When Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River on January 15, the first boat to get there was a NY Waterway commuter ferry—with commuters aboard. The companies vessels pulled 143 people out of the water and brought them to the ferry terminal, where NY Waterway employees were ready with blankets and coffee.

The most remarkable thing about all of this is that, though NY Waterway was widely praised (44 marine employees were interviewed by media outlets), no one was particularly surprised, because NY Waterway has done this before, for example, on Sept. 11 and during the 2003 blackout. The company actually plans for situations like that, and runs drills for its employees on emergency situations.

The problem with this is that NY Waterway is a private company, and technically they don’t have any obligation to carry out rescue missions, and when they do, they lose money. While it’s comforting that some entity is ready and willing to respond to emergencies, it is far from ideal that it is not a government entity.

Which is probably why, at the 2010 Interferry Conference at the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn, the first session after opening remarks was “Emergency Preparedness.” Three of four speakers were from New York City, and looking at the problem of emergency rescue situations. (The fourth was William Annand of HMS Global Maritime, who talked about using high-speed Hawaiian ferries to respond to the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.)

Tom Fox, the president of Interferry, is also the founder of New York Water Taxi, which operates mainly on the East River. (NY Waterway runs on the Hudson between New Jersey and Manhattan.) New York Water Taxi has, and does, operate commuter ferries, but despite efforts to make it a truly viable, reliable mode of public transportation, it needs to be subsidized. The city has provided only limited and inconsistent funds. (This spring, however, New York Water Taxi, with money provided by the E.D.C., will start running with enough frequency and to enough locations that it will, if all goes well, be able to sustain itself.)

Commuting by boat should not necessarily be a new idea in New York City, but in the last half-century the waterfront was virtually abandoned, host only to industrial works like sewage treatment plants. Once, ferries had been the most efficient way to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and by 1870, those East River ferries were carrying 50 million passengers per year. (By contrast, NY Waterway, which is considered to have a relatively robust ridership, carries 30,000 passengers per day.) Then came the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, and the Manhattan Bridge in 1909; by 1925 there were no commercial ferry lines on the East River.

In his years-long pursuit of municipal money, Fox has used a number of compelling arguments as to why the city would benefit from East River water taxi service. And it’s not as if no one believes him—ferry service is part of Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC and something that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn enthusiastically supports—it’s just that waterborne transportation hasn’t been a priority.

Homeland security, the idea that boats are crucial in a city of islands during an emergency, is Fox’s latest argument, and given past actions by NY Waterway, it’s a compelling one; a disaster is just as likely to affect the East Side as the West Side, and in either case people would want to get home to Brooklyn.  Also, the ferry companies lose money every time they respond to an emergency. (NY Waterway considered filing a lawsuit against US Airways to recoup the money spent on the Hudson rescue; in 2006, a tugboat company semi-successfully sued the city for losses incured when it played a part in the response to the Staten Island Ferry crash in 2003.)

Speaking about Flight 1549 at Interferry, Alan Warren, director of ferry operations at NY Waterway, said that its boats carry 30,000 passengers per day, and, “It’s great to rescue 143 people, but those 30,000 people the next day and the next night expect to get to and from work.”

On the day of Flight 1549, “basically everything was over by 8:30, everyone was cleared out, but we had to work through the night in order to put some type of service out the next day. You can’t just completely shut down.”

The city Office of Emergency Management is currently revising its maritime evacuation plan, which was first developed as part of the area evacuation plan.

“We are working closely with private vessel operators and city agencies to get that done,” said Kelly McKinney, a deputy commissioner at O.E.M. and another speaker at Interferry. “Those private vessel operators execute the job, they get the work done. They are admired in the city and they are true partners in this effort.”

In some ways, the city just does not have the kind of presence in the harbor that the ferries have. We don’t have today the kind of landings that from an emergency perspective we would like to have. We don’t have the frequency and the location in order to support both evacuations and then logistics following the job.”

McKinney did, however, say that “in terms of financial compensation for some of these past jobs, there’s a gap” that needs to be addressed.

“For those private ferry operators, we are in discussions with them now about how, during  federally declared disasters, those expenses that they incur above and beyond their normal operating expenses, those are reimbursable, those can be paid through federal funds,” he said.

That process of asking Washington for help, he said, is underway.

The ferry companies “are talking with Secretary Napolitano and [the Department of Homeland Security],” he said. ”We want to make sure that when the assets and the dollars get distributed that we’re sitting at the table.”

The post Rebirth of the New York Ferries: Saving Us, to Save Themselves appeared first on City Portraits.

By Mark Hay

The Gowanus Canal does not breed much in the way of hope. A stew of ever-increasing piles of waste—human, industrial, and who knows what other sorts—remains and has grown since the last partial dredging by the United States Army Corps of Engineering in 1975, leaving the toxic waterway breeding not much of anything, other than that smell. So when, on March 2 of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency finally added the canal to its Superfund list—setting it up for its first-ever comprehensive cleaning—there was finally some reason for optimism on the banks of what some locals have nicknamed the Lavender Lake.

But now, some of the E.P.A.’s early findings suggest the impossible: the Gowanus Canal, a poster-child for urban environmental ruin, is even worse than we thought.

“In plain English, it’s quite scary,” said Carl Hum, president and C.E.O. of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. “As a layperson, it was quite shocking.”

When the site was nominated for federal Superfund status in April 2009, the E.P.A. started collecting data, reviewing and analyzing numerous (but scattered and limited) studies conducted over the past decade. This January, the agency began original studies—a bathymetric study, then a sediment sampling two months later, and recent work on test wells for groundwater along the banks. In March, when the Gowanus was officially designated a Superfund site, the E.P.A. began releasing the first truly comprehensive analyses of the Gowanus to the public. Those accounts read like a pharmaceutical supply catalog: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, cadmium, naphthalene, dibenzofuran, bendo(a)pyrene, acetone, ethylbenzene, mercury, and arsenic, to name just a few of dozens.

The canal is also brimming with heavy metals, volatiles, and other organic compounds. According to E.P.A. officials, many areas suffer from contamination measurable in parts per million to parts per hundred. Usually it’s a matter for concern when a waterway reaches a toxicity level measurable in parts per billion. In some places in the canal contaminants compose up to 4.5 percent of the total mass of sediments.

It’s no secret that the city’s industrial past polluted many of its waterways, but the Gowanus is also plagued by the present. To this day, raw sewage spews into the canal from, by some estimates, more than 200 pipes of unknown origin. The Army Corps of Engineers estimated such pipes dumped approximately 292.8 million gallons of sewage in 2005, feeding the canal a robust diet of household toxins, as well as live pathogens, including aggressive, disease-causing bacteria associated with the human digestive tract. And, as New York City College of Technology Professors Nasreen and Niloufar Haque have discovered, the canal has even contracted a case of gonorrhea. That is to say, they have discovered live cultures of the (more often) sexually transmitted bacterium free-floating in sample drops of water—not too surprising when considering that typhus, typhoid and cholera cropped up in studies of the Gowanus in the 1970s. Even worse, the Haque sisters have also identified a new strain of carcinogen- and bacteria-resistant micro-organism evolving on the floor of the canal.

While locals may be surprised by the presence of these (and many, many other) contaminants, E.P.A. officials say what’s in the Gowanus is not what caught the agency off-guard. “There’s currently no cutoff wall between the source areas [of chemical runoff on the shores or at sewer pipes] and the canal,” says E.P.A. community involvement coordinator Natalie Loney. “So it’s not surprising if there was a large increase in contaminants over the last decade.”

What is remarkable, officials say, is the rate at which it happened.

Over just seven years, according to E.P.A. testing, the upper canal has accumulated up to three feet of new sludge. The E.P.A. suspects they will have to remove much of this, but at massive expense—a quarter to half a billion dollars—when it’s not clear whether or not the muck will just pile up again over the course of the next decade.

This is not the first time the Gowanus Canal has been host to ambitious projects and passionate environmental initiatives. As early as 1889, just over 20 years after the official canal opening, and with just four sewers dumping into it, a mayoral commission proposed stemming toxic degradation, defending the costs by asserting that “the condition in which [the canal] is allowed to exist is simply a disgrace to the city of Brooklyn.” Those proposals failed, as did many thereafter.

Even the more successful projects have achieved only partial—and usually dismal—victories. One of the most famous among them is the 1911 construction of Flushing Tunnel, built to pump clean water from the Buttermilk Channel (a short waterway between Brooklyn and Governor’s Island, and also the name of a restaurant in Carroll Gardens) into the Gowanus and push the fetid soup out to sea. But the tunnel has never operated properly. Even after a spirited renovation in 1999, a city report revealed that the pump, intended to provide 300 million gallons per day of fresh water, provided on average only 154 million. Having done little to improve water quality, save at the mouth of the pump, the tunnel is already slated for yet another round of renovations, which the city suspects will increase the force of the pump by only about 60 million gallons per day.

The mostly industrial and sparsely populated area around the Gowanus has never been a political priority, according to Hum, in part because “there’s never been a moment when the city could throw money around.”

“The will [for a cleanup] was always there,” said Katia Kelly, a Brooklyn blogger who has tracked the progress of the Gowanus efforts, “but there aren’t so many people living right on the shores of the canal. It was a lost land—really, as a community, we thought we had lost.”

Before the E.P.A. won the battle, there was a year-long clash between the agency and the Bloomberg administration, which opposed the Superfund designation on the grounds that it would drag on and stall development for over a decade. The city proposed an alternative cleanup plan designed to facilitate residential development on a shorter timeline. Developers promoted the idea of a flourishing and livable Gowanus, brought to fruition by the new residents themselves in an effort to make their long-blighted neighborhood more palatable.

It’s not just developers that see the canal that way. There are groups like the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Clubs that organize regular cleanup missions to tidy the streets and, paddling on the river, skim waste from the tops of the waters—they have attracted thousands to the cause. Others have pointed out with joy that there are some fish swimming in the canal, and have begun to engage in recreational fishing, vocally promoting an image of a relatively clean and healthy Gowanus.

Prominent among these believers is resident Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto, who believes the canal can become an urban Venice right now and promotes development of the area. Responding to the New York Post in 2009 during the first rumblings of Superfunding, Scotto said, “There’s no question the canal is clean enough now to support development.” He attacked the cleanup plan as a political tool employed by those who, in general, opposed development.

But the E.P.A. has made it abundantly clear that the problems of the Gowanus go far deeper than beautifying the streets. “Every time somebody flushes a toilet in Park Slope on a rainy day,” said Kelly, “it goes right into the canal,” dumping more used condoms, paper waste, and human feces (“floatables”) for the Dredgers to pick up.

And the fish, according to a 2004 study by the USACE, pop out from the Buttermilk Channel waters of the Flushing Tunnel and do not propagate. The waters are officially designated as too dangerous for recreation.

Oddly enough, the argument between the E.P.A. and the city ended before either side had totally clear plans, meaning that no one knows exactly what the E.P.A. is going to do.

“We avoid preselecting a remedy,” said Loney, adding that while some solutions have been tossed about based on preliminary data and analysis of pre-existing reports, the E.P.A.’s ultimate timeframe, price tag, and method remain unclear.

Any plan will have to involve dredging the recent massive accumulation of soupy sediment, and the eight to ten feet of unruly coal tar that lies under it. The layers below the coal also contain unhealthy materials, but that, say E.P.A. officials, can be capped and covered with healthier materials. But there is no clear solution on what do to with the dredged material, nor for how to deal with the continuing contamination seeping down from sewage lines and riverbed industrial and development sites.

This points to the severe limitations on the E.P.A.’s cleanup efforts. “Upland portions above the canal are not part of the Superfund site,” said Loney, “but they do impact the site.” The E.P.A. can clean the waters, but must rely on the city and developers to stymie the flow of sewage and chemicals. And that’s not the only issue. For example, coal tar, one of the key pollutants that developmentthreatens to add to the canal, can easily flow around a site’s retaining wall. The E.P.A. has not yet figured out what to do about that.

Kate Orff, Columbia University architecture and urban design professor and founding principal of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, suggests the restoration of native wetlands as a means of naturally beautifying the area while filtering out pollutants from the shore and helping to maintain the E.P.A.’s progress. Such plans, supported by USACE reports, also require upland actions. Also, said Orff, “that process takes time and coordination and management—things often in short supply in an urban real estate driven context.” The very forces necessitating a cleanup—although against their will—also appear to be the primary forces complicating any sort of truly comprehensive longterm solution.

The E.P.A.’s cleanup hinges on concurrent efforts by the city to reduce sewage overflow and toxin leakage and increase water flow down the canal. Loney remains hopeful, and said that the city has been cooperative thus far in E.P.A. cleanup efforts. But Kelly said that the city’s halt on rezoning the area for residential use is just an attempt “to be contradictory and to enact a self-fulfilling prophecy,” whereby restricted development limits the extent of the pressure to clean the canal. She and others also have said that developers like Toll Brothers are bluffing when they threaten to abandon the area, or at least that they are motivated by forces other than the stigma of a Superfund.

Even if the city does pull through and limit toxin seepage, estimates say it will only decrease sewage influx by 34 percent. And the increase in water quality, according to a study by Baruch College, could lead to a housing boom that would increase the residential population by up to 30 percent, effectively negating the sewage reduction and leaving the E.P.A. right where it started. At the very least, “the level of cleanup means that change will happen,” said Orff, “Superfund opens up alternative scenarios for interacting with the water.”

Which may require taking a deep breath.

The post The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club appeared first on City Portraits.

There is a wonderful picture of Maria Schneider at the Newport Jazz Festival last summer. Clad in one of her signature black dresses, her eyes are shut, her head is tilted to one side and her hair swings in the air.

The music of the most important composer in the jazz world has that kind of beauty—and it’s not one always associated with the genre.

“I don’t try to make music that sounds interesting,” she said when when we went with her on a bird-watching trip to Central Park earlier this year. “It’s that thing Wayne Shorter said to me about Miles Davis. He said Miles loved music that didn’t sound like music. I think that’s exactly the idea.”

For the most part, that is true of Schneider’s work. She writes lush, enveloping orchestrations. The trumpet section often plays softer sounding flugelhorns. Her saxophonists will put down their primary instruments and pick up flutes, clarinets and occasionally an English horn. Schneider brings in an accordionist to join in on some of her most recent works.

Schneider, who will turn 50 during her annual Thanksgiving residency at the Jazz Standard this year, uses this instrumental mélange to create music that is unapologetically beautiful. She writes melodies that have a way of morphing into tonal narratives, much like classical works do. What is more, her soloists all have their assigned roles in her musical dramas.

Greg Gisbert is her heroically lyrical flugelhornist. Rich Perry is provides a yearning, introspective voice on tenor saxophone. This much is certain: you will never hear anybody blow a long, self-indulgent solo in one of Schneider’s pieces because if she allowed her players to do that, her music would just sound like any other jazz band, and that would not be beautiful at all.

In fact Schneider does belong to a movement in jazz, a group of similarly inclined musicians who came of age in the nineties, like pianist Brad Mehldau, saxophonists Mark Turner and David Binney, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and the drummer Brian Blade. Their rise was a natural evolution in the history of jazz.

In the politically charged ’60s, the jazz avant-garde rejected melodic beauty in favor of dissonance and experimentation. Then in the Reagan era, the New Traditionalists, led by Wynton Marsalis, led a counter-revolution. They restored swing and melody as primary elements of jazz. Their hero was Miles Davis, the most gifted balladeer in the history of the art form. But Marsalis and his followers were too busy defusing all the bombs thrown out by their predecessors to make much of a new sound themselves.

It was only after the dust settled that Schneider and her allies showed up on the scene and started examining the implications of Davis’ lyricism. Mehldau wrote jazz nocturnes inspired by German romantics like Johannes Brahms. Binney crafted anthems influenced as much by Joni Mitchell as Wayne Shorter. These new musicians became fascinated with beauty, and their aesthetic has reigned in the jazz world ever since.

None of them tapped this vein as deeply as Schneider. She grew up in Windham, Minn., and wrote for jazz big bands at the University of Miami and Eastman School of Music. When she came to New York, she became an assistant to Gil Evans, the legendary arranger who was such a force in the creation of Davis’ classic Sketches of Spain session, and his famous adaptation of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Schneider’s earliest work was heavily indebted to her mentor, and she never pretended this wasn’t the case. The title track of her first album, Evanesence, released in 1994, is a tribute to her mentor.

Her own style didn’t really crystallize until after she visited Brazil in the late ’90s. Schneider was enthralled by the way music had become a part of the common language of the whole culture, not just a pastime, hobby, or special skill.

“Everybody somehow is musical,” Schneider said. “Everybody sits around the table and knows how to tap out certain rhythms, even if they are not musicians. Music is just part of the culture. I love that.”

Upon her return in 2000, Schneider recorded an album entitled Allegresse with pieces inspired by her trip. Unlike a lot of jazz musicians, Schneider isn’t afraid to articulate what her music is about. She plainly stated her intentions in the first sentence of her brief liner notes: “For this recording, I wanted to create music that conveys beauty.”

Perhaps the best example was the opening piece, “Hang Gilding,” an evocation, over a lilting Brazilian 5/4 beat, of what it felt like to fly over Rio de Janeiro.

Schneider continued to draw on folk music for the same effect in her subsequent work. There were stunningly beautiful compositions on her self-produced 2004 recording, Concert in the Garden, that were derived from Brazilian Choro (“Choro Dance”) and flamenco (the epic 18 minute “Buleria, Solea Y Rumba”). The album won a much-deserved Grammy and cemented Schneider’s reputation as the foremost jazz composer and big-band leader of her generation.

But there is an inherent tension in Schneider’s music. The difference between the truly beautiful and the merely pretty can be hard to discern. For the most part, she has trodden the fine line without a misstep. But to this critic’s ears at least, she lost her balance on Sky Blue, her most recent album released three years ago.

Pieces like “The Pretty Road” and “Cerulean Blue” were orchestrated perfectly and full of lovely detail. But they sounded like themes to forgotten B-movies. In other words, they sounded too much like music. (I have to add that I sat through these pieces in concert that year and was similarly disappointed.)

Some of Schneider’s compatriots–particularly Mehldau and Rosenwinkel–have hit similar walls recently. At the same time, some of the best young jazz musicians are drawing deeply from the work of the once-scorned avant-garde that preceded Schneider’s generation. We are living in time of high unemployment and political strife. It is any wonder that beauty is not longer as fashionable as it once was in jazz?

The good news is that Schneider’s prettiness stage was only temporary.

Last fall, she premiered two new works at the Jazz Standard. They were as weighty and magical anything she has previously written.

“The Thompson Field” smacks of Copland but this time, her New Americana is pitch perfect. It helps that the featured soloist is Ben Monder, a guitarist who gives “The Thompson Field” a sharp edge with his electronic effects.

Then there is “Nimbus,” a bracing feature for alto saxophonist Steve Wilson. Schneider said she was as surprised as anybody by its darkness.

“Maybe I just haven’t been to Brazil for a while,” she said, laughing. “It was kind like a lost part of myself came out again, this intense brooding.”

The post Maria Schneider’s Birdland appeared first on City Portraits.

The story of a New York City politician in trouble usually begins with something dramatic or embarrassing. A scandal of some sort—ethics violations, some improprieties of finance, the delving into the illicit—is the catalyst to bring the political opportunists out of the shadows.

This is exactly why the Democratic primary in Manhattan’s 30th State Senate district, which straddles the western and northern parts of Central Park before jutting north through Harlem to the base of the George Washington Bridge along the Harlem River, is such an unusual specimen.

There is no evidence here of the sort of chaos produced by former city councilman Miguel Martinez, who was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing more than $100,000 from city coffers last year, or, at the federal level, by Representative Charles Rangel, accused of ethics violations by his House colleagues.

The incumbent in this race is State Senator Bill Perkins. He is a former city councilmember from Harlem who moved up to the Senate in 2006 after the former senator, David Paterson, became lieutenant governor. He was born and raised in Harlem. He holds a political science degree from Brown University. He is a cancer survivor, as well as a marathon runner. He is uncomplicatedly liberal: he opposed the Iraq War from its start, was arrested protesting the RNC in 2004 and fought to make a living wage the law in New York City. The Nation magazine named him one of the leading local progressive political figures in the country in 2005.

“I’m a product of a movement, the civil rights movement,” Perks said. “I don’t come to this from a cynical point of view. I come to it from the point of view that no matter how dysfunctional or difficult the challenge, that I can be successful.”

He went against his own political interests to support a presidential candidate from Illinois against the hometown favorite in 2008. As a state senator he has fought to make state agencies more accountable and the air cleaner by removing pollutants from heating oil. He is greeted by name on the street, and possesses that crucial political ability of recalling other’s names, faces and stories on command.

Most importantly of all, he is untouched by political scandal. By the conventions of political wisdom, State Senator Bill Perkins should be coasting to a third term.

Basil Smikle, the eminently credible first-time candidate who has decided to challenge Perkins, knows all of this. He is a creature of politics. His life before running for office himself was helping other people run for office. In his attempt to net all the top political fish in the sea for his reelection run last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg reeled Smikle into his campaign. Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, then a Democrat, hired Smikle to oversee his 2004 presidential efforts in New York. Before that, Smikle worked as a Senate aide to Hillary Clinton after helping her win the seat in 2000.

Smikle, like Perkins, grew up in modest financial circumstances. He was raised in the Bronx by Jamaican immigrants who were so intent their son be well-educated that they only allowed him to stay up late to watch television as a child if he agreed to write a report on the program. He, too, has Ivy League credentials, having graduated from Cornell as an undergrad before moving to Harlem to attend Columbia for graduate school in 1994.

From the outside this race has been cast as a battle over charter schools, which is accurate insofar is that’s the most easily identifiable policy difference between the contestants. Earlier this year, Perkins came out in opposition to a plan to raise a limit on charter schools in New York State. Many state and city officials, including both Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg, supported the plan as a way to qualify New York for federal education funds. Perkins and others—including the state’s powerful teachers unions, who have long opposed charters—argued that more oversight was needed to ensure the for-profit schools were meeting students’ and the community’s needs.

“Ninety-seven percent of my constituency is going to wind up in public schools of the traditional type,” Perkins said. “They are frustrated because they see so much of the political leadership looking at the 3 percent that are charters and ignoring the 97 percent where most of the children will be in attendance.”

In the end, the cap was raised, and Perkins got himself a primary opponent. The polarization of Harlem, in particular, over the issue provided a window of opportunity for a savvy, well-connected challenger to enter the race against the senator, garner support over the issue, and raise the necessary funds to be seen as a legitimate contender. Smikle, with his political acumen and history, seized the opportunity.

“In many ways he’s pit parents against each other, neighbors against each other, he carves out sort of a comfortable incumbency for himself where he can observe a lot of what’s happening and observe the turmoil and witness this decline in jobs and in affordable housing and sort of blame everybody else but not take an actual leadership position,” Smikle said of Perkins.

Listen to the candidates speak and you’ll hear more or less the same talking points. While much of the media reporting on the race has focused on the issue of charter schools, on the streets of Harlem neither candidate gets asked much about the issue. Jobs, affordable housing, violence are the issues residents more frequently want to discuss, and both candidates agree that the need for action in all those areas is urgent.

What separates Smikle and Perkins is less policy positions than age. Perkins makes a point of connecting himself to the civil rights era. Smikle, by contrast, presents himself as a product of the success of the civil rights era. Young, politically sophisticated and personally ambitious, Smikle’s professional accomplishments are proof that when Perkins’s generation told Smikle’s it could grow up to be whatever it wanted, it was true.

From Smikle’s perspective, one that many of the emerging leaders of his generation appear to share, that also meant the narrative of success would change. Becoming a Wall Street banker could be considered just as valid a pursuit as becoming a community activist, and public service could take many forms. Which in turns means that the pool of candidates for officialdom would necessarily look different than it did before.

“[Local residents] feel that people have been in there long enough that they’ve been seeing the same names so long that they really want some new blood,” Smikle said. “When you couple that with what happened with Obama in 2008 and Cory Booker a few years prior, there is an appetite for younger leadership, so I think people seem to be ready for my kind of candidacy, I just need to prove to them that I could be just as competent as the folks who’ve come before me.”

Democratic voters in Harlem are about to render a verdict on whether he’s succeeded.

The post Basil Smikle, Bill Perkins, and the Race for Harlem appeared first on City Portraits.

“In Europe at the time, that was not typical,” the 68-year-old trumpeter, who looks like a smaller and more svelte Elvis Costello with his goatee and prominent glasses, said. “We are always saying, ‘He’s fantastic. He plays like Miles. Or he plays like Coltrane.’ We follow. But I felt that it I really wanted to do something serious with this art, I have to build my own language.”

It was clear that the young trumpeter was well on his way when he made his recording debut in 1965 on Astigmatic, an album by Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish pianist-composer who is most famous for writing the music for Roman Polanski’s movies likeKnife in the Water and Rosemary’s Baby. He died in a car accident in Hollywood in 1969.

But the album was ignored by Americans — and not without some justification. This was the same year that John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme hit the stories along with Miles Davis’ E.S.P., and the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra. Who cared what was happening in Poland?

Listen to Astigmatic now, though: it’s clear that Komeda was listening to the newest American sounds and integrating them into his cinematic compositional style, which was full of open space and introspection. It was one of the first examples of the intimate cerebral jazz that would blossom in Europe in the ’70s and be popularized by ECM, the German record label run by producer Manfred Eichner.

And Stanko shone on Astigmatic. By now he had also absorbed the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and his mischievous pocket-trumpet playing sidekick Don Cherry, and was using it to forge his own brand of modernism.

Maybe he should have gone to New York then. He certainly could have held his own. That’s what all the young players do these days. But Stanko wasn’t interested.

“I never pushed,” he said. “ Music has always given me pleasure. I can always play. I just follow life as it goes naturally.”

And anyway he had an audience of adoring fans in his homeland. It was easier to stay in Poland.

His big break came in 1975 when he signed with ECM himself. His first record for the label, Balladya, was a gem featuring the English bassist Dave Holland and the Finnish drummer Edward Velesa. Even today, some people compare Stanko to Davis. But it was now clear how tenuous the connection was.

They are both brooding, intimate players. But you don’t feel as if you’re intruding on something private and possibly dangerous when you listen to the Pole as you often to do when you hear Davis. Stanko is more of an absurdist. He plays like a guy who would buy you a drink at a bar and tell you jokes, rather than cursing you as his American counterpart was so famous for doing. It didn’t make him better than Miles; it just meant he was doing something very different.

Balladya was Stanko’s first album as a leader for ECM. And it would be his last for nearly a decade and a half.

The trumpet player hinted that it might have had something to do with the baggage he carried at the time. He said his lifestyle at the time was “a very dark one.” He is the first to admit that it involved smoking, drinking and “doing dope.”

THEN HIS TEETH BEGAN TO FALL OUT. In 1992, Stanko had to cancel a tour because he could no longer play. This is every trumpet player’s nightmare. Sure, you can get a false set. But it changes the embouchure that you have spent years perfecting. Some great trumpet players who have lost their teeth and replaced them say they never fully regain their technique or their old comfort on their instrument.

In Stanko’s case, things turned out differently. He got new teeth and regained his glory by playing hours of long tones while watching television. He particularly enjoyed observing tennis matches while practicing this way. Two months after he was fitted with new teeth, he got a call from his friend, Polish film composer Zbigniew Preisner. He was doing the score for Louis Malle’s Damage, an overwrought film about a politician who falls in love with his son’s girlfriend.

The French director wanted a jazz trumpeter on the score. Stanko felt he couldn’t say no. After all, Malle had hired Miles Davis himself to provide the music for his 1958 film noir classic Elevator to the Gallows. “My friend called me and he said, ‘Man, you have to play. You know, after Miles Davis, only you can do it.’”

Stanko was afraid but he showed up at the recording studio and played several solos. All his tedious practicing had paid off: He sounded as strong as ever before.

“I didn’t do many second or third takes because I wasn’t in condition. But as a jazz musician, I can always use my imagination.”

Stanko picked up his horn and looked at it curiously. “Music isn’t here,” he said pointing to the Monette. “It’s in the brain. Sound is your life. Everything is in your sound.”

He also chose his moment to clean up his life.

“I stopped using dope,” he said. “I stopped drinking and smoking cigarettes. Then I have plenty of time and I also have power to believe. It was a new period of my life. It was fantastic.”

Stanko also went back to ECM after a long break, and this time, his career took off.

Stanko fell in love with jazz as a teenager in the late ’50s. He adored the sparse playing of Chet Baker and Miles Davis. It wasn’t just the mournful beauty of their sounds or the way they seemed to be walking on eggshells when they soloed. Their hip, stylish music was the sound of something forbidden under his country’s repressive communist regime: American-style freedom.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before he ended up in New York. It was always his dream. It took years for him to get a gig in New York. When Stanko first visited the city in 1979, he came as a tourist and stayed at the YMCA.

“I just wanted to check out this famous city of the jazz musicians — like Coltrane and Miles,” he said.

A great deal has changed since then. Somewhat belatedly, he became an international jazz star in his 50s. He can play very dissonantly, but he can also reach into your soul with a single note like Baker and Miles. He has even won over xenophobic American jazz fans who think their countrymen have a monopoly on soul. His recent album Dark Eyes on ECM is dripping with the Eastern European variety.

New York never lost its magic for Stanko. Two years ago, he decided to get his own apartment in this city of the famous jazz musicians.

“I’m a lazy guy,” he said. “To live here is pretty tough for a European musician. It’s hard. But two years ago, the dollar was down and the Polish zloty was very high. I started to count my money.”

He pretends to do so, dropping imaginary coins into his hand: “Okay, cool. Bop, bop, bop. And I am here.”

Here is his studio apartment on 86th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. He is relaxing on the sofa. His trumpet, a shiny new custom-built Monette, lies nearby along with a black plastic mute that he sticks into the bell so he doesn’t disturb his neighbors while practicing. From time to time, Stanko forgets something and makes a Skype call to Warsaw to see if his daughter Anna, who is also his manager, remembers. She usually does.

His apartment is a fairly small place with a spiral staircase that that leads up to a loft where he sleeps. But for Stanko, it is wondrous to be here.

“I don’t have too many dreams,” he said in his fluent, if heavily accented English. “People ask me, ‘what are you dreaming? To play with somebody?’ I always play with good musicians. I was satisfied with my art, my music. But if I have a dream, it was to be in New York, to be a New Yorker.”

Stanko is quick to add that he still spends half his time in Warsaw.

“Of course, I am not a New Yorker. I am only living partly in New York. But I have a small apartment on the Upper West Side, and I feel fantastic that I can enjoy the city every morning, the style of life, the energy on the street.”

Already, the city has seeped into his music. The trumpet player has written three love letters to Manhattan on Dark Eyes. There is “Grand Central,” an appropriately tense composition inspired by his visits to the terminal. “For a while, I was living at the Hotel Deauville at 28th and Park,” Stanko said. “I was crossing all the time, crossing Grand Central.”

“Amsterdam Avenue” is an edgy, late-night ballad inspired by things closer to his apartment.

“I can wake up and look out the window and see the traffic on Amsterdam Avenue,” he said. And “The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsch,” a 10-minute piece with moments of balladry and fast swing, refers to a painting by the expressionist Oskar Kokoschka that Stanko has spent hours studying at the Neue Galerie of German and Austrian art on Fifth Avenue. “It’s just a few minutes away through Central Park,” he said.

But more than anything, there’s a sharper edge on Dark Eyes that hasn’t always been evident on Stanko’s last few records, which were much more impressionistic works. It’s obvious that he had been out at the city’s clubs, soaking up the latest sounds. He and his excellent band of young musicians from Scandinavia sound like more like Americans, particularly the excellent Danish guitarist Jacob Bro. He is the perfect foil for the trumpeter.

Stanko picks up his un-muted horn and blows a gorgeous burst of brassy notes. “I believe in paradox,“ he said. “Paradox is kind of the motor of life.”

That’s all the music for now. He lives in New York. The last thing he wants is a fight with the neighbors.

The post The Language of Tomasz Stanko appeared first on City Portraits.

Bona drag: From Bert Savoy to Charles Busch to Tyra Sanchez

By James Jorden | June 17, 2010

It was two whole seasons before I understood ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’ But when I got it, the show changed everything I thought I knew about drag.

At first, the drag on the Bravo competition show just made no sense. Yes, it was pretty; occasionally it was gorgeous. The queens could breeze through the complex gymnastic dance routines while doing flawless lip-synching in even more flawless makeup. But then they would stumble on the simplest tasks, such as acting a brief campy scene.

No, these were not the drag queens I knew. And I’ve known a few of them. My ex—let’s just call him “C”—did drag part-time back in the late 1980s. (How many nights did I have to call the car service postponing the pickup for half an hour, an hour, two hours, four hours…) C and I were best friends with a full-time drag queen, and by full-time I mean she was Empress-elect of the Imperial Court of New York. I even did drag once or twice back then, though never again after that awful post-performance experience removing duct tape (I wanted cleavage, all right?) and taking with it about three layers of dermis. I have never known worse pain, and what did my C do? He shoved two Tylenols and half a tab of Ecstasy down my throat, put me to bed, and went out to Sound Factory. Which, come to think of it, is the main reason C is now my ex.

And even though I haven’t worn duct tape, or even false eyelashes, since roughly the Gulf War, today I’m known best online as a drag persona: the opera gossip columnist La Cieca, a role I’ve played for almost 15 years now.

Yet I just couldn’t fathom those wannabe Next Drag Superstars. To be sure, I spotted the eventual winner, Tyra Sanchez, early on, but if you asked me why she was destined to win, I couldn’t have told you. She wasn’t as pretty as Tatianna or Morgan McMichaels, as glamorous as Raven or Sahara Davenport, or as witty as Jessica Wild or Pandora Boxx. Tyra was sullen, uncooperative, slow on the uptake, and ignorant of anything in popular culture beyond Beyoncé: at one point she lost the thread of a backstage conversation and asked in her gravely monotone “What’s Bollywood?”

This is drag? I always thought drag was about camp style, a parody of femininity and middle-class values. Camp is certainly a through-line of drag from its modern beginnings in vaudeville female impersonation acts like Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy.

Savoy’s untimely death in 1923, in fact, may have been the ultimate act of camp. According to legend, he was strolling on the beach with a few friends as a storm approached. Startled by a sudden thunderclap, he squealed, “Ain’t Miss God cuttin’ up somethin’ awful?” And then he was struck dead by a bolt of lightning.

By the 1920s, the drag subculture was so well established in New York that Mae West (who based her stage persona on Savoy’s act) could set the climactic scene of her 1926 melodrama “The Drag” at a downtown cross-dressing ball. True, the play closed out of town, but not because the drag material puzzled audiences. On the contrary, anti-vice groups objected to the (barely) double-entendre dialogue West adapted from the queens’ raunchy club patter. In one scene, a straight cab driver protests to a drag queen, “I just don’t get you guys!” The queen snaps, “If you don’t, you’re the first taxi driver that didn’t.”

THIS TRANSGRESSIVE, SEXUALLY AGGRESSIVE ELEMENT of drag also informed the downtown arts scene of the early 1960s. Playwright Charles Busch singles out filmmaker Jack Smith as an icon of what might be called Art Drag, a type of performance art in which drag is so deconstructed as to offer not even the possibility of identification of the performer as female. In “Normal Love” Smith’s muse Mario Montez sports ragtag bits of women’s clothing, his face is sloppily slathered with makeup, and he strikes poses learned by rote from 1940s B-movies, but never is there an instant of doubt that he is a muscular male: even his stage name deliberately betrays his gender.

Julie Halston and Charles Busch in “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” Photo by Craig Schwartz Photography

But even at his most cinched and fill-lit glossiest, Charles isn’t fooling anyone visually: the auburn pageboy and Adrian shoulder pads don’t conceal the middle-aged, round-faced fellow underneath.

If it’s not a real woman on stage (as Busch constantly, subtly reminds us), then we have permission to buy into a brand of old-fashioned theatrical extravagance that a biologically correct actress couldn’t sell nowadays. Busch, an avid student of theater history, recreates for his audiences the experience of seeing a great actress playing in a stage or screen vehicle, but he does it though a lens of intentional camp. Distanced from the unlikely melodramatics by laughter, we can thrill to glamorous virtuoso Gertrude Garnet’s clash with the Nazis in “The Lady in Question” or shudder at has-been screen siren Angela Arden’s LSD-induced breakdown in “Die, Mommie, Die!”

If a modern-day Katherine Cornell or Susan Hayward were to attempt to this kind of stuff straight, the result would be unintentional, embarrassing camp. Busch circumvents this hazard by tacitly announcing, “None of this is any more literal than I am a woman.” He further distances himself from the material by playing, not the role, but rather, the actress who plays the role. He always writes his character a “delayed entrance,” deliberately teasing the audience with hints of the leading lady’s impending arrival. Finally, when the big moment arrives—when the spectacle of the great lady sweeping down a staircase or through a pair of French doors—finally transpires, the audience plays along with the gag, interrupting play’s action with an ovation while the “leading lady” basks in the waves of love across the footlights.

So well does Busch play the onstage diva that it takes a few moments to get accustomed to the real, offstage Charles: soft-spoken, witty and generous.

When I interviewed him earlier this month in connection with the impending Channel 13 telecast of the documentary “The Lady in Question is Charles Busch,” I hesitated to broach so pedestrian a topic as reality television. To my delight, Charles admitted that he adored reality competition shows (though “I don’t care about those housewives”) and he chatted eagerly about the most recent season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

Admitting that he lacked an important prerequisite talent for such a competition (“I am the world’s worst lip-syncher”), he mused that if he and John “Lypsinka” Epperson ever appeared on the show “we’d be eliminated the first week.”

And that’s probably true, though not because Busch or Lypsinka lack glamour, talent or a Helen Lawsonesque level of gritty determination, but rather because the show focuses on exactly the quality Busch and other “Art Drag” artists deliberately avoid: verisimilitude or, in the terminology of drag-house culture, “realness.”

Tyra Sanchez commands realness, though not in the way you might expect. Yes, she’s pretty, and she moves well, and if you squinted really hard she might (just) pass for a biological woman, but lots of other queens do all these things far better than Tyra. No, Tyra’s realness, and it is absolute, is the realness of being a diva.

Yes, “diva” is a double-edged sword, and Tyra’s behavior during the series exemplified many of the qualities we associated with obnoxious diva behavior. She was late, she was lazy, she was self-absorbed, she was difficult. And yet, she also produced dazzling moments of that almost-supernatural fascination that only true divas can.

The most stunning example occurred during the wedding challenge, and that was the moment when I knew Tyra was the winner. A number of the other contestants criticized her on the runway, and for a moment the strain got to her. Her eyes welled up and her lips trembled, but she shoved the emotion down, repaired her mascara and stood tall. And then, she pulled her tulle wedding veil over her face. It was an instinctive gesture, but the slight distancing effect somehow made her seem all the more regal. No, not regal: she didn’t look like a queen. She looked like a goddess, and somehow at the same time like a statue of that goddess in a temple to herself, disdainful, proud, not of this earth.

At the time, all I thought was “wow!”—but on reflection, I realize what Tyra was doing there. No—not doing. What she was being there. Tyra was being a diva.

Now, Charles Busch does diva, which is to say he portrays divas—expertly, with the technique and style of a brilliant actor and writer. But Tyra Sanchez has diva in her DNA.

This is not be the drag I know, but it may be the highest form of drag of them all.

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Enter the world of the king/queen of drag with a look at the actor/playwright’s early influences and his arduous rise to New York theater stardom in this 2005 documentary film directed by John Catania and Charles Ignacio.

In Catania and Ignacio’s first feature documentary we look deep inside the world of one of the most prolific, talented, and outrageous New York theater artists of the last two decades, beloved playwright, actor, novelist, drag artist, and leading lady, Charles Busch. Splashed on the map in 1984 at the dingy yet inspired Limbo Lounge as one of the burgeoning artists of New York’s East Village arts scene, Busch’s scandalously sex-charged, cross-dressing classic, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom quickly became a theater phenomenon. It moved from the Limbo Lounge to the Provincetown Playhouse and ran an unprecedented five years, securing its place as one of the longest-running shows in Off- Broadway history. Vampire Lesbians of Sodom also marked the birth of one of New York’s most memorable theatrical companies, as Busch’s legendary Theater-in-Limbo plays brought together an eclectic troupe of actors whose talents are on display in rare archival video footage.

For more information, visit www.theladyinquestion.com

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