The Year in Review

8. Year of the Blues Despite questionable inclusions and woeful omissions, both this year’s PBS series and host of special recordings, reissues and anthologies gave the blues some overdue national attention.

9. Comedy Central At a time when cloning Law & Order and CSI is considered a gutsy creative move at the networks, Comedy Central offered the boldest, funniest pair of shows on broadcast or cable with The Daily Show and Chappelle’s Show.

10. The dominance of hip-hop, R&B and urban music Anytime a bland pop jock like Rick Dees is playing crunk on his Top 40 show, it’s a sign that the music has emerged as the sound of Young America. Like it or not, rap and R&B are for now what Motown and Stax were to the mid-’60s.

David Maddox

When asked to pick the most significant cultural events in the past year, one way to look at it is that what’s most significant is what occurs where you are. Localism becomes more important every year as a monolithic culture, the product of an inexorable commercial and political logic for consolidation and expansion, penetrates deeper into social, psychic, economic and physical space. Here are best-of lists for music and visual arts, more or less chronological within each category. Plenty of these artists came from out of town, but when they’re here, they’re ours.

Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, Feb. 22 at Acklen house party Flaherty played sax relentlessly, the fruit of a lifetime of going his own way and staying “local” back East. Corsano was a revelation, a young, technically amazing drummer, and musically wise beyond his years. This show took place at a house party, which was a great way to cohabit with the music.

LaDonna Smith, June 21 at Ruby Green This Birmingham-based musician makes avant-garde improvisation a deeply Southern art form by insisting that it teem with humor and storytelling. Using viola and voice, she converted a conversation with her 100-year-old aunt from earlier in the day into a performance at Ruby Green that was part narrative and part abstract play in sound and rhythm. She also did a hilarious piece about dogs. Her show challenged people like me who take all this stuff so seriously to lighten up.

Davey Williams and Martin Klapper, Oct. 3 at Springwater Guitarist Williams, the other heavyweight on the Birmingham new music scene, came to Nashville with Copenhagen-based percussionist Klapper. Williams is a great musician, but everything was overshadowed by Klapper’s “kit”—two card tables crammed with toys of all sorts and colors, which he blew, struck, threw, hit and switched on to make noises that were as fun to watch as they were to hear.

Peggy Snow sings Mahler In German. With the Cherry Blossoms. At Springwater. Peggy’s voice is so tender, it’s the perfect vehicle for Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. Hang it up, Blair School of Music—let’s have more late Romantic pieces performed where you can buy beer by the pitcher.

Parts and Labor, Nov. 20 at Springwater It’s 2 in the morning, a bleary-eyed time on a school night, and then this synthesizer-led New York band starts up and cuts through the fuzziness with sharp, bright sounds and tight song structures that bounce ferociously like cybernetic bunnies.

“Glass of the Avant Garde,” Cheekwood The most voluptuous show this year. Object after exquisite object made in Central Europe during the years 1900-1938. The glass was molded, cut, etched, blasted and painted, with a consistently elevated sense of shape and image. Stylistically, it covered a trajectory from Art Nouveau into the classic modernism of the Bauhaus, all of it threaded with idealism about the importance and concrete value of design.

Dorna McDonald May This year at Garage Mahal, May had a show of her nature-oriented fantasies that dig for deep connections with the earth, arriving, whether intended or not, at an inherent paganism. But her gallery show was missing the family portraits she exhibited earlier in the year at the Renaissance Center in Dickson. Those paintings of her husband, children, kids-in-law and infant grandchild overflowed with love and affection for her family.

Amy Pleasant, Ruby Green Yet another visitor from Birmingham! This one-person show gave Pleasant room to lay out her almost scientific way of analyzing the world through the process of painting. She envisions human experience in pattern and representation, recorded in paintings with a lovely understated quality.

“The Art of Tennessee,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts This is the kind of show we expect from the Frist Center—broad in scope, thorough and stimulating both in the objects on display and the ideas built into the show’s structure. It succeeded particularly well in bringing out Tennessee art’s historical foundations. Given that a high portion of the local visual arts GDP is going to go the Frist, all we ask is that they do something this good year in and year out.

Todd McDaniel, Fugitive Art Center A Nashville painter of abstractions that brood and glow. These works displayed attentiveness and an economy of means worthy of a Zen master. He doesn’t show his paintings often, so I was glad to have had this chance to see them.