

The Monotones wondered who wrote it back in 1957.

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01/31/2012
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Albert Einstein, Ambient Music, Apollo 11, Bram Tchaikovsky, Brian Eno, Buzz Aldrin, Camilla Williams, Charles Beavers, Edward J. Goodwin, Indiana State Legislature, Indiana University, Intelligent Design, Jacobs School of Music, Kansas (band), Koyaanisqatsi, Malcolm X, Mental Floss, Minimalism, Neil Armstrong, New York City Opera, Philip Glass, Prog Rock, Trance Music, Value of Pi

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity — and I’m not sure about the former.” — Albert Einstein

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A HEAVENLY PIONEER

Bloomington’s own Camilla Williams, international opera star and professor emeritus at IU, died Sunday. She was 92.

Williams

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Williams was thought to be the first black woman to appear with a major US opera company, the New York City Opera in 1946. Her late husband, Charles Beavers, was an attorney for Malcolm X.

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MASTER OF MINIMALISM

Philip Glass is 75 today. He is also still very, very cool.

Glass

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Do yourself a favor and download the documentary, “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.” It is a gloriously beautiful and ugly examination of life on late 20th Century Earth. It has no narrator; no human’s voice is heard throughout. The only sound you’ll hear is Glass’s musical score.

Glass presaged trance music by decades. And the composer certainly influenced Brian Eno, whose ambient forms beginning in the mid-1970s helped save the world from the navel-gazing pap of the likes of Kansas and other uber-pretentious prog rockers.

Eno

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Glass may well be the composer music students in the year 2512 revere as they do Bach or Wagner today.

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INDIANA: THE SQUARED STATE

Now that the great state o’Indiana is considering teaching the myth of Intelligent Design in our public schools, it’s worth keeping in mind that our fair fiftieth of this holy land once before attempted to throw a caveman’s club into the gears of intellectual progress.

Mental Floss points out that in the 1890s, an Indiana chucklehead by the name of Edward J. Goodwin fantasized that he’d discovered a method to “square the circle,” a long disproved mathematical exercise. Goodwin was convinced that by equating the circle with a square, one could easily find its area.

Part of Goodwin’s fever dream was to jigger with the value of pi, the constant that allows the sane among us to calculate a circle’s area. It was the equivalent of NASA navigators saying, “Aw, what the hell, let’s just call the distance to the moon 240,000 miles — what’s a couple thousand miles one way or another?”

Given that attitude, the mummified corpses of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might today be floating several billion miles outside our Solar System.

Just Point That Thing Toward The Moon, Boys

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Goodwin — from the town of Solitude, appropriately enough — told the world in the 1890s that he’d found the secret to squaring the circle. In the grand tradition of many another snake oil salesman, Goodwin was more than willing to let mathematicians and educators use his secret formula — for a price.

But he had a soft spot for Indiana and offered to let Hoosier State schools teach his method for free as long as the state legislature would enact a statute declaring his crackpot idea the real thing.

And guess what — several Indiana House committees studied his equations, including his insistence that pi should be 3.2 (as opposed to the accurate constant 3.141592653589793….) The committees approved Goodwin’s methods and wrote up a bill declaring pi to be 3.2 and the circle, legally, squared.

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And then the full House approved the bill unanimously! By the time the nation’s newspapers got hold of this news and began to bray with laughter at Indiana, the state Senate defeated the bill. Even that vote was iffy after a Senate committee passed it onto the floor.

Science and Indiana — I wonder if this is the first time the two words have ever appeared together in print.

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GIRL OF MY DREAMS

Another chestnut from my college radio years, by Bram Tchiakovsky.

Pure power pop poetry:

Judy was an American girl/

She came in the morning/

With the US Mail.

Enjoy the soaring melody, goosebump harmony, and bell-ringing rhythm chord progressions.

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01/25/2012
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Antarctica, Barack Obama, David Baker, Diane Singleton, Eugene McCarthy, Felicity Aston, George Gershwin, Herald Times, Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music, Jazz, Kepler 22b, Kevin Wilson, Mark Kruzan, Michael McRobbie, Miles Davis, Mitch Daniels, Morning Edition, NPR, Porgy and Bess, Steve Inskeep, The Purple Pig, Tom Crean

The Pencil Today:

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TODAY’S QUOTE

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.” — Eugene McCarthy

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SMALL TOWN HEARTS

One more observation from the sad tale of Diane Singleton, who was found dead near a creek Monday evening after wandering away from home earlier in the day.

More than 100 people volunteered to search for her Monday. The volunteers included friends, family, her fellow church-goers, her husband’s co-workers and students, and many others. Once again, Bloomington-folk have proven themselves to be caring and willing to go out of their way for their brothers and sisters.

Searching (photo by Jeremy Hogan/Herald Times)

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Which is in stark contrast to the likely reaction of people in my old hometown Chicago. Sure, the word would have gotten around and people would have shaken their heads and clucked their tongues upon learning of the woman’s disappearance. “That’s a horrible shame,” a typical Chicagoan would have said. “I wish I could do something to help. Say, let’s get over to the Purple Pig for dinner — I’m dying to taste those prosciutto escarole bread balls.”

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WON’T THEY EVER LISTEN?

A lesser human than I am would become frustrated.

Once again, the world is refusing to listen to me. I mean, I’ve got all the answers, which I gladly share with the Earth’s seven billion residents on a daily basis here.

See, I’ve harped on this too many times to count already. Still, people continue to waste their time and effort doing things that…, that…, well, that are stupid.

To wit: someone named Felicity Aston has become the first woman to ski solo across the Antarctic. I remind you that the Antarctic is more than a thousand miles wide. It is the world’s largest desert. Mean temperatures during the summer (it’s the equivalent of late July there right now) range from -5 to -31F.

Summer

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Locations in Antarctica experience a phenomenon known as whiteout. Here’s a description from an Antarctica travel site (go figure): “”Whiteouts are another peculiar Antarctica condition, in which there are no shadows or contrasts between objects. A uniformly gray or white sky over a snow-covered surface can yield these whiteouts, which cause a loss of depth perception — for both humans and wildlife.”

Early explorers learned to keep an eye on their fellow travelers, looking for signs of disorientation due to hypothermia. People can literally go mad in the frigid air and the howling winds.

Bet you’re itching to click on that site so you can plan next January’s vacation, no?

It’s in this frozen hell that Felicity Aston decided to ski, alone, for 59 days, in order to get from one end of the continent to the other.

A continent, by the way, that’s fairly well mapped, considering there’s nothing there.

So Felicity Aston isn’t doing the world a favor by pushing into an unknown land, striving to discover new flora and fauna, hoping to learn something about the biome that might benefit civilization.

No. She skied 1,084 miles, dragging her supplies on a couple of sleds behind her because…, well, because.

Aston

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NPR Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep interviewed her this morning as she waited for the last flight out of Antarctica before the weather turns bad (turns bad?) for the year. She spoke of days when she was unable even to see her feet because of the driving snow. She could only keep her head down and watch her compass as she schussed across the ice shelf on those days.

Inskeep asked her if she was happy to get back to base camp and interact with people again after nearly three months of solitude. She replied, unsurprisingly, no. She did say, though, that she had to remind herself not to pee wherever she felt like it, as she did during her journey.

Nice of her.

At the conclusion of the interview, Inskeep told her, “Congratulations.”

Lucky I wasn’t the interviewer. I would have told her, “So what?”

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FAVORITE SON

Mitch Daniels gave the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress last night.

When it comes time for the GOP to select a vice presidential candidate in August, the party could do a hell of a lot worse than Daniels. They probably will.

Daniels

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WE TREASURE DAVID BAKER — BUT NOT AS MUCH AS…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks, you know that David Baker celebrated his 80th birthday on December 21st.

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The Indiana University and Bloomington communities have been toasting him since November. The Jacobs School of Music threw a gala birthday bash for him Saturday night at the Musical Arts Center. Speeches were made, Michael McRobbie presented Baker with the President’s Medal of Excellence, students and fellow faculty members serenaded him, a proclamation by Mayor Kruzan was read declaring January 21st David Baker Day in Bloomington, and the Jacobs School announced the establishment of the David Baker Jazz Scholarship.

Baker, natch, is a legend and one of the top people in his field in the world.

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So, troublemaker that I am, I decided to check the Herald Times database of public employee salaries, just — you know — for kicks.

Baker, as near as I can determine, made nearly $147,000 as a professor in the jazz department at the Jacobs school last year.

Good. I’m glad he gets paid handsomely for his contributions to that peculiarly American art form. I hope that the residents of the planet Kepler 22b, when they finally translate our radio transmissions, hear some of Baker’s music. They’ll get a good first impression of our crazy, mixed up world.

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And how crazy and mixed up is it?

IU football coach Kevin Wilson made half a mill last year for the singular accomplishment of leading the Hoosiers to a 1-11 record. Tom Crean, the basketball boss, made 600 Gs. Of course, Crean’s guys are a tad more adept than the gridders.

I’m just sayin’.

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SUMMERTIME

Miles Davis plays George Gershwin‘s tune from the opera, “Porgy and Bess.”

That’s all I need to say.

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