Month: December 2018

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Chelsea Morning

Sometimes I just drive around. It’s a life-long habit. I’ll look at a map and explore a random street from one end to the other, just to see what I can see. Last Sunday, it was Chelsea Avenue, which carves a steady east-west course across the northern tier of the city.

I begin at the street’s west end, where it emerges from Uptown, the slowly gentrifying neighborhood near St. Jude. Once you get onto Chelsea, the gentrifying stops, as you enter the New Chicago neighborhood. I detour north on Manassas Street, past the impressive new edifice of Manassas High School, which has, according to the google, 382 students, of which approximately 100 are grade-level proficient in reading.

North of the school, I turn on Firestone Avenue and pass the abandoned factory site with its lonely small brick building and massive smokestack, vertically emblazoned with the tire company’s logo. At the Firestone Grocery & Deli, two men pass a paper bag and watch the world go by. The homes are small, some neatly kept, some falling down but inhabited, some blighted beyond repair.

Back on Chelsea, I pass through a dystopian world of auto repair services and junkyards — the graveyards of rusted automobiles that serve as a poor man’s AutoZone. You go in looking for a driver’s side mirror for your ’98 Le Sabre or an alternator for your old F-150. You take your tools, and if you’re lucky you come out with your part — and dirty hands.

I cross streets with familiar names — Watkins, McLean, Highland — but up here in North Memphis they look different than they do in Midtown. I venture onto Willett Street, north into a little neighborhood hard by the shores of Kilowatt Lake. There’s a boat repair shop, an auto-painting business, various sketchy quonset huts, Dino’s Sausage(!), and houses that shouldn’t be lived in but are. It’s a world apart, a different Memphis. Who lives here?

At Hollywood and Chelsea, things look a little more brisk. There’s the Fashion Corner Men’s Store, 2 Star JR Barbecue, a big thrift shop, warehouses, and a couple of factories, including Southern Cotton Oil.

I cross Warford and decide to drive by Douglass High School. Like Manassas, it’s an impressive newish building, and like Manassas, it’s underpopulated, with only 476 students. The surrounding neighborhood features the requisite small, boxy houses, many painted in lively colors. There are signs of pride — small statuary, a string of Christmas lights, a nice patio set on a porch. An elderly woman stands in her yard with a power cord in hand, arguing with an MLGW worker. The cord appears to be coming from a neighbor’s window, a work-around for someone whose power has been cut off, I’m guessing. Another reminder that life can be cold.

Near Highland — another familiar street in unfamiliar country — I pass the Dixie Disinfectant Co. and Elegant Security Products. Small churches abound — The Upper Room, Sunset Church, and St. John MB Church near Pope Street, just before Chelsea veers under Jackson Avenue and into the Nutbush city limits, as Tina Turner once sang.

The store names begin to change: Especialitas, La Raza, Las Cazuelas, La Roca Tienda, Santa Maria Tires, Montero’s, La Hacienda. The driveways are filled with more pickups than sedans. It’s another Memphis universe. I pass two small pink houses as Chelsea narrows into a residential street paralleling a set of railroad tracks.

After a few blocks, near the elbow of the I-240 loop, Chelsea ends its eastward journey at Wells Station. There are large trees and a forested area between the neighborhood and the interstate. It’s acreage where a landfill has been proposed — and is being fought fiercely by the neighborhood. For some reason, companies like to put landfills in neighborhoods with little pink houses and poor people. And in this case, they’re wanting to put a landfill near Memphis hipsters’ favorite treat shop — Jerry’s Sno Cones. Maybe that will help the neighborhood’s cause. I hope so.

I take these drives because they take me out of my comfort zone, and because they remind me how many of our fellow Memphians need decent housing, a good education, reliable transit, real jobs, and protection from corporate polluters.

At this time of year — at any time of year, really — it’s good for all of us to consider what we can do to make our hometown a better place for our fellow citizens. Find an organization that’s doing good work. Give your time or your money or both. Take a drive and see what you can see.

Categories
Book Features Books

Edward Carey’s Little.

Edward Carey’s first novel, Observatory Mansions, announced the coming of a new American fabulist. It may have been the best first novel since Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mulhouse. And like Millhauser, Carey’s inventiveness was joyous and full of marvels, like a bookish visit to Aladdin’s cave. His second novel, Alva and Irva, only cemented his reputation as a new Calvino. Little is his first adult novel in years, after a well-received Gormenghast-like young adult trilogy.

This new novel, as they say in a film’s opening credits, is based upon a true story. But the literary magic, the supreme storytelling, the novelistic pacing and design belong to Carey, and he dazzles. The Dickensian tale begins in Switzerland, in the 1760s, when a young orphan girl, Marie, becomes apprenticed to a Doctor Curtius, who has washed out of medical practice, only to begin an eccentric career based on making figures in wax. Marie is under five feet in height and becomes known as Little, a moniker at times affectionate, at times demeaning. “Little ill-facedness, little minor monster in a child’s dress … little thing … little howl … little crumb of protruding flesh … little statement on mankind,” one nasty man calls her. Little’s story is fraught with horrors, then becomes a mix of horrors and enchantments.

Little is voiced in first person by Marie, and she is an engaging narrator. She says, “This is the story of a shop. The story of a business, of its highs and its lows, of its staff coming and going, of profit and loss, and sometimes of the outside world and the people that came knocking on our doors. So then. Let me explain.” She also illustrates her tale with chiaroscuro drawings, demonstrating the craft she has learned from the doctor, though the pupil soon outstrips the educator. Carey is an accomplished artist, and his illustrations add to the strange and eerie luster of the tale. The book’s pages are as lovely as a rill; the words wind around these intricate and arresting sketches. They remind me of the illustrations in some of John Gardner’s novels. I met Gardner once and asked him why he liked visuals in his novels, and he said, “Because every time you open one it’s like Christmas.”

Curtius’ art takes them to Paris where they take lodging with the Widow Picot, in her home called the Great Monkey House. She is one of the novel’s antagonists, an unpleasant woman who takes an immediate dislike to Marie and sets about to make her young life a living hell. “I loathed her utterly, then and always,” Marie says. “Can I describe my hatred for her? It would poison these pages.”

Meanwhile, the waxworks they’ve begun in the widow’s house have become a popular attraction. She wants to exhibit only the best people — she is a terrible snob — while Curtius is drawn to the criminal and the insane. The exhibition is yin and yang, heroes and villains, dark and light. It is this seesawing back and forth that propels the story, as Marie attempts to come into her own. It’s a bildungsroman, with the added twist that the hero is a woman, who must not only battle her tormentors but also the prejudices of a male-centered universe. Carey adds just the right amount of gothic seasoning to his tale. One can feel a bit of Bronte behind his descriptions of the various households and plain and fancy folk whom our protagonist finds herself among.

The historical background for this tale is the French Revolution, the same as A Tale of Two Cities. Carey’s version, seen through the eyes of a young woman coming into her own, is a masque with a colorful cast of real people, from Marie Antoinette to Jean-Paul Marat and Jacques-Louis David, from Rousseau to Robespierre. Carey’s vividly painted setting and equally vivid rendering of characters makes Little the kind of book you feel you are living within. When I finished, I immediately missed it. I wanted to listen to Marie a little longer. It’s also a story too large and rich for a 700-word review.

Little is the best piece of new fiction I’ve read this year. It is a marvel. It is like a Christmas present. Give it to yourself.

Categories
News News Feature

Shop Local Suburbs

This holiday season, we’re encouraging our readers to support local businesses by shopping right here at home. Consider these Memphis-area establishments for your gift-giving needs.

Buff City Soap

Pamper your giftees with handmade products crafted in-store at Buff City Soap. Made with natural ingredients like hemp seed oil and rosemary and without detergents and harsh chemicals, their soaps, lotions, and bath bombs leave skin soft and clean. This three-piece gift box ($23) covers all the bases. Available at Buff City Soap locations (3000 Kirby Whitten Road, Bartlett; 101 S. Main; 944 S. Cooper, and others) and buffcitysoap.com.

Truffle Pig

This design and lifestyle boutique offers a variety of gift options, jewelry, home decor, and art, including items made by local artisans. The 2019 Bicentennial Memphis Calendar ($38) created by mixed-media artist Erika Roberts celebrates our city with watercolor paintings of Memphis landmarks, along with notations for dates that are of importance to Memphians. Visit Truffle Pig at shoptrufflepig.com or 9056 Poplar Pike, Suite 201, Germantown.

Bella Vita Gifts & Interiors

Featuring art and pottery, frames and furniture, bath and bedding essentials, dinnerware, and more, Bella Vita can help with your gift list. This bracelet set (starting at $219) from the exclusive Debbie Segal line made in East Memphis, is among the jewelry offerings within. Check out their Debbie Segal Trunk Show December 21st through 23rd. Visit Bella Vita at 3670 Houston Levee Road, Suite 101, Collierville, or shopbellavita.com.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Traditional tea service at TreeLeaf Tea Room.

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Morgan Lee moved to Memphis from L.A. to pursue teaching. The city surprised her, as it wasn’t super Southern-y, as she was expecting. About a year later, her mother Stacy Brooks joined her and, together, the pair opened TreeLeaf Tea Room in Bartlett in mid-August.

TreeLeaf offers Cream Tea ($5.99) with a pot of tea and a scone served with Devonshire cream; Light Tea ($10.99) with a pot of tea, the scone, and assorted savory snacks; and Afternoon Tea ($16.99) with a pot of tea, the scone, savory treats, dessert, and fruit. A plate on a recent visit included finger sandwiches, a sandies cookie, melon and grapes, and a pie bar.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Morgan Lee (left) and Stacy Brooks of TreeLeaf Tea Room

Teas include black and herbal. There are the classics — Earl Grey, English Breakfast. There are also seasonal teas like a cranberry hibiscus. There are a dozen offerings in all.

The prices are kept affordable. They want everybody to feel like they can stop in for some tea. For comparison, the afternoon tea at the Peabody is about $45.

Lee says she was too much of a tomboy to be into tea sets when she was a kid, but Brooks says she loved to play house. She liked serving people, and she liked cleaning. This extends to present day in the tea room, which is pristine and pretty with linens and tea sets, many bought at thrift stores.

While Lee manages the business side of the tea room, Brooks is in charge of the overall experience — how the space looks and how the table is set and how the food is placed on the plate. Lee laughs that when she plates the food, her mother tends to move it, even just a little. “It’s got to look nice,” insists Brooks.

The pair initially thought about a cookie business as Brooks loves to bake, but then the idea branched out to include a place to eat the cookies. Lee was taken to a tea room in L.A. as a birthday present from her sister. The idea set in.

Brooks says she figured out how to do the tea room by watching YouTube and checking out Pinterest.

Brooks stresses that it was God who put her on this path, steered her toward Tennessee, and led her to use her talents in this manner.

TreeLeaf is named after Brooks’ favorite psalm. She knew it was divine intervention when she came upon the idea and was ready to call her daughter, who had been bugging her about the name. But, first, she played a game on her phone. One of the questions from the game had to do with trees and leaves. Lee was just happy to have a decent name. “Sounds good to me,” she responded to her mother.

Brooks raised eight children in L.A., and there were plenty of struggles. But the mother-daughter relationship is relaxed and not fraught. “It’s a good thing we like each other,” says Brooks. Lee says even their squabbles are productive.

“Morgan sacrificed her life to help me with this,” Brooks says.

“It’s time for her,” answers Lee. “She sacrificed many, many times for her children. It’s a very small price to pay.”

TreeLeaf Tea Room, 2780 Bartlett Blvd. (512-5936), treeleaftearoom.com

Drunk Competition

After Miles Kovarik put up his post for a spelling bee event at a local bar, he was a bit astonished by the response. He says about 1,000 people were interested. “I thought we were onto something,” he says.

He then set about creating similar, nontraditional events for bars. Events he calls intellectual or boring.

And, thus, he established Drunk Competition, which puts on these events at Taylor Berger’s bars, Loflin Yard, Maciel’s, and Railgarten, about twice a month at each establishment.

The next event is Drunk Debate at Loflin Yard, December 27th.

The competitions begin with the easiest questions and increasingly get more difficult as they move along. At a recent math competition, Kovarik says that the first questions were of the most basic, two-plus-two variety, but the last question, he thought, was darn near impossible. But someone solved it.

Kovarik imagines all the directions Drunk Competition could take — Drunk Connect Four, Drunk Pictionary, Drunk Charades. The possibilities are endless.

Kovarik notes that you don’t actually have to be drunk to compete, it’s just whatever gets you comfortable enough to be in front of a crowd. “You can be drunk on water,” he says. “The emphasis is to have fun in your own capacity.”

But, if you want to drink, so be it. The bar usually offers drink specials, and the winner of the competition gets $100, “for more alcohol, if you like,” says Kovarik.

Sign up to compete via Facebook or eventbrite.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Scotched!

So, it happens the last Thursday of every month until, well, it stops happening. And you’ll need reservations. And tickets. But there is no good reason not to do it. After the success of his Irish Whisky tastings last year, D.J. Naylor over at the Celtic Crossing is now picking out some the best Scotches he’s ever had to share, taste, and talk Scotch whisky.

This isn’t just “drinking Scotch” as wonderful as that is — it is a production in praise of good Scotch … while drinking a tot here and there, or course. Ah, and aren’t you glad that I didn’t say a “wee dram”? Tasting is different from drinking, or more to the point, “drankin’.”

Scotch tastings in Memphis can be tricky. The day before, it was 40 degrees and I was all set to wear my tweed and drink some wooly Scotch. Then it turned out to be 70 degrees and I wore my tweed anyway becausee I’m bloody-minded and thought it would help me sweat the toxins out. As D.J. said: “We’re here to educate — to increase your purchasing power. We’re not here to taste a $1,000 bottle of whisky.”

At half-time during the tasting, reservation tickets included a smoked salmon appetizer and a bit of Scotch egg — which is a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage and deep-fried. It lacks finesse, I’ll admit, but it is wonderful. Now, here’s what we tasted.

Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch, 14 Year Bourbon Barrel Reserve, Dufftown, Baniffshire, Scotland $50, ABV 43%

As the name might suggest, this is a homage to U.S. bourbon — the Scotch is aged in used bourbon barrels and finished in deep-charred new American oak, which is a little different from the usual process. This is a light golden Highland Scotch — it’s malty, it’s got some spice to it, with little hints of toffee and vanilla. If you are a little nervous or wary of those peat-fire Scotches, this is a good choice for you.

Bruichladdich — The Organic Scottish Barley, Isle of Ilay, Argyll, Scotland, $100, ABV 50%

Pronounced “Brook-laddie” because, of course it is. Bruichladdich was bound to happen: The Scots went all organic. It is the localvore Scotch, using all local ingredients from three counties that no one on this side of the Atlantic ocean can pronounce. Bruichladdich has no pesticides and no artificial coloring. This last bit really threw me because I always thought that the original “water-of-life” was that rich golden brown on its own. I thought this because like a lot of people, I crave order in a disturbing universe. So it looks lighter than its counterparts, but at 100 proof, this can be misleading. It is the color of hay and has fine, oily legs when swirled in the glass. There is some sweetness to it and a hint of spice for the big feel of this most virtuous of scotches.

With a high-proof scotch, you can really see how diluting with a little water changes the taste, if not the character of a whisky. Here a little bit of water in a whisky neat really opens up the flavors. For one thing, undiluted spirits at that strength will pretty much overpower the senses.

Ardbeg Corryvreckan, Isle of Islay, Argyll, Scotland, $90, ABV 57.1%

D.J. says, “If you are a peat-head, this is a most enjoyable peat whisky.” In 2010, the year Ardbeg introduced its Corryvreckan (pronounced: Ahh … do we really care at this point?), it won “World’s Best Single Malt Whisky” and “Single Malt of the Year.” It has been likened to Laphroig 10-year, but I don’t see it. They are in the same ballpark, but Laphroig is the more smoky peat-fire of the two. One wonderful thing about the Ardbeg is that is has a lot of spice from the French oak casks, but because it’s distilled close to the sea, it has that certain iodine, seawater brine character. Which, I know sounds nasty, but it really is the hard-to-press-down quality that, for me, makes a great Scotch.

Macallan Extra Rare Cask Edition, Craigellachie, Banffshire, Scotland, $300, ABV 43%

This is just ostentatious. Wonderful but ostentatious. And I’m not just talking about the $300 price tag or the awesome red box it comes in that viewers of The Crown know looks suspiciously like those dispatch boxes the queen gets her official business in. This Scotch is blended from whiskies drawn from 16 Sherry cask styles. It leaves me asking, “Why?” Is it to justify the $300 price? Don’t get me wrong, this was an epic snort of whisky, but I’ve had much better at $70. It is dark gold in color, with flavors of Sherry and oak and a long dried fruit finish.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Labyrinth at Pink Palace

How is it possible that a movie starring David Bowie in the world’s tightest pants and the galaxy’s biggest mullet flopped at the box office? In spite of enormous pre-release hype, Labyrinth, a dark and dream-like fantasy, written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and directed by Muppet creator Jim Henson, was just a little too weird for 1986 and made back less than half its $25-million budget. The story of Sarah, a fantasy-obsessed teenage girl, and her quest to rescue her infant brother from Bowie’s Goblin King, didn’t find its audience until it came out on home video the following year. Here’s a short list of things you’ll want to watch for now that this longtime staple of the small screen is getting blown up bigger than ever when it screens at the Pink Palace’s Giant Theater.

• The Bog of Eternal Stench smells so bad nobody who ever touches its dark, brackish waters can ever wash away the stink. Judging by the Bog’s physical appearance and the gassy sounds it makes, the Bog of Eternal Stench might have been alternately named the Pond of Belching Buttholes.

• Protagonist Sarah falls into a hole where she is tormented by faces made entirely of hands. It’s a fantastic example of Henson’s boundless creativity as a puppeteer. It’s also nightmare fuel.

• Henson built so much anthropomorphic detail into the world of Labyrinth, even the moss has eyeballs, and it’s everywhere.

• Most of Labyrinth‘s world is handcrafted, but the film is also regarded as Hollywood’s first use of “realistic” CGI animation.

• The crystal orbs the Goblin King spins in his hands are inspired by paradoxical drawings by artist M.C. Escher. They are manipulated by juggler Michael Moschen, not Bowie. The final confrontation occurs in an impossible Escher-like landscape made of stairs that travel in every direction — meant to be viewed on the biggest screen available.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Liquor Fight

CREDIT: Institute for Justice

A Memphis couple will fight the Tennessee liquor lobby before the U.S. Supreme Court next month, refuting a state law that many, including a past Tennessee Attorney General, have said violates the U.S. Constitution.

State law now requires anyone seeking a license to operate a liquor store to be a resident of Tennessee for at least two years before they can get a license. That law says that since these stores sell products with higher amounts of alcohol, it “is in the interest of the state of Tennessee to maintain a higher degree of oversight, control, and accountability” over the people who have liquor-store licenses.

Institute for Justice

The Ketchums outside Kimbrough Towers Fine Wine

But the law was twice deemed unconstitutional by Robert Cooper when he served as the Tennessee Attorney General in separate opinions issued in 2012 and 2014. In 2012, Cooper wrote, “yes,” residency requirements here “violate the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.” The clause, broadly, empowers Congress to regulate commerce among states. Cooper repeated his opinion in 2014.

“A number of courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have rejected the argument that a state’s need for greater oversight with alcohol-related licenses can be served only by favoring residents over nonresidents,” he wrote in 2014.

But the law remained.

Fast forward to 2017. Doug and Mary Ketchum bought Midtown’s Kimbrough Towers Fine Wine & Spirits. They bought it because their daughter, Stacy, who has cerebral palsy, had a lung collapse when temperatures changed quickly in their home in the Salt Lake valley. To save her life, according to the group representing them, they had to find another place to move.

The opportunity to buy Kimbrough came along, and the Ketchums thought the move to Memphis would allow for a better climate for their daughter’s health and owning the store would allow them more flexibility to care for her.

They applied for a license to operate the liquor store. But the Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association threatened to sue the state Alcohol Beverage Commission if the Ketchums were approved, citing residency requirements in state law. All of this is according to the Institute for Justice, the group representing the Ketchums in court. The group describes itself as a “legal advocate for economic liberty.”

A federal district court in Tennessee ruled for the Ketchums and later, too, did the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. State officials did not seek a stay of the district court’s injunction, which allowed the Ketchums to get their liquor license and buy Kimbrough in the summer of 2017.

But the liquor lobby aims to prove its case in court, and now oral arguments are slated for January 16th before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three separate parts of Tennessee’s law will be argued. One, the two-year residency requirement to get a liquor-store license; two, a 10-year residency requirement to renew liquor-store licenses; three, that corporations cannot get such licenses here unless every member of the corporation, its directors, and stockholders have lived in-state for at least two years.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Seventh Heaven

CREDIT: Christian Patterson

Now that Beale Street has been renovated, and neon warms its coldest nights, it’s hard to conjure up the feeling that must have greeted 37-year-old Calvin Newborn when he returned there after making his name in the jazz world.

“I came back to Memphis in 1970,” he told author Robert Gordon. “Beale Street was being torn down. I couldn’t find no place to play. … [I was] playing with Hank Crawford every six months in California. And when I came back to Memphis, I would stay inebriated. It broke my heart, you know, to come on Beale Street and it wasn’t there. So I just went to the liquor store. When they finally tore it completely down, I thought that was the end of Beale Street, you know. But they started to rebuilding, you know, slowly.”

Christian Patterson

Calvin Newborn

Newborn had dealt with heartbreak before, over the years, in many forms. Happily, he did eventually resume his rightful place as one of Beale’s star attractions. Now the heartbreak’s all ours, since he passed away on December 1st in his adopted home of Jacksonville, Florida. And for lovers of music history, his death marks the loss of more than one man and musician, great enough in his own right. Calvin was the last of the epoch-defining Phineas Newborn Family Showband.

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Herman Green

Family Ties

“When I hear stories about Elvis going and hearing [Calvin’s] dad’s band in the Flamingo Room, and borrowing Calvin’s guitar and sitting in with their family band, I think that Elvis probably got a lot of his feel from their family band. I can see how that was an influence on Elvis,” reflects musician and producer Scott Bomar, who worked with Calvin. “It was quite a band. I think Calvin and his family are that missing link between Sun Records and Stax. They were playing on Sun sessions, and you look at all the people that came through that band. William Bell, George Coleman, Honeymoon Garner, Fred Ford, Charles Lloyd, Booker Little. That whole Newborn Family Band was a cornerstone of Memphis music. It’s a chapter that I don’t think has gotten its due.”

Saxophone legend Charles Lloyd recently tried to give the Newborns their credit, when asked to recall his formative years in Memphis. “I was also blessed that Phineas Newborn discovered me early and took me to the great Irvin Reason for alto lessons. Phineas put me in his father — Phineas Senior’s — band. Together with Junior and his brother, Calvin, we played at the Plantation Inn which was in West Memphis. Phineas became an important mentor and planted the piano seed in me. To this day he still informs me.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin with brass note on Beale honoring the Newborn family.

Of course, Phineas Newborn Jr., or just “Junior,” was Calvin’s older sibling, who some would later call “the greatest living jazz pianist.” Their parents, Phineas Sr., or “Finas,” and Mama Rose Newborn, raised them to love and play music, always hoping to carry on as a family band (with Finas on drums). And, for a time, they did. But, ultimately, Junior was too much of a genius on the ivories to be contained by such ambitions. Indeed, Calvin grew up in the shadow of Junior’s gift, something he apparently did not mind one bit. Though the brothers won their first talent show early on as a piano duo, that moment also brought home Junior’s genius to Calvin, who soon after began guitar lessons on an instrument that B.B. King helped him pick out.

Beale Street held a fascination for the whole family, who would initially make the long trek on foot from Orange Mound just to be there, until they moved closer. Finas turned down opportunities to tour with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford just to be near his family and the promise of playing music with them. At that time, a flair for music was often a strong familial force. Dr. Herman Green, master of the saxophone and flute, went to Booker T. Washington High School with Calvin. “We grew up together. We been knowing each other since we were babies,” Green says. “The Newborn family, and the Green family, and then the Steinberg family. We had a lot of families together at that time that were musicians, you know? So we came up together, ’cause we had to go to the same school.”

Steve Roberts

Calvin Newborn, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Robert Barnett (back). Dr. Herman Green & Willie Waldman (front) in FreeWorld. ca. 1990.

Though both brothers were soon proficient enough to tour with established acts (as when Calvin hit the road with Roy Milton’s band), by 1948, their father landed the family group a residency at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Green, too, joined the band, as did a young trombonist named Wanda Jones. For a time, Finas’ dream flourished. “Oh, we all was good, man!” recalls Green. “We was playing with his daddy. We had some good singers, like Ma Rainey.” Before long, they moved to the Flamingo Room in Downtown Memphis, and then collectively hit the road with Jackie Brenson, who was touring behind his hit record, “Rocket 88,” recorded (with Ike Turner’s band) by Sam Phillips.

If the family band was tight, Calvin and Wanda were getting even tighter. As Green remembers it, “Wanda, yeah — I’m the one that put ’em together. She was the vocalist with Willie Mitchell. I heard her, and I told Finas Sr. about her. And then we ended up using her for quite a while there. Now, Calvin was my right-hand buddy, man. Junior was in and out of there, you know, but me and Calvin were very close. He told me he was getting ready to get married to Wanda. I said, ‘Well, congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, you ain’t heard the rest.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘I want you to be my best man.’ And then we lived together in my daddy’s house, when he got married.”

The Phineas Newborn Family Showband was the toast of Memphis, with a plethora of future jazz and soul greats rotating through. And Calvin was distinguishing himself with a talent that his gifted brother did not have: showmanship. As Calvin told author Stanley Booth, “You’d have guitar players to come in and battle me, like Pee Wee Crayton and Gatemouth Brown, and I was battlin’ out there, tearin’ they behind up, ’cause I was dancin’, playin’, puttin’ on a show, slide’ across the flo’.” And flying, as captured in an iconic photo of Calvin in mid-air, his eyes fixed with fierce determination on his fretboard, his legs angled high in a mighty leap.

The Elvis Connection

As their reputation grew, the family band began to notice a young white kid at their shows, watching Calvin’s moves like a hawk. As Calvin recalled to Gordon, “I would see him everywhere, he used to come over to the Plantation Inn Club when we was over there.” That kid was Elvis Presley.

“Elvis used to be there, show up every Wednesday and Friday night to see me do Calvin’s Boogie and Junior’s Jive. I’ll be flyin’ and slidin’ across the dance floor [laughs] and I think that’s when he … started to flyin’, too.” Almost as a footnote, Calvin adds, “but he went on and made all that money, made millions of dollars, and I went to the jazz mountaintop and almost starved to death.”

But through it all, Presley remained close to the Newborns. It went far beyond studying their moves and their sounds at the club, as Calvin’s daughter, Jadene King, tells it. In describing her father’s prolific writings, she notes that he penned an as-yet unpublished volume with “a lot of the history between him and Elvis in it.” Titled Rock ‘n Roll: Triumph Over Chaos, “there’s an enormous amount of unspoken-of history of my dad and Elvis’ relationship. Actually, Elvis’ relationship with my entire family,” King says. “A lot of people think he was a prejudiced kind of human being, and from a very bigoted family, but that’s not true. He spent a lot of his life with my father and my uncle, at my grandmother’s home. They were very close. He ate many meals with my dad and my uncle, and my dad was the one that was responsible for a lot of his moves and a lot of his musical talent, as far as teaching him a lot of what he knew. They were very close.”

The Jazz Mountaintop

Family and Elvis aside, Calvin was more concerned with climbing to the jazz mountaintop, especially once the extent of Junior’s deep genius on the piano became widely known. After brief stints in college and the army, Junior was back in Memphis when Count Basie and the great talent scout John Hammond happened to visit, and heard him play. In that moment, the ring of opportunity became the death knell for Finas’ dream of a family band. By 1956, Junior and Calvin had moved to New York, playing in a quartet with two legends-to-be, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and recording for Atlantic and RCA.

Before long, Junior would go his own way, and deal with his own demons, leaving Calvin to deal with his. At first, the jazz mountaintop offered an escape from the South’s rampant racism. “I think that’s the main reason why I left Memphis, you know,” he told Gordon, “to play jazz. Because jazz seemed to have put it on an even keel, because a lot of white people respected jazz. And that was the bebop era, you know, and I admired Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the jazz artists, so I was, that’s one reason I was so glad to get away from Memphis.”

But he also fell into the traps of bebop life, as did Wanda. As Booth writes, “Calvin began working with Lionel Hampton, then joined Earl Hines. His wife, who had become a narcotics addict, had convulsions and died in her sleep, and Calvin began using heroin himself.” And yet, he managed his addictions well enough to keep playing, building his reputation every step of the way. As the 1960s wore on, Calvin ended up working with Jimmy Forrest, Wild Bill Davis, Al Grey, Freddie Roach, Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Hank Crawford, and David “Fathead” Newman.

Meanwhile, Junior’s eccentricities were turning into full-blown mental anguish, and he spent time here and there in mental institutions, recovering from his alcoholism in hospitals, or simply convalescing in the family home. Still, he would perform and record.

In 1965, Finas, now suffering from heart problems in spite of his then-clean living, ignored his doctor’s warnings against performing and joined his eldest son onstage in Los Angeles. It was the closest he’d come to recapturing the Newborn family band’s glory days. And he died of a heart attack as soon as he walked off stage. Still, Mama Rose kept her home in Memphis, and Junior stayed there more and more.

Thus was the state of his life and his family when Calvin returned to see Beale Street in ruins. He was once again based in Memphis, but toured often. As his daughter recalls: “The first thing I remember as a little girl was him being in the Bubbling Brown Sugar tour. That had him over in Europe for several years, and he lived in Holland, London, Paris.”

King, whose mother was an Italian immigrant whom Calvin met at Coney Island, but who grew up in Jacksonville, goes on: “That’s my first memory of daddy being gone for a long period of time. That was in the mid-1970s. And he did that for a while. He was constantly gigging and touring during most of my childhood, but he would always come to Jacksonville to see me, or I would go to Memphis and spend time with him at my grandmother’s house. Mama Rose’s.”

Staying at the family home or on his own, Calvin would help with Junior’s care and began playing more with his old classmate, Herman Green. The quartet recordings they made as the Green Machine still stand as some of the finest jazz that Memphis has produced. As the 1980s went on, Calvin joined Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, made the occasional solo album, and began working with younger musicians. When Green fell in with the funk/rock/improv group FreeWorld, Calvin was not far behind. “Calvin was a member of FreeWorld for about two years, and his guitar virtuosity brought us all up several levels, musically speaking,” says FreeWorld founder Richard Cushing. “Herman and Calvin would occasionally start playing off each other in the middle of a song, pushing each other, cutting heads as only two old-school masters can do.”

Mike Brown

Working in the studio.

New Born

Memphis musician and producer Scott Bomar also treasures his time with Calvin, first as pupil and then as the producer of his phenomenal album, New Born. “I had to put a band together to back Roscoe Gordon, and I asked Calvin to play guitar. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of us doing gigs together. Some of the most amazing musical settings that I’ve had the good fortune to be part of were with Calvin. At one Ponderosa Stomp show, the Sun Ra Arkestra actually played with Calvin and me. That’s one of the most intense audience reactions I’ve ever seen at a concert. And every time I’d talk to Calvin, he would still talk about it. The last time I spoke to Calvin, he was still talking about that performance. It was a tune of his called ‘Seventh Heaven,’ and that was a very, very special performance.”

Even as the next century approached, Calvin had a flair for showmanship. Bomar goes on: “When he got on stage, he had this energy that not many people I’ve ever played with have. He was electric. He could hit his guitar in a way that got people’s attention. His tone — I love his rawness. Of course, he had this deep musical knowledge and was very melodic, but he also had this kind of raw, rock-and- roll edge to his tone and his playing. His tone was always on the edge of distortion.”

By 2003, there was less to keep Calvin here in Memphis. Junior and his mother, Mama Rose, had left this mortal coil behind. And so he settled in with his daughter, adapting to the Sunshine State and a more contemplative life. “My dad had various levels of spirituality, and he studied every religion known to man. He studied Islam, he studied Jehovah’s Witnesses, he studied Judaism, he studied Hinduism. My father was just a brilliant individual. He’s read the Koran three or four times. He’s read the Bible many times. He was just a very well-versed man, and I would say the last 10 years of his life he completely went over to Christianity.”

Calvin also continued to perform at the Jazzland Cafe and the World of Nations festival in Jacksonville, not to mention many area churches. And he remained as feverishly creative as ever. “He has several unpublished compositions that I have,” notes King. “I have several plays, several books, and tons of lyrics and scores for new music, new songs. He had just finished scoring a musical project that he wanted to take to New York and record.”

And then, in the spring of this year, romance came back into his life, in the form of one Marie Davis Brothers, who he had known for decades. “I’ve known her my whole life, for over 43 years,” says King. “Originally, they were together for 12 years, and they separated and were apart for 20 more years. In 2017, they started communicating again. They’d been talking over the phone for a little over a year, and then in April she moved here from Memphis. And in May they got married and they moved into their own apartment.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin Newborn at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction of his brother Phineas.

The Final Chapter

No one expected Calvin Newborn to die this month. “He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the years and years and years of smoking and drinking and just the jazz life, but he’d been sober and clean for over 35 years, and he was doing very very well,” says King. “Just in the beginning of November, his oxygen levels weren’t what they needed to be, but he just went from not having oxygen to wearing a little Inogen [portable oxygen] machine. And then toward the end of the month, that stopped giving him the levels that were needed, and here we are.”

Just before the end, he was still giving his daughter new writings to type up. “In my father’s last couple of months, he wrote a poem called ‘Seventh Heaven.’ It was based on a dream where he saw his great-granddaughter, who he called Bliss, looking out into what he called seventh heaven, and everyone was at peace. There was no more hatred, there was no more racial divide. There was no more poverty. Everything had been leveled out. It was a beautiful world. I guess if my father had an epitaph, it would be ‘Seventh Heaven: There’s no race, just the human race.'”

In Calvin Newborn’s heaven, there’s room enough for everyone to fly.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Build Up Not Out

Since the announcement of the proposed $950 million Union Row development, there has been much discussion about what this project means to Memphis and Shelby County. There is no question that an investment of this scale within our urban core signifies momentum. The concept is visionary. The investment is unprecedented. And the access it provides to the neighboring communities is game-changing.

DMC president and CEO Jennifer Oswalt

Memphis isn’t unfamiliar with revolutionary ideas — Piggly Wiggly, FedEx, and St. Jude were all born in the Bluff City. We are a community of out-of-the-box thinkers. We value diversity and creativity. And we demand that our progress be inclusive. The Union Row development’s forward-looking take on community not only raises the stakes for the property itself, but it also significantly changes the neighborhood by bridging two currently underserved areas with new access to food, jobs, and green space.

The area Union Row will occupy has been called the “donut hole.” The planned site spans a void between areas seeing significant public and private investment — South City, the Core of Downtown, and the Edge neighborhoods. Union Row will replace blight with active ground floors and well-lit streets. The planned project intends to bring a grocer, a park, a boutique hotel, office space, and over 700 residential units. These components will also bring more than 2,000 permanent jobs and over 4,100 temporary construction jobs.

In order to help make this monumental development possible, a Downtown Memphis Commission-affiliated board approved the TIF application for this project. A TIF is a win-win, allowing developers to borrow from future increased tax revenues which would not exist but for the development, and to invest those funds in public infrastructure to literally pave the way for the development. The TIF provides for these infrastructure enhancements while also allowing developers to span a gap in financial feasibility generated from their own project’s success. No property receiving a real property PILOT or TIF pays less property tax than it pays pre-incentive as a result of the PILOT or TIF.

Additionally, the city and county benefit by receiving 25 percent of the increased taxes during the TIF period. In the case of Union Row, this is almost $2 million more collectively to the city and county each year during the incentive period. Since the development will long out-live the incentive, the city and county will see exponentially increased tax revenue once the incentive period ends. The incentives are needed because the combination of high property tax and affordable rents does not always allow for feasible development.

The development team, Big River Partners, and its partners, led by LRK, Montgomery Martin, and Duncan Williams have a strong history of inclusive practices and are committed to building a complete team that is representative of Memphis. They are committed to meeting minority and women-owned participation goals of at least 28 percent and offering local minority ownership opportunities. A project of this size means great opportunity for partnerships and planning for minority and women-owned businesses. The DMC looks forward to helping fill the commercial and retail spaces with emerging and minority-owned Memphis businesses.

Union Row is catalytic, and along with another $4 billion of development in the Downtown pipeline, Memphis definitely has momentum. We are in the middle of a hotel boom and a corporate renaissance, with Orion, Oden, Southern Sun, DCA, Leo Events, ServiceMaster, B Riley, and Indigo Ag, among others, choosing to plant their corporate headquarters Downtown. Our riverfront is also changing, and it is clear that opportunity is calling. Union Row answers that call, and responds to Memphis 3.0’s mantra of “Build Up Not Out.”

The Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis and Urban Strategies, the Mayor, Planning & Development, Housing and Community Development, and Business Diversity & Compliance as well as Memphis Housing Authority and Memphis River Parks Partnership have worked hard to show Memphians what our next century should look like — inclusive. Together with developers, elected officials, and city and county leaders, the Downtown Memphis Commission is building a Memphis that is investible — a Memphis that has momentum and a Downtown for everyone.

Jennifer Oswalt is president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

A Seasonal Summing-Up for Memphis and Shelby County

As Memphis and Shelby County headed into the heart of the holiday season, the two entities and their resident populations had much to rejoice about and many serious concerns as well.

For purposes of contrast, merely consider the rather different facts reflected in the respective circumstances of the two major local legislative bodies — the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission.

It may be that the council is able to resolve the issue of filling three vacancies this week. Or maybe not. The council will need to produce a quorum even to begin untangling the circumstances of last week’s deadlocked vote to fill just one of the seats, and acquiring a quorum has been made tougher by the resignation of two council members who were present and voting prior to last week.

Bill Lee

Those two members — Janis Fullilove and Edmund Ford Jr. — are two of the trio of members who were elected to Shelby County positions on August 2nd but deigned not to resign their council seats in a timely manner that would have allowed their positions to be filled by the vote of constituents on the November ballot. The third member of this threesome — Bill Morrison — had resigned earlier by a week.

It is uncertain the degree to which the foot-dragging threesome held on to their seats for personal reasons versus retaining them on the advice, implicit or explicit, to do so by their remaining colleagues, whose demonstrated passion for replacing departed collegues by the appointment process is equaled only by their fecklessness in actually delivering on the appointments.

In any case, if the deadlock holds, the obvious solution is to call for an election, which should have been done in the first place. Only this time, the taxpayers will be footing some extra expense.

Over on the county commission, things seem a little more Christmas-y. Though there are conspicously different political points of view on display there (of the liberal-vs.-conservative sort), so far they have not created a divide. Instead, there has been a measure of peace, harmony, and compromise. The most obvious difference between the version of county government elected on August 2nd and the one preceding it is that there is no schism between the executive and legislative branches, as there was in the long-running power struggle between the former commission and then Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The current county mayor, Lee Harris, and the new commission, led by chairman Van Turner, have evinced an obvious determination to agree on as many issues as possible, and numerous disagreements of the past have been resolved, resulting in a common understanding on such issues as independent legal representation for the commission and an alignment of views on the conduct of legal action to offset the ravages of opioid distributors.

At the state level, things are a tad uncertain as of yet. While we welcome the positive aura emanating from Republican Governor-elect Bill Lee, we are disappointed by his expressed support for voucher legislation (a specter that we thought had been abandoned by the General Assembly) and his reluctance to see the good sense of long-overdue Medicaid expansion.

Even so, we’ll try to be optimistic. Happy Holidays!