Jay Wrote

I think I skimmed a Time Magazine article about Samuel Beckett’s play in the 1960s.  Probably a black and white photo and a headline using the label “absurdist.”  Yeah, the play where nothing happens. I had pushed my way through a Kafka and Camus or two long, long ago. No Beckett. So my expectations were fuzzy and not high. With some sense of adventure and a feeling that “this is something I should see, even if it is dreadful” I made plans with my English major friend, Mike. I decided to listen to two podcasts before seeing The Guthrie Theater’s production with Jason Strathairn this fall. They were both helpful to understanding, understanding of the context, the spirit of the play.  Most importantly I was advised:  “Don’t try to understand the play; just experience it.” What a great approach!  I experienced great theater, though perhaps not a great play, not in the traditional sense, where plot, character development, action, language, beauty, humor and insight...

  Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl:   Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation. On September 13 , 2026 Cox and Motl brought their double basses to Fine’s Studio Toile d’Angles in near north Minneapolis for two hours of intense, exciting improvisation, perhaps fitting the Free Jazz label.  Fine rotated between playing clarinet, percussion and his Bosendorpher Imperial.  This time I did not ask about planning vs. improvisation.  When I first heard Fine and Cox a year ago, Fine affirmed that that two hour performance was 100% improvised and Cox reported that the two of them had been practicing their improvisation together for five decades.  I suspect Motl, who teaches bass at the U of M,  has not been playing bass for two decades, let alone five, but their answers to my question last fall would have been equally true this week. In my appreciation of the Cox Fine performance in 2025 I express my wonder in the up close experience of Fine’s ma...

Sunday afternoon in late June, it is hot. You come up the subway steps and head deeper into the Village.  Ahead, you spot the Vanguard awning stretching across the sidewalk to the curb. You duck in and down, hand a five to Max at the bottom of the stairs. The steps are steep, pipes assembled into handrails on each side. The walls are flaking red, like someone had dunked leaves into barn paint and pressed them onto the wall.  A waste pipe runs down and metal conduits up the east wall. The room is a wedge. The streetside east wall runs from the bottom of the stairs to the stage, not twenty five feet ahead.The stage forms the apex of the triangle, twenty inches high and no more than ten feet wide. There’s a curtain at the right side of the stage but there’s no room for anything other than a wall behind it. A fellow sits in front at the right side of the stage, fiddling with several pieces of equipment, including a large tape recorder. Three microphones. One angled over the piano ...

Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.  Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.  Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.  ...

  It is cold and rainy in St. Paul.  Listening to Eric Dolphy. Solo and with a band. Jazz.  The music is inspired, recorded in 1963. The sound is direct and fluent. The slight enhancement of pot tightens the mind’s links with ears. The instruments are each uniquely marked by their aural shapes in that plane of the universe just ahead of me. I hear the breath from Dolphy’s chest; percussive key runs on the sides of the saxophone. I almost feel the pressure on calluses modulating notes on bass strings. This tune is Alone Together with Dolphy on alto sax and Richard Davis on bass. An alternate take.   There are additional horns and more excellence in the mix on other tunes but the solos, as with Dolphy and Davis trading on Alone Together and with Dolphy, alone, on Love Me , are somehow brought most directly here, into my very presence. Maybe Dolphy and Davis played with the echo to achieve an experience of more than three dimensions. I can hear their moves in ...

Finger Poppin’ with The Horace Silver Quintet, An Appreciation Jay Wilkinson, August 23, 2023 When eyes are closed, it is hard not to imagine that I am at a table in a club.  Facing the stage. Thirteen feet away.  The table in front of us is, miraculously, still unoccupied. There oughta be the clink of glasses twenty feet behind me and murmurs of drunks and lovers around us. Sax and drummer, Junior Cook and Louis Hayes, are to the left, bassist Eugene Taylor center and trumpeter Blue Mitchell stands to the left, behind pianist Horace Silver, who plays the 1954 Steinway that stretches across the front of the stage.  When the snare or trumpet launches a variation or a solo, their sounds arise up. How is the cymbal sounding like it’s five feet higher than the piano?  A sax solo on the left will not be echoed on the other side of the stage but is heard there organically.  Silver vamps behind the horns - a trainer’s hands stimulating a horse’s shoulders just before t...

None selected  I came home and immediately listened to the soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi (or “life out of balance” in Hopi), the masterpiece of modern music and video by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. I experienced, with ever-changed ears and saw with new-sighted eyes, the Philip Glass Ensemble play the full score live with a wide-screen showing of the film at Northrup Auditorium more than thirty years ago. It was an intense, beautiful and disturbing experience. Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Invisible Cities , a dance, music and visual show strikes me to be of  equal ambition and is similarly intense and inventive. The music was dynamic and varied, with  classical Carnatic (South Indian) instrumentation and modern production alternating and blending.  The Invisible Cities score is not, like Glass said of his first movement “ahistorical”, but rather it  takes in essences and excellence from the past 2000 years of Indian music and from today’s house, hip hop and cinemati...