“In Search of Blind Joe Death,” New Documentary on John Fahey

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After hearing filmmaker James Cullingham interviewed on WNYC last Friday I was glad I could make it to Cinema Village that night for the first Gotham screening of “In Search of Blind Joe Death,” Cullingham’s new film on John Fahey, the idiosyncratic instrumental musician, fabulist, record label founder, album hunter, turtle venerator, musicologist, and writer who pioneered a genre dubbed around 1960 as “American primitive guitar.” John Fahey docuAlong with the poster for the film, also shown here is a shot (courtesy of docnorthfestival.ca) showing Cullingham (r.) with Pete Townsend of The Who. Ever a literary-minded sort, Townsend, a former book editor, says in “Joe Death” that for him Fahey occupied a role like that played by William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski in modern American literature.jamesandpete

As suggested by Townsend’s reference to the Beats, Fahey drank and over-used prescription meds. Sadly, he also suffered with diabetes and other chronic ailments. His life journey was at times lugubrious and he was living quite squalidly when died at age 61, but the film does a very good job of spotlighting his considerable talents and singular accomplishments for which we should be grateful. He developed a prodigiously creative vernacular guitar and compositional style that reflected blues, folk, and traditional American sources while also drawing on Charles Ives, Bela Bartok, Gregorian chant, and world music, before that term had any currency. As a facilitator and label owner, he would do things like send a postcard cold to a black bluesmen c/o General Delivery at a Mississippi delta town post office where he hoped the man still lived, asking: “Would you like to record for the Takoma Records label?”; thus, did he bring to public awareness the music of Booker (later known as ‘Bukka’) White. He was also involved in rediscovering Charley Patton, Skip James and more guys with “Blind” as part of their name than I’d ever known of.

Before his death in 2001, Fahey would himself be rediscovered by grunge bands, including Sonic Youth and Cul de Sac. Along with Townsend, Cullingham also interviewed Chris Funk of The Decemberists and Joey Burns of Calexico, both of whom testify to Fahey’s influence on their music. I met the filmmaker briefly before the screening and I learned he worked for a time at the CBC. He lives in Toronto, and is associated with Seneca College there. In his interview on the Leonard Lopate Show  he said that he met Fahey three or four times when he performed in Toronto. Although the guitarist had a deserved reputation for making up stories about himself and his origins, with flights of fancy that were expressed in colorful titling of his compositions and prolific self-mythologizing, the director said he always found Fahey straightforward and direct. Blind Joe Death, borrowed by Cullingham for his title, was one of Fahey’s album names and one of the aliases he adopted as a creative alter-ego, mordantly observing that if a musician had “blind” and “death” in his name he would surely be successful.

Lots of archival sequences of Fahey talking and playing are punctuated by the interview segments with a total of about eight music industry figures (including Townsend, et al). There’s also conspicuous use of animation in the film, with many of the graphics arriving on-screen in sequentially hand-lettered script. This was used to best effect when the filmmaker’s voiceover reads the contents of Fahey’s postcard to Booker White in Mississippi. The audience chuckled at that on-screen animation as it unfolded for all to read along with the voiceover. According to the wikipedia article on Fahey, the White album then released on Takoma became the label’s first non-Fahey release.

Takoma was far from a vanity enterprise. Among the artists and acts Fahey championed on the label were guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Canned Heat, both of whom I recently saw on-screen in the blues documentary “Born in Chicago“, and Leo Kottke, whose first album “6 and 12-String Guitar,” released in 1969, is still a treasured part of my record collection. It became Takoma’s single bestselling release. From the armadillo on the cover (not a turtle, but here you might say a hard-shelled repti-mammal stands in for the standard reptile), through Kottke’s liner notes and the song names on the back of the album below, you can see that he had fun borrowing Fahey’s grandiloquent style and self-mythologizing. (“All that is left to be said is that Kottke’s voice does not appear on this album. His guitar does.”)

Though Fahey’s life took downward turns in later decades, he nonetheless managed to start a second label, Revenant Records; in 2003 their Charley Patton CD collection won three Grammys. The name revenant could not have been accidentally chosen, suggesting an unkillable being who returns from beyond to seek revenge against his tormentors; perhaps Fahey saw himself in pitched battle against dumbing-down influences and the homogenization of indigenous cultures. There is no readily distilled or uplifting message in Fahey’s life, yet I recommend the film for showing how a determinedly idiosyncratic and protean artist may make a musical mark and leave behind a rich legacy of inspired experimentation and curation. To learn more about “In Search of Blind of Joe Death,” I suggest you listen to Leonard Lopate’s interview with James Cullingham from August 16 and visit the film’s website to learn about future opportunities to see it.

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Exploring the Little Red Lighthouse, a Manhattan Gem

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As readers of this blog will know, I admire the Great Gray Bridge, aka the George Washington Bridge–finding in it something like my own “beau motif (beautiful motif),” the words Cezanne used to describe Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Provencal peak he made the subject of at least 60 paintings. Not to liken my picture-taking or creativity to the work of the French master, but as I imagine MS-V was for him, the bridge is for me the ideal of an inexhaustible image. Much as my visual appetite thrives on it, I must add that I also admire its fated companion, the Little Red Lighthouse, an image of which from the time I began this blog I placed at the lower right corner on every page of the site. On the right-hand rail of the blog, under the heading “Foundational Posts” is a post I wrote early on called How This Blog Its Name, about these twinned NY landmarks.

If you’ve never had a close-up view of the two structures and aren’t certain where they are or how to see them for yourself, we’re talking about upper Manhattan on the island’s west side roughly level with what would be West 178th Street and the Hudson River. I get there on my bike, pedaling on good pavement along the river most of the way from my neighborhood around West 100th Street. The area can also be reached from Washington Heights, near 181st Street, and in both cases it’s accessible to walkers as well as cyclists. The forty-foot tall lighthouse–whose exterior is dotted with porthole windows and decked out in bright red enameled paint with a white cone and clear glass at the top–sits below the lower deck of the bridge, close to the monumental steel foot of the span’s eastern arch. According to a NYC Parks Dept web page, the two structures became most indelibly linked in the public imagination in the early 1940s, and even earlier in the city’s maritime history.15 LVD Roadway Here’s a lightly edited version of the Parks Dept. article:

“In the early 20th century, barge captains carrying goods up and down the Hudson demanded a brighter beacon. The [lighthouse] had been erected on Sandy Hook, New Jersey in 1880, where it used a 1,000 pound fog signal and flashing red light to guide ships through the night. It became obsolete and was dismantled [but not destroyed or discarded] in 1917. In 1921, the U.S. Coast Guard reconstructed this lighthouse on Jeffrey’s Hook [future site of the George Washington Bridge] in an attempt to improve navigational aids on the Hudson River. Run by a part-time keeper and furnished with a battery-powered lamp and a fog bell, the lighthouse, then known as Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse [the name since the early 1800s for the shelf of Manhattan schist that juts out in to the river right there], was an important guide to river travelers for ten years. The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, and the brighter lights of the bridge again made the lighthouse obsolete. In 1948, the Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse, and its lamp was extinguished.

“The Coast Guard planned to auction off the lighthouse, but an outpouring of support for the beacon helped save it. The outcry from the public was prompted by the children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, written by Hildegarde Swift and Lynd Ward in 1942. In the popular book, the Little Red Lighthouse is happy and content until a great bridge is built over it. In the end, the lighthouse learns that it still has an important job to do and that there is still a place in the world for an old lighthouse. The classic tale captured the imaginations of children and adults, many of whom wrote letters and sent money to help save the icon from the auction block.”

The Parks’ web page adds that in 1951 the Coast Guard gave the lighthouse and grounds to the City, and in 1979 the Little Red Lighthouse was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places. Refurbishments took place in 1986, when on the 65th anniversary the concrete foundation was restored, and in 2000 when it was repainted, true to its original shade of red.

In a real sense, the persistence of the lighthouse on the Manhattan shoreline is a product of one of the first episodes of “historic preservation” in the modern history of New York City. Too often, the city and posterity have been the loser in those battles, such as what ocurred in 1963, when–unaccountably to current-day New Yorkers–the old Penn Station was torn down. More recently, fixtures of the city’s industrial and maritime past other than the Little Red Lighthouse have been preserved, such as the old railroad car transfer at 60th Street and the Hudson, which I wrote about and photographed just a couple of days ago.

With all this as prologue, imagine my surprise yesterday when, on one of my bike rides up the Hudson to the bridge, on what turned out to be one of the most stupendously gorgeous days so far this summer, I suddenly spied people walking in and out of the lighthouse doorway–something I had never seen before! Seeing my surprise, a New York City Parks employee explained that in the warmer months, on the second Saturday of each month, they open the lighthouse to visitors. As I let down the kickstand on my old Trek and prepared to enter this maritime abode for the first time, another ranger in uniform greeted me and showed me and a second visitor a burnished brass key that she explained was for a long time used to open the lighthouse’s door. It was a chunky thing with big notches and looked like it weighed nearly a pound. In my eagerness, I neglected to take a picture of it, though I hope to do that the next time I visit, perhaps next month. Entering through the oval-topped door I found a nearly-dark chamber that looked like the lower decks of a ship or a submarine, with panels of thick riveted steel plates making up the walls. As I hope the pictures below help to show, the visitor encounters three spiral staircases with sturdy metal treads underfoot and a curved railing to help you climb up them. Between each flight of stairs, you can peer out the portholes that look south, toward lower Manhattan and Jersey City, and north, up-river toward Yonkers and the upper reaches of Palisade Park in New Jersey. Now, I’ll leave the rest of the storytelling to the photos I took and the captions I write for them.  I invite you to visit the little red lighthouse and the great gray bridge for yourself. They are vibrant links to our not so-remote industrial and maritime past.   Please click here to see the full photo gallery.

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Great New Documentary on the Blues, “Born in Chicago”

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I tweeted this message last evening with a link to a trailer for the NY premiere of a new documentary I was heading out to see at the Lincoln Society Film Center.

 

The screening was for “Born in Chicago,” a new 90-minute doc on the blues. It was a thrill for Kyle and me to be there. We had learned about the one-night showing from a NY Times article yesterday that began like this:

“Late in his career, Muddy Waters recorded a song called ‘The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll.’ That, in a nutshell, is the story told in the new documentary “Born in Chicago” — how he, Howlin’ Wolf and other black blues musicians working in Chicago in the 1960s schooled young white acolytes from that city who went on to play on some of the most influential pop recordings of the era.”

After reading the paper we quickly went online and ordered tickets for the lone screening, luckily for us because when we arrived it had clearly sold out. It is a joyous film with superb archival footage, moving interviews, and high-quality audio of many great blues performances. It also narrates a moving story about how aspiring teenage musicians like guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboard player Barry Goldberg, from affluent parts of Chicago, began frequenting the clubs and bars where black titans of the blues like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were then in residence, well on to being the blues legends they ultimately would be known as. Despite their age–Bloomfield was only 17 at the outset in 1960–co-producer Goldberg chronicles the time the two boys borrowed Michael’s mother’s car, drove through the all-black neighborhoods on the South Side to the club, which was called Pepper’s, I believe. They found parking “four steps from the front door,” made their way to a front table, and began listening to the masters. Gratified by the respect shown them and their clear eagerness to learn the music, the musicians soon invited them to sit in with the bands and a fruitful and historic musical collaboration was born. The generosity of Muddy and Wolf, with their sidemen like Willie Dixon, Sam Lay, and others became a hallmark of the era. And, the youngsters really learned to play.

Goldberg recalled that soon when Otis Spann, who often played piano in Muddy Waters’ outfit, was invited to go on the road with another big bluesman of the time, say Little Walter, he was able to take the job because Barry could sit in and play keys for Muddy while Spann was out of town. The bench of blues performers in Chicago got a lot deeper.

Born_In_Chicago_Trailer_Screen_smAmong the musicians interviewed for the film are Bob Dylan, who later hired Bloomfield and Goldberg for his backing band; B.B. King, who remembered Bloomfield as one of the best guitarists he ever heard; Keith Richards, who with his Rolling Stone bandmates are shown here in hilarious footage with Muddy Waters and Mick Jagger (in a bright red track suit) swapping lead vocals; Buddy Guy, who we learn would stroll out the open door of a blues club playing his electric guitar on a “100-foot long chord” to make music right out in the streets; Hubert Sumlin, lead guitarist with Howlin’ Wolf, who’s shown here with the aid of medical oxygen, in what would be his last taped interview; Eric Burdon of the Animals, who remembers that growing up in Newcastle, England, new blues albums from Chess Records would arrive in local record stores, allowing him and his bandmates to hear and then play the blues; Charlie Musselwhite, a white southerner who migrated north to Chicago for factory work and soon found himself ensconced in a blues community; Elvin Bishop, who like Mike Bloomfield played in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and who tells such tales as wandering in to a Chicago pawnshop to buy a new guitar, and being waited on by young Bloomfield; Nick Gravenites, who wrote a signature song of the Butterfield Band, “Born in Chicago”; Harvey Mandel, who played in Canned Heat, with John Mayall and the Blues Breaker, and Bob Dylan; Sam Lay, drummer with many of the great blues bands; Jack White, who spoke about the influence of the blues on his music and the challenges young artists face today in gaining access to, say, senior players, in hip-hop or rappers, especially.

In the audience last night were “Born in Chicago” director John Anderson; Chicago bluesman Corky Siegel, of the Siegel-Schwall Band; Marshall Chess of Chess Records, who narrates “Born in Chicago” (not his late father Leonard, as I had mistakenly tweeted); and co-producer of the film, Barry Goldberg. After the film they took seats in front of the audience and Siegel played a blistering harmonica solo, which got everyone pumped for the spirited conversation and Q&A session that followed. During the Q&A, Marshall Chess recalled how eager he was to make an outpost in Britain for Chess Records by forging a relationship with record distributors there. Chess also remembered that Howlin’ Wolf could be stern with a musician who played a wrong note, but was also a gentle giant. Corky Siegel remembered that between sets of music outside of clubs such as the Blue Flame he and Wolf would talk, sip whiskey, and walk the nearby alleys. Siegel said that Wolf’s generosity showed him the blues is not just about music, but a way of living one’s life, with love and freedom.

The film’s theatrical release is still being plotted by the producers. It clearly warrants widespread distribution and I expect it to have major exposure in the months to come. In the meantime, I suggest you ‘like’ their Facebook page, read this Chicago Blues Guide review of a recent reunion concert that brought together many blues musicians from the film, read Larry Rohter’s NY Times story from July 26 and view the accompanying slideshow of great B&W photos, share the above trailer widely with your friends. Here are photos I took after the screening and shots of some of my treasured blues LPs from Chess Records and one I’ve had for years by the Siegel-Schwall Band. Please click here to see photos.
Since you got all the way down here in this post, you must love the blues. So, I recommend my personal essay about Cleveland bluesman Mr. Stress, who I wrote about in the book Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology. Stress was a great local bluesman I followed all the drinking-age years I lived in my old hometown, from 1972 to 1985. A harmonica player, singer, and bandleader Stress was the Paul Butterfield of Cleveland. He still lives in Cleveland.

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Motown to Def Jam, a Quartet of Harlem Art Openings

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Kyle and I had a great time this past Tuesday at a group exhibition where she showed a new painting of hers, “Brick by Brick.” The reception was at Strivers Gardens Gallery in Harlem, one of four galleries that have held openings over the past two weeks, all part of African American Music Appreciation Month and the Harlem Art Crawl. These Motown to Def Jam exhibits have been curated by the impresario Sou L Eo. who beginning last spring asked more than forty visual artists to take inspiration from songs from major record labels (Motown, Stax, Chess, Def Jam, etc.) that over the past several decades have fueled African American music, from Motown to the Philly Sound to blues to hip hop. Sou L Eo asked each artist to choose a particular song, and allow it to inform a new work for these shows. I’ve been to two of the openings by now, and have found the work consistently bold and interesting throughout.

Kyle’s song was “Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto,” a 1977 release by the Philadelphia All-Stars with Lou Rawls on the Philadelphia International Records label. While viewing at the Strivers Gardens Gallery is generally by appointment, it will be open to the public from 1-4 PM on two upcoming Saturday afternoons, July 13, and July 20. There is also a gallery talk there on July 17 from 7-9 PM. Strivers Gardens Gallery is at 300 West 135th Street between St. Nicholas & Frederick Douglass, less than a block east of the 135th Street station stop for the ‘B’ and ‘C’ subway lines. Here are some photos from the reception starting with a shot of Kyle and “Brick by Brick,” in a photo taken by artist and writer Daniel Maidman, followed by a group shot with many of the participating artists and friends, and a shot of an informational postcard. If you’re interested in seeing more of Kyle’s work, you may visit her website at http://www.kylegallup.com/.Kyle w/Brick by BrickMotown to Def JamIMG_0729

 

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Restoration of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow Masterpiece

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Mackintosh bookOn Twitter today I learned that one of the greatest buildings in Europe–the Glasgow School of Art, designed by the brilliant Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928)–is undergoing a key restoration. The picture desk of the Glasgow Herald shared a story, Taking Great Panes, with photos of the process of restoring the windows in the building which first opened in 1899. Mackintosh was a pioneer of industrial design who placed delicate Art Deco motifs in such solid materials as steel and stone. He was also a notable typographer, furniture and fabric designer, and watercolorist. On the four separate trips I’ve made to Scotland over the years, I’ve visited the school several times and was always gobsmacked by the beauty and utility of the building. It was very impressive to see that Mackintosh’s creation is still in daily use by students and faculty. Consider that people in the building still enter the washrooms under the standard British signs for “Gents” and “Ladies,” which still sport the same lettering that Mackintosh created for them more than a century ago.

The windows are key to the building, as in the library where the glass rises from one story to the next, admitting the most light possible, so vital in Scotland where daylight fails early during many months of the year. It’s also a certainty that Scotland’s rugged climate has taken a toll on the hundreds of window panes that punctuate the stone facade.

I’m happy to say I have a personal connection to this building, and to Glasgow. A late friend, Isi Metzstein, whom I eulogized on this site when he died in January 2012, was a well-known architect and professor of architecture. His business partner and colleague for many years was Andrew Macmillan, one of the co-authors of the book I own on the Glasgow School of Art. It makes me happy to remember Isi when I think about the restoration of this handsome building, and to recall the many happy occasions I spent with him and the whole Metzstein family at their lovely home in Glasgow, which was designed with clear influences from the Mackintosh era. Below are photos I made from pages of the book, Mackintosh’s Masterwork: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art, and other sources. Please click here to see all pictures.

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Ray Harryhausen, Pioneer of the Imagination and a Good Man

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In my family, the passing this week of Ray Harryhausen evoked real sadness, along with fond memories and appreciation for this film pioneer who was–as we learned when my son Ewan, now a teenager, was just a toddler–also an extremely kind and gentle man. When Ewan was young he steadily worked his way through a movie diet that included many of the science fiction and adventure classics–“King Kong,” “The Blob,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and once he discovered them, all the films that Harryhausen worked his magic on: “Mysterious Island,” “20,000,000 Miles to Earth,” “The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” the three Sinbad features, “The Valley of Gwangi,” and from the early years of Harryhausen’s career, his Mother Goose fairy tales, which were reissued beginning in 2002. What’s more, TCM, in addition to showing the movies to which Harryhausen had contributed, aired and re-aired a fine documentary about his career, “Master of Fantasy.” We learned from this about his friendship with Ray Bradbury, going back to their days as chums in Los Angeles. I’m sure it was a blow to Ray Harryhausen when his lifelong friend died last June.

Safe to say, that much as our son came to love these movies, so did my wife and I, capturing as they did great imagination and vivid storytelling. Ewan even adapted his own form of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s signature technique, to make some short videos of his own. In 2004, when Ewan was just 7, Harryhausen came to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for a special screening of some of his films. I had to be in the Bay Area for a publishing sales conference, but Ewan and Kyle got tickets and went to the theater for this special occasion. After the films were shown, they met Ray, and as the pictures below show, he was warm, charming, and very patient while photos were taken of him with Ewan. He autographed our copy of his book,  Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, and the two left of them, feeling they had just met a really fine and nice man. I”m sure that one of the reasons Ewan has a creative spirit and a questing imagination is thanks to his early enchantment with the work of Harryhausen. Below is a video a fan compiled with many of the creatures and monsters Ray crafted, from “Mighty Joe Young” to the rattling skeletons of “Jason and the Argonauts” and pictures from the day Kyle and Ewan met him, along with other images of Harryhausen’s work.

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A Favorite Film, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” With One of the Movies’ Greatest Laughs

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CastI’ve seen “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” many times, yet couldn’t resist watching it again when TCM aired the 1948 film this past Sunday night. It’s a great movie based on the mysterious B. Traven’s 1935 novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Its scenes unfold inexorably like the movements of a symphony. Walter Huston (Howard), Bogart (Fred C. Dobbs) and the too-little seen Tim Holt (Curtin) form the amazing core of a powerful cast. Howard is the moral center of the movie, possessing shaman-like wisdom and healing powers. As played by Huston, he also displays one of the most prodigious laughs I’ve ever seen or heard in the movies. At the film’s climax, as it becomes clear that all their dreams of wealth have gone up in dust, he gives vent to a laugh that seems to mock all human vanity and grandiosity, at which point Curtin also sees the cosmic humor in their dashed dreams, and he joins Howard in laughing at the outcome of their quest for riches. I just love their expressions and so took pictures of my TV at that point, with the rest of those photos, and other relevant images, at the bottom of this post.

Walter’s son John Huston, years later seen on-screen as character Noah Cross in “Chinatown” wrote the screenplay of “Treasure” and directed the film, winning an Oscar for each of those, while Walter won the statue for Best Supporting Actor.

Two more great movies with Walter Huston in leading roles are “American Madness” (1932), directed by Frank Capra, where he plays a Depression-era bank president preventing a run on his bank. The film celebrates the welfare of ‘the little people,’ not dissimilar to “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I also love “Gabriel Over the White House” (1933), directed by Gregory LaCava, who also worked with W.C. Fields, where Huston plays the president of the United States. At the outset, his President Hammond is unconcerned about the plight of the masses suffering in the Depression, and (in an evocation of the pleas of the real Bonus Army that FDR faced) he’s planning to crush the protests of the veterans massing outside the White House. However, after sustaining a providential blow to the head in a car accident, he turns over a new leaf and offers succor and hope to the desperate vets. Please click here to see all photos.

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Album Covers as Art, or How Jazz LPs Changed Our World

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IMG_0442Thursday night my wife and I greatly enjoyed the reception and opening for the new exhibit, “Jazz. Covers. Politics–Album Art in an Age of Activism.” We had been invited by Elisa Pritzker, artist and art curator, who assisted Nathan Cummings Foundation and Romare Bearden Foundation staff in mounting and hanging the show. They’ve assembled over 150 album covers as examples of social activism from America’s civil rights struggle, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the campaign to end apartheid, among many other historic milestones shown.Brochure cover

The musicians and albums on display constitute a veritable hall of fame of jazz recordings, including Max Roach’s “We Insist!,” the signature piece for the whole exhibit, that used for its cover a news photograph of three African-American activists sitting in at a segregated southern lunch counter, as they and the white-uniformed counterman, all eye the camera challengingly; Nina Simone’s “Emergency Ward!,” with its backdrop of war headlines from daily newspapers; and Duke Ellington’s “Liberian Suite,” with its red masks, and his “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse,” with a tableau showing dozens of faces from the human family. The artists whose work is found on these covers are equally important, from Jacob Lawrence’s painting decorating a Jelly Roll Morton LP to several Romare Bearden works, on Wynton Marsalis, Billie Holiday, and Ricky Ford covers. There’s so much more on these walls: Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” Paul Robeson’s “Songs of Free Men,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and dozens more.

The spacious quarters of the Nathan Cummings offices on Tenth Avenue were ingeniously used to hang the album covers, as each time we turned a corner there was something new and splendid to see and read about, with insightful text alongside the images. In addition, a room was set aside for a listening booth where we sampled the music from the albums on display, and another room was reserved for a video about the album covers, musicians, and artists. The exhibit can be seen Monday-Friday, by appointment via email to exhibits@nathancummings.org. It will be up through August 23, so if you’re in NYC I urge you to make plans to see it. As an indication of the wealth of material on display, here are some pictures I took during our tour of the exhibit last week. Click here to see all photos

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