Three year hiatus

The nine variables returns after a three year hiatus. Back from Philippines to Australia.  Now in Iraq.

Baghdad Early 60s

Donald Byrd, Renegade Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 80

Donald Byrd, one of the leading jazz trumpeters of the 1950s and early 1960s, who became both successful and controversial in the 1970s by blending jazz, funk and rhythm and blues into a pop hybrid that defied categorization, died on Feb. 4 in Dover, Del. He was 80. His death was confirmed by Haley Funeral Directors of Southfield, Mich. Word of Mr. Byrd’s death had circulated online for several days, but was not announced by his family. Almost from the day he arrived in New York City in 1955 from his native Detroit, Mr. Byrd was at the center of the movement known as hard bop, a variation on bebop that put greater emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. Known for his pure tone and impeccable technique, he performed or recorded with some of the most prominent jazz musicians of that era, including John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and the drummer Art Blakey, considered one of jazz’s great talent scouts. As a bandleader, Mr. Byrd was something of a talent scout himself: he was one of the first to hire a promising young pianist named Herbie Hancock — who, like Mr. Byrd, would later become known for a renegade approach that won a wide audience but displeased many critics. Mr. Byrd, a strong advocate of music education, spent much of the 1960s teaching. Then, in 1973, he made a surprising transition to pop stardom with the release of the album “Black Byrd,” produced by the brothers Larry and Fonce Mizell, who had been his students at Howard University in Washington. With Mr. Byrd’s restrained trumpet licks layered over an irresistible funk groove seasoned with wah-wah guitar and simple, repeated lyrics (“Get in the groove, just can’t lose”), “Black Byrd” reached the Billboard Top 100, where it peaked at No. 88. Mr. Byrd was hardly the first jazz musician to try such a crossover: Miles Davis had achieved a similar musical synthesis with “Bitches Brew” three years earlier. But “Black Byrd” was more overtly pop-oriented, and its success was extremely rare for a jazz musician. It became, and for a long time remained, the best-selling album in the history of Blue Note Records, the venerable jazz label for which Mr. Byrd had been recording since the 1950s. “Then the jazz people starting eating on me,” Mr. Byrd recalled in a 1982 radio interview. “They had a feast on me for 10 years: ‘He’s sold out.’ Everything that’s bad was attributed to Donald Byrd. I weathered it, and then it became commonplace. Then they found a name for it. They started calling it ‘jazz fusion,’ ‘jazz rock.’ ” The criticism did not stop him from making more pop records. In addition to recording as a leader, he organized some of his Howard students into a group called the Blackbyrds and produced their records. The band had a string of hit singles in the 1970s, including “Walking in Rhythm,” which reached the Top 10 on the pop charts, and “Rock Creek Park,” which evoked late-night romance in a wooded park in Washington, D.C. “Rock Creek Park” became something of a local anthem and one of many recordings by Mr. Byrd to be sampled by rap and hip-hop artists, including Public Enemy, Nas and Ludacris. His music and the Blackbyrds’ has been sampled more than 200 times, with the 1975 album “Places and Spaces” among his most frequently repurposed recordings, according to the Web site whosampled.com. “They use all of the music that I did in the ’50s, ’60s and the ’70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J,” Mr. Byrd told students in a lecture at Cornell in 1998. “I’m into all that stuff.” Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II was born in Detroit on Dec. 9, 1932. His father, E. T. Byrd, was a Methodist minister. His music studies there at Wayne State University were interrupted by two years in the Air Force. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State, Mr. Byrd moved to New York, where he began his jazz career in earnest and received a master’s in music education from the Manhattan School of Music. His musical pursuits were paralleled by a lifelong interest in education. He taught jazz at Howard, North Carolina Central University, Rutgers, Cornell, the University of Delaware and Delaware State University, and also studied law. In 1982 he received a doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University. He spent many years, at various institutions, teaching a curriculum that integrated math and music education. In 2000 Mr. Byrd was given a Jazz Masters award by the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Byrd had homes in Dover, Del., and Teaneck, N.J. Information on his survivors was not available. In his 1998 Cornell lecture Mr. Byrd said he had been inspired by musicians who changed music, notably John Coltrane. “I met him in the 11th grade in Detroit,” he told the students. “I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy’s band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You want to play?’ “So he played piano, and I soloed. I never thought that six years later we would be recording together, and that we would be doing all of this stuff. The point is that you never know what happens in life.” New York Times By WILLIAM YARDLEY Published: February 11, 2013 Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Electric Boogaloos - Soul Train

Johnny Otis - Watts Breakaway

RIP Etta James 1938-2012

RIP Johnny Otis 1921-2012

Fairweather and Foul: Art as Driftwood

ONE night in April 1952 near Darwin, a strange, shy man, 60 years old, with a cultured voice and intense pale blue eyes, climbed aboard a raft he had constructed from aircraft drop tanks, and shoved off into the Timor Sea.

He carried a sack of dried bread to last 10 days and a compass. Within minutes the waves slapped up between the planks.

A week or so later, after search planes gave him up for dead, the obituary of Ian Fairweather appeared in newspapers in Britain and Australia.

To Australians at least, his story is as familiar as a slouch hat. He was British, the youngest son of a distinguished surgeon-general in the Indian army, and had grown up on Jersey in a large house with a butler. A prize-winning student at the Slade, he had known Augustus John, Somerset Maugham and Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, whose brother was engaged to his sister Queenie. He had shared a successful exhibition with Walter Sickert in London and one of his paintings was hung in the Tate. Until the moment of his disappearance, he was living in Gauguinesque squalor in the stern half of a derelict patrol boat. Locals in Darwin referred to him, not without derision, as "Rear Admiral".

"If he had died on that raft, as he nearly did," says Murray Bail, whose updated edition of Fairweather (Murdoch Books, 280pp, $125) is the fruit of almost four decades of sleuthing, "he'd be a pleasant sort of minor footnote; a post-impressionist, with a Chinese flavour, of what he called his tourist pictures."

But Fairweather did not die. He touched shore after 16 days at sea and, profoundly altered by his near-suicidal journey, survived to become one of the most revered Australian artists of the century; a figure comparable to Nobel prize-winning novelist Patrick White, who looked up to Fairweather as a model of commitment to art. (White wrote with Fairweather's painting Gethsemane above his desk and borrowed characteristics of Fairweather for his novel about a reclusive artist, The Vivisector.) Ten years after Fairweather was discovered alive, future Time magazine critic Robert Hughes queued all night in a sleeping bag outside Sydney's Macquarie Galleries so that he might buy one of the "post-raft" works. "The emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty", Hughes wrote of another of Fairweather's paintings, Epiphany, "seem to me surpassed by no other Australian picture". Bail goes further: "There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art -- or anywhere else."

In 1951, one year before Fairweather's mysterious sea voyage, Sidney Nolan arrived in Britain and based himself there until his death 40 years later. Most educated Britons will have heard of the urbane Nolan, Australian artist of the iconographic Ned Kelly series ("Sir Ned Kelly", White called him). The same cannot be said of Fairweather: a British painter of arguably greater interest and depth who, though well-read, quite learned, fluent in four or five languages, concealed himself on his own in the Australian bush on and off for the same length of time and whose work, mingling the styles of East and West, bridges two cultures that grow closer by the minute. As Bail writes:

Due to the nature of things, reticence and distance on Fairweather's part, the rest of the world scarcely knows, or even knows now, of his existence.

I first came across Fairweather when researching a biography of Bruce Chatwin. I was staying south of Brisbane with a friend of Chatwin's who had on her wall a grey abstract painted in gouache on pages of The Courier Mail. The painting, Bail says, "knocked Bruce's socks off". (Swedish critic John Sundkvist has likened the effect of standing before a Fairweather to a mineshaft opening up in front of you: "Whether it's like something else or not doesn't matter. What it communicates is complete unconditional necessity and of resistance overcome.") Chatwin wanted to know more. Who was this reclusive artist who signed his works "IF"? Where had he come from? How had he got to Australia?

After getting hold of the first (and substantially different) edition of Bail's book, published in 1981, Chatwin wrote to the author: "I read Ian Fairweather from cover to cover. Absolutely A1. I haven't read so enjoyable an Art Book (which it isn't) ever . . . What a figure! And what a destiny!" A key to Fairweather's mysterious life and art is held by his nephew Geoffrey, the owner of his copyright and, at 90, a tall, spry lightning rod to a separate age. In his small upstairs drawing room overlooking the Malvern Hills in Ledbury in the West Midlands, he points at a portrait of his walrus-moustached grandfather, surgeon-general James Fairweather ("a man of the most perfect temper", according to his commanding officer) who fought in the 1857 Indian Mutiny and was responsible for the sanitary conditions of 19 million Punjabis. "That was Ian's father."

Geoffrey fishes out a few belongings: Ian's jade seal, with his name engraved in Chinese. A photograph of Ian in his 20s, rather resembling D.H. Lawrence. "He's distant. I don't know what it is. I'd say bereft." And two albums: one bulging with blue airmail letters sent by Fairweather to his brothers and sisters, all written in the same wavering hand, as though on bark; the other containing photographs of the family at Forest Hill, the grand house on Jersey.

I flick through the photographs, pausing over a child's watercolour of a boy hiding up a tree.

"Who's that?"

The boy wears pink-striped pyjamas and stares down at a man and a woman in evening dress, about to kiss. Underneath someone has written in pencil: "The incident of a certain small boy who sat up a tree and saw and heard things he should not."

"That's Ian."

The youngest of nine children, he was born in Scotland in 1891, the year Gauguin landed in Tahiti. His solitary childhood smacks of Kipling, Saki and Maugham, all brought up by stiff, starchy strangers. When he was six months old, his father was recalled to India as medical adviser to the maharaja of Kapurthala. With reluctance, his parents left Ian in the care of two pious, alcoholic spinster aunts. He would not clap eyes again on his mother until he was nine.

The aunts took him to live in Brechin, Sydenham and Jersey. It is likely that he experienced the same traumatic incident as his siblings. One morning, says Geoffrey, the aunts thought that the world was coming to an end and dressed the children in Sunday clothes. "The blinds were drawn and they had to wait for the end of the world, and it didn't come." When one of the aunts fell out of a window, Ian's mother made him go and see her body in its coffin.

In 1901, his parents had returned from India and scooped him up to Forest Hill, but scant attention was paid to Ian, least of all by his mother, an irresponsible and extravagant woman who spent a fortune on hats. "She always looked astonished and a little alarmed," he remembered, "as though some strange bird had flown into the room." His best friends on Jersey were ravens that perched on his head, gouging beak marks in his scalp. Aged 10, he ran across the rocks, staying out all night on an inlet cut off by the tide: he wanted to experience what it would be like to be alone on a desert island, he said. Islands, isolation, escape, already he was determining his themes. A favourite novel was Knut Hamsun's Pan, which sent him one winter to live in Norway. "I still remember the opening lines of it in Norwegian. Translated they are: "I sit here and think of that time, of the hut I lived in, of the forest behind the hut."

His father made him go into the army. Australian bushfires afterwards recalled for him the inferno at Louvain. Mentioned in despatches, he witnessed one of the last cavalry charges at Mons on August 22, 1914. Two days later he was captured with his regiment en bloc, and spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war, despite managing to escape three times. "I even got on to the frontier once and saw freedom just a few hundred yards away, but I failed." His "department" was map-making and stitching German uniforms from Russian overcoats, in which disguise he marched out of Freiberg Camp, pretending to be part of a drainage commission. His two fellow escapees have left us this image: "My brother and I watched him crawl -- a strangely pathetic figure in spite of the brave uniform -- into the centre of a dense patch of Indian corn growing alongside the path, and then we made off at our best pace."

Once, on being recaptured, he was placed in solitary confinement in a "cage". Three weeks without food. Only the smells of fresh bread from a bakery nearby to sustain him. His family believed this experience may have unhinged Fairweather.

"He's a very difficult man to work out," says Bail. "I don't understand him. Some sort of schizophrenia may have kicked in, triggered by the war."

Fairweather saw it a different way: "I think perhaps those years I spent as a prisoner of war were some of the happiest of my life -- no responsibility for practical things like money, food and shelter, endless time to devote to something I enjoyed doing." Because in prison he had begun to draw.

The war over, Fairweather enrolled at the Slade, studying drawing under Henry Tonks, who found him "profoundly melancholic". He was 37 when, as he confessed, "my world collapsed". It was 1928 and his artistic career was leading nowhere. "My family were fed up with me. They paid me off, as I saw it." They handed him pound stg. 100 and a one-way passage to Canada, where he worked on the prairies, harvesting grain for poor farmers. "I have to steal from the granary and spend my odd moments masticating wheat," he wrote to his long-suffering friend Jim Ede, who would encourage collectors like Eddy Sackville-West to buy a painting. "My people would not raise a finger to help towards anything to do with art." (Ten years later, when he was living in a deserted cinema in Brisbane and using billboards for easels, Fairweather's mother wired pound stg. 30, which gave him a "belly-ache" to accept. "My dear," his mother wrote, "what is a cinema compared to a healthy, honest life?"). Sickened by his family, Fairweather confided to Ede: "Though I wish to return home one day, I do not wish them to know of me any more." In loco parentis, Ede sent him a paintbox. It reached Fairweather on an island off Vancouver, where he was looking after the property of an absent landlord. "I am all alone on this island," he replied.

Then, this harbinger: "I am making a raft of driftwood." And, much later: "I sometimes wish I had stayed there."

Geoffrey Fairweather rereads that last sentence and laughs. "This is looking back; he didn't like it in the end -- he fell out with the owner, who was a bit of a basket and didn't pay him. It's all better when he looks back. Always something would go against him and he moved on."

Fairweather's next billet was Geoffrey's home in Victoria, British Columbia. Geoffrey would have been the same age as the boy in the pink-striped pyjamas when he met his uncle in Canada. His eyewitness account is not much, but it's the one glimpse by someone still alive of Fairweather before he arrives in Australia. It was the winter of 1929. Geoffrey was sitting in his parents' kitchen when there was a rap on the door. "Next thing I heard was my father shout, 'No! No! I'm your brother.' I looked out and I could see my father holding this really shabby man on the veranda by the scruff of his coat. What he'd said to my father, I don't know."

Fairweather stayed a week at 165 Joseph Street. He sat upstairs in his room "like a hermit", drawing. "Mother would knock at the door and leave a plate and he'd pick it up." Geoffrey had not met any of his relations. "That's why it was a big thing for me. Once, the door was slightly open and I went in. He'd hung lines of string across the room and sheets of paper over them. I looked at what he was drawing on the desk and thought, 'That's funny.' He then explained: 'This is a depiction that I'm studying with a French artist, to get the essence of a child in one line.' To me that was a load of rubbish. I was nine years old. But it was quite suggestive. You could see the child in these lines, a baby's face."

A baby with its mother. Fairweather's favourite motif. Only through his work was he able to travel back to infancy, to "the denied paradise", as Hughes puts it, and recapture a relationship he never knew.

Not long after that, Fairweather boarded a Japanese ship bound for Shanghai, from where he called for the contents of his steamer trunk to be sent on, filled with his line drawings of children. Geoffrey stood beside his mother in the garden as she opened the trunk's curved top and tentatively peered inside and recoiled. "It was an absolute mess. It was heaving with silverfish. They had eaten everything."

Geoffrey watched the glittering silverfish stream out as his mother shrieked to his father: "Neville, this stuff cannot be brought into the house!"

China was the making of Fairweather. He learned Mandarin and studied calligraphy, excited to discover that the arts of writing and painting were closely interlocked. To pay his way, he worked as a park attendant, a road inspector and "manager" of an asphalt plant. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai, he drifted to Bali, and in 1934 stepped ashore in Melbourne with pound stg. 2 in his pocket and unrolled some drawings tied up in a singlet. "I was absolutely staggered," remembered the first person to view them, Alan Sumner, an artist who worked in the stained-glass department of Yencken & Co. "I was dumbfounded at the beauty of those things."

Fairweather hawked the drawings for pound stg. 1 and pound stg. 2 a piece, giving as his address the Mission for Seamen in Flinders Street. "In five long years of wandering," he wrote to Ede, "it is here for the first time I feel I am not a criminal -- trying to make a living by painting." But after six months of work -- "frenzy rather" -- for a commission on a mural for the Menzies Hotel, "I had to tear it up". He explained: "It was wrong from the start."

Moving on, he abandoned Australia for The Philippines and was back in China when Ede reached him with the news that Bathing scene, Bali had been bought by the Tate, and enclosed cuttings of his exhibition at the Redfern Gallery. But Fairweather was "too miserable to write". He was living, rent free, in a freezing room in Peking's Chung Hua College of Art -- stone floor, paper windows with holes and a sheet for a door: "Right now my teeth are chattering." He could not afford to buy paint. He was thrown off trams because he stank. And hopes of gaining assistance from the British community had gone up in smoke after a lunch party where he met the writer Harold Acton ("he seemed quite nice"), but was treated by everyone else with frigid suspicion that he had come to Peking with the intention of crashing its social portals.

"Please for goodness sake wire me pound stg. 50 and let me get out of here for goodness sake."

And so a self-imposed pattern entrenched itself.

Few artists, in Bail's opinion, can have enjoyed such poverty and in such inhospitable surrounds. Back in Australia, Fairweather avoided the art world. He worked as a bush cutter and lived variously in that deserted cinema, an empty goat dairy (Cairns), a concrete-mixer and wrecked patrol boat (Darwin). By the time he clambered aboard his triangular raft, he was, Bail writes, "incoherent with despair".

The waves drenched his sack of bread and soon it was mouldy, green and pink with a gamey flavour. "The rest I used as a cushion." Saltwater sores made the least movement painful. He could not look at anything in sunlight or even the stars at night. On the fifth night he began hallucinating.

The sea was quite black and the haze took on the appearance of a mosquito net hanging down over the raft. On the net I could see lines, drawings of figures behind which the stars danced. I lay contemplating these with much pleasure, for they were better drawings than I had ever made on land.

Late in the evening of Fairweather's 16th night at sea, his raft bumped heavily on to a reef. The next wave slid him over it into a calm lagoon where men holding red flares were fishing.

Geoffrey was living in Lima when he heard that his erratic uncle had scraped ashore 750km from Darwin, on a remote coral island west of Timor. "It was," he remembers, "world news."

Given Fairweather's temperament, it is not so far-fetched to regard the output of his remaining 22 years as a conscious attempt to pin down, in paint, the visions buzzing him when adrift in the Timor Sea, abandoned by his family and himself for dead.

Bail has no doubt that the raft journey was central. After it, Fairweather is at peace, less restless, his art more abstracted. His subject matter is never English and hardly ever "Australian". His combination of Chinese line and European space is unlike anything else. This is the period when he produces his finest works, described by Bail as "layered meditations", of China, Bali, The Philippines. The effect is like looking at butterfly wings beneath old brocade.

He is nostalgic to a pathological degree. The many layers of paint reflect layers of memory, usually of experiences long past "as if the present was far too unpleasant", as Bail puts it. Shalimar, for instance, consists of 74 white and yellow overlays in which the artist struggles to net an Edwardian song that his sisters used to sing on Jersey. "Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar. Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?"

When questioned about one of these paintings, Fairweather was evasive. He had had little to do with it. "It just happened, like a piece of driftwood." But he admitted that each time he started a new painting, it was like preparing to climb the Eiger.

He was more expansive in a postscript to his sister Queenie, with whom, needing money, he had got back in touch:

You ask about abstract art -- it is something I think like the Buddhist idea of suspended judgment. The mind is cleared of thought but not awareness. Always the purpose of art is to find its way through the forest of things to a larger unity containing all things. I often had the idea in Jersey that running over rocks (of which I was inordinately fond) had some psychological or psychical significance -- to balance, one must run quickly from point to point. You cannot rest on one point.

It was why, he suggested, modern art tended more and more to the abstract -- "to get away from our stricken world".

Following what he called "my ill-fated raft journey", Fairweather built a palm-thatched hut on Bribie Island, 30km north of Brisbane, "about as far out of the world as it can get". Here, dressed in striped pyjamas, he painted at night by the brownish glow of a hurricane lamp, using whatever materials came to hand: newspapers, thin stiff cardboard, even mixing ash from a mosquito coil into a tin of Dulux housepaint. A perfectionist, he destroyed the drawings and paintings he did not like -- those the white ants, cyclones and bushfires did not get to first -- so that, despite a career spanning more than half a century, barely 500 examples of his art survive.

Settled inside his leaking, mosquito-ridden hermit's hut, the act of painting was the thing. "It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people." He did not much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of disowning and even not recognising it. Of Epiphany, singled out by Hughes as one of the masterpieces of Australian art, Fairweather's terse comment was: "I don't like it." On the unique occasion that Bail met Fairweather, bringing for verification a slide of a 1956 gouache of a bridge in Huchow, the artist barely glanced at it and said, "I don't remember it." About critics, he wrote to Queenie:

Today they smile on me for no good reason. Tomorrow they may damn me for equally no reason. I damn them all the time. My teeth are chattering. Must stop.

Even so, after the raft trip it became harder for Fairweather to escape the world's scrutiny. Reports of his 1962 show in Sydney brought unwelcome visitors, as well as mail from "every kind of soft touch artist. One 50 pages about flying saucers. I am a nut they think, so they let down their hair to me." The publicity rattled him. "I'm so jittery I can't paint." In this nervy, disillusioned state, he toyed with the idea of coming home.

One unlikely reason given for his raft trip was to get back to London, 13,600km away, to rescue 130 badly-packed gouaches that had gone missing. Whatever the truth, he hankered for "old Chelsea", writing to Queenie: "Chelsea has been home ever since you and mother came round in a cab with me and we found one in Yeomans Row, my first lodging." What he longed for was "a bath for Christ's sake -- a hot bath to relax in -- and clean clothes".

Early in September 1966, he flew to London, but his return home spiralled into yet another disappointment. He had known the horsedrawn city before "the coming of the motorcar, the flying machine -- and all the gadgets, the plastics". Swinging London was no place for Fairweather. He did not last the month, scribbling a note to his brother Harold, who was travelling from France to meet him:

It is too late -- we are all getting very old. I would like to see you but as we are all getting deaf communication in any real sense is a thing of the past and only makes one sad. There is no turning the clock back. I am impatient to get back to the Bush which never changes and the sun . . .

He flew back to Bribie Island, dying on May 20, 1974, of heart failure. He was 82.

Ever since his solitary death on the fringes of another continent, Fairweather has gained a reputation as Australia's most original artist. And yet at a time when London art lovers are streaming once again into retrospectives of van Gogh and Gauguin, this British Gauguin remains almost unheard-of in his native land. Aside from the Tate, the only public galleries to own a Fairweather are in Leicester, Lincoln, Cheltenham and Belfast. Both Bail and Geoffrey Fairweather hold out the tantalising prospect of masterpieces still awaiting discovery in Britain. Since 1981, Bail has tracked down 40 paintings and a few drawings, almost 10 per cent of Fairweather's oeuvre, but there are at least 12 works from four exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery that are still in Britain somewhere, untraced. Not all missing Fairweathers are in collectors' hands. Says the artist's nephew: "He used to pay for nights in hotels with a painting." So if you're staying in a British B&B and pass a strange painting on the landing, it might well pay to stop and investigate whether it is signed with a Kiplingesque "IF".

Nicholas Shakespeare, The Australian, July 07, 2010

Unity - Voodoo Funk

Unity by Voodoo Funk on Mixcloud

This Is Marijta

El Gran Percusionista Cubano Orestes Vilató

Volker Kriegel - Zoom

Soul Jugglers - Hanggang Magdamag

Hello Philippines!

Kano- I'm Ready

Mess Hall: Keep Walking

Utopia by the Sea

In the early mornings, when the ocean is enveloped in fog and the scent of wild iris hangs in the air, the possibility for solitude can be found on a wind-tossed path. Deer eyes stare from slender meadow grasses, and a curve in the trail along the headlands can unexpectedly yield a squadron of pelicans zooming skyward on ocean thermals.

At Sea Ranch — even the name has an aura — it is possible at once to lose and to find yourself on a path, following it past tumbledown picket fences to a driftwood throne on a secluded beach. When the architects Charles W. Moore, Joseph Esherick, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, and Richard Whitaker and the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conceived this place along a mystical 10-mile stretch of California coast in the early 1960s, they courted the wind. They measured it, observed the way its salty gusts sculptured the cypress trees.

Eventually, they would tame the wind in architecture, its force poetically echoed in the angled plank roofs and slanted towers of the original building, Condominium One, an austere Shaker-like ode to nature’s power and the first of many groundbreaking structures at Sea Ranch.

The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than bird-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Mr. Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Mr. Halprin’s experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature.

Since moving to the Bay Area nine years ago, my family and I have rented numerous houses at Sea Ranch, a place that for me has become the psychic equivalent of a tubercular Victorian’s healing in a sanitarium. Over the years, I have gotten to know Mr. Halprin’s landscape intimately, savoring the way the trails lead to salty cliffs alive with nesting cormorants and into dark, enchanted forests straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Like many, I fantasized about what it might be like to experience some of Sea Ranch’s most iconic houses, the ones designed by the guys who dreamed up the place before the sad arrival of what might be called Sea Ranch sprawl. This past summer, I finally got my wish, indulging in architectural promiscuity by renting Mr. Moore’s fabled Unit 9 in Condominium One, a complex now on the National Register of Historic Places; an Obie Bowman-designed Walk-in Cabin; a Binker Barn designed by Mr. Turnbull; and, as the drum-rolling crescendo, or so I thought, one of the original Esherick houses tucked into a now-fetishized cypress hedgerow.The timing was fortuitous: the Sea Ranch Lodge, the community’s dated, killer-view hotel, is about to be Post Ranch-ified, as Passport Resorts, whose principals created the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur and other high-end lodges, proceeds with an expansion. The company envisions a luxurious watering hole with 15 or so house-size cottages serviced by motorized carts spilling down 52 acres of now-pristine meadow.

They will by necessity be marketing seclusion. Just getting to Sea Ranch, about two and a half hours from San Francisco, requires negotiating a stomach-churning, acrophobia-inducing sliver of Highway 1. The payoff is a relatively undiscovered, unspoiled swath of California coast — bordering Sonoma and Mendocino Counties and nicknamed Mendonoma — that mercifully has yet to be mythologized à la Mendocino village or Big Sur.

Charles Mooore called Sea Ranch his “Mother Earth.” All I could think of when I stepped into Unit 9 was that the little rat had kept the best place for himself.

I had this revelation while sipping coffee from a vintage Vignelli-designed mug in Mr. Moore’s kitchen — a riot of painted checkerboards overseen by a textile of frisky Indian goddesses. A misty cauldron of waves was churning madly against the cliffs that Condominium One, widely considered to be one of the most influential buildings of the 1960s, seems precariously perched upon. My teenage son, Gabe, and his two pals were still asleep, white iPod wires in their ears, visions of a winged cow, a wooden dinosaur, a shadow puppet, toy blocks spelling out M-O-O-R-E and a fragment of a Corinthian column dancing on wooden beams over their heads.

A restless global wanderer and voluminous author who collected university appointments the way he did Oaxacan clay pigs (Yale, U.C.L.A., Berkeley, etc.), Mr. Moore, who died in 1993, possessed an infinite capacity for joy that was expressed in his architecture. “I think that fairy tales have a great deal to teach us architects,” he once wrote. The way that most magical adventures, he observed, “end in time for tea seems to me worth careful looking into.”His twinkly view of the universe lives on in Unit 9, which has been delightfully frozen in amber by his family, who still own it, down to the papier-mâché ponies and abalone shells inserted into the 14th-century tile ceiling fragment on the wall. It thus has become a shrine for architects, whose rhapsodies fill the guest register.

Hovering gluttonously over the ocean, the condo was Mr. Moore’s salon-by-the-sea, filled with students and a blizzard of manuscripts. Today, it is a powerful argument for the afterlife, an indoor fairy tale with a four-poster bedroom loft held up by logs, creating a cozy shelter underneath. For Gabe and his friends, Pete and Gabe D., a cadre of teenage Coppolas equipped with a digital movie camera who had resoundingly rejected Mr. Moore’s leftover jigsaw puzzles of Queen Elizabeth in Parliament and the Tokyo subway system, it was the perfect place to plot a literal cliffhanger.

My most vivid memory of Mr. Moore, whom I interviewed six years before his death, involved the spectacle of the architect as human periscope, swimming in the pool around midnight at his compound in Austin, Tex., and clutching a flashlight aimed at the water so that he’d be able to spot wayward tarantulas.Puttering around the kitchen the morning of my visit, admiring Mr. Moore’s global tchotchkes, I realized things were getting weird. “Where does Charles keep the vacuum cleaner?” I muttered to myself. “I wonder if Charles has a steamer.”

I knew Mr. Moore had worked his magic when I found Gabe sprawled on the turquoise cushions of the saddlebag — a trademark Moore feature in which windows project out of the main space — gazing at the horizon. “Hey, Mom,” he wondered. “If you went straight across the ocean, where would you be?”Daydreaming is the emotional agenda at Sea Ranch. It’s a place to watch a hummingbird with your coffee or to observe a deer grazing improbably on a sloping grass-covered green roof.

It is a place to drink too much wine while being transfixed by harbor seals with your college roommate and then being unable to find your way home in the foggy dark. The possibility for both discovery and community undergirds Sea Ranch, an early example of ecological planning that, for better and worse, spawned suburban wannabes across the country. The founding ideal, shaped by Mr. Halprin and his all-star cast, was that 10 stupendous miles of California coast were something to be shared rather than subdivided.

The early architecture was communal and modest, with houses clustered perpendicular to the ocean so that everyone would have a view, leaving the meadows open and held in common. Houses were sited to settle into the landscape, like quail nesting. “This wasn’t a place to show off your architecture,” said Mr. Whitaker, now a 79-year-old renegade. “Buildings were meant to be like geodes, ordinary rocks on the outside with the inside going gangbusters.”

Too much of that philosophy has bitten the proverbial dust, a long, bloody tale of politics, real estate, public access to the coast and the sad disconnect between taste and money. Today there are essentially two Sea Ranches: The southern portion, planned by Mr. Halprin et al.; and the later more suburbanized north, with cul-de-sacs and palazzos along the bluffs.

But plenty of the genuine item survives, including the Moonraker Athletic Center, one of three recreation centers with pool, tennis court and family sauna (this is California after all). Along with miles of hiking, biking and horse trails and a Scottish-style golf course, the centers are major perks for renters, who must dangle passes from their rearview mirrors. Moonraker is a stark, weathered cathedral of chlorine, all but buried in an earthen berm.At the Obie Bowman Walk-in Cabin I rented, the first challenge was finding the door. Spatial organization has never been my forte. Anxiety mounting, I finally spied a padlock attached to a sliding barn wall. Eventually, I realized it was the door. Architects! I cursed.

The conceit of the Walk-in Cabins, a remote gathering of 15 troll-like dwellings in a kingdom of redwoods in the hills above Highway 1, is that no cars are allowed. They are left about a quarter-mile down a dirt road, which sounds romantic until you realize that your garbage has to walk out the same way.Make no mistake. Sea Ranch is not pussyfooter terrain. I was reminded of this fact when, traveling solo this time and relieved at having found the front door, I perused the welcoming material: a form to fill out should I spot a mountain lion, with blank spaces for size, color, tail and attitude.

Mr. Bowman, who still works in Healdsburg, was a shopping center designer in Los Angeles when he took a trip up the coast and discovered Sea Ranch. After the Walk-ins were completed in 1972, he remarked that the spartan cabins, recipients of umpteen design awards, were about the size of the restrooms in his shopping centers.

In contrast to the Moore condo, with its drama-queen ocean views, the Walk-ins are about quietude, the light feathering through the redwoods. With its compact loft bed, wood stove and twee kitchen, it all felt a bit like inhabiting a lifestyle magazine edited by the redwood-dwelling activist Julia Butterfly Hill.One of the pleasures of a rental, of course, is imagining the real owners (the tip-off here may have been the stuffed gnome in a basket). Exhausted, I hiked down to the ocean, where the harbor seals were sunning on the rocks like old couples by the pool in Miami Beach. They seemed to have the right idea. So I hiked back up to the cabin and promptly collapsed on the deck into savasana, the yoga corpse pose. I let the breeze, sun and scent of pines lull me before soaking in the hot tub (life is tough at Sea Ranch).

The only sign of fellow humans in the dense thicket were scattered lights at dusk — the home fires burning in our little warren of Prius-driving hobbits.Every visit to Sea Ranch has a mood. I have watched migrating gray whales breach the surface from Walk-On Beach, experienced a near-tsunami with pelting rain followed by brilliant sun at Christmas. During abalone season, when divers routinely lose their lives (three so far at Sea Ranch this year), bulbous wet-suited figures with inner tubes around their waists scramble down rocks to plunge into the churning kelp-ridden abyss.

Like the weather, houses set a tone. And it was an exhilarating one in Barn Dance, one of 17 Binker Barns designed by William Turnbull, who died in 1997 and designed the houses to be replicated around Sea Ranch. As soon as my husband, Roger, and I opened the wooden door — artfully carved in quilt-like patterns — we knew we’d hit pay dirt.

The house is poetry in wood, a beautifully fashioned breakfront in architecture. Built like a barn, with plank walls and crisscrossing beams with exposed bolts, it felt like a totally chic abstraction of Nebraska, with an airy central space soaring to the roof and a staircase winding up to an interior bridge leading to the bedrooms. The dining area and kitchen had me convinced I could cook like Thomas Keller. They were enfolded in lustrous Douglas fir, with light streaming ethereally through clerestory windows.Roger promptly deposited himself on a lounge chair beside the fireplace, becoming positively ecstatic when he discovered the owner’s voluminous CD collection, including the obscure “Veedon Fleece”*/ by Van Morrison, with whom he is obsessed. Shortly thereafter he proclaimed, “I want to live in a Turnbull house!”.

Warmed by radiant-heat floors, I cracked open the guest register, in which the owners had charmingly chronicled their own escapades, including a week of nonstop rain in which they hunted for mushrooms and watched bygone episodes of “The West Wing.”

Gualala, a village nearby, offers escape valves for the stir-crazy: a couple of excellent restaurants; a fine-foods store, a bookstore, a first-rate crafts gallery and even an au courant design store, Placewares (Mendocino and the Anderson Valley wineries are a curvy hour-and-a-half drive away).

The most popular hangout at Sea Ranch is the Twofish Baking Company, which has morphed into an ad hoc community center for the growing number of full-timers, many of them aerobic grandparents.

But there remains a psychic divide between people who are drawn to Sea Ranch for its history and those who regard it as a generic seaside resort. The impending transformation of the lodge is causing some fear and loathing. “A highly processed destination resort, with all sorts of pleasure amenities, will bring people with different expectations and a less deep commitment to the place,” said Kenneth Wachter, a demography professor at Berkeley who was walking his poodle not far from the house he and his wife bought on their honeymoon 26 years ago.

Arguably, Sea Ranch’s most hallowed ground are the Hedgerow Houses, a group of genteel rustic shacks that Joseph Esherick tucked inconspicuously into a row of wind-blown cypress trees not far from Black Point Beach. Along with Condominium One, they define the Sea Ranch style. Mr. Esherick, a master craftsman of space who died in 1998, used to say that “the ideal kind of building is one you don’t see.”

For renters, the prime Hedgerow House is the one that Mr. Esherick designed for himself, a sophisticated cottage with ship-like woodwork that seems to all but disappear into the meadow grasses.

A mere 875 square feet, the house is made from inexpensive materials though its spatial arrangements are quite complex. Ironically perhaps, the current owner, Jim Friedman, builds $10 million to $20 million 20,000-square-foot houses for a living. “The Esherick house has taught me that really great architecture doesn’t require gilding a lily,” he said.

Sadly, the house was already spoken for, so the rental agency, Sea Ranch Escape, suggested an alternative Hedgerow House also designed by Mr. Esherick.

So it was a crushing blow to open the door and find pickled woodwork, wall-to-wall carpeting and Venetian blinds — a Motel Esherick. Trying to cheer me up, Roger gamely kept chanting “location, location, location.”

Nevertheless, I began to suspect that our abode wasn’t even an Esherick because the conventional arrangement of spaces was so un-Esherick-like. Several days later, a Deep Throat with access to the historic files confirmed that the house was designed in the manner of Esherick by Van Norten Logan, a little-known architect turned land investor.

It was then that I felt the palpable presence of the ghost of Joe Esherick returning to my beloved Sea Ranch.

“Never trust a real estate agent,” he whispered.

IF YOU GO

In the Zen sense, it’s hard to go wrong with any house at Sea Ranch (just don’t forget to bring your own sheets and towels). The nicest agency to deal with is Ocean View Properties (707-884-3538; http://www.oceanviewprop.com/; $200 to $250 a night for William Turnbull’s Barn Dance). Rams Head Realty rents a number of homes at Sea Ranch, including the Redwood Cottage Walk-in Cabin (800-785-3455; http://www.ramshead.com/; $342 for two nights). Sea Ranch Escape (707-785-2426; http://www.searanchescape.com/) has the largest collection of prime rentals by classic architects, including Unit 9 ($468 to $525 for two nights ) and the real Esherick house ($761 for two nights).

Sea Ranch 101: “The Sea Ranch” by Donlyn Lyndon and Jim Alinder (Princeton Architectural, 2004); “The Sea Ranch ... Diary of an Idea” by Lawrence Halprin (Spacemaker, 2002); “The Place of Houses” by Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon (University of California, 1974); “William Turnbull: Buildings in the Landscape” (William Stout, 2000); “Appropriate: The Houses of Joseph Esherick” by Marc Treib (William Stout, 2008). The Sea Ranch Association Web site (http://www.tsra.org/) is also an excellent resource.

PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
NYTIMES
2008