Trio: Three Squares – 2002
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
and the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich
and your ma is good-lookin’
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry
One of these mornings
you’re gonna rise up singing
And you’ll spread your wings
and you’ll take to the sky
But till that morning
there ain’t nothin’ can harm you
With daddy and mammy standin’ by
–Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, Dubose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin (1934)
I am not so sure about the livin’ is easy part of summertime. Summer has often felt more like steel cage death match for me. Or a grim and gritty fever dream. You might ascertain that it is not my favorite season by a long stretch.
But that doesn’t take anything away from my appreciation of the great aria from Porgy and Bess. Like so many great songs, it’s melody and lyrics are so beautifully composed that it’s hard to find a performance that doesn’t resonate. There have been many, many great versions of this classic and there’s hardly a lemon among them. The Ella Fitzgerald version is perhaps the gold standard though that might be debatable. I am sharing a live performance by Janis Joplin from 1969 in Amsterdam. I probably like this version because it has the grit and tone of my summers.
The image at the top is a small triptych from 2002 that hangs in my studio. It has long been a favorite and still gives me a rush when I look up at it, like I did just this moment. I see it as a link between my earliest work of the mid and late 1990’s that focused on sparsely detailed blocks of color and the subsequent work.
Here’s Janis…
It’s been a warm summer. I guess for some of us that’s an understatement. The mowed lawns are burned to the color of Shredded Wheat and ponds show more and more of their banks as the water levels slowly descend. There’s a dustiness in the air from the driveway that coats everything and the thickness of the heat has me dreaming of hopefully cooler days ahead in the fall and winter.
Redtree Times 