With Kory and Max

With Kory and Max. This would have been VS185X Songs & Places: The International Edition, in Spring 2012. (I named it for the English language version of the Herald Tribune in Paris..) We were blessed with some particularly good people that term--including Max here, with accordion. An architecture major, with an architect's acuteness, Max brought a very individual sensibility--the way he'd structure his projects in terms of oppositions--I remember his Mississippi John Hurt Avalon, with the city train and country train pulling beautifully in opposite directions. But he also brought a very generous musical sensibility--the subtle way he could add his Max phrasing to Goodnight, Irene. (See Songs & Places post.) Next to him is Kory--this may have been the first term we encountered each other,  but it seems now that we've been friends for ever. There were some Argentine songs that semester--but Kory's family was from México, which gave her a different perspective--I had to try and win her over to the canciones criollas. (Her father and uncle had been singers in some rough borderland cantinas as young men, and their rancheras were Kory's bedrock.) Months later, though, well after the class, she made her own trip to Argentina, in part to sort this out. (See Kory post.)

One of the things I loved about these Thursday evenings was the back and forth like this. (Probably the three of us during the class break.) Everyone brought their own experiences, but that table and lamp in Room 170 provided a common ground where we could begin to share them...
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The sign in the background was a project from Charlie Dubbs--who'd spent a year in the south of Chile. His engagement with the environmental plight of the local people in their struggle with a Spanish hydro-electric dam corporation was another of the strands in the class...


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