Tag: William Eggleston

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Music Music Blog

William Eggleston’s New Single … With Brian Eno

William Eggleston (Credit: Peter Townsend)

Appreciators of William Eggleston’s art often have a fondness for music, and the renowned photographer’s been known to associate with more than a few musical artists himself. And, as Memphis Flyer readers may recall from our 2017 coverage of his debut album, Musik, he’s also a gifted self-taught pianist who’s played classical works by ear and improvised his own compositions since childhood.

That album, as we noted upon its release, was played and recorded by Eggleston on an instrument he was enamored of in the early 1990s, the Korg 01/W sampling keyboard. “It’s manufactured in Tokyo, but a hundred percent of it is a bunch of engineers in California,” he told us at the time. “It makes maybe a billion different sounds. When this model of Korg came out, I was so enchanted with the machine.”

And he was inspired, using the keyboard’s recording function to preserve many extemporaneous compositions in which he could command a variety of orchestral sounds at once, riffing out entire concertos in one sitting. Selections from those recordings formed the basis of Musik.

Now with today’s single, “Improvisation,” Eggleston is announcing another album, 512, to be released November 3rd on the Secretly Canadian imprint. Produced by Tom Lunt, 512 features four standards, “Ol’ Man River,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” along with the originals “Improvisation” and “That’s Some Robert Burns.” 

In a departure from the free-wheeling soliloquies of Eggleston’s debut, Lunt invited musicians Sam Amidon and Leo Abrahams to collaborate on 512. This openness to collaboration led to Brian Eno performing bells on “Improvisation,” an introduction of sorts to 512’s piano-driven palette.

512, produced in one day in 2018, is named after the room where it was recorded, the Parkview apartment in Memphis where Eggleston lived for many years. The resulting 512 is a sparse, stark work that holds a mirror to music that Eggleston has internalized most profoundly. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Eggleston notes in a press release. “It’s very modern.”
 

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We Recommend We Saw You

Eggleston, Finders Keepers, Wild Game Dinner, Pegasus

It was great hanging out with the great William Eggleston at a reception prior to his show, ‘William Eggleston and Jennifer Steinkamp: At Home at the Dixon,’ at Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

William Eggleston was the guest of honor at a reception, which was held January 25th, for his family, friends, and supporters at Dixon Gallery and Gardens. The reception was held prior to his show “William Eggleston and Jennifer Steinkamp: At Home at the Dixon.” The exhibit juxtaposes floral, garden, and still life imagery in late-19th and early-20th century paintings with Eggleston photos and Steinkamp computer animations.

Guests greeted the dapper Eggleston, 80, who sat on a sofa during the reception.

They knew Eggleston was coming to the reception, says Chantal Drake, Dixon director of development and communications. They were anticipating his visit, she says.

People enjoyed meeting him and “being in the room with him and his work.”

Dixon director Kevin Sharp says, “It was an honor to have William Eggleston attend the reception for our current exhibitions at the Dixon. And, speaking personally, it was very special to meet and have a little time with a figure of his importance in the history of art.”


Michael Donahue

Jennifer Steinkamp

Michael Donahue

William Eggleston reception

Michael Donahue

William Eggleston reception

MIchael Donahue

Zane Myer-Thornton and Bren Pepke at Finders Keepers

Bren Pepke and Zane Myer-Thornton carried a massive 48-inch-by-60-inch abstract painting out of Memphis College of Art during the school’s Finders Keepers event. The sale and auction consisted of the school’s entire collection of artwork.

She was carrying the painting for her father, Mark Pepke, who bought the Mary Reed painting on the first night of the sale, which ran January 25th to the 29th.

“We were carrying it to the car ’cause it wouldn’t fit in their car,” Bren says. “And it ended up not fitting in our car, either. We had to get another car. But we got it home.”

The Pepke family — Mark and his wife, Amy, and Bren’s sister Karis — showed up early. Mark spotted the painting, which he immediately recognized. “It was in my office for five years,” he says.

Mark, who was director of student life and housing, says, “I didn’t know it was there. I knew the collection was being sold. I wasn’t necessarily looking for that particular painting. But when I saw it on the wall I was like, ‘It’s going home with me.’”

The painting has sentimental value for him, but Mark says he also likes it. “I’m not much of a fan of abstract art, but I like the line quality in the painting with the color.”

He likes the “heavy dark line contrasted with the red and orange.” And, he says, “It has a definite focal point, so your eyes go right to it and wander around a few areas.”

It was a bit stressful after he saw the painting at the sale. “The students were putting up a ladder. I thought they were putting up a ladder to get it off the wall ’cause there was a lady with them.”

Mark put his hand on the painting as if to say, “Hey, it’s mine. Stand back.”

It turned out the woman was interested in something else.

The College of Art also meant a lot to his children, Mark says. The sale had “an element of a sad passing of time for us. The College of Art has been a big part of their lives since they were probably 3, 4, and 5 years old. They’ve grown up down in the hallways with me in my office. They’ve taken classes there. We’ve gone there almost every year for Holiday Bazaar.”

So, where is the painting going? “It’s too big for the house. It’s contrary a little bit to her (his wife’s) color scheme. So I’m putting it in my office now.”

Opening night resembled a Black Friday sale of very cool items. People crowded around tables filled with artwork.

Reed Malkin, one of the guests on the jam-packed opening night, says, “The art was getting in the front door.”

Memphis College of Art president Laura Hine estimates 1,000 to 1,500 people attended  opening night. “It’s very hard to say how many people were here on Saturday night,” she says. “Before we opened the doors, the line was down the front stairs wrapped around the south side of our lawn all the way to the Brooks Museum.”

And, Hine says, “A 30-year faculty member said he’s never seen the gallery as crowded.”

As for how much money was raised, Hine says, “We are not disclosing the amount of money raised during the sale. The sale proceeds are being added to MCA’s operating budget while we teach our remaining students who will graduate in May.

“It was a very emotional experience for the MCA community, especially in the preparation phase when we had to catalog decades of artists’ work. The only thing that made it palatable was that the artwork would find homes and that people will preserve and appreciate it for decades to come.”


Michael Donahue

Finders Keepers

Michael Donahue

Finders Keepers

Michael Donahue

Jimmy Crosthwait at Finders Keepers

Michael Donahue

Laura Hine, David Lusk, Henry Doggrell, and Carissa Hussong at Finders Keepers

Michael Donahue

Finders Keepers

Michael Donahue

Mystic Krewe of Pegasus Mardi Gras Ball XVII

Joseph Osment Is king Pegasus XVII, and Jane Pratt Park is queen Pegasus XVII of the Mystic Krewe of Pegasus.

They were announced at the Mardi Gras Ball XVII “A Night Under the Big Top,” which was held January 25th at Minglewood Hall.

Mystic Krewe of Pegasus is “a Mardi Gras krewe here in Memphis,” says Ball Captain Jesse James. “We are a gay Mardi Gras krewe, but we are way more than a gay Mardi Gras krewe.”

And, he says, “We run the whole gamut. We have straight people. We try to have the most diversity possible.”

About 500 people attended the event, which was a fundraiser for the Shelby County Drug Foundation, says Ball Captain Jesse James.

James didn’t have the total amount of money raised at the ball, but, Jesse says, “We will do a check presentation in April because we still collect money for them through the end of March.”

And, he says, “Up to this year, not knowing what we raised [at the ball], we’ve raised over $300,000 for charities over the past 17 years.”


Joseph Osment and Jane Pratt Park at the Mystic Krewe of Pegasus Mardi Gras Ball XVII

Michael Donahue

Mystic Krewe of Pegasus Mardi Gras Ball XVII

Michael Donahue

Mystic Krewe of Pegasus Mardi Gras Ball XVII

Michael Donahue

Laura and Nick Scott at the Mystic Krewe of Pegasus Mardi Gras Ball XVII

MIchael Donahue

Conrad Phillips at Season’s End Wild Game Dinner & Fundraiser

Conrad Phillips hosted his first dinner at Caritas Community Center & Cafe, where he is chef de cuisine.

His Seasonal Wild Game Dinner, which was held January 25th at the center, featured hors d’oeuvres and four courses paired with wine. Guests began with bacon-wrapped quail breast with a porcini glaze and alligator poppers with chipotle ranch and continued with elk bolognese, duck confit/duck fat Yukon mashed potatoes, and herb-crusted rack of wild boar with smoked gouda grits and roasted asparagus.

Dessert was chocolate Grand Marnier duck crème brûlée. Linda Smith, one of the guests, says, “It was one of the best I’ve ever had.”

During his remarks, Phillips told the diners, “I like to give people something they’re not familiar with. And do it in a way they can accept it — not have to be afraid to try it.”


Michael Donahue

Season’s End Wild Game Dinner & Fundraiser

                                  WE SAW YOU AROUND TOWN
Michael Donahue

Lester Quinones Jr. of the University of Memphis Tigers and Scout at Gibson’s Donuts

                           

MIchael Donahue

Holly Long, Lindsey Gammel, Shawn Whitworth, Lauren Poteet, and Laura Davidson at Gibson’s Donuts. They work or have worked at Ella David Salon.

Michael Donahue

Autozoners from Brazil and Memphis at lunch Downtown

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Cover Feature News

Flower Power: Eggleston, Steinkamp Exhibition Blooms at the Dixon

The story goes that there was a time William Eggleston didn’t give much of a thought to photography. And then, in the late 1950s, a friend at Vanderbilt gave him a nudge. The man who would forever change how we regarded picture taking bought his first camera, a Canon Rangefinder-35mm.

And what if he hadn’t? It’s likely that Eggleston would have picked up another camera at some other point, as he was and is possessed of a curious mind, one with a love of art and craft and beauty and a need to try everything that piques his interests. Photography would have come along sooner or later. He once told Interview magazine that as a child he’d play the piano in his house every time he walked by it. His love of music, both listening and performing, continues to this day. He’s also a student of sound engineering. And radio astronomy. And guns.

Winston Eggleston

William Eggleston at work, early 1990s.

But that affair with the camera launched him on a journey that has led to the highest of praise in the art world, although not without plenty of critical drubbing, particularly at the start of his career.

Virginia Rutledge, director of the Eggleston Art Foundation, referred to the time when Eggleston was gaining wide attention for his color photographs, notably in the 1976 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “It is difficult to imagine now, but at the time, some of his subject matter was seen to be as shocking as using that intense color in ‘art’ photography,” she says. Rutledge refers to critics who were getting the vapors over the show: “What was the point of these banal subjects in this color aesthetic that looked more appropriate to commercial advertising? Painting may have gone through several formal revolutions, but not everyone was ready for photography like this.”

The naysayers used “banal” as a pejorative but failed to understand that the everydayness of the subject matter made it widely recognizable. Add to that Eggleston’s eye and his use of color, and the photographs go beyond mere snapshots and allow viewers to construct their own story from the familiar scene.

© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy the Eggleston Art Foundation and David Zwirner, New York, London, Hong Kong, AND Paris

Type C print

“It’s a natural way of seeing,” Rutledge says, “but Eggleston was a real pioneer in making it visible.”

And since that breakthrough show in 1976, Eggleston’s work has influenced photographers, filmmakers, storytellers, and artists of all kinds.

© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy the Eggleston Art Foundation and David Zwirner, New York, London, Hong Kong, AND Paris

Dye transfer print

Eggleston, at age 80, is certainly one of the region’s best-known artists. And though it’s not difficult to find his works, there has been no local place devoted to his works and interests. Around 2011, a group of patrons started a discussion of creating such a facility, a museum to celebrate the artist’s work and showcase Memphis as an arts center. That particular effort didn’t pan out, but the conversation had been started and eventually Eggleston’s family — Winston, Andra, and William Eggleston III — formed the Eggleston Art Foundation and brought on Rutledge — an art historian and intellectual property lawyer — to helm it. She’s involved and well-connected in the art world, having been a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and vice president and general counsel for Creative Commons.

The purpose of the foundation is to preserve, protect, and promote Eggleston’s legacy of work and maintain the archive. But there’s no interest in simply having a shrine to the photographer’s work. The vision is broader than that. Having conversations with other people who have their own passions has been an essential part of Eggleston’s life. To this day, he has a stream of visitors who come to discuss a wide variety of topics.

© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy the Eggleston Art Foundation and David Zwirner, New York, London, Hong Kong, AND Paris

Dye transfer print

And it’s that wide curiosity that the foundation wants to explore, certainly with exhibitions of Eggleston’s works, but also including other artists and a variety of events — music, film, performance, lectures.

“We want to be responsive,” Rutledge says. “Not to be driven by public opinion or requests, but to be ready to respond to opportunities to connect, and to help create those opportunities where we can. We love what we see with Crosstown Arts and the way that they are located in the kind of space that allows people to take in art as part of their daily routine. We’re interested in connecting Eggleston’s work to a broad creative community.”

© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy the Eggleston Art Foundation and David Zwirner, New York, London, Hong Kong, AND Paris

Dye transfer print

The foundation is headquartered in a building on Poplar across from East High School, and the hope is to use that space as a center for the planned activities. But there will also be partnerships with other institutions, such as the public library and other art organizations.

The first exhibition under the auspices of the foundation opens January 26th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. “William Eggleston and Jennifer Steinkamp: At Home at the Dixon” has two groundbreaking artists — Steinkamp is an internationally acclaimed artist who works with computer animation — to display works related to core Dixon themes: floral, garden, and still life works.

© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy the Eggleston Art Foundation and David Zwirner, New York, London, Hong Kong, AND Paris

Type C print

One of the Dixon’s paintings ties the exhibit together. A Memory by William Merritt Chase hangs in the Dixon Residence Living Room. The 1910 work, as described by the Dixon, “depicts a woman seated in a genteel domestic interior opening onto a sunlit Italian garden.”

Dixon director Kevin Sharp met with the foundation and says their first conversation was a success. “I told them that photography is something that we don’t have a lot of,” he says. “We like photography and we’ve done photography shows here and we’ve done shows that have elements of photography, but we don’t have a lot of expertise in the area. So we felt partnering with the foundation would be very high on our priority list.”

Koto Bolofo

Jennifer Steinkamp

Discussions continued regarding having Eggleston’s works at the Dixon. “It wasn’t long after that that Virginia made the suggestion that we involve Jennifer Steinkamp who’s an artist I’m crazy about,” Sharp says. “I love her work, and we’ve had her work on view. So it all came together pretty organically, and we’re very excited about what it’s going to do for us.”

Rutledge was taken with the idea of having the Chase painting anchoring the show. “Bringing in work with similar themes emphasizes the fact that you can see beauty in very different ways,” she says. “Eggleston’s work on view is a combination of some of his virtually unknown and some of his best known images. There are two images of women that are just knockouts, gorgeous in unexpected ways.”

There are also Eggleston’s remarkable still life photographs. Not all are, as Rutledge observes, what you usually see at the Dixon. One such image is a 1978 photograph of a pot with flowers. “Much of the floral arrangement looks artificial, and it’s definitely bedraggled, crammed in a straw basket sitting in a banged-up terracotta pot,” she says. “But it’s beautiful. The colors are ravishing.”

© Jennifer Steinkamp
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and greengrassi, London


Steinkamp is also a pioneer in her art, Rutledge says. Like Eggleston, who transformed his photos by using commercial color technology, she uses animation, a medium that still is more generally understood as being reserved for commercial uses, such as in Hollywood movies. “Instead, she’s using these computer animation tools in an art context,” Rutledge says. “All Steinkamp’s work in this show happens to use floral imagery. People often comment that her imagery is hyper realistic. But what’s fascinating is that the work is not based on anything imaged from the real world in terms of photography. Her flowers are entirely made from code. She doesn’t start with any pre-existing imagery, instead she programs the computer to generate what she sees as an artist.”

Steinkamp is an accomplished gardener, Rutledge says, and knows her botany. “She describes in code the look of a particular flower, but that’s only the start of the process. Because her works exist and move in a 3-D space, she also has to set rules that describe weight, the effects of gravity, of wind, the source of light. All those ‘recipes’ then ‘cook’ in the computer for several hours while the graphics are rendering.”

Steinkamp’s work can also have subtle political overtones, such as the work in the show titled Ovaries. “We see flowers and vividly colored seed-bearing fruits — literally plant ovaries — whirling around in a sky-blue space, but continually being caught up, flattened against what appears to be the window of the screen. You can read this as the artist’s comment on constraints that can still exist on women’s control of their own bodies. There’s a poignant parallel perhaps to the imagery of the Chase painting,” Rutledge says. “Although it is a gracious and priveleged setting, we know because of the time and her social milieu the woman depicted had a confined sphere in life.”

Rutledge sees both artists advancing narratives that are tied to the cycle of life. Still lifes often show some aspect of mortality and Eggleston’s photographs, whether a funeral urn or everyday tree tops, suggest a certain mystery, as do Steinkamp’s floating, nebulous flora.

With the foundation’s debut event at the Dixon, Rutledge and the Eggleston family are hoping to follow with additional significant contemporary arts programming in the city.

“We want to be involved in sharing what Memphis is all about to the rest of the world. We want to offer greater access to the range of Eggleston’s work here in the city. And we know that will be a draw as well for many people who may not know about the strong visual art scene that is already here. And once they’re in town, they’ll also see the Dixon, Crosstown Arts, Brooks, newer spaces such as the CMPLX. It’s an amazingly good time to see art in Memphis and we’re excited to be part of it.”

Spring Forward

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens is bursting with shows. The Eggleston/Steinkamp exhibition is the fifth to open in two weeks, and all are as different as they can be.

“Lawrence Matthews: To Disappear Away: Places soon to be no more”

Through April 5th at Mallory/Wurtzburger Galleries

“Under Construction: Collage from The Mint Museum”

Through March 22nd

“Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman”

Through March 22nd

Kong Wee Pang in the Interactive Gallery

Through March 8th

“William Eggleston and Jennifer Steinkamp: At Home at the Dixon”

January 26th through March 22nd

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

At War With the Obvious

The photograph on this week’s cover is by world-renowned Memphis photographer William Eggleston, who, in the 1970s, stunned the art world when his prosaic and groundbreaking images of Southern life were shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Eggleston’s 1976 show is widely recognized as the singular event that brought color photography into the world of high art. Prior to Eggleston’s emergence on the scene, black-and-white images had been the only photography recognized as such since, well, the invention of the camera.

Now, nearing 81 and still living in Memphis, Eggleston has secured his status as a major American artist and pioneer with decades of subsequent work. His photos are celebrated and analyzed in books and essays. They are displayed in museums and galleries around the world. There is, as you may know, much discussion about a possible Eggleston museum in Memphis that would showcase his work — and works by others who’ve followed in his artistic footsteps. Read Jon W. Sparks’ cover story for all the details.

Type C print

I first encountered Eggleston’s photographs in the early 1990s, when I moved to Memphis. I had (and have) friends who knew him and who would delight in telling me tales of his eccentricities and his unconventional lifestyle. To be honest, I knew of him as an iconic Memphis character before I knew his work. When I first saw his photos at a gallery, I was stunned by their apparent simplicity, their depth of color, and their audacity.

Intrigued, I read more about Eggleston and discovered many more of his oddly compelling images: the front of a car parked against a brick wall, a gaudy McDonald’s restaurant next to an equally gaudy Foto Hut, a stack of tires between two vehicles, a solitary rusty tricycle in a suburban street. And there were his photos of women, often of a certain age, Southern females gone to seed, wearing gaudy bell-bottoms or floral prints, matronly types smoking in a diner or walking to a car.

There were others that struck me: a child staring from an open car door, bright tomatoes on a kitchen counter, a vase of flowers, and famously, a blood-red juke joint ceiling. Every photo was saturated with dye-transfer color that pulled the eye all over the piece. Every shot provoked questions: What exactly is happening here? Who is this person? What am I supposed to see?

That may be the point: There is nothing to see and there is everything to see. And you’re not “supposed” to see anything. The photograph is what it is — and what you get from it is up to you. Eggleston’s work sprung from his theory of a “democratic camera” — a nonjudgmental glass eye that allows us to see all-too-familiar sights as new — and look at them as long as we like.

There were those I knew in Memphis who thought it all rather silly. Eggleston’s pictures were just weird snapshots, they said. Anyone could take them. What’s the big deal? It’s just a picture of a tricycle. The emperor has no clothes.

They were wrong, I think.

The writer Richard Woodward has called Eggleston’s work “fearless naturalism — a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen.” Eggleston himself has said he is “at war with the obvious.” And, of course, sometimes what seems obvious is anything but. Or is that too obvious?

Maybe it’s more difficult to understand Eggleston’s impact now, when almost literally everyone you know is a photographer, when the simplest of snapshots from a phone camera can be manipulated with dozens of filters, resized, cropped, enhanced — all with the swipe of a finger. Every day, millions of people are creating often striking and compelling photos of children, cars, food, pets, sunsets, faces, etc., though few would argue that they’re creating art.

With our social media photos, we are advertising ourselves, creating virtual scrapbooks for the world to take in, using a lens through which we want others to see us. What’s personal becomes very public.

Maybe that’s the true secret of Eggleston’s genius. His art runs exactly counter: What seems at first glance to be public becomes an experience that’s very personal.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Real Stuff: William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton Screens at Crosstown Arts

Furry Lewis in Stranded In Canton

Telling folks about their past, their cultural heritage, the artists who shaped how we think today, is usually the job of people like me. But writers and documentarians, no matter how hard we try to tell the whole story, are always doomed to tell only part of the tale. We decide what’s most important (which describes what our job entails in a nutshell) and edit out the rest. Rarely do general audiences get to see the unfiltered stuff, the raw material out of which cultural history is made.

In 1976, Memphian William Eggleston was the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Until that time, color photography was not held in high esteem in academic and “serious” art circles. Eggleston’s haunting, egalitarian photos of the Mid South changed that forever.

At the time, Eggleston had been seriously pursuing photography since the mid-1960s. While he was being feted in the highest circles for his ravishing prints, his interest had turned to video. Sony had just released a brand new video camera that taped to an open-reel deck. It was portable, but just barely. Eggleston got his hands on one and started obsessively shooting anything that was in front of him.

For years, the tapes lay dormant until they were assembled into a film called Stranded in Canton by director Robert Gordon. Today, even the press releases supporting the film refer to it as “infamous”. This is not a work with a narrative arc. It is more like being a fly on the wall at a particularly strange time and place. Memphis attracts eccentrics, and Eggleston hung out with the best of them. And by “best” I mean “weirdest”. Eggleston’s friends included Furry Lewis, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, and a host of other hard partying artists. The photographer catches them with their guard down—if, indeed they had guards to drop in the first place. Much has been written about that time in Memphis cultural history, but this film puts you in the room with the people who were making that history, warts and all. Imagine Salvador Dali’s home movies, and you have the beginning of a sense of what Stranded in Canton is like

The film will screen tonight (Thursday, May 23rd) as part of the Crosstown Arts weekly film series. After the film, The Alex Chilton Revue Band featuring Ross Johnson and The Klitz will perform period-appropriate music at The Green Room. You can get tickets here at the Crosstown Arts website. 

The Real Stuff: William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton Screens at Crosstown Arts

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Dr. William Ferris Brings Voices of Mississippi to Crosstown Theater

Dr. William Ferris with his camera in Mississippi in the 1970s.

In the early 1970s, William Ferris was a graduate student studying folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. His specialty was studying the rich musical culture of North Mississippi. “I was doing field recordings and photography, and coming back and presenting that. I felt I couldn’t communicate the full power of the church services and juke joints I was working in. Film would be the best way to do that. No one there was willing to help me, at the film school. So I got a little super 8 camera and began to shoot footage and do wild sound on a reel-to-reel recorder. I put together these really basic, early films, which in many ways are the best things I ever did. It’s very visceral, powerful material. I brought those back, and people were just blown away by them.”

Ferris was particularly interested in the proto-blues fife and drum music tradition kept alive in Gravel Springs, Mississippi, by Othar Turner. “I was trying to finish a film on Othar Turner that I had shot, and David Evans had done the sound. Judy Peiser was working at public television in Mississippi, and she interviewed me. I told her about the fife and drum film, and she said she would like to edit it. That led to the creation of the Center for Southern Folklore in 1972, and to a long history of working on films. I would spend my summers in Memphis when I was teaching at Yale. We would work on films and other projects. I made a lot of wonderful friends that I’ve been close to ever since.”

Dr. Ferris, with the help of Peiser and others, acquired progressively better equipment and, over the years, created a series of short documentaries immortalizing the artists and traditions of the Mississippi Delta. His successful academic career would go on to include a stint as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently, he is a Senior Associate Director Emeritus at the Center for Study of the American South at the University of South Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Center for Southern Folklore, which he and Peiser founded, became a beloved institution in Memphis. “The Center has made a mark, and continues to make a mark with its festivals and exhibits. Judy Peiser has continued it. She’s an anchor for all this work and Memphis, and really a national treasure.”

On Friday, May 17th, Indie Memphis will present “Voices of Mississippi,” a collection of Ferris’ now-classic short documentaries, beginning with “Gravel Springs Fife and Drum.” “Ray Lum: Mule Trader” introduces us to the title character, who Ferris calls “an amazing raconteur.” Ferris recorded the auctioneer’s stories and tall tales in film, and with an accompanying book and soundtrack. “There are two soundtracks. You can hear the wild sound, and his voice. I don’t think that had ever been done before. All of that was published and produced through the Center. I think it was really ahead of its time in terms of media and film.”

“Four Women Artists” documents writer Eudora Welty, quilter Picolia Warner, needleworker Ethel Mohamed  and painter Theora Hamblett  “Bottle Up and Go” records a Loman, Mississippi, musician demonstrating “one strand on the wall,” a precursor to the slide guitar that makes an instrument out of a house. “It’s one of the earliest instruments that every blues singer learned on as a child, because it was free,” says Ferris. “He also did bottle blowing. Both of those are sounds that have deep roots in Africa and are the roots of the blues.”

Dr. Ferris will bring along some of his Memphis-based collaborators and sign the Grammy-inning box set of his life’s work. He says that for him, this Memphis screening is like a homecoming.“To me, Memphis is the undiscovered bohemian culture,” he says. “You have black and white, rural and folk voices coming out of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, meeting this formally educated group of musicians and artists like Sid Selvidge, William Eggleston. Music and photography was a big part of the scene. The photography, because of Eggleston and Tav Falco and Ernest Withers, makes Memphis unique. It just has so many pieces that you don’t find in the French Quarter in New Orleans, where William Faulkner went to write. You have Julian Hohenberg, this very wealthy cotton broker whose heart is in music. He was involved in the music scene for many, many years. It’s the escape valve for people who love the arts. It’s really funky and countercultural. Everything they couldn’t do in these little towns and rural areas, they do in Memphis — and they do it with a passion.”

“Voices of Mississippi” will screen at 6 PM on Friday, May 17 at the Crosstown Theater. RSVP for a free ticket at the Indie Memphis website. 

Categories
Music Music Features

Memphis, 2017

CREDIT: Alex Greene

A large portrait of Bach hangs in William Eggleston’s apartment; pivot to the left and you’ll see stacks of oscilloscopes and other electronic modules, green waveforms pulsing; pivot again and you’ll see his treasured Bösendorfer grand piano. Such disparate images capture both his love of music and the contradictions inherent in it. Of course, one must begin with the disconnect between his notoriety as one of the most compelling fine art photographers in the world and the fact that his latest project has nothing to do with photography at all — at least on the surface. His debut album, Musik, released last month on the Secretly Canadian label, explores his other great passion, one that blossomed long before he had his first camera.

“I began playing classical music when I was about four,” he explains, adding that “I have an ability to play anything I’ve heard.” Indeed, he is completely self-taught. “We had a piano in the hallway of our home. Whenever I’d pass through, I’d stop and play something.” Eventually, he deciphered musical notation, but his playing has always sprung from his ears more than his eyes. “People that are really good at sight reading, generally that’s the only thing they’re good at. Without the score, they can’t play a damn thing. Sight-reading is not musicianship to me.”

Alex Greene

William Eggleston at home

That’s a rare opinion for a classical music fan. Yet Eggleston listens to practically nothing else. He remains disdainful of most rock music, from Elvis Presley to Alex Chilton (despite having been a close friend of the Chilton family). And he’s even skeptical of jazz. This is especially paradoxical, as nearly all of Eggleston’s own recorded output is entirely improvised. Nonetheless, its closest stylistic affinity is with the harmonies and cadences of orchestral classical music.

For an artist who resolutely uses only real film stock, it’s ironic that his orchestral ambitions were made possible by modern digital synthesis. In the early 1990s, after a lifetime of playing piano, Eggleston discovered the Korg 01/W sampling keyboard, able to trigger hundreds of different orchestral sounds simultaneously with a split keyboard: cellos with the left hand, flutes with the right, and so on. His love for finely crafted machines, from guns to cameras, now extended to the Korg. “It’s manufactured in Tokyo, but a hundred percent of it is a bunch of engineers in California,” he notes admiringly. “It makes maybe a billion different sounds. When this model of Korg came out, I was so enchanted with the machine.” In fact, he bought four of them. And as he began improvising symphonies on the spot, the machine would record his every move.

Korg 01/W

“The machine has a memory, but also it has a floppy disc drive. And once you cut the power off of the machine, the memory’s erased. If you’re lucky, you’ve made a disc from the memory, which sounds just like it did when played.” Eggleston would improvise one orchestral piece after another, compiling many hours of music. His friends and family were the only listeners privy to these works, though readers of Robert Gordon’s It Came from Memphis got a taste from that book’s accompanying CD, which included an excerpt from the then-freshly recorded “Symphony #4, Bonnie Prince Charlie.” (As Eggleston notes, “I’m very much interested in Robert Burns.”) But after that initial exposure and a flurry of such spontaneous “compositions,” Eggleston’s recorded output tapered off.

“Now, this release that these people are doing was not my idea. I had nothing to do with it,” he notes. “This fellow, Tom Lunt, is the main force behind [Secretly Canadian’s] productions. And he’s been here a lot of times. All told, we went through something like 60 hours of music, all from floppy discs. I had tons of them.” None of the music was recorded in a conventional sense. “They would say, ‘Well, you must overdub.’ No. It was just straight, accurate recordings of what was played.” Each floppy disc was a snapshot of what he produced when sitting at the Korg.

The snapshot metaphor is apropos, given the artist’s freewheeling approach to photography, whereby he riffs off images encountered in everyday life. This tactic is especially apparent in the film Stranded in Canton, edited down from many hours of unstaged video footage that Eggleston shot on the fly in the mid-’70s. He is quick to affirm the similarity between improvised music and what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment” to which a photographer must always be attuned.

But don’t expect Eggleston to reprise his Musik in a live setting anytime soon. “I don’t do public performances,” he says. “I really play for myself and a select group of friends that might drop in. I’m delighted to play for them. Concerts, public performances — not interested. It wouldn’t be difficult. I don’t have any form of stage fright. So it wouldn’t mean anything to me, except a career like that is just a hell of a lot of trouble.”

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Art Art Feature

“Voice of the Turtle” at TOPS.

John Fahey’s 1968 guitar ballad “Voice of the Turtle” is a classic piece of Vietnam-era musical Americana. The song’s train-like rhythms draw out a melody that is as mournful as an empty boxcar but as defiantly optimistic as the all-American promise of something greater down the line. “Voice of the Turtle” is a kind of frontier hymn colored by the psychedelic urge to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

This past Saturday night, TOPS Gallery opened an exhibition called “Voice of the Turtle” in honor of the late Fahey. The show features a small, abstract tempera work by the guitarist who took up painting in the years before his death in 2001. Fahey’s painting is shown at TOPS alongside work by eight Memphis artists, many with a similar interdisciplinary bent. The show includes sculpture and drawing by Fahey’s friend and 1960s Memphis scene-maker John McIntire, alongside drawings by William Eggleston, Guy Church, and Jonathan Payne, sculpture by Terri Phillips and Jim Buchman, collage by Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, and painting by Peter Bowman.

Fahey’s small painting at TOPS is nothing to write home about, at least in light of his talent as a musician. Painting was a secondary art form for Fahey, but that isn’t a bad thing. Plenty of artists, including Bob Dylan, David Lynch, and Eggleston, have exploratory painting practices that often meet with undue critical disdain. TOPS’ “Voice of the Turtle” is an exhibition that celebrates these practices, and references a time when the interdisciplinary (art as a multi-hued journey of personal discovery, rather than as a specialized niche practice) was more celebrated than it is today.

A marble “game” sculpture by McIntire occupies the center of the gallery. To clarify: It is a sculpture made from white marble, but it is also a game of marbles. Viewers are invited to drop a marble into one of the sculpture’s many holes connected to a network of tunnels, and assumably, see where the marble emerges. At Saturday’s opening, no one had any marbles (perhaps having misplaced them in the ’60s? ba dum ching…), but not much was lost. McIntire’s sculpture is still beautiful and playful — the sort of thing you’d expect a favorite uncle to have stashed in his attic.

John McIntire’s portrait of John Fahey

McIntire also contributed a small drawing on yellow legal paper of Fahey, sitting in profile, wearing sunglasses. A cigarette hangs out of Fahey’s mouth. The drawing feels like a dashed note, a quick record of a lost conversation. Between this drawing, McIntire’s sculpture, and Fahey’s painting, there is a kind of friendly history — a warm context that makes room for the other featured artists’ work.

Eggleston’s squiggly, colorful drawings are each about five inches tall. There is not much to say about them except that they are really fun, and that every artist should probably make a squiggly drawing once in their lives. Beaudoin’s cut-and-paste collages are assembled from old magazines. They are at once personal and alienated by the material’s faded gloss. Buchman contributed two roughly hewn abstract ceramic works with an understated drama.

The works that pack the most punch are four expertly stippled drawings by self-taught artist Church, whose genre scenes seem drawn from an otherworldly forest. The characters that inhabit this realm are likewise magical; their exaggerated proportions seeming all too natural in Church’s constructions. “Voice of the Turtle” is worth going to see if only for Church’s work.

Another high point in the exhibition is a small drawing by Payne. His elaborate, obsessive mark-making, navigated through hundreds of undulating lines, is quietly done without seeming restrained or restricted. Payne is also the youngest artist in the exhibition, and his presence in “Voice of the Turtle” shows a kind of artistic heritage — a generational relationship between artists that is as open-ended and bravely optimistic as Fahey’s eponymous song.

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Cover Feature News

Bon Appétit!

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Opera Memphis’ Ned Canty wants to change the way you think about opera.

“I don’t want anybody to think I’m saying they’re wrong about opera,” he says. “But not every movie is a Hollywood movie. And when we talk about popular music, we might be talking about Beyoncé, Adele, or your favorite local garage band. It should be the same when we talk about opera. I only want to make a case that there’s a whole lot more to opera than most people have ever realized.”

Canty is making his best case yet for opera’s depth, breadth, and versatility this week. He’s closing his second season as general director for Opera Memphis with the first-ever Midtown Opera Festival, an ambitious new event at Playhouse on the Square.

Canty knows his work is cut out for him. He knows opera purists who aren’t interested in arias that aren’t sung in Italian and understands that, among the broader population, opinions about opera tend to be based more on the visual stylings of Bugs Bunny animator Chuck Jones than the musical compositions of Georges Bizet.

The festival features more singers than Opera Memphis has ever before imported at one time. It’s staged entirely by Canty — with music direction by Steven Osgood — and is built around a strong trio of modern chamber operas.

Lucretia, Child, and Eggleston

The Rape of Lucretia, by British composer Benjamin Britten, opens the weekend. It’s followed by an evening of quirky one-acts by American composer Lee Hoiby: This Is the Rill Speaking and Bon Appétit!, the Julia Child opera.

The three showcase pieces will be performed alongside a variety of smaller works, ranging from a children’s opera to a deliriously off-color and extremely adult new monodrama written specifically for the festival and inspired by Memphis’ iconic photographer William Eggleston.

Eggleston and Child won’t be the only atypical opera inspirations brought to life onstage over the weekend. There will be drunken, fornicating Etruscans, a nameless woman who’s in love with her van, fictional teenagers learning to masturbate, and a real American hero.

Britten and Hoiby are lyrically inclined 20th-century composers working in an era when dissonant and atonal compositions were in fashion. Admired for their technical skills, both men were largely underrated for making music considered by some as old-fashioned and out of step with modernity. In retrospect, “timeless” seems like the more appropriate adjective.

Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, described by the composer as a “chamber opera,” was written immediately following WWII. There wasn’t much money for opera production, so the composer challenged himself to create a work for 13 instruments and a streamlined cast that could tour cheaply and still deliver the emotional payload of a traditional opera. Set in the period just prior to the founding of the Roman Republic, it tells stories of men behaving badly at war, of women behaving badly on the homefront, and of Lucretia, a woman whose rare chastity and abiding love for her husband became so famous it attracted the unwanted attention of an envious prince.

It’s kind of like there’s this war that’s always there,” says Abby Fischer, the contralto singing the role of Lucretia. “The sets are a little bit 500 B.C., which is when The Rape of Lucretia takes place. But it’s also kind of set in 1946, when Britten wrote the opera. And it’s also kind of right now, in the time we’re performing the opera. That’s what Ned’s going for as the director. It’s what the costume shop and scene shop are going for. And it’s really what Britten’s going for too, I think.”

“The Rape of Lucretia makes Tosca look like a Disney film,” Canty says, comparing his festival’s grim opening act to Puccini’s popular tragedy, with its famous depictions of torture, murder, and suicide. “It’s an intense piece, although it’s not graphic at all,” Canty says. “Everything that’s horrific happens offstage.”

Festival conductor Osgood advises listeners to pay attention to how Britten develops the instrumental voices in his limited orchestra like characters in the drama. “Every single player in the pit has a specific personality,” Osgood says. “Each one has a unique and distinctive sound that Britten deploys consistently to comment on the action.”

When asked why there are two Lee Hoiby pieces on the menu, Canty answers without hesitation: “Because I think Hoiby is the greatest American opera composer, and he’s not recognized.

“The music of Bon Appétit! is very much in line with the sounds of grand opera,” Canty says. “But it’s all about Julia Child making a chocolate cake and showing us how to make a chocolate cake. What makes it funny is the wonderful tension between the music and what’s happening onstage.”

Jamie Barton, the mezzo-soprano singing the role of Julia Child in Bon Appétit!, also thinks that Hoiby, a student of Gian Carlo Menotti, isn’t better known because he wrote pretty melodies during a time when pretty melodies weren’t taken very seriously.

“You’ve got this group of atonal composers,” Barton says. “The scholars love them, and they love themselves, and a lot of composers were shunned if they were more accessible.”

This Is the Rill Speaking is based on an early play by American playwright Lanford Wilson. Like a cross between Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Rill weaves together many threads of small-town life hoping to capture the soul of community.

“This Is the Rill Speaking has a 1950s Americana feel,” says soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine, who plays one of the opera’s everyday folks. “You hear a lot of jazz and ’50s pop in it.

“So many times, I’m playing a goddess or a witch or an 18th-century maid all tied up in a corset. It’s rare to be in an opera that’s nearer to my actual frame of reference and memory.”

Magnanimous, a world-premiere piece created specifically for the festival, is most assuredly not in Italian. Created by composer Zach Redler and lyricist Sara Cooper and inspired by a William Eggleston photo, Magnanimous tells the story of a woman who has fallen in love with a $400 van that doesn’t run. “Let’s fuck,” it begins directly, without apology or too much in the way of explanation.

“We tend to write very strong characters,” Redler says. “We were writing six monodramas about unstable individuals and unrequited love.”

“I just saw this photo, and the way the woman is bent over washing her van seemed so submissive,” Cooper says.

Magnanimous, created in conjunction with American Opera Projects of Brooklyn, will be performed in the cafe space at Playhouse on the Square, which will also be used to present cabaret performances and other new works by American opera composers.

“Magnanimous is great, because you don’t know if the woman washing her van is really crazy or if she’s speaking metaphorically or what,” Canty says.

According to Osgood, the thing that pervades all of the smaller pieces, attracting both performers and listeners, is that, without exception, they are reactions to a specific time, place, and emotional attitude.

“So often, opera as an art form, however great, is still removed from all of us by 50, 80, 100, 200 years, and that’s not the case with any of these ancillary pieces,” Osgood says. “To be able to walk into an opera and be spoken to so directly is a unique and wonderful opportunity.”

Redler and Cooper have backgrounds in musical theater, and that’s evident in Magnanimous, which, for all of its frankness, should appeal to a wide audience, including fans of ’80s ballads and theatrical rock acts like the Dresden Dolls.

A “Film Festival” Atmosphere

Canty believes that the secret to a good arts-related event is density. “If there’s something not to your taste, you should be able to go across the street and see something just as good,” he says, allowing that it will probably take a few years to reach that “film festival” level of density.

“But that’s the goal,” Canty says. “Will there be enough this year for opera geeks to geek out over all weekend? Absolutely. Or, if you only want to bring your kids to the children’s opera, you can do that too.”

Canty is always looking for ways to expand opera’s audience. He thinks Overton Square’s redevelopment as a theater district will allow for unique opportunities as his festival grows. Already, a handful of Overton Square vendors have partnered with Opera Memphis to set the stage for an event that, like any good festival, spills out of the theater and into the neighborhood. Boscos will add an opera-inspired Vanilla Porter to its beer menu for the weekend, and YoLo will offer a custom gelato flavor in honor of Julia Child’s chocolate cake. For Canty, the more interesting festival opportunities will be apparent when the Hattiloo Theatre launches in Overton Square next year and when more bars and restaurants open, bringing more potential indoor and outdoor performance spaces.

“We really couldn’t have imagined anything quite like this before [Overton Square became a theater district],” Canty says. He has already doubled down on next season’s festival, expanding it to two full weekends. The second festival will also feature the world premiere of Ghosts of Crosstown, an original opera inspired by stories from the Sears Crosstown building.

“One of the things opera does is to make the personal universal,” Canty says, explaining his approach to the Ghosts of Crosstown project.

“I’ve been in the public library, looking through copies of an old newsletter called The Conveyor. And I’ve found some really wonderful stuff,” Canty says. He is developing the libretto with Memphis playwright Jerre Dye. Canty’s research has yielded stories that range from a mischievous clerk making intentional mistakes so he can visit his crush in shipping to a woman who lost the diamond from her engagement ring when it fell from its setting into a letter she sent to Sears and how employees searched through discarded envelopes until they found it.

Memphians interested in uncovering a lost gem or two will want to drop in on the Midtown Opera Festival at Playhouse on the Square this weekend. Although the Britten and Hoiby works are ticketed events, many performances in the cabaret space are free.

The Rape of Lucretia will be performed at Playhouse on the Square on April 4th and 6th at 7:30 p.m. Bon Appétit! and This Is the Rill Speaking will be performed on April 5th at 7:30 p.m. and on April 7th at 2 p.m. For tickets and additional schedule information, visit operamemphis.org.

Piece of Cake

Jamie Barton makes Julia Child sing in Lee Hoiby’s comic opera Bon Appétit!. Barton — the mezzo-soprano Opera News described as a “rising star” with a “sumptuous voice” — says she’s looking forward to coming to Memphis to reconnect with Ned Canty, a director she describes as the Quentin Tarantino of comic operas. As a foodie, cook, and singer who delights in character work, she is especially excited to take on the role of Julia Child in Hoiby’s 20-minute opera based on an episode of Child’s PBS television show, The French Chef, in which Child teaches viewers how to make a proper chocolate cake. Here’s what Barton had to say about Child, chocolate, and the cold hard facts of life as a mezzo.

Memphis Flyer: Bon Appétit! has a classical sound, but it’s not at all what people think of when they think about opera.

Jamie Barton: I’ve been craving to do it for years. In part, it’s because, if I could have any other career, I would probably be a chef. I absolutely love cooking. If the television is on, it’s probably the Food Network. Because that kind of thing is near and dear to my heart, Julia Child is near and dear to my heart.

This is an especially choice role for a mezzo-soprano, isn’t it?

The prospect of a 20-minute piece written for a mezzo-soprano is just something that doesn’t come along every day. Sopranos and tenors get good stuff all the time. But mezzos … we get to play the maid parts. We’re the witches, britches, whores, and bitches. When you combine all that with the cooking aspect, yeah, it’s way too good to pass up.

Julia Child has been memorably played by Meryl Streep and Dan Aykroyd. Following them has to be daunting.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t daunting. She is such an opera character in real life, and bringing gourmet cooking into the home was her entire mission. What I’m finding challenging is trying to stay away from the other interpretations of her. The broad caricature, which can be hilarious, isn’t right for me. I found the TV episode the opera is based on and made extensive notes. Because just getting her persona is enough. You don’t have to do too much to it to make it anymore entertaining than it already is.

Her speaking voice is so distinctive.

Lee Hoiby has added all of this into the score. For me, it’s very much like singing Mozart in a way. You don’t have to give too much emotion to it. You just follow what’s written. It’s all there for you already.

How much of a method performer are you?

What do you mean?

Have you made the cake?

Oh, yes. I made it yesterday. It went well, but my cake pans were the wrong size, so it ended up being very short and a little wide. That being said, I had a friend over last night, and I and my friend and my husband went to town on that short, wide cake. It was fantastic. I tried to stick exactly to her recipe, paying special attention to the little instructions. I had my iPod on and was listening to the Hoiby tracks as I was baking. And I made a huge mess.

For the singer, performing Bon Appétit! looks like it could either be like eating a big piece of chocolate cake or climbing Mt. Everest. Which is it?

I’m going to go to Mt. Everest. It sounds like it should be quite easy to learn musically, but it’s not. And on top of that, you’re making a cake onstage. You have exactly six beats to separate the eggs. And there are four eggs. There’s a lot of timing things that are going to be really interesting.