CulturalOyster

Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Will Vanquish Winter's Chill

2012-01-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

John Mosca on trombone, second row, second from right

by Susan Kepecs

Real jazz is a rebellious artform. It pushes against conventional boundaries. And as often happens in periods of popular resistance, there’s a jazz renaissance afoot – you can see it in the rising generation of talented leaders playing straight-ahead bop like Rudresh Mahanthappa and Ambrose Akinmusire, and even in the increase in jazz programming at Madison clubs and theaters. There hasn’t been this much good jazz outside the Latin canon since the revolutionary 1960s. Of course, the new wellspring of not-pop didn’t bubble up on its own. Among the handful of robust currents that's borne the bop banner along unbroken is a big band, the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, which takes the Wisconsin Union Theater stage next Saturday, Feb. 4. The UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra opens.

In the ‘60s, when the VJO got its start, there weren’t a lot of jazz orchestras left. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who usually worked in small combo format, produced a few orchestral works back then, and a few big jazz bands have formed since – the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra began playing in the mid-‘90s, and yes, the Madison Jazz Orchestra is even older than that. But only the VJO – originally the Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra – is a direct link to those few whopping big bands of earlier decades that lasted past the World Wars; Jones worked with Count Basie for a number of years, while Lewis toured with Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. But rather than reiterate what you can find on the VJO’s website, http://www.vanguardjazzorchestra.com/ (also take a look at the nice rundown on the band’s current players by Isthmus Jazz Series Coordinator Ben Ferris, himself a member of the UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra, on the Union Theater’s Green Room blog, http://uniontheater-greenroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/vanguard-jazz-orchestras-outstanding.html), here’s my short interview with jazz educator and VJO lead trombone / director John Mosca, whose precise answers to my questions provide the whole story in a neat nutshell:

CulturalOyster: You’ve been with the band since ’75 – both Jones and Lewis were still there then. What was the music like when it was closer to the swing roots of big band jazz?

Mosca: I used to go to the Village Vanguard as a teen and stand in line to get in – that line ran down to the end of the block. When I got into the band Thad and Mel were both still there, but Thad left for a job with Danish radio a couple years later. Mel was with us till he passed in 1990. One key thing they brought was the concept of swinging – it’s elusive but essential – it’s the ritmic feeling we generate that comes from Thad’s music and Mel’s drumming. Now we have John Riley on drums – he was a tremendous student of Mel’s, and he keeps the swing consistent. The band feels good playing that way. There aren’t that many veterans of the original band left, but we do keep the music going in the same vein.

Thad and Mel also pioneered changes in the way big bands work. They gave equal weight to the written aspect and the improvised aspect. That was a big innovation. Thad took inspiration from Coltrane [Thad’s younger brother, Elvin, was Coltrane’s drummer when Jones and Lewis started their orchestra] and opened up the solos – they were a lot longer than they were with the old big bands, like Basie’s. We’ve tried to preserve the original precepts we learned from Thad and Mel. When somebody’s soloing with a trio it’s a bona fide small group experience. But we also enjoy the big ensemble, and people want to hear the big band play, so we mix that up a lot.

CulturalOyster: What’s changed more recently?

Mosca: We’ve kept the older repertory current – we still play a lot of Thad’s stuff, that’s where the band lives. But what’s different is that now more of our music is true composed. This is a back and forth pattern that’s happened in big bands over the years. There used to be much more written music before the ‘60s. When [the recently deceased] Bob Brookmeyer came on [as composer/arranger] he went back to a more true composed idea, though with a very modern slant.

And there’s a generational turnover – that’s one of the great elements, each generation adds different qualities. In terms of arrangers, Jim McNeely, who’s a tremendous pianist, has really stepped up to take his place alongside Brookmeyer and Jones. McNeely was there with Thad and Mel and there with Brookmeyer – he really absorbed their lessons. He’s a great swinger and he can write that way, but he can also stretch out and do other things. There’s never been a surplus of great writers – they’re treasures. Though there are quite a few young writers doing good work. I like some of the things Maria Schneider does – I’m feeling kind of optimistic about the future of orchestral jazz. The big thing is the loss of performance and recording opportunities that nurture this kind of talent. All of us have to devote a great deal of time to trying to do business and to generate places to play.

CulturalOyster: I’d always rather experience jazz in a nightclub, club, sitting close to the music with friends and a drink in my hand. How do you feel about playing under the proscenium arch?

Mosca: The club is the generator where you work things out. That’s where the music is created and polished, but sometimes it’s nice to bring it out, to have room to play, to blow into a bigger space. We do try to set up up as close to the front of the stage as possible – we’ve run afoul of firelaws by going past curtain laws. But we’re pretty successful at creating something of the Vanguard experience on the big stage. This brings up another issue, though – now that so many club gigs are recorded digitally or streamed, the club engagement itself is in danger. People are less likely to go out on a limb if they can sit at home and find everything for free on their computers.

CulturalOyster: Is there anything else I should know?

Mosca: We’re looking forward to Madison. It’s been a long time since we were there. Hopefully, the weather will be – well, tolerable!

[UW School of Music prof] Richard Davis is a VJO alum – we’d love to have him come up on the stage. We still have some music written exclusively for him.

And oh, yeah – you can add that we’re all good union members!

Picking Tickets: Spring, 2012

2012-01-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

by Susan Kepecs

I’ve been so excited about the Million Signatures, and so bummed out about the Packers’ loss to the Giants last Sunday, that I almost forgot about the performing arts this week. But when the snow started to fly and the thermometer hit zero I locked myself inside with the websites for the city’s main performing arts palaces. After poring over what’s on tap, I’ve compiled my ticket picks.

Among the several opportunities to see dance performance, only Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Overture Hall, March 27) is on my list. The Ailey company will look somewhat different than it did last time it was here, at the old Madison Civic Center in 2002. Artistic director Judith Jameison, who took the reins from Ailey in 1989, right before he died of AIDS, retired last year. Her hand-picked successor, Robert Battle, is controversial – never a member of the company, he’s an outsider of sorts, though he choreographed several works for it while Jameison was at the helm. Battle has brought in nine new dancers, plus a number of new repertory works – though there’s no new choreography on the pre-announced Madison program. By audience demand Ailey’s “Revelations,” modern dance’s greatest hit, is on the bill for every stop in the 2012 North American Tour, which begins in February. The rest of the program changes up; in Madison it includes a lesser Ailey work from the 1970s, “Streams,” and two pieces Battle made for the company’s male dancers, “Takedeme” (1999) and “The Hunt” (2001). I haven’t seen either of these works, but The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella – by far the best dance writer in the country – depicts them as heavy-handed muscle ballet. I suspect this will not be my favorite Ailey company performance, but it’s an important one. The reviews of Battle’s first season have been mixed, though he’s only beginning to reveal his hand. What he does in the next few years will reveal whether modern dance, a twentieth-century innovation, has a future. Among the greats, Merce Cunningham’s company has closed up shop; Martha Graham’s has become a mere legacy troupe. Paul Taylor is still in command, though he’s 80-some years old. Only the Ailey company, always bold, is striking out in a new direction.

From the bounteous music options, I’ll take five. In the ‘60s, pianist Herbie Hancock (Overture Hall, March 15) was (along with Horace Silver) the potentate of hardbop piano. The hippie jazz freaks of Miffland were head over heels in love with him; we wore the vinyl rings off his greatest hits, “Watermelon Man,” “Cantaloupe Island” and “Maiden Voyage;” all three are permanently etched in my memory banks. In the ‘70s Hancock followed Miles Davis, with whom he played while becoming a leader in his own right, down the fusion rabbit hole. In the decades that followed, Hancock experimented with pop and hip hop and ended up with a pair of schlocky albums stacked with guest stars like Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Chaka Kahn and Juanes – River: The Joni Letters (Verve, 2007), an ode to Joni Mitchell (who appears on the album, which somehow won a Grammy), and The Imagine Project (Herbie Hancock Records, 2010). So why is Hancock on my list? Chalk it up to old times’ sake, plus advertising – the video clip posted on Overture’s website, which I think is from 2006, shows the veteran hardbopper playing, yes, “Cantaloupe Island.” His band for this event is TBA, and there’s no telling what tunes he’ll choose, but there’s no doubt he can still just play jazz, when he’s so inclined.

On the other hand, the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (Wisconsin Union Theater, Feb. 4) – the very sophisticated Monday night house band at Manhattan’s eponymous West Village club – has always played honest-to-god jazz. This big band, with its 15 heavy-hitting players, was born in ’66 of the fortuitous collaboration between two forward-looking orchestral jazz giants: trumpeter and composer / arranger Thad Jones, who’d been a soloist with swing king Count Basie, and drummer Mel Lewis, who honed his chops in Stan Kenton’s jazz orchestra. The VJO brought big band jazz straight into the postbop epoch, and despite huge changes in the times and personnel, it’s still true to its own brand of big band swing.

The wacky, whip-smart, genre-busting jazz fusion band Bela Fleck and the Flecktones stops in Mad City (Union Theater, March 1) on its much-touted reunion tour. Banjo master Fleck and the Wooten brothers (“Futureman,” inventor of the drumitar, and virtuoso bassist Victor) have been together since the band’s very first gig on PBS in 1988, but this is the first time they’ve played with pianist / harmonicist Howard Levy since 1992. There’s a new album, Rocket Science (E1 Records, 2011), to go with the tour, though the promo lit implies the band’ll mix new tunes with hits from the three albums they made before Levy split.

Nigerian saxophonist / vocalist Seun Kuti and his high-energy brass and percussion rich big band Egypt 80 (Wisconsin Union Theater, April 12) blew the roof off the WUT on their US debut tour in June, 2007. Kuti told me in an interview then that he’s not as wild as his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late, legendary king of Afrobeat and revolutionary politics. Maybe not, but like Fela, Seun is the consummate activist, taking the stage in support of myriad African causes. This month he's been in the midst of the Occupy Nigeria movement, performing his take-no-prisoners political songs onstage in Lagos during mass protests against the end of the fuel subsidies that help keep prices down for the underpaid masses – President Goodluck Jonathan’s concession to deregulation demanded by the IMF. A week into the protests Jonathan restored part of the subsidy, but count on Kuti to keep up the good fight.

I saved the best – my personal favorite – for last. When the going gets tough, as it will when state GOP challenges to the Recall signatures plus all those right wing corporate-funded ads aimed at the national presidential race heat up, we get the orishas’ blessings, right on time. Straight from Havana, Sierra Maestra – the group that rescued Cuban son from the dustbins of prerevolutionary history in the 1970s and has carried la musica forward ever since – plays Memorial Union’s Great Hall on March 23. I’m listening to their latest CD, Sonando Ya (2010, SASA Music), right now. It takes me to my happy place, despite the freezing fog outside. Yo soy sonera de corazón – I live to dance to Cuban son. You will, too. Aché.

The Best of 2011

2011-12-28T16:22:00.000-08:00

by Susan Kepecs

The economic crisis endures and bad behavior’s on the rise, but in a weird way it’s been an exhilirating year, filled with great performances and Republican bungles. Despite December’s snowless, chilly damp (yes, Virginia, that’s a sign of global warming), a cautious optimism warms my weary old bones. The 99% has finally risen up – hallelujah! – and the elephants are knee deep in their own spoor. What's more, if this year in the arts is any clue there's a lot to look forward to in 2012. Budgets bulldozed in the three-year crunch might have meant a near-beer season, but the best events of 2011 were sparklier than Dom Perignon.

The plentitude of progressive performances in inspired opposition to the wackos of Fitzwalkerstan occupies the pinnacle of my list – hundreds of thousands of protesters carrying wildly creative signs, a glorious profusion of political song (the gutsy, tenacious Solidarity Singers), and exquisitely executed works of political parade art flaunting Mad City’s smarts and sense of fun.

The energy of the peoples’ movement seeped into our lives all over town. At the Cardinal Bar, Tony Castañeda and his Latin jazz outfit closed their regular Sunday night gigs (now only on the last and first weekends of the month) with a slick take on Cal Tjader’s guajira bugalú “Wachi Wara,” reinventing the two word title / chorus as “Recall Walker.” It’s a perfect fit, and the audience loves to belt it out.

Also at the Cardinal Bar: a glorious jam session memorial (Oct. 23) for the late guitarist Marcos González, a leader on the local reggae / roots / tropical / funk scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. González, who you’ll remember as Tony Brown’s lead guitarist and founder of the Waves, died of cancer this fall in Mexico, where he’d lived the last 30 years. Primitive Culture’s David Hecht organized the homage and anchored the lead guitar slot through much of the evening. Musicians from far and wide gathered to celebrate González’ life, including his brother, drummer Arno González, who currently lives in California and who, along with Tony Castañeda, was an original member of Olmeca, Madison’s first Latin band. Tony Brown came in from Iowa. Sax master Bob Corbit and conguero James “Pie” Cowan were there, plus Castañeda, keyboardist David Stoler and a cornucopia of other players whose bands overlap in time and space. Partial lineups from the Tony Brown Band, the Roots, the Waves, Olmeca, Primitive Culture, the Kingtown Rockers and the Gibraltar Rockets came and left the stage like time-traveling shamans, weaving past and present into whole cloth and joining the deceased and the living at this gathering of the tribe.

The Ernán López Nussa trio’s sinuous, Havana-born danzón jazz at the Cardinal (Aug. 28)* was the year’s most overlooked event – López Nussa’s not well-known in the States, and his sparking performance was under-attended. But Cardinal proprietor Ricardo González deserves big accolades for taking the risk of whisking top shelf non-local jazz out from under the proscenium arch and bringing it back to the nightclub scene, where it belongs.

Still, some fine playing happens in formal theater settings. Terence Blanchard and his accomplished young quintet served up sizzling post-bop and Miles-style fusion at the Wisconsin Union Theater (Oct. 21)*. These edgy, mid-‘60s – early ‘70s styles may not make a big comeback, but for boomer jazz fans like me they’re a very satisfying antidote to the soft samba and hip-hop bop that’s marked the start of the new millenium.

Dianne Reeves (Union Theater, April 8), a giant of jazz song, swapped the poppier interpretations she’s favored in previous concerts for flat-out old-fashioned, straight-ahead swing. It was thrilling to hear her unleash those supple pipes on sheer improvisation, substituting scat for lyrics. Only Reeves could silkify the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” so suavely, and songs like “Social Call” and “Stormy Weather” haven’t sounded this smoky in years.

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s show, steeped in the tradition of the black church and shimmering with solidarity (Union Theater, Oct. 7), was sensational, but one special song overshadowed the rest. Carol Maillard’s solo, “I’m Goin’ Home One Sweet Day,” was the sort of rafter-raising, soul-clapping gospel that’s got the power to make you give it all up and praise the spirit, even if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool atheist like me.

The brilliance of hoofer Savion Glover’s SoLe Sanctuary (Union Theater, Nov. 13)* was tarnished at times by relentlessly speedy percussiveness, but Glover and performance partner Marshall Davis, dancing joyfully to “Resolution” off John Coltrane’s seminal Love Supreme, belongs in the ranks of the year’s best.

The lineup for the Madison World Music Festival, sponsored by the Wisconsin Union Theater with stages on the Union Terrace and at the Willy St. Fair (Sept. 15-17),* was one of the best in the eight-year history of this bighearted, free for the public event. I learned something about global interconnections from every band I caught. But Blitz the Ambassador (Sept. 16, on the Terrace), from Ghana and New York, blew me away with his inspired mix of Afrobeat, old-school soul and hip hop, rich with references to the lions of the African diaspora. Bring this band back!

At the other end of the spectrum, Madison Opera stepped out of its traditional box at Overture’s Playhouse (Feb. 4-16) with a cleverly staged performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s satirical, anticapitalist Threepenny Opera. The timing of this smartly updated production – the downtrodden masses marched with signs that said “I was outsourced” or “I was downsized” – couldn’t have been more fortuitous, coinciding with the announcement of Walker’s “budget repair bill.” The whole package was a work of art, from the impressively flexible sets to the eight-piece jazz combo led by Maestro John Demain at the piano, witnessed through a window at the back of the set and resembling a lit-up Joseph Cornell box. American Players Theater veteran Tracy Michelle Arnold, possessed with well-honed talent for both drama and song, was outstanding as the prostitute Jenny Diver, the role Lotte Lenya made famous.

New York Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay hated Remember Me, David Parsons’ collaboration with the East Village Opera Company, when it played at the Joyce in 2010. But I loved this sexy love story ballet, built on a clever sequence of opera’s greatest hits done with driving backbeat, which I saw at Overture’s Capitol Theater (Feb. 23). Parsons’ barefoot ballet base, adorned with hyperextended upper backs and oddly angled limbs and spiced with imaginative partnering, looked fresh, and the whole concoction, from the suggestive lighting to the interactions between dancers and vocalists, was emotionally and visually charged.

Last but not least, Madison Ballet’s Nutcracker (Overture Hall, Dec. 16-24)* topped off the company’s best year yet. I don’t say this lightly – I’ll take almost any ballet over the sappy Christmas chestnut, and I’ve never been bowled over by the local production. I was sure the company had reached its peak to date with Midsummer Night’s Dream (Capitol Theater, March 19-20), but I was wrong. Peter Anastos’ fluffy little work looked fine, but the choreography really was too simple for the company Madison Ballet’s become. Artistic director W. Earle Smith’s very traditional yet slightly quirky Nutcracker, with its Snow and Sugarplum pas de deux and its abundant divertissements, is choreographically much meatier, a fact that’s escaped me until now. This year the soloists were so polished, and Marguerite Luksik in the principal Snow / Sugarplum role so bright and precise, that the magic hidden in this overworked ballet happened spontaneously. It’s not just me – leaving the theater I overheard the audience giving it rave reviews. It was so good, in fact, that I saw it twice.

* full review elsewhere on this blog

Madison Ballet's Best Nutcracker Yet

2011-12-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

Dance Review: Madison Ballet’s The Nutcracker, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2 pm, Overture Hall

by Susan Kepecs

Nutcrackers are like snowflakes; no two are exactly alike. Madison Ballet’s very traditional version has trended up over the years, but two details made the ballet I saw Sunday afternoon stand out. The lavish sets and costumes, purchased by artistic director W. Earle Smith in 2004 for Overture’s opening season, seemed far too extravagant then. But the company’s finally grown into them, and now they supply spectacular production values. The sets for New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, telecast on PBS last week, looked pale in comparison. And while Madison Ballet doesn’t have starpower principals like Megan Fairchild and Ashley Bouder, it does have Marguerite Luksik, in the principal role that blends Snow Queen and Sugarplum Fairy into the sole character of Clara, grown up.

This is Luksik’s second year in the demanding part. In 2010 her Snow was luscious, but the quality of her performance slipped slightly in the second act. This year was different – Luksik, gracefully partnered by Brian Roethlisberger, whose last appearance with Madison Ballet was in Nutcracker 2003, turned in a pitch-perfect, superbly confident performance from start to finish. She floated into her lifts, her footwork sparkled, her turns were crisp, her lines elegant. Best of all she often elongated her phrases, creating a very neoclassical kind of kinesthethc tension by dancing a luxuriant split-second behind the music.
I expected Luksik's brilliance after her impressive performance as Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream last spring, but the solidity of the rest of the show surprised me. The Act I party scene – in any Nutcracker, not just Madison Ballet’s – always makes me wish Tchiakovsky’s magnificent score were attached to a better ballet. The Stahlbaum’s 2011 holiday gala on the Overture Hall stage was no exception, but the company did a notably better job with it than usual. In the young Clara role Maja Peterson, a Level 3B student at the School of Madison Ballet, displayed balletic chops well beyond those of her predecessors. For Madison actor Sam White, in his third year as the slightly creepy magician Drosselmeyer, the art of presenting in the ballet idiom finally clicked; that’s key, since without a strong Drosselmeyer the story falls apart. And Jacob Brooks blessed the soldier doll dance with impressive stage presence plus athletic triple pirouettes, cabrioles and tours en l’air.

Madison Ballet’s Nutcracker has finally blossomed, but the rats have been tops since the start. The way they leap, kick and scratch in their grizzly rat suits is just plain from-the-heart funny, year after year. No matter how much I may think I never want to see another Nutcracker, the rats, and Smith’s lush, slightly idiosyncratic neoclassical choreography for the Snow corps, always captivate me. This year’s Snow corps, composed of advanced ballet students and professional company members, looked, for the most part, nicely unified. But Rachelle Butler and Genevieve Custer-Weeks, who’ve been with Madison Ballet since the very beginning, stood out for their sumptious phrasing -- a distinction that was repeated in the Flowers corps in Act II.

The divertissements hit a few small snags. This is the second year Smith’s done the Merliton dance, usually staged for two or three, as a solo. Jennifer Holoubek, in her first appearance with the company, handled the piece well technically, but the sparkle she needed to meet the real challenge of this substantial dance was missing. In spots I craved more brio from Brooks, who looked slightly uncomfortable when partnering Katy Frederick in the Spanish dance, which fit her like a glove, and when taking his bows.

Nevertheless, Brooks’ Russian variation was bold. He bounded repeatedly into second position split jumps and whipped off a tricky string of cabrioles and tours en l’air that finished in front attitude, to the audience’s delight. The Arabian pas was seamlessly sensual; tall, limber Shannon Quirk snaked seductively around partner Phillip Ollenburg. Advanced School of Madison Ballet students Jon Stewart, Dierdre Turner and Marcella Van Kan turned in a terrific Thai dance. And Megan Horton revisited the Dewdrop role in the Waltz of the Flowers, which she performed in 2009. Horton is wispy, wide-eyed and graceful. Her turns weren’t always perfect, but the way she sailed her grand pas de chats and grand jetés, festooning them with fabulously articulate arms, made her a joy to watch.

SoLe Sanctuary: Hoofers' Last Hurrah

2011-11-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

By Susan Kepecs

Thursday night Savion Glover brought to the Union Theater those famously brilliant bebop feet, plus his dance partner Marshall Davis, to pay homage to the 20^th century’s master hoofers, all of whom have gone to their great reward. Posters – Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Slyde, Gregory Hines – flew from the battens, signaling their spiritual presence. A woman meditated on a small platform upstage right, as if offering a prayer to the departed deities.

Glover and Davis have highly individual styles. Both like to dance with their eyes shut, feelin’ the groove. But Davis tends to hold his upper body still, arms stretched straight, fists curled, though his legs are loose. Davis rides his beats; Glover doesn’t so much ride as fly. He whirls, playing air drums; he swaps feet, engages his hips, pops his knees. His hands reach out, out, palms up, in the universal “from the heart” gesture.

In SoLe Sanctuary the two hoofed routines in perfect unison. These morphed into long, improvised solos, or the two traded eights, riffing on a theme. They faced each other, grinning; one started a beat, the other picked it up,. They jumped, clapped and spun as one. They did call and response, Glover sending out a beat with his right leg, Davis answering with his left. Glover often took the lead, Davis supplying counterrhythms upstage.

Most of the show was straight up percussion, sans accompaniment. Glover and Davis danced on a small wooden platform, playing the hollow floor with all facets of their feet the way congueros play their skins with every part of their hands. This pyrotechnical footwork is rhythmically rich, the moves visually arresting. But nearly two hours of pure percussion, much of it at lightening speed, at times felt relentless – moreso than the more tuneful (though also unaccompanied) Bare Soundz, which Glover performed here in ’08. More than once Thursday night I felt relief when the driving beat was broken with a slower step.

The pure percussion mode, showcased on the platform's restricted space (something Glover used to do with Gregory Hines, the link back to the original tap dance kings), reveals the remarkable range of the artform, accentuates the artists’ sheer virtuosity, and adds a younger, tech-oriented edge to an old artform. But the original jazzy, jivey, joyful hoofers ate up space, and most often used accompaniment of some sort. There are hundreds of YouTube videos you can watch to see what I mean – but here's one with most of the grand old men (introduced by Hines), for a point of comparison. I think this was taped in 1989:

In both Bare Soundz and SoLe Sanctuary I missed those expansive moves across the stage, though the hollow box makes it easier to pick up all the small variations those shoes, on the right feet, can create. And while the wow factor in SoLe Sanctuary was constant, the show was at its most soulful during those interludes in which other sounds slipped in. At one point Glover, ecstatic and sweating, laid a soft, off-key vocal renditon of Johnny Nash’s 1972 hit “I Can See Clearly Now” over his steps. Tapping quietly, he scatted around the Gil Scott Heron lyric “no matter how far you’ve gone, you can always turn around.” And finally, dancing to John Coltrane’s “Resolution,” the second track on Love Supreme, Glover and Davis blew the lid off the show, flying easy, spinning, playing off each others’ steps. Davis swung by himself to McCoy Tyner’s cascading piano solo; when Coltrane’s sax came back in Glover took over, postboppin' and grinning, loose as a goose.

When this joyful journey ended the two men bowed to each other and shook hands. Glover, alone on the stage, recited the roll call of the departed to whom homage had just been paid. He spoke softly, over an electronic track of the spiritual “A Long Way From Home,” while his feet tapped faster and faster. I couldn't catch all the names, but Jimmy Slyde, Chuck Green, Gil Scott Heron, Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis, Jr., the great Lon Chaney and Buster Brown were on the list.

Glover pivoted around his left foot, eyes closed, instinctually recalling steps learned at the masters’ sides. He flew, landed, raised his palm in thanks. Davis joined him, and the two, raising their eyes to the posters above, looked solemn and prayerful as the curtain went down.

According to the program notes Glover and Davis are “the last hoofers standing.” And, as my friend the pianist David Stoler said to me recently, the arts, like life, have an arc. When it's over, that's what it is. Just as there’ll be no more Coltranes, or no more Van Goghs, there may well be no more hoofers, and that’s indeed solemn and sad. But given that the old masters possessed immense warmth, good humor, and soul in spades, the end of SoLe Sanctuary was sort of a letdown. I’d much rather have seen a big, splashy jazz band on this hearse wagon.

Footwork Phenomenon: Savion Glover Returns!

2011-10-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

Savion Glover returns to the Wisconsin Union Theater stage on Thursday, Nov. 10 – exactly three years minus two days after his last performance here. The master tapper touched down in Madison on Nov. 8, 2008 (just four days after Obama won the presidential election, to put that in perspective), bringing us Bare Soundz, a stripped down performance featuring Glover with fellow hoofers Marshall Davis Jr. and Maurice Chestnut, dancing – apparently effortlessly, but I saw sweat flying – on three amplified platforms. They played bebop with their feet, trading eights and swapping solos like the jazzmen they are, flaunting their astonishing ability to play recognizable tunes with nothing other than beats, breath, and bits of metal tacked to the bottoms of their shoes.

From what I can glean about the show Glover’s bringing this time, SoLe Sanctuary, it’s similarly pure, but it has props – some audio clues, including a section from John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, plus posters of Glover’s artistic ancestors and an altar to a pair of tap shoes that assumably belonged to one of those beloved, departed mentors. (For more info on Glover and those who came before, see the background piece I wrote for Isthmus in 2008, attached below)

SoLe Sanctuary features Glover and Marshall Davis Jr., an onstage partnership that began with the original 1995 Broadway production of Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, which catapulted Glover to global fame. Last week I had a chance to talk to him about his dancing, and this show. The king of tap is strikingly possessive of his artform, and you can agree with him on that issue or not. But everything he had to say points clearly to this: what he does onstage comes straight from his heart. And that’s what distinguishes art from mere entertainment. Here are his responses to my queries, in his own words:

CulturalOyster: Last time we talked you described working with Lon Cheney, Chuck Green, Gregory Hines and all the others from that time – and how thankful you were for their teachings. So it feels like SoLe Sanctuary is a project that’s been in your heart for a long time – can you tell me about that?

Glover: First, SoLe Sanctuary isn’t a production. The whole idea of it is just what I do. What you have to understand is that whatever I’ve done outside Broadway is all about dedications to my mentors, the pioneers of this artform. It’s all something I live with and express in every performance I do. It just happens that this is the first time I’ve said that out loud, and with the pictures I use onstage.

CulturalOyster: What’s the basis of this show – do you and Marshall Davis take steps learned from the greats and improvise on them? If we in the audience were educated enough to know the styles of the elders, would we recognize them?

Glover: Yes, and again, this concept is in everything I do. We take the steps and routines and rhythms of the pioneers and build on them. If you’re familiar with Chuck Green, or Gregory Hines, when you see one of their steps done by us it’s an homage, a form of respect. But they taught us by saying ‘Don’t just do what we do. Don’t steal my step, but take it and do something with it.’ So aside from any of our own steps that we may come up with, Marshall and I are just up there enjoying each others’ company and enjoying the sound.

CulturalOyster: How is your own style unique – different from those who came before?

Glover: I think my style is similar to what my mentors did. What separates it from the other tap dancers of today is that our approach to the dance – I’m speaking for myself and these men who are no longer here – is more spiritual, more about communion, than about entertaining.

CulturalOyster: In the program notes you call yourself and Marshall Davis Jr. “the last hoofers standing.” Do you really feel there’s no future for your art form?

Glover: I feel that the future is within me, within us – so there is, God willing, a hopeful and bright future as long as I stay on the path I’m on. I was blessed and fortunate to be with a handful of those great men who invented the art form. They’re not around any more, so the kids today aren’t getting that same energy and attention. I have students, but I’m only one person. There’s no comparing that to what I had. I do my best to allow my students to understand the artform, but we don’t necessarily need more good [tap] dancers – we had greats and there’ll be nothing greater than those men. What we need is more awareness – more writers, more literaries. We need the dance to be spoken about so we can remember those men. It’s just like the music – we need more conversation about Coltrane and his contribution to the earth, more discussion about Miles [Davis], Sidney Bechet, Van Gogh, Gauguin. It [hoofing] isn't meant for everyone. I am not the biggest genius, but I have a gift for the dance, for what I express. Some young people just ain't got it. Their brilliance isn't in dance, it's elsewhere, but they just want to be onstage. That's not going to help.

***********************************************************

(the following piece first appeared in Isthmus, under the title “Savion Glover Stretches the Boundaries of Tap," on Nov. 6, 2008)

by Susan Kepecs

Savion Glover brings his neo-bebop happy feet to the Wisconsin Union Theater Saturday night. In his current touring repertory show, Bare Soundz, he plys his renowned rhythm taps on a rangy set of African diaspora beats.

A child prodigy, Glover made his Broadway debut at 12 in Tap Dance Kid. At 22 he copped two Tonys, for his performance and choreography in Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. He's a superstar at 34. Even if you're not a hoofer habitué you've seen Glover tap on TV. He's done everything from PBS specials to commercials and even Dancing with the Stars, though glitz isn't his game. Glover's biggest claim to fame is that he's taken an art form born in the 19th century and rendered it new for the 21st. That's no small feat.

When I was a dance class kid in the '50s, the Golden Age of movie musicals was done. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were out; Balanchine's ballets, Martha Graham, Agnes De Mille's revolutionary musicals were in. Tap was relegated to the warpy wood floors of second-rate Dolly Dinkle ballet schools. Glover's usually credited with saving tap dance, though that's not quite right. The liquid, lanky-faced dancer / actor Gregory Hines, star of movies I loved like Frances Ford Coppola's Cotton Club (1984) and White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov (1985), was the real bridge between the legendary rhythm tappers and the genre's resurgence. Hines was Glover's mentor. But it's Glover, with his trademark dreads and baggy threads, who made hoofin' hip for the next generation.

How Glover came to be crowned tap dance king seems like destiny, even to an atheist like me. He was dancing in utero, his mother, Yvette Glover, says in Savion! My Life in Tap, Glover's autobio as told to New York Times writer Bruce Weber. The Lord wanted to call this rhythmic child Savior, the story goes, but Glover's mom prudently swapped the "r" for an "n."

"My mom was a singer," Glover tells me on the phone. "She was very heavy in the church and jazz as well. So she had her career. Music was all throughout my family. My grandmother was a minister of music, my grandfather was a musician. That's where my inspiration comes from, having a happy family and giving thanks to God that I'm alive and able to express myself through dance."

Yvette Glover, a single mother in economically depressed Newark, N.J., scraped together what it took to send seven year old Savion to tap class. No Dolly Dinkle school would do. Glover got his first glimpse of glinty Teletone taps at the Hines-Hatchett studio (owned by Gregory Hines' older brother Maurice) in midtown Manhattan, where legendary hoofers still hung out. "The day my mom signed me up I saw Chuck Green and Lon Chaney [the tapper, not the actor]," he says. "I was pretty turned on."

Glover's trademark lightning-speed, polyrhythmic style didn't quite happen overnight. "I started like everybody else," he says.

That means Maxi Fords and shufflin' off to Buffalo, but Glover mastered the elements in minutes and zoomed ahead. At 10 he auditioned for Broadway / film choreographer Henry LeTang, who got the young rhythm whiz cast in the 1984 Broadway production of Tap Dance Kid. Five years later Glover found himself in the Paris production of Black and Blue, a tribute to African-American music directed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, a pair of Argentinian showmen whose previous song and dance revues included Tango Argentino and Flamenco Puro. LeTang won a Tony for his choreography in Black and Blue, which featured a 13-piece jazz orchestra, R&B diva Ruth "Mama he Treats Your Daughter Mean" Brown and a pantheon of iconic hoofers including Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde and the elegant queen of jazz tap Dianne "Lady Di" Walker.

Gregory Hines saw the show. It was Glover's luckiest break. "I met Gregory before, at Hines and Hatchett, he'd come up there from time to time, but it wasn't till he saw me in Paris that we started working together," Glover says. "It was a beautiful experience. I worked with him till he died."

Hines' influence still flows through Glover's taps. You can see his style take shape in old YouTube videos of the two trading eights. But the whole hoofer community seems to have taken the young prince of tap under its collective wing, Walker in particular. Glover still calls her "Aunt Dianne."

While apprenticing at the masters' sides, Glover played himself -- an endearing, wholesome teen -- on Sesame Street. He did the Broadway run of Black and Blue. In Jelly’s Last Jam, based on the life of Jelly Roll Morton, Glover played Young Jelly opposite Hines, who won a Tony for his role as the aging jazz piano man.

In a video interview made years later, LeTang took credit for his discovery. "I'm so happy with Savion," he tells the camera. "He's keeping it alive. I took him when he was a kid exposed him to the older dancers like Bunny and Jimmy Slyde. I'd say Bunny, show the kid a step. Savion's got a piece of all of us."

Most of the rhythm tap kings in whose shoes Glover now dances are gone. Lon Chaney died in '95, Green in '97, Hines in '03, LeTang last year, Jimmy Slyde last May. "My teachers were far beyond show business," Glover says. "They taught me that I wasn't a show business kind of kid. Every show I've been involved in has been by invitation on their part. I'm grateful to God that they taught me to represent an art form that belongs to my people. Being part of the family of hoofers is a blessing. I'm thankful I was able to know the cats and they let me copy them till I was ready to speak in my own voice."

Glover's voice emerged full-blown in '95 with Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. Black and Blue had loads of soul, but Noise / Funk, subtitled "A Rap/Tap Discourse on the Staying Power of da' Beat," broke Broadway barriers with its young black aesthetic. Glover danced with an all-male crew of new-generation hoofers to song lyrics by poetry slam champ reg e. gaines. Noise / Funk ripped across the entire canvas of African-American street music, from the slave diaspora to hip-hop.

Glover got slapped with a tag: hip-hop tap. He spurns the term. "I was around before the word hip-hop. I was there when it was rap, enjoying the songs and lyrics. Today it's nothing, it's a setback. There's a lot of things the kids 18 or 19 understand, but at 34 I don't get it. There is no link between hip-hop and what I do. I play music. The only links I have are to people like Hines or Lon Chaney. Those people know nothing about hip-hop. It was straight swing jazz through bebop. What I do, I can play all types of music, whether it's Caribbean or folk or jazz. I don't want kids to think that what I do has anything to do with hip-hop. No. It has to do with a very long legacy of tap dancers."

Glover's stretched that tradition with his spiffy Gen X look and rhythmic chops. Like Noise / Funk, his 2005 tour Classical Savion (think Vivaldi, Mozart, Dvorzak) pushed the envelope. The show was controversial, netting both high praise and arched eyebrows from the press. Asked if he'd take on more classical themes in the future, Glover hesitates. "Sure, why not?" he says, after the pause.

But the mature Glover is heading in a more relevant direction. He's picked up the bop legacy where an earlier generation of hoofers left off. Swing and bebop bands often worked with tap dancers. Like his predecessors Glover's tapped to bebop potentates -- he did an evening of works to Thelonious Monk at Lincoln Center a few years back. But he's also the world's first serious post-bop hoofer. He's got a Coltrane-inspired small-venue improv show, If Trane Wuz Here, with reg e. gaines and rising young Chicago-born composer / saxwoman Matana Roberts.

"Coltrane's the same as dancers like Gregory Hines," Glover says. "Hines is like Miles [Davis], Miles is like Sammy Davis Jr. They're like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ghandi. They're all the same to me 'cause of their contributions to the world. They all taught me that we can continue to evolve as artists 'till we run out of evolvement. They're transformative."

Glover's evolution includes gigs in big city jazz clubs and concert halls with his own jazz quartet, the Otherz, or post-bop pianist McCoy Tyner and his trio. But it doesn't stop there. Like Hines, Glover plys his beats on the silver screen. He played a vaudeville minstrel in blackface in Spike Lee's bitter satire Bamboozled (2000) -- a very edgy part, but Glover's a versatile performer. Proving that fame hasn't eclipsed the good-humored kid from Sesame Street, he did the tap-over for Mumble the Penguin in Warner Brothers' 2006 animated film Happy Feet. When former New York Times arts critic John Rockwell complained that the dancer didn't get proper credit, Glover responded that he saw himself as stunt man, not star; he was just glad somebody wanted to make a movie about tap dancing.

Like his mentors, Glover teaches at the Broadway Dance Center, formerly Hines and Hatchett. He's passing the torch to the next generation, particularly to Cartier Williams, 18, who's been Glover's protegé for a decade.

Williams struts his stuff with Glover Saturday night, along with Marshall Davis Jr., from the original Noise / Funk cast. "Davis is a student of the late, great Steve Condos, who danced in the '30s with musicians like Benny Goodman and Count Basie," Glover says. "I really dig performing with these two dudes, they have great respect for the art form and the cats who came before us."

There's swing, bebop and post-bop, plus Calypso and more on the Bare Soundz bill. "It displays tap as music," Glover wraps up. "That's what it is. We play grooves through tap. It's tap dance as song."

Terence Blanchard Runs the Voodoo Down

2011-10-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

The Terence Blanchard Quintet brought jazz full circle (at least for this first-wave boomer) at the Union Theater last Friday night (Oct. 21). Blanchard rose to prominence in the ‘80s, plying his Crescent City-spiced trumpet with hard bop king Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers two decades after the golden days of that rousing gospel and blues-tinged flavor of bop and its edgier, more modal, post bop sister. If Blakey and his one-time trumpet man Lee Morgan, along with Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver were hard bop’s honchos, Coltrane, in his Love Supreme period, was the potentate of post bop – but the almighty Miles Davis, who played all kinds of bop and invented half of them, started it when he opened up the terrain of modal scales. Hard bop speaks to my Chicago girl soul, but post bop embodies the most daring spirit of the Big Apple ‘60s, when both of these takes on jazz (which sometimes overlap) were huge.

That adventuous edginess has been gone for decades. A few years back Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddens quit reviewing, calling jazz an artform of the past. And in 2005, UK jazz writer Stuart Nicholson published a talked-about book titled Is Jazz Dead? It’s true – jazz had a feeble existence once it burned itself out on imitations of Miles' original electronic fusion sometime in the ‘70s. The music’s quasi resurgence at the start of the new millenium -- the Africanization and hip-hopization of bop (think Lionel Loueke, Esperanza Spalding) and the soft approach to bossa nova (Gretchen Parlato, among others) is often pretty good, but except for grizzled old lions like McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, keepin' on into their 70s and 80s, real, honest, old-fashioned bop has been hard to come by for a very long time.

And then Blanchard blazes into town, signaling solidarity, exhorting us to “get [Walker’s] ass out!" – shades of the ‘60s! – and leaping into the void with his smokin’ young quintet: Havana-born Fabian Almazan on piano (Ben Ratliff recently called Almazan one of the country’s most interesting rising pianists: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/arts/music/four-young-pianists-on-the-rise-in-the-jazz-scene.html?scp=19&sq=ratliff&st=cse); the impressive, accomplished Brice Winston on tenor sax; 19-year old Juilliard student Joshua Crumbly on bass, and, sitting in (with no rehearsal) on drums, Jeremiah Williams. A Blanchard-penned tune titled “Wandering Wonder” – a miracle of modal expression – started the first set; only Almazan’s brief, semi-disguised montuno hinted at anything other than ‘60s New York.

Of course, these are versatile musicians; on the heels of “Wandering” came the bluesy, gospel-y “Ashé,” off Blanchard’s Tale of God’s Will album, the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s movie When the Levees Broke – followed by a piece of sheer post bop by Winston, “Time to Spare,” featuring Winston’s sinuous sax and Almazan’s quirky keyboard work.

The second set opened with a soaring, sexy take on the standard “Autumn Leaves,” and an extended segment from Choices, Blanchard’s 2009 CD on Concord. I carried away from that an image of Blanchard and Winston bent over their horns, playing the same cascading runs seconds apart.
In the closer, a new, as yet unrecorded piece by Almazan called “Pet Step Sitter’s Theme” (or something like that), the keys were souped up with electronic processing, and Blanchard’s authoritative trumpet looped through a chorus pedal. Throughout the night Blanchard, the consummate jazz educator, had served up commanding solos while leaving wide open spaces for his rising sidemen. Almazan, true to this form, broke loose in his fusion-tinged piece, which possesses a wildness akin to Bitches Brew. And, saving the best for last, Blanchard ran the voodoo down.

Picking Tickets for Fall, '11

2011-10-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Sweet Honey in the Rock Dwight Carter photo

by Susan Kepecs

Since the Crash of ’08 I’ve written a lot about how the city’s culture palaces are feeling the pinch. In the old days, I was at Overture or the Wisconsin Union Theater at least once a week, sometimes twice. This season, again, the pickings are slimmer – but so what? Who can afford more than a handful of tickets these days? As always, my enthusiasm runs higher for some shows than others, even among those I plan to see. Here’s a look at my choices among the imported shows by Overture Presents and the WUT.

My fall theater-going season starts this Friday (Oct. 7, WUT) with the unsurpassable Sweet Honey in the Rock, which hasn’t graced Madison since its 2000 concert at the old Madison Civic Center. This week is perfect timing for the return of this national treasure – there’s no better way to get the spirit as American Autumn (Occupy Wall St.! Recall Walker!) gears up. When these six elegant sisters raise their collective a capella voice to the heavens, spirits soar – but this music, steeped in the vocal traditions of the black church, is more political than religious. There’s always a message in Sweet Honey’s rousing repertory of spirituals, gospel, jazz, blues, freedom songs and African chants. Some of these songs are old as the hills; others, penned by group members, speak truth to new excesses of power. Sweet Honey’s been twining rich four and five-part harmonies around their demands for justice and equality for nearly 40 years, and they do it with wide-open heart and soul.

My final fall pick, calendar-wise, is Mad City fave Dobet Gnahore (Nov. 11, the Sett, Union South). Since her first visit to Madison with Putumayo’s Acoustic Africa show in the fall of ’06, we’ve watched this Ivorian chanteuse / dancer go from rising star to the top of Afropop. A new-generation pan-African idealist, Gnahore guards the continent’s culture from the jaws of global commercial forces. Unlike older, hard rock-influenced Afropop gods or Africa’s hip hop youth she sticks to the roots. She’s a sizzling songstress; she dances pan-African freestyle like liquid fire. She’s a goddess of Afrochic. She grooves.

Gnahore smokes; Madeleine Peyroux (WUT, Oct. 12) is cool. The Athens, Georga-born chanteuse, who started busking on European streets as a teen, was the ticketed headliner for the Isthmus Jazz Festival four years ago. She’s traveled new ground since then. Her spare alto voice still sounds a lot like Billie Holiday sans pain, though unlike Holiday Peyroux plays a guitar, and her repertory often strays far afield from bluesy jazz – she’s covered Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, lots of Leonard Cohen. Lately, Peyroux’s been writing (or co-writing) her own songs. Most of them swing, and her words wink.

My jones for old-fashioned jazz gets fed when multitalented trumpeter / bandleader / composer / film score master and four-time Grammy winner Terence Blanchard, long a leading lion of straight-ahead, takes the WUT stage with his quintet on Oct. 21. Blanchard, a New Orleans native, emerged as a leader in the ‘80s during his stint with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Through Blanchard, the flames of hard bop and Miles-style fusion burn on, sizzling with Crescent City pizzazz. Amen to that! But Blanchard’s no relic of bygone eras. An educator who works with some amazing young musicians, he keeps his sound current with the intense global colors – mostly African, though his forthcoming album with conga king Poncho Sanchez, Chano y Dizzy, is pure Cubop – that mark the burgeoning new jazz of the twenty-first century generation.

By way of contrast, rising young jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire – a former Blanchard student – plays Overture’s Capitol Theater (Oct. 11) with “The Miles Davis Experience,” a commercial, pre-packaged affair from Blue Note Records, CAMI Music and Miles Davis Properties, LLC. The show concentrates on Miles’ works from 1959 through 1969, which would include just about all of his best albums, from Kind of Blue through In a Silent Way, while seeming to stop a few months prior to the 1970 release of Bitches’ Brew, his seminal fusion album. With or without Bitches Brew this is some of the best repertory in jazz, and Akinmusire’s gotta be good – he won the Thelonius Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007, and he gets rave reviews. I’d love to hear him play, but this is one of those history channel packages, filled with film clips and other epoch-related relics and aimed at rescuing the twentieth century for the twenty-first. Shows like this have their place, but they tend to make me gnash my teeth. I might go, if I’m in the mood. But if you just want to hear living jazz, rooted in Miles’ legacy and moving into the future on its own, choose Blanchard instead.

Dance gets the short shrift in the theaters this fall – there’s not a lot, but virtuoso hoofer Savion Glover (Nov. 10, WUT) is a best bet. Last time Glover was here, in November, ’08, he plied his renowned rhythm taps on Bare Soundz, a show with a rangy set of African diaspora beats. Bare Soundz was brilliantly sophisticated, and Glover, who’s paid homage to monumental musicians from Monk and Coltrane to Bach and Bartok, is still pushing the envelope with those fortunate feet. This time he’s touring Classical Encounter, a show so brand-new there are no reviews yet – I don’t know what’s in it, but you’re bound to be blown away.

Ballet Maribor’s Radio and Juliet (Overture Hall, Oct. 15) is on my maybe list. The company, from the eponymous Slovenian city, doesn’t have much of an English-language online presence, other than a couple of positive reviews of this full-length work, which was performed at Pittsburgh’s International Festival of Firsts in ’08 and again at Jacob’s Pillow the following year. But from YouTube clips it’s clear that Radio and Juliet, choreograhed by the company’s artistic director, Edward Clug, looks a lot like the work of Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian of Nederlands Dans Theatre, whose pieces are also prominent in the repertory of Chicago’s Hubbard St. Dance. I’m not a huge fan of Kylian’s work, but I’m a sucker for clean, contemporary ballet technique, and I’ve never seen Ballet Maribor, so you might find me there.

That’s it for me this fall -- what are you planning to see?

Broke or not, I’ve got my eye on more tickets for spring. Stay tuned.

High Holy Music

2011-09-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

CD Review: Further Definitions of the Days of Awe. The Afro-Semitic Experience (Reckless DC Music, 2011).

Just in time for the high holidays (Rosh Hashanah this starts at sundown on on Weds., Sept. 28 this year), an album called Further Definitions of the Days of Awe, by a band called the Afro-Semitic Experience, landed on my desk.

The Afro-Semitic Experience, which draws jazz, Latin and soul influences into its mix, isn’t the only band with a black / Jewish bent; kosher soul brother Joshua Nelson, a cantor who frequently performs with alt-klezmer kings the Klezmatics, has his own distinct take – joyful, gospel-charged, and politically progressive – on black Jewish music. The Afro-Semitic Experience, founded by African-American jazz pianist Warren Byrd and Jewish bass player David Chavan, is equally good, if less well-known.

For a decade, according to the liner notes, the Afro-Semitic Experience has played the Selichot services that precede Rosh Hashanah with Cantor Jack Mendelson at his synagogue in White Plains, NY. Selichot, Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the day of attonement) – collectively, the Days of Awe – are solemn times of repentance and renewal, but Further Definitions of the Days of Awe manages to be both deeply liturgical and unabashedly celebratory, all at once. Really, that's the right note for renewal, not to mention welcoming a new year. My ancestors might not approve such joyful noise, but I say hallelujah!

Classic cantorial vocal lines weave plaintively through soulful arrangements. An Ashrei prayer becomes funky R&B, the bari sax adding edges of Monk-like dissonance. Viddui, a prayer of confession, morphs into a Motown-based ballad with a hint of rumba congas at the end. Adoshem (praise) is done first as smoky tango, then as classic salsa in 2-3 clave. “Sh’ma Koleinu” sneaks in as soul, then slides toward straight-ahead jazz. “Shomer Yisrael,” a song for the guardian at the gates, simmers in soul ballad mode, spiced with supremely graceful horn lines; you can hear the audience say “Woo! Yeah!” at the end of the track.

For the record, I’m an urban secular Jew. My parents sent me to synagogue for a few years to instill a sense of my heritage, but my only vivid memory of that experience is the time I played Queen Esther in the annual Purim play. Religion’s never been my bag, but I can say this beyond a shadow of doubt: if the Afro-Semitic Experience had played at our services, I’d have attended religiously.

Further Definitions of the Days of Awe isn’t a disc I’d spin every day, but it’s much more than a mere holiday album. The Afro-Semitic Experience packs a lot of power onto a little CD – it’s worth a listen any time you feel the need for repentance and renewal.

Mazel tov. Shana tova.
-- Susan Kepecs

Reflections on the Madison World Music Festival's Eighth Incarnation

2011-09-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

By Susan Kepecs

Some Madison World Music Festivals have been better than others, and this year’s fest – the eighth – was one of the best. Every band I heard was brilliant, and the overarching lesson I took away from the event was this: while what we call “world music” is constantly evolving, and while lots of it is, overtly or not, about cultural resistance, absolutely all of it is woven from the shifting cultural-economic web of the world system. For a social scientist like me that’s a fascinating phenomenon.

I caught almost every group that played at the Memorial Union, though I missed Frigg due to bad timing Thursday night. I opted out of the Willy St. Fair – I had mixed feelings about Sergent Garcia and Bomba Estereo anyway, which I reported in the preview I posted last week. Still, I’m sure these bands, like the rest, shed some light on the world system. If you were there, please use the comments box below to tell me what I missed!

Here’s what I thought of the rest of the fest. My pre-event pick was Nawal, the voice of the Comoros Islands, and she was great – a warm performer in a red Sufi turban, barefoot and smiling. Nawal, a mesmerizing Muslim woman wielding a mighty voice, chose to open her set with a Sufi trance take on “Shalom Aleichem,” an Israeli song every good Jewish kid learns at a tender age. That alone was a revelation, but the whole show underscored the essence of the island crossroads in the Indian Ocean where Nawal was born, and where traders from Madagascar, South and East Africa, Arabia and Asia mingled from medieval times through the late nineteenth century. Most of the Nawal’s repertory married Bantu polyrhythms and Arabic tonalities, though she stretched into deep, ringing hums like cosmic breaths, swung into the Soweto sound or intoned purely Persian modal melodies. Rounding out the set, the pianist in the stellar three-piece backup band plunged into some joyful straight-ahead western jazz during the encore. Bravo.

The Chai Found Music Workshop from Taiwan (which played two concerts, Thurs. and Fri. nights) was a big surprise. Billed as traditional Chinese chamber music, I expected a high-end noodle shop sound. Instead, this virtuoso ensemble with its fabulous Chinese instruments (including a violin like a small box on a stick, played bottom down like a cello, and a big, round, banjolike guitar) melded echoes of western composers from Chopin to Prokofiev with non-western scales and elongated, sliding notes. I even caught a few blue notes, a whiff of medieval Spain, a boogie woogie blues and a Chinese song built on a Buddy Holly-like 1957 rock n’ roll chassis. Of course, China was at the heart of the world system from early days of the Silk Routes till the Ching Dynasty instituted the closed door policy in the seventeenth century – and Taiwan, celebrating its centennial of independence this year, has been much more open to European influences than mainland China since the late 1800’s -- so Chai's striking mix makes sense.

The pizzica tarantella dance music Canzionere Grecianico Salentino brought to the fest wove a different sort of tapestry from world system sounds. I loved the multi-instrumentality of the players and the folksy, scarf-flinging dance in 6/8 time. It was absolutely freezing out on the Terrace late Friday afternoon, but a group of local women – one of them a bona fide expert – whirled joyfully around on the concrete. Ancient Greeks brought the original form, a Bacchanalian festival dance, to southern Italy, where it morphed into a medieval cure to cast out devil venom acquired through spider bites. The tarantella still thrives in Italy, but there’s much more to it than the Adriatic connection. Italy was a Silk Route stop – that’s how Marco Polo got to China in the thirteenth century. His travels, and the links they established, came through loud and clear in Canzionere’s tunes, especially in the snake charmer flute solos and the echoes of Asia and Persia elicited from the concertina. Did you hear that, too?

Kutumba, from Kathmandu, on its first-ever U.S. tour, served up high-energy fare. The young players, wearing jeans under their Nehru jackets, take a twenty-first century approach to cultural resistance, updating traditional Nepalese sounds with a slim, bright edge of rock and a slew of heartfelt activist themes. On their playlist Friday night was a song for the environment and another about Nepal’s 1996-2006 civil war. Though Nepal is sandwiched between India and Tibet, Kutumba sounds much more Indian than Chinese. Drums, cymbals and gongs are a hallmark of this music. But like the Chai Found Music Workshop, Kutumba cooks with conversations between violin (sarangi – a much different-looking instrument than the Chinese violin) and flute.

It was all great, but I saved the best for last. I’ve always been nuts about Dragon Knights, those spectacular stiltwalker puppets towering over the Terrace, the Union Theater and the Willy St. Fair. Founder Lily Valerie Noden, who’s French and lives in California, describes her artform as culturally blended theater with roots in Europe, Africa, Asia and the U.S. (go to her website, http://www.stiltshow.com/home.html, for more of the story). But her puppets are more like creatures from another planet, or your dreams. The dragon’s been dazzling MWMF goers since 2006; the luminous dragonfly was new here this year. Little kids seemed scared of them, but grownups were as thrilled as the slightly bigger kids, following them around with awestruck expressions. And here’s a law of life: when a Dragon Knight touches you, you never forget. The dragon tried to take a bite of my hair, and I fell madly in love with him; MWMF artistic selection chair Esty Dinur danced with the dragonfly and was similarly charmed.

Finally, Blitz the Ambassador, from Ghana and New York, blew me away. Blitz bills his act as hip hop, and I’m way too much of a boomer to be a big hip hop fan. From the YouTube videos I watched before I wrote my preview I was willing to bet Blitz and his band would be boss, but live onstage they beat the pants off my expectations. What a troupe of tremendous showmen! As the students in the UW-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives' First Wave Program might say, this band just bust. It was late Friday night. It was cold, but Blitz was hot. People were bopping before the stage; one guy was break dancing like wildfire. Blitz’ socially savvy lyrics ("You got to organize! Bring in the horns!") satisfied, and his mix of Afrobeat, highlife, old-school soul and hip hop ("I’m gonna blend it together, Madison!”), plus the blazing James Brown-style horn section, citing lions like Masakela and Coltrane, did me in.

Thanks, Wisconsin Union Theater, for the Madison World Music Festival. Bring back Blitz the Ambassador!

A Gringa's Guide to the Madison World Music Festival, Chapter 8

2011-09-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

When the first hint of crispness creeps into the air, you know it’s time for the annual Madison World Music Festival. This feast of free music (Thurs. - Sat., Sept. 15-17, with special added attractions tonight -- that's Sat., Sept. 10 -- and Weds. Sept. 14) hits its eighth incarnation this year. It's facilitated, in large part, through collaboration with other, overlapping Midwest fests, and it’s brought to you by the Wisconsin Union Theater and a generous group of local sponsors. Most events occur on our beloved Memorial Union Terrace, but on Sat., Sept. 17, everything but the wrapup show takes place at the Willy St. Fair. That's a hike or a parking nightmare if you don't live on the Near East Side, but never fear -- this year for the first time Greyhound Bus offers free hourly shuttle service between the Memorial Union and Willy St., so there’s no excuse not to hit the near East Side for any band you want to hear.

The festival, as always, brings in rising young acts and established bearers of cultural traditions little-known outside their home countries. But this year there’s also a warmup concert by a big star, Vieux Farka Touré, master Malian guitarist and son of the late, legendary Malian bluesman Ali Farka Touré. Vieux’s playing, rooted in his father’s flowing style but infused with fancy, Hendrix-like licks, wields his wicked axe on the Terrace this Saturday at 10 PM.

Next up (Weds., Sept. 14, 7 PM at the Marquee, Union South) is Cultures of Resistance, an award-winning documentary by Brazilian activist Iara Lee. Lee's traveled the globe documenting activist artists, many of them musicians. This important film speaks to the oblique powers of nonviolent artistic resistance against the global oligarchs, and reveals voices you’ll never hear in the mainstream media. Dr. Jonathan Overby, of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Higher Ground, leads a post-screening Q&A, and he’s the best person I can imagine for this role. The film screens again, without Overby, at the Play Circle in the Memorial Union at 9 PM Thurs.

For years, most of what we call “world music” was a tool of cultural, if not overtly political or economic, resistance. But the genre’s always changing, as an historical glance at Madison's seven previous festivals shows. For its first four years the fest was a savvy mix of very traditional sounds and the rootsy indie blends cooked up by a younger generation. Among my many favorites in the first category I'll list sonero/merenguero Puerto Plata from the Dominican Republic in 2007, and the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar in 2006; in the second, Chicana/Mixteca Lila Downs’ sin fronteras rancheras (2005) amd Gjallarhorn’s jazzy electronic takes on medieval Swedish folk (2006) left lasting impressions.

By the festival’s fifth year, the emphasis expanded. Two underground Europop bands – a wacky Hungarian group called Little Cow, plus Prague rockers Plastic People of the Universe, who billed themselves as the Czech Republc’s Mothers of Invention, found questionable room in the festival’s big tent. And at this year’s fest, alongside traditional and next-generation players you’ll discover three hip-hop groups. Global hip-hop’s been edging into the world music festival circuit since at least last year, when several acts appeared at Chicago’s event, but I admit it – I have mixed feelings about this development. After all, hip-hop, an artform born in the Bronx, blazed its way around the world via the conduits of U.S. military-economic domination. Not that all hip hop is part of the capitalist machine – far from it. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the insipid thug themes of cheap, commercial rap is the socially conscious movement around which the UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives has built First Wave, a brilliantly innovative program of undergraduate education. OMAI dishes up its lavish Line Breaks Festival every spring. Given hip-hop’s already prominent presence on campus, is adding it to the world music lineup the right way to go? You decide, and let me know – please, drop me a line in the comments box at the end of this preview.

Of the three hip-hop acts at this year’s fest, one – Blitz the Ambassador (from Brooklyn, via his native Ghana) – stands out (Fri. 9:30 PM, Memorial Union Terrace [rain, 10 PM, Union Theater). This is top-shelf, socially conscious hip-hop with honest world music roots – super-sharp, gritty, urban rhymes set to a scorching synthesis of highlife, Afrobeat and Big Apple hip-hop. I’d be happy to hear Blitz the Ambassador at the MWMF, the Line Breaks fest or anywhere else. I’m less enthusiastic about Sergent Garcia (Sat., 5:30 PM, Willy St. Fair; 9:30 PM on the Terrace [rain, Rathskellar]), a Parisian ex-punk rocker with Spanish roots who’s given his sound the unfortunately silly name of “salsamuffin.” In a nutshell it’s sin fronteras salsa-with-reggae-and-rap; it’s muy bailable, but neither the sound nor lyrics, ranging from mildly political to self-indulgent refrains on the artist’s own hipness, can hold a candle to Blitz the Ambassador. Bomba Estereo (Sat., 7:30 PM, Willy St.), from Colombia, plays “electro-tropical,” a close cousin to reggaeton and, yes, salsamuffin. Its lead singer, Liliana Samuet, is slick, but this band’s let’s party, quitame la ropa lyrics (in Spanish and English) leave me cold. Still, Sergent Garcia and Bomba Estereo will rock the crowds, and there’s something to be said for that.

Here’s a look at the rest of the fest. My personal pick this year is Nawal (Thurs., 8:30 PM, Union Theater), chanteuse extraordinaire from Paris via the Comoros Islands. It’s the first time this volcanic chain in the Indian Ocean off the southeast coast of Africa has been represented at the MWMF. The Comoros, a crossroads for medieval trade, was colonized by France at the start of the 20^th century and cut out of contemporary commercial routes. The islands are among the poorest regions in today’s world, but the historical legacy of their rich exchange with South and East Africa, Arabia, Asia and Madascar lives in Nawal’s music; she plies her powerhouse alto voice on a jazz-like Sufi / Bantu mix – sometimes pulsingly polyrhythmic, sometimes a meditative flow – and accompanies herself on the gambusi, a sort of oud with a banjolike sound.

Another country represented for the first time this year is Nepal. Kutumba (Fri., 8 PM, Union Theater), a six-piece instrumental folk ensemble from Kathmandu, is dedicated to preserving the traditional folk music and instruments of this tiny, landlocked sliver of the Himalayas, while updating the sound for the 21^st century. On its website, Kutumba makes it clear – this band is all about cultural resistance in the face of globalization. I like Kutumba’s rich aural Buddhist/Hindu tapestry, which, at least for this gringa boomer, conjures up incense and hippies. This is Katumba’s first U.S. tour, but the expat Nepalese community is already in tune with this troupe. A comment under a YouTube video says it all: “Kutumba, the pride of Nepal. Saving our culture, thanx, man.”

From Taiwan, in celebration of the island's centennial as a sovereign state this year, comes the Chai Found Music Workshop (Thurs., 6:30 PM, Union Theater; Fri., 7:30 PM, Terrace [rain, 7 PM, Union Theater]). This remarkable group works in two veins. The first is traditional Sizhu (“silk and bamboo”) music, which essentially consists of improvisational dialogue between wind (bamboo) and strings (silk). In the second, compositions created in collaboration with other musicians from around the world, while clearly Chinese in instrumentation, fuse east and west in contemporary ways. At Thursday’s indoor concert you’ll hear a quiet, traditional, very Chinese sound; the group’s Terrace performance on Friday shows off its more upbeat, international side.

For a closer-to-home sound, Brazilian sambista/popster Luisa Maita, the latest young phenom to climb the Latin charts, is a good pick. Her sound’s not unique, but it’s satisfyingly silky.

Two really hot Italian bands take the stage this year. I’m especially looking forward to Canzionere Grecianico Salentino (Fri., 5:30 PM, Terrace [rain, 5:30 PM, Union Theater]), from the Puglia region of southern Italy – the heel of the boot, jutting into the Adriatic toward Greece. This bright seven-piece band-plus-dancer plays 21^st century arrangements of pizzica salentina, a regional form of tarentella dance music rooted in medieval belief that spirit-possessed dancing was the cure for tarantula bites. In Italy right now there’s a big revival of this lively music, featuring tambourines, accordion and Italian bagpipes, and Canzionere – the band’s been around since the 1970s – is the reigning king of this scene.

At the opposite end of the spaghetti spectrum is singer / songwriter / guitarist Marco Calliari (Sat. Willy St., 3:30 PM). Born in Montreal to Italian immigrant parents, Calliari started out playing thrash metal with a group called Anonymus. On trip to Italy he discovered his roots; today he writes his own tunes and casts traditional Italian songs like “Bella Ciao” in his own style, mixing traditional Italian rhythms with rock, hints of flamenco and more.

Calliari's on my to-do list, and so is Frigg (Thurs., 9 PM, Union Terrace [rain, Union Theater]), a band of Finnish fiddle players and Norwegian folksters that serves up “Nordgrass,” a high energy, contemporary takes on traditional Scandanivian tunes. Frigg is the name of the Norse goddess of happiness, and Frigg the Nordgrass band puts out an ebullient violin and accordion (concertina, actually) sound. The echoes of Celtic and Cajun music you won’t fail to notice weave whole musical cloth from the Viking invasions of Ireland, then Canada, and the later flight of the Acadians from the Canadian maritime provinces to Lousiana.

And last but not least, there’s the festival ambience – sunset on the Union Terrace, rowdy Willy St., beer, brats, ice cream – and, returning for the fifth year in a row, the amazing Dragon Knights (they tend to amble sporadically through the crowd, but they’re slated specifically for 7:20 PM Fri. on the Terrace [rain, 8 PM, Union Theater] and Sat., 3 and 5 PM at the Willy St. Fair). These spectacular, otherworldly puppets on stilts by Lily Valerie Noden, who trained at the Ecole International de Theatre in Paris, are worth the parking hassle all by themselves.

I can't wait. See you there!

López-Nussa Rocks the Cardinal Bar

2011-09-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

Last Sunday night I caught the Ernan López-Nussa trio at the Cardinal Bar. That afternoon the high-end Cuban jazz outfit played the Orton Park Festival, but this is nightclub music, and I chose to hear it where it belongs. Kudos to Cardinal proprietor Ricardo Gonzalez for providing a rare treat in a town where non-local jazz is usually relegated to the formal constraints of the proscenium arch – think the Isthmus Jazz Series at the Wisconsin Union Theater, and Sonny Rollins or Kenny Barron at the Overture. That never feels right to me – jazz, a spontaneous artform, demands a drink in your hand, friends at your table, the right ambience for head-bopping and the freedom to say “yeah!”

López-Nussa, a Havana native, is, like all great musicians raised in Revolutionary Cuba, conservatory trained. Early in his career he worked with Silvio Rodríguez, whose nueva trova, while far from my favorite style, provides some of the satisfying softness that comes through in López-Nussa’s own sound. With jazz giant Bobby Carcassés’ Afrocuba, López-Nussa honed his guaguancó. Today the versatile pianist, who’s got six or seven albums under his belt (most of them not available in the States) is a big name in Cuba. But while this is his second (or third?) U.S. tour, he’s not nearly as well known here as other piano titans from the embargoed island like Chucho Valdés, Gonzalo Rubalcaba or Omar Sosa. That’s a shame, since López-Nussa’s phenomenal jazz criollo explodes with sabor. Based on the stately danzón and contradanza rhythms of nineteenth century Cuba – a fortuitous marriage of the Viennese waltzes that were the rage in Europe and Afro-Cuban influences – it’s a gentler sound than the mambo / rumba jazz played by Lopez-Nussa’s counterparts. Not that criollo is Lopez-Nussa’s only style; Sunday night he ranged from from Bach to bossa nova, mixed montunos with modal progressions and plunged into some tasty jazz/rock fusions.

Onstage at the Cardinal, López-Nussa’s remarkable rapport with his Cuba-born sidemen, Jimmy Branley on drums and Jorge Alexander on bass, stood out. Branley’s a subtle but sparkling drummer with some of Roy Haynes’ snap-crackle in his sticks. His credits include Valdés and Rubalcaba, plus NG la Banda, the band that invented timba and is still the only timba outfit I enjoy. Alexander started playing with López-Nussa at the turn of this century, in the latter’s jazz fusion band Habana Report (the name evokes the king of ‘70s fusion bands, Weather Report, fronted by Wayne Shorter and the late, great keyboardist Joe Zawinul – and the influences of both players are evident in Lopez Nussa’s style).

López-Nussa, Branley and Alexander, clearly in love with their music, sat facing each other, conversing, I swear, flirtatiously, via their instruments. It was some of the best musical dialogue I’ve heard in years.

At one point López-Nussa, grinning, looked up from the keys saying “I’m going to do a sacrilege!” and launched in to Chopin’s Waltz No. 7 from Les Sylphides. From straight-up Romanticism López-Nussa swung seamlessly into danzón, letting the audience experience the blood tie between the two forms. Say yeah!

López-Nussa served up several more spot-on danzones and a contradanza, all filled with soaring improvizations, plus some brilliant two-fisted piano playing on a playful piece of jazz / gospel / rock fusion. In a fine Cuban finish the trio took off on Rafael Fernández’ famous guaracha, “Capullito de Aleli.” I left wishing for more, and ready to spring for all the Lopez-Nussa CDs I can find.

Isthmus Jazz Festival Shimmers in Summer Heat

2011-06-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

   SKepecs photo

I didn’t catch everything at this year’s Isthmus Jazz Festival, but despite the absence of a ticketed headliner for the first time, the lineup was the best yet. Friday – the first real summer night of 2011 – the Memorial Union Terrace was jam-packed. People of all persuasions perched on every available surface, from the famous metal chairs to the Union Theater steps and the tops of the low stone walls that separate levels and surround big old trees.
I arrived at 7:30 PM, just in time for the Madison Mellophonium Jazz Orchestra, the 23-piece brainchild of Rand Moore, of Drums and Moore in Monona. Florida-based bandleader Joel Kaye, a veteran of Stan Kenton’s early ‘60s big band, which featured its own mellophonium section, flew in to lead this horde of local musicians, most of them drawn, as you’d expect, from the Madison Jazz Orchestra. The bright two-hour set featured the kind of old-fashioned tunes Kenton favored – Johnny Richards’ arrangements of West Side Story and My Fair Lady, “Misty,” “My Old Flame.” Super sax solos from Jeff Sime and Bill Grahn, Ken Gleason’s mellow mellophone grooves and a short vocal set from Angela Babler of Ladies Must Swing embroidered the rich, orchestral sound.
Though the music was transporting, on the Union Terrace part of the entertainment is what happens offstage. Here’s what else caught my eye: The variety of Recall Walker T-shirts. Great big boats bobbing behind the stage – why do people need immense cabin cruisers on Madison’s little lakes, anyway? A couple in a canoe, paddling among the behemoths on their way to Picnic Point. A female mallard, flying low overhead. At a table behind me, a passel of enterprising students stacking beer pitchers into a very tall “tower of power,” precariously pouring frothy yellow liquid from the top container into their cups.
   SKepecs photo
At 10 PM I watched Isthmus publisher Vince O’Hern present Tony Castañeda, whose Latin Jazz Super Group was up next, with the Isthmus Jazz Personality of the Year award. Castañeda, in fine form, seized the opportunity to dedicate the honor to the demonstrators at the Capitol. Former regular band member Neeraj Mehta, on timbales, called up the orishas with Cusito’s famous guaguancó “Habana de mi corazón” before the current sextet, plus Darren “wildman of the trombone” Sterud, who recently moved out of town, and guitarist Louka Patenaude, who’s been playing a lot with Castañeda lately, plunged into its well-loved mambo and cha-cha-cha repertory. There was joy on peoples’ faces as the spirits moved their feet.
   SKepecs photo
On Saturday I made it a point to catch Jan Wheaton’s set at 4:30 – unfortunately her last with primo pianist Matan Rubenstein, who’s taken a teaching job in Vermont. At 68 Wheaton’s voice is a little less elastic than it used to be, but that doesn’t matter – she still plies plenty of range, and her delivery’s as heartfelt and soulful as ever. Tunes from her 2005 album Expressions of Love dominated the set – “Almost Like Being in Love,” “One Note Samba,” “That’s All.” Despite sunny skies I was hoping for “Stormy Weather,” too, but I didn’t get my wish. I settled for a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream cone instead.
While up-and-coming Indianapolis trumpeter Marlin McKay set up, I watched scrawny undergraduates in bathing suits crowd the pier at the east end of the terrace; the Betty Lou Cruise passed by, going west. People all around me were desperately fingering their iPhones.
McKay, who studied with ‘60s hard bop giants like Curtis Fuller and George Cables, turned out to have a really fine feel for that funky old New York sound. With his very solid backup trio he played classic tunes by Pepper Adams and the Adderly brothers, plus an oh-so-slightly slightly Latinized take on Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low.” And, as if to complement a cool breeze that came up off the lake, McKay blew the cool, sweet strains of Carla Bley’s “Lawns.”
I left after McKay’s set. But in retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t pick up a copy of his CD, Deep in the Cosmos, on my way out.

The Divine Dianne Reeves Returns to WUT

2011-04-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

by Susan Kepecs

The Wisconsin Union Theater welcomes back the divine Dianne Reeves on Friday, April 8. Last time the jazz-pop diva was here, in February, 2007, she was riding the crest of her 2005 Grammy win for Good Night and Good Luck, the soundtrack CD from George Clooney’s eponymous flick about how TV news anchor Edward R. Murrow brought down Wisconsin’s other great political embarrassment, US Senator and maniacal cold war fear monger Joe McCarthy. Reeves, a consummate showwoman, fired up the theater that frigid night, unleashing her sumptuous voice on a splendid set of tunes – Nat King Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” straight from the movie; the early Betty Carter classic “Social Call," and even the temptin’ Temptations’ 1971 chartbuster “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me).”

I remember walking up State Street with Union Theater marketing and communications director Esty Dinur a week or two after that concert. We were still talking about it. “That’s what it’s like to be in the presence of greatness,” we said at precisely the same time.

Four years later, I expect no less. Reeves, born in 1956, stands apart from other jazz singers we've heard in Madison lately. She occupies an interesting niche between the stupendous swing divas of the ‘40s and ‘50s and the Gen X chanteuses who've made recent appearances on the WUT stage. Like almost all jazz singers performing today, Reeves was heavily influenced by one particular predecessor, though she stamps the standards with her own definitive style. Gretchen Parlato's model was Astrud Gilberto; Jane Monheit's was Ella Fitzgerald; Madeleine Peyroux's was Billie Holliday. For Reeves, it was Sarah Vaughan. (Reeves can't match Sassy's sax-y glossolalia, but her sound is silkier).

Also like her younger counterparts, Reeves, who toured with Sergio Mendes in the early ‘80s, has a bent for bossa nova. But two crucial elements distinguish her from the post-baby boom pack. Her powerful contralto voice was honed in the black church, and unlike the ‘90s pop and global beats that creep into the sounds of younger singers, Reeves’ mainstream side has late '60s roots.

She was born in the Motor City, so it’s no surprise she’s been singing Temps tunes lately – “Just my Imagination” is the first track on her 2008 Blue Note release, When You Know. The recording can’t hold a candle to Reeves live in performance, but her approach is luxurious and the slow Motown rhythm’s irreproachable.

“The Temps were my favorite,” Reeves says. “As a little girl in Detroit I got to meet them. Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams especially were really down home people who were real easy to be around, and they loved kids.”

“Just My Imagination” aside, most of When You Know lacks sizzle – it’s got too many tunes that don’t suit my taste, like the very sappy “Windmills of My Mind” made famous in the late ‘60s by Dusty Springfield. But there's another cut on this disc that blows me away -- the rousing secular gospel “Today Will Be a Good Day,” with the luminous Russell Malone on electric guitar. It’s the only song on the album Reeves wrote, and it’s for her mother, she says. “I did it in that idiom because that’s what she loves. She loves music that allows her to celebrate spiritually. She’s like this incredible life force. She’s always been a forward thinker – she pushed us to keep moving forward and do our best, and if there’s no way, make a way.”

Last time I interviewed her, Reeves, then 50, talked about how life changes at the half-century mark. One of her new goals was to produce a full album of her own compositions, though that dream project is taking its own sweet time. Reeves has other adventures on her plate. When we spoke last month she’d just returned from a German jaunt with multifaceted singer/songwriter and guitarist Raul Midón.

“He’s so inspiring,” she says. “Whenever I’m around someone fabulous like that I start writing, and I’m writing now.” But there’s no album in the works just yet. Reeves says she’s busy creating some balance between her zooming career and her desire to be a bit of a homebody, which doesn't sound easy. She’s playing seven theater gigs in the States just this month. And she’ll be traveling the world with Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright over the summer. It’s the second “Sing the Truth Tour” – the first, an homage to Nina Simone in 2009, featured Reeves, Wright and Nina Simone’s daughter Simone; the 2011 version pays tribute to three recently deceased divas – Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba and Odetta.

Reeves’ longtime pianist Peter Martin will be with her Friday night; the rest of her backup personnel this time includes Reginald Veal on bass, Terreon Gully on drums and the brilliant Romero Lubambo (who was here in ’09 with Luciana Souza) on guitar.

Will they play “Today Will Be a Good Day”?

“We can probably do that!” Reeves laughs.

Madison Ballet's Midsummer Night's Dream Delivers

2011-03-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

Titania (foreground) and Puck. Photo by Andrew Weeks

by Susan Kepecs

Peter Anastos’ Midsummer Night’s Dream, a blithe bit of fluff, wrapped up Madison Ballet’s fourth season (March 19-20 in Overture's Capitol Theater) with a bang. Anastos’ ballet isn’t perfect. I longed to see more from Titania’s lovely fairy corps, and in several spots slapstick acting upstaged dance. The frequent tugs of war between the two jinxed couples in particular could have used some judicious editing, and a more balletic approach to humor would have played up the considerable chops these dancers possess, especially the limber Yu Suzuki (who also works with Chicago’s Elements Contemporary Ballet), in the Helena role.

Madison Ballet isn’t perfect, either. While artistic director W. Earle Smith has assembled 17 strong dancers and stamped his rhythm-savvy Balanchine style on all of them, which lends unity to their individual strengths, the company’s other productions this year didn’t escape with clean slates. But it was hard to find fault with this performance of Anastos’ 90-minute caprice.

In 2004, when Madison Ballet was still a pre-professional studio company, Anastos himself set the Titania role on Genevieve Custer Weeks, who often flew in for soloist roles while also dancing with now-defunct Oakland Ballet. Last weekend a more mature Custer Weeks, in total possession of the part, took buoyant pleasure in its simple variations, pushing luxuriously through the music, syncopating a waltz or stretching an arabesque on pointe a breath beyond the beat. Her acting-while-dancing skills are sharp, too – her gemlike little pas with the bumbling Bottom (played to the hilt by Zachary Guthier), hexed into a donkey by the wood sprite Puck shone with sincere humor.

Joseph Copley, who joined Madison Ballet last year – he also works with San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkens Dance Company – was an utter hoot as Oberon, parading around in a bright blue mohawk and long purple capes. Copley, who’s blessed with both stage presence and striking technique, whipped off cabrioles, tour jetes, tours en l’air and a coupe jete menege with no break, and embroidered his entrechat quatres and brise voles with épaulement. Even just standing, his back to the audience as he commanded his tiny fairies (drawn from studios across Dane County, including Madison Ballet) to dance, he was impressively expressive.

The wedding grand pas classique was gratifyingly full of movement. The Royal Court corps and the two soloist couples flowed across the stage in kaleidoscopic combinations. The regal, understated pas de deux was an ideal vehicle for Jennifer Tierney, an impeccable music box ballerina and a Madison Ballet soloist since the studio company days. Tierney, solidly partnered by Gabriel Williams, floated in and out of his embrace, wheeling around in arabesque or rising weightlessly into low lifts. At one point Williams kneeled; Tierney, balanced on pointe in deep penche arabesque, supported only by his upheld hands, lowered her head almost to the floor – a breathtakingly extended line.

A couple of amusing moments captured the essence of Shakespeare’s comedy without sacrificing the ballet canon. Juliana Lehman, from Titania’s fairy corps, bounded onstage alone in a big pas de chat, eyes wide, only to be chased away by a hissing Puck. Helena, fleeing the pursuing Lysander (Bryan Cunningham), disappeared stage left. Cunningham flung himself into a wide échappé, pointed toward the wings – you could hear him thinking “Aha! There she is!” and lept after her.

But it was Marguerite Luksik, as Puck, who stole the show, delivering her light, elastic, Pan-like variations, built from impish sixth position prances, low tours en l’air, pas de chats and bounding saut de chats, with sheer mischief. That’s exactly how wood sprites would dance, if they were real.

Acoustic Africa Brings On the Sprits

2011-03-06T15:38:00.000-08:00

by Susan Kepecs

It always moves me when people, faced with adversity, make art. There’s been a lot of that around here lately – the citizens of Wisconsin have been superlatively creative in the struggle against Dictator Walker. But nowhere have our brothers and sisters survived more catastrophic political and economic assaults than in Africa. Somehow, through slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, environmental disasters and post-colonial strongmen, the spirits of the arts persevere. Beyond a shadow of doubt, African musicians make some of the most magnificent music on earth. Get ready to savor the sound on Thursday night, (March 10), when the 2011 Acoustic Africa tour takes the Wisconsin Union Theater stage. This is music from the Orishas, a panacea for the Walker-weary blues.

The Acoustic Africa tours (they’re semi-acoustic, really) sound more intimate and closer to the music’s traditional roots than heavily amplified Afrobeat / Afropop, though this softer sound is contemporary, with cutting edge, socially conscious lyrics. The first Acoustic Africa tour, which played the Union Theater in the fall of 2006, featured Malian guitarist Habib Koite plus South Africa’s Vusi “The Voice” Mahlasela and Ivorian dancer / chanteuse newcomer Dobet Gnahore, who was such a hit she was asked back to Madison several times in rapid succession.

The second installment of Acoustic Africa is a guitar-based show, featuring three superstars, Koite, Afel Bocoum and Oliver Mtukudzi, who’ll perform individually and together in varying combinations. Each of these virtuosos brings several backup musicians from his own band to fill out the sound. In addition to backup vocals, percussion and bass, these players add the lute-like West African n’goni, the Malian njarka fiddle, the Zimbabwean m’bira (thumb piano) and other instruments.

Of the three frontmen, Koite’s by far the best known in the States. He’s played with US musicians as diverse as Bonnie Raitt and the avant garde Art Ensemble of Chicago. Koite plays traditional music in non-traditional ways, usually on a nylon string, plugged-in acoustic guitar that he tunes like a kora or n’goni. International flourishes acquired by listening to Jimi Hendrix albums and spending years playing club gigs in cosmopolitan Bamako, Mali’s capital, adorn his multi-ethnic approach to Malian music. Koite’s a griot by birth – “I come from a family of traditional musicians,” he says. “But I went to school – the National Institute of Arts – to study classical guitar. When I started to create a style for myself I learned the regional musics of Mali so I could play for everybody in my country. I wanted to use language and music and scales from the north, from the west, from the Sahel. To you it probably sounds like one style, but Malian people know the regional differences in my songs.”

Afel Bocoum, also the son of musicians and the protégé of his uncle, Ali Farka Toure, the late king of Malian desert blues, has a gentle sound, steeped in the ambience of his ancestral town, Niafunké, in the semi-arid, agrarian Sahel on the Niger river. Of the three stars on this tour Bocoum is the most traditional, though his lyrics address the contemporary social issues of his home turf. In his music the Malian roots of the delta blues come through loud and clear. Compare Bocoum to, say, a recording by Robert Johnson. You can’t miss the echoes of Mali in 1930s Mississippi. (Blogger isn't letting me post YouTube videos today, but you can easily find both of these artists, and in fact, all of the musicians I talk about in this post, on the web).

Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi, from Zimbabwe, created his own mix – “Tuku music,” a name his sons came up with – from the sounds of southern Africa. “Borders are created by a handful of divided people with special interests,” he says. “The borders don’t matter. Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa – the same tribes live in all those places, and their art overlaps.”

The influences in Tuku music include Zimbabwe’s polyphonic m’bira, chimurenga (Zimbabwean social justice music), the swift Harare beat called jit and South African mbaquanga, itself a mix of Zulu jive, township jazz and Xhosa tribal twists.

Though they have very distinct styles, Koite, Bocoum and Mtukudzi wrote a song together for the tour. It’s based on Malian Mandinga music and Shona sounds from Zimbabwe, and appropriately titled “MaliZim.”

Mtukudzi, who says this is the first time he’s done a project with West African musicians, was delighted to find common musical ground. “What surprised all of us when we wrote ‘MaliZim,’” he says, “was that despite the geographic distance we have rhythmic similarities. We use those similarities in the song, but we also take different rhythms and mix them. If you know what you’re looking for and have a good ear, when you listen to it you can say ‘oh, that’s Mandinga,’ or ‘that’s m’bira,’ but it all comes together very well.”

What’s notable, besides the music, is the determination of these players to live in their home countries when so many African musicians have set up shop in Paris or New York. “Show business in Africa is done poorly,” says Koite. “I completely understand why someone African would want to live in Europe where you can do the gig with a good sound system and get royalties for the albums people buy after your concerts. You can bring money and hope back to Africa without living there. But for me it’s important to stay in my country. I’m really proud and happy that I can bring Malian culture to the world and then come back home. If I can inspire the young people – I want them to ask themselves ‘why does he go and come back?’– if they go on to do the same, we all win. Mali wins. Africa wins.”

Madison Becomes Hotbed of Politics and Performing Arts

2011-02-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

It always happens over the long haul. When the established social, political and artistic order goes stale, places on the peripheries of the centers of power, having more flexibility, become hotbeds of innovation. So it is that when Japan displaced America in the automobile industry, Silicon Valley arose to replace Detroit as the country’s economic engine. And as the 21st century starts to reveal its character, mid-size cities may become the country's new cauldrons of creativity. Certainly, Madison is emerging at last from the shadow of that great nearby 20^th century city where I was born and raised, Chicago. Definitively, the cow town with a university in “Wisc – where??” that I was somewhat embarassed about when I moved here four decades ago is gone.

Madison dominates the news cycle as the national leader in the new struggle for workers' rights, which is a whole damn lot to crow about. But since this is an arts blog, what I want to point out is the synergistic growth of our local arts organizations. We aren't Chicago, or New York, yet. But in particular, it’s worth noting that Madison Opera’s Threepenny Opera (Overture’s Isthmus Playhouse, Feb. 4-13) was so innovative and brilliant it sold out consistently. The company had to add extra performances. And I happen to know we’re about to be socked with another piece of local performing arts wizardry. In three weeks (on March 19-20, in Overture’s Capitol Theater), Madison Ballet performs a luscious production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, choreographed by Peter Anastos, noted ballet historian and founder of that famous troupe of men on pointe, Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo.

As a balletomane and a dance reviewer, I couldn’t be more excited. When Madison Ballet was just a pre-professional studio company it put on Midsummer twice, in the old Civic Center, in 2002 and 2004. The production looked lovely on artistic director W. Earle Smith’s student dancers. It’s going to absolutely sparkle on Smith’s professional company, which wraps up its fourth season with this show. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been watching Madison Ballet’s progress carefully, and writing about it regularly. In the innovative spirit that’s enveloping our city, Smith’s managed to transcend the economic straitjacket of the times. Despite the very short seasons dictated by shrunken funds, he’s built a strong, cohesive company with a recognizable, Balanchine-based style. The upcoming production of Midsummer should put Madison Ballet on the national map. Watch this space for further updates, and my review.

Susan Kepecs

Madison Ballet Romances the Audience, Sometimes, in its Annual Valentine's Day Show

2011-02-15T15:15:00.000-08:00

by Susan Kepecs

Madison Ballet’s “Evening of Romance” in Overture’s Capitol Theater last Saturday (Feb. 12) – a repertory show featuring four new works by artistic director W. Earle Smith – was notable for how much this four year old professional company’s grown lately. The hard work of training together over time has paid off handsomely. Technical unity and group rapport were in evidence throughout. Madison Ballet’s become a smooth, well-trained unit that can turn out nearly flawless performances, which bodes very well for the company’s future.

That said, “Evening of Romance,” like most repertory shows, was a mixed bag. The first piece, “Rhythm, Where Are You?” was a suite of ensemble dances, duets, trios and quartets, performed before a giant video screen showing footage (restored and compiled by Timothy Tomano) of Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Cole Porter and other greats from the era of big band swing. The movement onstage wasn’t ballet, but it was definitely rooted in ballet technique. It echoed rather than replicated the dance steps of the ‘30s and ‘40s, a strategy that worked. The big group numbers were colorful, and there were highlights: Jacob Brooks danced a good old-fashioned jazzy spat with Michelle Tucker, who’s starting to shine in her second season with the company. A balletic solo with a touch of soft shoe (in pointe shoes) by veteran company member Jennifer Tierney was flirty and joyful.

But the video screen was set so high on the back wall my field of vision was split between the dancers and the film. And despite the dancers’ smooth performance, the choreography was repetitive and uniformly jivey. Some virtuoso airborne steps added to this mix would have broken the monotony and knit screen and stage together in interesting ways while providing visual and rhythmic counterpoint to the overarching dips and jitterbug language of swing.

The second piece, “Rain,” a solo for company veteran Genevieve Custer-Weeks with composer / pianist Michael Massey playing a concert grand live onstage, was billed as a dance “inspired by the childlike joy of skipping through puddles on a rainy afternoon.” But the long dark pink dance dress Custer-Weeks wore, with its unfortunate empire waist, was more frumpy than youthful, and “Rain” was as wistful as it was joyful. Repeatedly, Custer-Weeks pushed away from the piano, danced a combination, and then returned to stand still, facing the instrument rather than the audience, as if lost in nostalgia. The dance itself was a repetitive series of pique arabesques and chaine turns that crossed the stage on the diagonal or in an arc. On any other dancer this work would have looked dull, but Custer-Weeks found freedom in its simple patterns, pushing through the notes with elastic musicality and revealing nuances that made an otherwise unmemorable piece mesmerizing.

“Palladio,” the only pure neoclassical work on the program, was a complex short ballet with a very traditional structure. The presto movement opened with four women (Megan Horton, Molly Luksik, Madelaine Boyce and Yu Suzuki) in white tutus, moving in and out of unison against dark blue backlight. A staccato series of releves on pointe in échappé, fourth, and fifth position, adorned with bent-elbowed, expressive wristed, Balanchine-style port de bras, was broken by a lyrical solo from Tierney. Swift shifts between Tierney and the corps followed, all involving very fast petit allegro footwork.

In the adagio pas de deux that followed, Tierney, seemingly weightless, was ably partnered by Bryan Cunningham. This pair has been dancing together since the company went pro, and their confidence in each other was palpable. Tierney floated into lifted pas de chats, then landed on pointe in arabesque or folded back dreamily over Cunningham’s arm. The corps joined Tierney and Cunningham for the third, allegretti movement, which mirrored the relentless petit allegro of the first.

I have profound respect for “Palladio,” both as a piece of choreography and as it was danced. Petit allegro is the hardest element of the ballet vocabulary, and this long, difficult piece required endless endurance. Madison Ballet couldn’t have carried off a work like this even a year ago, but it looked quite beautiful Saturday night. Still, it’s grand allegro, with its sweeping leaps, that usually draws gasps from the audience. I would have liked to see “Palladio” balanced by a second, freer work in the classical canon; I often wonder why Smith, whose masterful grand allegro combinations are the highlight of his company classes, so rarely lets this side of himself loose in his stage choreography.

“Expressions,” a suite of dances to tunes from Madison jazz diva Jan Wheaton’s eponymous 2005 album, with Wheaton and her trio live onstage, was originally choreographed for the company’s 2009 Evening of Romance show – the one that was cancelled in the economic aftermath of the Crash of ’08. I saw a studio performance of this work two Februaries ago, and I’ve been dying to see it onstage ever since. I wasn’t disappointed. “Expressions” was the program’s high point.

Wheaton was a treat, jiving and flaunting a feather boa while emceeing the show, introducing her trio – Matan Rubenstein on piano, John Christensen on bass and Rodrigo Villanueva on drums – and the dancers for each ballet-based, jazzy piece.

The dancers – women in short black fringed dresses and fishnet tights, men in black jazz pants and shirts – sat at nightclub tables set around the bare stage. The choreography was similar to that of “Rhythm, Where Are You?,” though the dances in “Expressions” were better and more ballety. My one complaint is that “Expressions” would have looked fresher if “Rhythm” hadn’t been on the same bill.

I liked everything about “Expressions.” Custer-Weeks was jazzy, stretchy, free and spontaneous in her solo to “Can’t Help Lovin’ that Man of Mine.” Cunningham and Phillip Ollenburg, who’s new this year, served up a spunky, high-energy contest of skill in the ballet-jazz idiom to “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” each challenging the other to do bigger, better cabrioles, kick-leaps and pirouettes. The lush “Don’t Explain” gave Yu Suzuki, Anna Counts and Juliana Lehman a chance to flaunt their classical chops, albeit with jazz attitude. Custer-Weeks, Megan Horton, Rachel Butler and Molly Luksik strutted their stuff in “Stormy Weather,” shimmying hips and whipping off flirty, foot-flicking turns. And Tierney’s “One Note Samba,” a showcase for her natural coquettish, creampuffy style, was the program’s piece de resistance.

The finale was a festival of jazzy ballet, the company pirouetting, jumping and kicking in unison, with groups of dancers emerging to show off contrasting strings of steps. “That was really fun,” Wheaton said, “let’s do it one more time!” And they did.

A Little Sunday Night Mambo Jazz

2011-02-14T20:28:00.000-08:00

As usual, I was at the Cardinal Bar Sunday night to catch the Tony Castañeda Latin Jazz Sextet. But where were you, my still-hip fellow first-wave boomers? The Cardinal may be best-known as a disco dance club, but on Sundays it draws a small, mellow, devoted crowd of jazz club regulars. The scene is comfortably intimate, but on a night like this the Cardinal should be packed with like-minded folks. If you’re looking for a little mambo jazz and a dance or two you’re missing out on a very fine thing.

I thought about this when I wrote my previous post – the one on Gaelic Storm. That band started out playing Sunday night pub gigs, too. They hit the jackpot with James Cameron’s epic ship flick Titanic, and now they’re a huge box-office deal. The TCLJS has yet to find its Titanic, but take it from this old jazz writer – it’s as good as any big-name Latin jazz band out there. If you listen closely to WORT’s Saturday afternoon Latin music show “La Junta” when Cardinal owner Ricardo Gonzalez is spinning discs you’ll hear cuts from Castañeda’s two albums, Mambo o Muerte and Viva el Cardinal, flowing right into the mix with tunes by Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria and Tito Puente.

Yes, I know Monday morning’s just a shot away, but Castañeda’s gig is early, with two live sets, at 8:30 and 10. DJ Ken Horn plays Cuban son and salsa in between (and afterwards). And it’s worth the effort – I swear, the three hours I spend at the Cardinal on Sunday nights are what keeps me young. I’m always home before midnight, anyway, which is this old boomer’s bedtime.

Readers, this is one Sunday night ship that shouldn’t sink. Please get out and support this Madison institution. If you go, please drop a comment on my blog and let me know how you liked it – and if you don’t go, let me know why not!

Susan Kepecs

Union Theater’s World Stage Series Gets Set for St. Paddy’s

2011-02-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

photo by Kevin Gilbert

by Susan Kepecs

Here’s your chance to get warmed up for St. Patrick’s Day – Gaelic Storm, at the pinnacle of pan-Celtic pop, whips up a tornado at the Wisconsin Union Theater on Sat., Feb. 19. Once a humble bar band playing weekend gigs at O’Brien’s Irish Pub in Santa Monica, CA., Gaelic Storm catapulted to international success by serving up traditional Irish dance tunes as the Titanic went down in James Cameron’s eponymous 1997 movie. The whirlwind band has blown away Milwaukee’s Irish Fest a time or ten and rocked the rafters at the Majestic, the Stoughton Opera House, and other venues in the vicinity, but this is its first appearance ever on the Union Theater stage.

The band’s seen some personnel shakeups over the years, though lead singer / accordionist Patrick Murphy (a native of Cork, he’s the only born Irishman in the bunch) and guitarist Steve Twigger, who’s English, have fronted the outfit since its start. The rest of the current lineup includes fiddler Jesse Burns, who’s also English, drummer Ryan Lacey, who grew up in California but drank in Irish culture by the pint over a four-year resident stint, and bagpiper Pete Purvis, who hails from Canada.

I had a chance to talk to Twigger about the band’s evolution the other day. Here’s what I found out:

Q: What led to the classic Irish storytelling that goes on during your sets?

A: When I met Patrick, I was playing in rock bands and he’d been doing backroom pub gigs. I was in a transitional period in my life. He and I would party out at my house – we’d have 25-30 people just sitting around telling stories and passing the guitar around. That’s a very old-fashioned way of entertaining yourselves. There were copious amounts of beer that went along with it, of course. And that’s the true story of how the band got started.

Before that I’d been in bands that did showcase gigs every two weeks – we rehearsed four times a week to get ready for that, and I was sick of it. I just wanted to play and have the music happen. So we got up onstage [at O’Brien’s] unrehearsed and made it up as we went along. We’d play the same music every week and the same people would come to hear it. We’d do the same song 200 times, but it was always different because of somebody’s reaction to it, or because of what had happened that day with one of us, or what was in the news. We reacted spontaneously to the people and events around us – the music was almost incidental. It’s same process today. Go put on the CD if you want to hear one of our songs exactly as you heard it last time. We’re very organic – every live show is gonna be different.

Q: How did your appearance in Titanic change the band’s trajectory?

A: We weren’t teenagers who’d just had their first beer – we’d already been around the block. So we were very careful and conscious of what was happening. After the movie the phone was ringing off the hook, but we’d set out to play music purely for the fun of it. We turned down many offers because we didn’t want anything to take away that pure joy. Those Sunday evenings at the pub were so magical – we refused to let anything ruin that. When we signed the contract for the movie – it wasn’t a lot of money, by the way – we stood our ground and insisted that they had to fly us back to L.A. for our regular gigs. That was where our purity came from. So when we had the chance to hit the road we said “we’re only gonna do this if it scales up our sound.”

And it has. We’ve improved our craft over time, but we’re the same band. Of course, we don’t do the Sunday night gigs any more – in fact we hardly ever do pubs now. We pop into O’Brien’s or some other small venue every now and then and it’s fun – you’re right there, practically standing on people’s tables, but it’s mayhem.

You miss some of that life and you don’t miss some of it. But what’s gone is replaced by bigger and better elements – more great people, more energy, more stories. And that all translates into our music. We’ve seen it before. The Rolling Stones are still out there touring in their 60s because it’s such a kick to be a catalyst to somebody else’s good time.

Q: Early on when you played Irish Fest in Milwaukee it was clear you were a party band. You partied hard onstage. How has that aspect of your show changed over the 16 years you’ve been doing this?

A: Behind the scenes there’s a lot of professionalism to what we do now. Other bands that think of us as party guys are shocked to find out about our work ethic. The comedians we all love practice their spontaneity, you know, and it’s the same with us. I love it that people want to party with us all night, but we do work very hard.

Q: Given the personnel changes the band’s gone through, how do you maintain the high quality of your performances?

A: I’ve often said that personnel change is an opportunity to go to the next level – it’s a shot in the arm. All our players have been fantastic and each brought new strengths to the lineup. I’m a very optimistic person and I like to move forward. I find musicians all over the place, and the more we get our name out the easier it is. The big change for us was when the first drummer left – he’s 67 and he’d been on the road for years and it was time for him to go home. But I set about finding a new one – I went to all the drumming schools in the country and asked for their most talented grads and that’s how we found Ryan.

Q: Here’s a followup – how do changes in personnel influence the directions the band’s taken, from really traditional to the pan-Celtic pop-rock sound you seem to favor lately?

A: There’s always been some of both. I’ve been with Gaelic Storm from the start, and my influence is wide. I listen to more rock in general than Celtic. My background was rock, I started playing in a rock band in 1976. We were doing everything from Led Zeppelin to Rod Stewart back then. So I’ve been an influence on what we play, and Ryan the drummer had a background in rock as well, though he played a lot of traditional music when he was living in Ireland. We all bring our enjoyment of different forms of music to the table. I think music in general has become more eclectic in the last 15 years – it’s less compartmentalized than it used to be. There’s this wonderful cross-breeding now, and we’re just part of that. It’s the convergence everybody’s been talking about for years – finally, here it is.

Angelique Kidjo Invokes the Spirits

2011-01-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

by Susan Kepecs

When I learned that “Bud Light Capitol Concerts” (aka Frank Productions / True Endeavors, in partnership with the Overture Center) was presenting Angelique Kidjo on Sat., Jan. 22, I asked a friend who’s a fan, like me, if she wanted to go. “Meh,” she said, “I’ve seen Angelique tons of times.” I was going come hell or high water; reluctantly, at the last minute, my friend agreed to come, too. She was glad she did. The show, which packed the Capitol Theater, proved once again that for the sake of your soul you can’t afford to miss the Queen from Benin when she’s in town.

Kidjo, backed by a tight four piece band, served up an energetic two hour set. She looked a little heavier than last time she was here, at the Wisconsin Union Theater in 2008, and though she still has every bit of that powerhouse voice I thought she might be starting to show her age till she let loose with her signature dance steps about a third of the way through. Her material, from start to finish, was bright and fresh, and the event proved to be the gathering of the tribes that Kidjo shows always are.

Most of the diverse tunes were off her Grammy nominated 2010 Razor and Tie release, Oyo, an album dedicated to songs that inspired her childhood; the traditional “Atcha Houn,” which she described, strutting around the stage, as the first piece she ever sang onstage, at the age of six; the gentle “Lakutshona Llanga,” in homage to the late Miriam Makeba; compelling covers of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and Aretha Franklin’s “Baby I Love You.” In memory of her father, who, she told the audience, used to play everything on the banjo from Beethoven to Sidney Bechet, Kidjo offered a remarkable rendition of the latter’s “Petite Fleur.”

Oyo’s a satisfying recording, but Kidjo’s at her best live onstage, partly because her performance personality’s so strong but also for the celebratory rituals she does that take everybody in the house to a higher place. I’ve seen people dance during encores twice in Overture Hall – once when the Neville Brothers, during their Mardi Gras bash in ’09, cast their spell on our lazy bones, and again a month later Afro-Cuban Allstars filled the big hall with aché. But Kidjo’s show this weekend was the first time I’ve ever seen the crowd get loose enough in the upscale Overture Center to stand and dance through most of the show.

Some folks were boogieing in the aisles by the third tune, and by the time Kidjo invoked the spirit, as she always does, dancing through the theater laying hands on the audience and singing her anthem, “Afirika,” everybody was belting out the chorus and getting’ down. A jubilant bunch, including the hosts of WORT’s Pan-Africa show Alhaji Njai and DJ Linda, followed Kidjo back onto the stage, dancing like wildfire with her Senegalese sabar player, whose name I wish I’d written down. Those who didn't wrap up the show under the proscenium arch were rockin’ in their rows till the very last note.

The Best of 2010

2010-12-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

By Susan Kepecs

As we close out the first decade of the new millineum with multiple unwinnable wars, a repressive transnational political economy, and emerging environmental catastrophe – not to mention the TeaPublicans poised to take over the state (and the lower body of the federal legislature) next week – the survival of the performing arts is touching testimony to the strength of the human spirit. Not everything I saw this year was great, but here’s my list of this year’s pearls.

There’s no real order here – no “top of the list.” But I’ll start with Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, Overture’s Capitol Theater, Nov. 11, since it packed a personal wallop. The drug war’s spiraling violence can’t kill Mexico’s vibrant culture – even the cultish narcocultura is unmistakably Mexican – but the ramped up dangers south of the border impose exile on anyone who loves the place but doesn’t absolutely have to be there. Luckily, Los Angeles-based Los Camperos, at the top of the mariachi tradition in the States, returned to Madison after a four year absence. Overture’s outreach needs improvement – los paisanos were in the house, but I was surprised La Movida’s Luis Montoto wasn’t invited (as he was in 2006) to present the band. Still, the music was so glorious I had to choke back tears while belting out, with all the other exiles in the audience, the chorsuses of the great mariachi anthems – “Volver,” “Cielito Lindo,” and of course, “El Rey.”

Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Wisconsin Union Theater, Feb. 6. King’s dancers are among the world’s best, and his remarkable artistry, stretching the physical and metaphysical boundaries of ballet, links the global 21^st century to the many-layered ancient past. The two long pieces he brought this year – in both, ensemble dances were interspersed with pas de deux – showcased distinct aspects of King’s sensibilities. “Signs and Wonders,” originally choreographed for Dance Theater of Harlem, was stocked with bold moves and set to traditional African chants. The enigmatic, luminous “Dust and Light” had a lofty score woven from Corelli’s baroque concerti and Poulenc’s sacred motets. Almost opposites on the surface, both works transcended time and space. Throughout, King achieved a serendipitous synergy between light, energy and imagery (onstage) and a kinesthetic response (in the audience) that was almost spooky, and left me breathless.

El rey del piano, Eddie Palmieri, with his Latin Jazz Septet, Wisconsin Union Theater, Nov. 5. The band sailed through two sets of the Maestro’s compositions, including “Crew,” a showy new mambo, and “Slowvizor,” a funky cha cha cha off his groundbreaking 1994 album Palmas, plus Tito Puente’s “Picadillo” in homage to the late mambo king. At 74 Palmieri still rips on the keys, growling into the mike, but he leaves plenty of space for his collaborators to stretch out. The long, sinuous grooves that prevailed, driven by Palmieri’s regular rhythm section (Little Johnny Rivero on congas, José Claussel on timbales, Orlando Vega on bongos), were lavishly embellished with trumpeter Brian Lynch’s agile hard bop chops, Curtis Luques’ brawny bass solos and newcomer Louis Fouché’s gently blues-infused alto sax.

The Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour, Overture’s Capitol Theater, April 29. A slate of straight-ahead masters – pianist Kenny Barron, violinist Regina Carter, guitarist Russell Malone and vocalist Kurt Elling – put on a tight and generous, though conservative show. I wanted more solos from Barron, and more bop. But the radiant exchanges between Barron, Carter and Malone on Barron’s joyful composition “Calypso,” and Barron and Carter quoting everything from “America the Beautiful” to Bach in their playful take on “Georgia on My Mind,” were worth the extravagant ticket price.

Nrityagram Indian Dance Ensemble, Wisconsin Union Theater, March 6. This was the best event no one attended this year. The tiny audience was embarrasing, but the show was sumptuous. The company – really a holistic dance community dedicated to Odissi, a classical, supremely sensuous style that was banned under British rule but revived in the 1950s from ancient temple sculptures – brings an utterly contemporary, theatrical sensibility to this lyrical ancient form. The five dances on the program, rich with rhythmic complexity and technical precision, were framed in extraordinary ambiences of light and color.

Andrew Weeks 2010

Madison Ballet’s Cinderella, Overture Hall, March 13-14. Three years after going professional, the company hit its stride with this sparkling production. Artistic director W. Earle Smith’s confident choreography fit his strong, bright dancers like a glove. And the company, solidified by its previous seasons, achieved a distinctive unity based on neoclassical vocabulary and a slightly syncopated musicality. Madison, just a cow town with a big university when I first came here 45 years ago, finally has a bona fide ballet company, and a Balanchine-based one at that. To me, that’s the mark of a real city.

Li Chiao Ping’s Knotcracker, Overture’s Promenade Hall, Dec. 3-5. Balletomane that I am, I loved this clever postmodern holiday show for the way it knocked down every possible preconceived notion about the art of dance. Li’s tongue-in-cheek deconstructions of formal ballet conventions were charming and smart, and the mix of professional and community dancers, including seniors and the physically differently abled, pitted a populist message against ballet’s rarified world.

SKepecs 2010

Mad City conga king Tony Castañeda’s exuberant Latin Jazz Septet – catch this band at its home base, Sunday nights at the Cardinal Bar – is always evolving. Lately, I’ve noticed repertory tweaks. Mongo Santamaria and Cal Tjader tunes still prevail, but the band’s swapped out some of its staple cha cha cha and boogaloo grooves for more wide open mambos, plus some clave-based takes on slinky straight ahead standards. Don’t get me wrong – this band has always delivered dazzling mambos, and it hasn’t lost its cha cha cha chops. But the slight shift accomodates the mighty musicianship these players (besides Castañeda, the current lineup consists of David Stoler on keys, Henry Behm on bass, Anders Svanoe on sax, Darren Sterud on trombone, Charlie Wagner on trumpet and Kyle Traska on timbales) bring to the table, making more space for sizzling improvisations. This is great Latin jazz, both mesmerizing and bailable, and you can dig it where it belongs – in a hip urban nightclub instead of under the proscenium arch.

Madison Ballet's Nutcracker: Gorgeous, with a few Glitches

2010-12-21T15:30:00.000-08:00

By Susan Kepecs

The sheer range of choreographic ingenuity exposed in New York Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay’s cross-country Nutcracker Chronicles – have you been following this? – is staggering. His dispatches, from traditional productions – the Joffrey’s Nut, Moscow Ballet’s, Balanchine’s, by New York City Ballet – and the offbeat ones – hip hop Nuts, R-rated Nuts, Nuts set in the historical contexts of the cities in which they’re staged, Mark Morris’ famous ‘70s retro Hard Nut, the 15^th Annual Black Nutcracker at Harlem’s Apollo Theater – paint a precise portrait of American diversity through the lens of a beloved Christmas classic. Macaulay’s blog posts (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=nutcracker+chronicles) reveal the gorgeous, the glitches, what’s memorable, and what’s not, in every single one of these sundry productions.

Macaulay omits Madison, but I caught the 7:30 PM performance of Madison Ballet’s annual Nutcracker in Overture Hall on Sat., Dec. 18 (the casting shifts slightly from one show to the next and there are two matinees to go, on Christmas Eve at 1 PM and Dec. 26, at 2). The production, which marks the fourth season since the company went professional, was slightly uneven, like Nuts nationwide.

Madison Ballet’s Nutcracker, choreographed in the Balanchine tradition by artistic director W. Earle Smith, falls squarely in the traditional camp. This is certainly the right approach for this company, in this city, in these times. But my biggest beef – and I’ve said this before – is the humdrum party scene in Act I, in which little Clara receives a nutcracker doll as a holiday gift. Unless your own little dance student is shining onstage there’s no real excitement, and the canned music the company’s used since the crash of ’08 exaggerates the problem. Since we can’t hang our attention spans on a live interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s brilliant score, only Gretchen Bourg’s hammy pantomime as the maid, plus the local celebs disguised as party parents – Mad City Police Department public information officer and former WISC-TV reporter Joel DeSpain and UW’s Wisconsin Union Director Mark Guthier this year – provided relief.

Well, that and the dancing dolls. Zachary Guthier, a Madison Ballet apprentice, merits mention for his crisp, clean Soldier Doll performance. But this short burst of bona fide ballet is nowhere near enough to carry the whole scene, which is sorely in need of a new slant.

Guthier (Zachary, that is) swapped costumes to come right back out as the Rat King in Clara’s post-party midnight nightmare, with its zany battle between the rats and the toy soldiers. The rats were terrific this year, kicking and leaping in their grizzly rat suits.

At the end of this silly-spooky dream little Clara grows up and the nutcracker doll comes to life; the two celebrate their budding romance in the Snow pas de deux that follows. This year Smith cast Molly Luksik and Bryan Cunningham in the protagonist roles – a challenge for Luksik, a fiery redhead who stole last year's show with her daredevil Russian dance. Since her natural style is swift and brash I was amazed to see her pull out dreamy nuances in the Snow pas, floating into her lifts, swooping backwards into Cunningham’s arms and flipping birdlike into plush penchée arabesques, the lines of her extended limbs continued upward in the raised arc of Cunningham’s free arm.

Cunningham’s partnering was indeed pitch perfect, and he delivered a relaxed, fluid performance in his short variation. But the pair slipped slightly in the second act. The Sugarplum pas de deux, studded with fish dives and risky lifts, was confident, and Luksik, flaunting fancy footwork in the coda, sparkled. But the creampuffy quality she brought to the Snow pas gave way, and Cunningham’s clean lines faded at his less than pointed feet during his nonetheless admirably airborne coupe jete menege.

The divertissements deserve a salute. Katy Fredrick, subtly flicking her feet, brought a smidge of escuela bolera, suspiciously missing in previous years, to the Spanish dance. Avichai Scher’s bravura chops brought cheers for his Russian dance, reprised from 2008. Laura Rutledge, by herself, finessed the substantial Merlitons piece, which is usually staged for two or three.

In the performance I saw Madelyn Boyce had the demanding Dewdrop role in the Waltz of the Flowers. Boyce is a lovely dancer, notable for her faultless musical phrasing and expressive neoclassical style, but she played the part too close to the chest – the Dewdrop requires the kind of give-it-all-up-for-the-audience glitter hometown favorite Genevieve Custer-Weeks used to bring to the part.

Small flaws and the party scene aside, though, I’ll admit it – this was Madison Ballet’s best Nutcracker yet. The proof’s in how the audience sees it. I walked outside after the show with an old friend whose daughter was in the youth company corps de ballet for the first Nut Smith directed when he took over in 1999. At that time the production was simply a community affair, relying entirely on area ballet students except for the pair of big-name guest principals flown in for the Sugarplum pas. “Earle came to Madison with a vision,” my friend said, meaning his plan to create a professional company equal to those of other mid-size cities, “and he’s realizing it.”

Li Chiao-Ping's Knotcracker Knocks Sox Off

2010-12-08T16:06:00.000-08:00

"Faux Pas" photo by John Maniaci

by Susan Kepecs

Knotcracker, a new full length, two-act anti-ballet from Madison’s premier second-wave postmodern choreographer and UW Dance prof Li Chiao-Ping (in Overture's Promenade Hall last weekend, Dec. 3-5) was no Nutcracker knockoff. Li’s holiday gift to the city was seriously original, and often hilarious – not an adjective anyone would apply to the nineteenth century holiday classic.

Though Li’s made funny dances before, much of her oeuvre is decidedly intellectual instead. Knotcracker had broad audience appeal, in a very non-slick, un-commercial, from-the-heart way. Personally I like edgy performances, but an occasional work that packs popular punch can only be good for postmodern dance in general, and for Li’s company in particular.

Knotcracker mixed Li’s current professional company with community dancers, including seniors and the physically differently abled, most of whom have been working with Li for years. The professional troupe isn’t the strongest Li’s had, since about half the dancers are new this season. But the choreography fit them fine, and the community group has never looked better. I was dismayed to find no notes about these brave non-pros in the program’s dancers’ biographies section.

For Knotcracker, Li took a cubist approach to a loose tale in which the protagonist, Little Miss Steps – a bit of a misfit in big red sneakers – is determined to dance. We see her at the beginning and end of the program as a little girl (Kenna Titus), though the main story revolves around a young adult (company member Liz Sexe) who ultimately triumphs over the trials and tribulations of the bunhead, Pilates-toned, conformist dance world.

Seventeen short dances revealed clever facets of both the heroine’s story and the artificial chunks into which this thing we call dance is divided. The story’s non-linear arrangement was highlighted with a fragmented score mixing classical composers – Mozart, Prokofiev, Strauss – with klezmer, Indipop and contemporary electronica by local musicians Patrick Reinholz, Matan Rubenstein and Ben Willis.

Yes, there were several Nutcracker references. The most overt one opened the show. Li, as Mother Ginger, a staple character in Nutcracker’s Act II, rolled in regally on a high platform and released horde of small children – young Little Miss Steps’ companions – from beneath her gigantic skirts. Slightly subtler was “Tangle,” a sideways glance at the parents’ cotillion from Nut’s Act I. The playful pairs piece for community and company performers, set to an infectious sound track by local klezmer band Yid Vicious, injected a soupçon of Chanukah into the lopsided sectarian season.

Knotcracker, in fact, knocked the art of ballet jokes out of the park. My favorite piece, “Faux Pas,” was a tongue in cheek, anti-classical pas de six reminiscent of “Go,” Li’s brilliant 1995 Swan Lake in combat boots. In “Faux Pas,” dancers in clunky laceup pointe shoes and wildly deconstructed tutus danced a mix of Li’s unmistakable movement vocabulary and turned-in, knock kneed, flexed foot pique turns and penchee arabesques. Of course, “Faux Pas” was part of the story, so when Little Miss Steps tried to join the ballerinas they hissed at her and stomped offstage.

Divertissements are little dances – diversions, or amusements – that interrupt the narratives of traditional story ballets. In Nutcracker, the divertissements are balletic folkdances – Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabian – that break up Act II. The Knotcracker program listed three divertissements, and the very idea of deconstructing this formal but inconsequential element of classical ballet tickled my funnybone. No. 1, “Knot in Kansas,” was a high energy, shake-fisted boogie featuring Michael Ziemet, one of Li’s long-time community dancers. In “Lumen Beings” dancers moved in the dark with flashlights in understated homage to certain works by multimedia dance theater maven and UW alum Tim Glenn or his late mentor, Alwin Nikolais. No. 3, “Seeing I to I,” performed by the company in black tutus and bright bodices, was built of quintessential Li-isms. But a fourth piece, “A World, A Part” – a looney-bin bit of fun in which Li’s community dancers spoke in tongues to Matan Rubenstein’s electronic score – fit the divertissement mold, too.

Ballet wasn’t the only target for Li’s sharp-eyed wit. In “eRacers” she set her sights on the Pilates craze, moving the storyline forward with a dance in which Little Miss Steps was rejected by a sorority of firm-up fanatics dressed identically in black pants and sunglasses, flaunting their pink and blue – eraser colored – Pilates mats.

Dances to utter absurdity – “A World, A Part,” and “Aqueducks,” in which “swimmers” in flapper-style bathing suits made Miss Steps smile by spouting real water as they mimed the crawl – filled the space between “eRacers” and the story’s four-installment denouement. In the first of these, “Stamps of Approval” – a party of line and circle dances, full of spins, jumps and hand jives – Little Miss Steps finally cracked the knot, claiming her spot in the midst of the action. In “Miss Steps Misses Steps No More,” she soloed happily. “Playground – Reprise Surprise Oh Mys” featured community dancers’ bodies as playground equipment for the cast’s little kids plus a charming two-piece Chinese dragon, courtesy of the Zhong Yi Jung Fu Association, in a tender duet with young Little Miss Steps. In “Esperanto Stomp,” the finale, everyone from community elders to little kids let loose, with both Little Miss Steps smack in the center.

This long spate of relentless joy is, in fact, my only gripe. I’d have broken it up, giving Little Miss Steps one last hurdle before the finale – a dangerous, clunky, anti-Sugarplummy pas de deux.

Madison Ballet's Big, Bright Season

2010-12-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

By Susan Kepecs

If last spring’s luxuriant production of Cinderella is any clue, Madison Ballet is set to debut a stunning season. It starts when the curtain goes up in Overture Hall on the first of five Nutcracker performances at 2 PM on Saturday, Dec. 18.

This production marks the company’s fourth year as a professional outfit, and to be frank, the first two seasons were uneven. That’s no surprise, since no artistic venture as large and complex as a ballet company – which requires dancers to develop intuition about each other and to internalize the artistic director’s vision – comes ready-made. But Madison Ballet’s artistic director, W. Earle Smith, who brings to the table beautiful Balanchine training and his own slightly quirky, syncopated musicality, has worked wonders with what began as a batch of dancers with diverse ballet backgrounds. With Cinderella, the company finally gelled. In my review I wrote that Madison finally has a bona fide ballet company – the stuff of a real city.

There’s no reason to suspect this success was a flash in the pan. I like Nut – a Russian Victorian relic that morphed into an American Christmas ritual during the prosperous post-WWII period – less than Cinderella. The holiday ballet never fails to bring out my inner Grinch. But Nut has its magic moments, even for me. Smith’s Balanchiney Snow scene is a lovely ballet blanc, reason enough to go even if you’ve already seen it several times.

Madison Ballet’s Nutcracker hasn’t seen radical change since Smith rechoreographed it when he launched the professional company in 2007 -- before that, the performance arm of the organization was a pre-professional studio company dependent on guest principals to dance the Sugarplum pas de deux. But in every Nut there’s something new. Smith tweaks his choreography every year, tailoring the solos, pas de deux and variations for specific dancers. And this time around he’s taken a bold risk, casting against type, which adds a new edge to the performance. “I have a lot of faith in my dancers,” he says. “I know how far I can push them out of their box.”

Nutcracker, based on a story about a little girl and her Christmas doll, is partly a ballet for and by children – and this year’s Nut has the largest youth cast ever. The young dancers come from schools all across Dane County. Neither of the two little Claras, who alternate performances, is from the School of Madison Ballet. “It’s not about who’s better, it’s just that I saw something I liked in these students, and that’s testimony to the open audition process,” Smith says.

Coming up in a post-holiday blink of an eye is “Evening of Romance” [Capitol Theater, Sat., Feb. 12], Madison Ballet’s Valentine to the city. This repertory concert gives Smith a chance to stretch out and showcase his dancers without the constraints of a full-length, storybook production, and it offers the public an entirely different view of ballet. Much of what’s in “Evening of Romance” originally was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, 2009, but the program became a casualty of the economic collapse. A few days before the show was scheduled – the works well-rehearsed, the dancers ready – the bottom fell out of the budget. The Capitol Theater performance was cancelled, but a small studio showing was so good it moved the audience to tears.

Two years on, with his company on a roll, Smith’s expanded this program, adding works I haven’t seen and pushing the choreographic envelope farther. Acompanying the post-Balanchine neoclassical dances he’s prepared for this show there’ll be archival film footage from the big band era, plus live music onstage by longtime local singer / songwriter / pianist Michael Massey and the great Jan Wheaton, Mad City’s First Lady of Jazz, who'll do a set from her very swingin’ 2005 album Expressions of Love.

Midsummer Night’s Dream [March 19-20, in the Capitol Theater] rounds out the season. Though it’s a story ballet, it’s got a whole different aesthetic than the traditional workhorses of every company’s repertory, like Nutcracker, Cinderella and Swan Lake. Balanchine once choreographed Shakespeare’s famous play about wedding mixups and midsummer forest sprites, but Smith bought the rights to the version done by Peter Anastos, a major US choreographer and ballet historian who’s best known as the founding director / choreographer of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo, that famous troupe of men on pointe.

“Midsummer, like all things Shakespearean, has so much substance,” Smith says – “acting, dancing, comedy, drama. And Anastos is a great storyteller. It’s really exciting to set someone else’s work. I don’t always want to do my own choreography. I want my company to have the diversity and training to do many styles and to carry off works by many different choreographers. Versatility is what makes a company successful. That takes well-trained, smart dancers, and I have them.”

Madison Ballet, back in its studio company days, performed Midsummer twice at the old Civic Center, today the Capitol Theater – in the spring of 2002, and again in 2004. As a pre-professional production it was delightful, and it should look utterly fabulous on the fast-rising company Madison Ballet is today.

But if that’s not enough, there’s a little bit more. “The dancers are taking to the streets,” Smith says. “Look for them in surprise performances around town. Sometimes, out of the blue, ballet just happens.”

________________________________________

The Nutcracker schedule (all shows are in Overture Hall) includes a single 7:30 PM evening performance, on Sat., Dec. 18. You can catch a 2 PM matinee on Sat., Dec. 18 or Sun., Dec. 19. There’s a 1 PM Christmas Eve show on Fri., Dec. 24, and a 2 PM matinee on Sun., Dec. 26. “People need to get out of the house after being cooped up inside all day on Christmas,” says Smith. “In my family we always used to go to the movies – but now there’s Nutcracker. It's a perfect alternative."

The Mambo King Returns

2010-10-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

Palmieri at the Union Theater, 2006 SKepecs photo

By Susan Kepecs

If the pundits are right, after Tuesday’s alarming midterm elections are over I’m going to be in mourning for our country in general and for my representation, as a Wisconsin citizen, in the US Senate in particular. But halleluja, there’s brief, shining respite on tap Friday night (Nov. 5). After a four-year absence Maestro Eddie Palmieri, the mambo king, presides at the piano on the Union Theater stage with his stellar Latin jazz septet.

Since Palmieri’s last visit he’s reaped his ninth Grammy, with his protegé-turned-collaborator, trompetista Brian Lynch, for their stunning 2006 release, Simpatico. And Azucar Pa’ Ti, Palmieri’s glorious fifth album, recorded with his Conjunto La Perfecta in 1965, was chosen for the National Recording Registry of the US Library of Congress. Azucar’s Nuyorican-style Cuban dance beats are brilliantly laced with jazz idioms –montunos imbued with dissonant, Thelonious Monk chords and the extended instrumental mambo improvisations that mark everything Palmieri’s done since.

Was Azucar Latin jazz, or salsa’s precursor? Either way, Palmieri and his brother Charlie were among the founding fathers of the son-based dance music we still love to groove to at the Cardinal Bar. But please, don’t yell out requests for “Adoración” or “Vamonos p’al Monte” Friday night. Palmieri’s instrumental mambos are bailable, though sometimes, with Lynch in the lead, they head toward hard bop territory. If you need your salsa fix first, head down to Chicago the night before. Palmieri mostly plays Latin jazz these days, but he’s never been able to completely cash in his dance band chips. La Perfecta II revives its predecessor’s greatest hits at V Live on Logan Square at 2047 N. Milwaukee Ave., Thursday (Nov. 4) at 9 PM.

“I didn’t grow up with jazz,” Palmieri says. “I brought myself up in the Latin dance genre. That was my forte, my main interest. I love to watch people dance, and leading a dance band orchestra was my ideal. But little by little the genre changed. I saw the writing on the wall. I had no choice but to go into Latin jazz.” His first official jazz release was the all-instrumental Palmas, in 1994.

Nevertheless, for Palmieri there’s always been a fine line between Latin dance music and Latin jazz. “Remember,” he says, “jazz started with the big dance orchestras. In the 1950s the Palladium [New York’s legendary Latin ballroom] and Birdland, ‘the jazz corner of the world,’ were right next to each other. We had the greatest jazz players coming to the dance club and vice-versa.”

Palmieri rattles off stories about the birth of Cubop, the original Latin / jazz fusion. “When Chico O’Farrill came to New York and started composing and arranging for Machito’s orchestra he was always going next door to Birdland and listening to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And don’t forget the most famous example – when [Havana-born conguero] Chano Pozo meets Dizzy Gillespie in New York one percussionist changes the entire jazz orchestra. The power of the drum was the New York phenomenon of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. All these years Latin rhythms and jazz have gone hand and hand and now they’re moving forward in wonderful new kinds of jazz fusion.”

Everywhere he travels lately, Palmieri explains – Japan, Russia and Australia as well as Europe, Mexico and the US – he’s finding incredible interest in Latin jazz and its instrumentation. “The young players that aspire to be jazz musicians start to comprehend the rhythmical patterns we use and they find it extremely exciting. Many aren’t Latinos, but they’ve discovered than using Latin rhythms within any composition enhances it.”

The new fusions that emerge from the new, global generation’s experimentations with Latin beats are the vanguard of the 21^st century, Palmieri says. The problem is that jazz doesn’t get commercial airplay, so a lot of it happens underground.

Frankly, I find some of the new global jazz fusions confusing. I’ll take Palmieri’s Afro-Cuban-plus-bop brand of Latin jazz any day. His regular rhythm section – José Claussel on timbales, Vincent “Little Johnny” Rivero on congas and bongocero Orlando Vega – provides the drum power Friday night. Vega, who’s been playing with Palmieri for a couple of years now, is the youngster of the bunch – Claussel and Rivero have worked with the maestro since he swapped salsa for Latin jazz.

So has Milwaukee-born Lynch, who started playing Latin way back in the late ‘70s with the Brew City’s original salsa / Latin jazz band, La Chazz. Lynch, who went on to play with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in New York till Blakey died in 1990, first recorded with Palmieri on Palmas. “If you count up all the years Claussel, Rivero and Lynch have been working with me,” Palmieri says, “it comes out to about 100.”

Also in Friday night’s lineup is Luques Curtis, a fast-rising young bass player who studied with leading Latin jazz bassist Andy González of the Fort Apache Band. González himself played with Palmieri in the early ‘70s, so Curtis, whose recording career with Lynch and Palmieri began with Simpatico, brings it all back home. And on alto sax for this tour is newcomer Louis Fouché, who’s been playing with some happenin’ young musicians, notably New Orleans-born trumpet and fluglehorn player Christian Scott. Scott’s uncle is saxman Donald Harrison, another of Palmieri’s longtime associates.

Palmieri’s bringing us one helluva band Friday night, so buck up, Mad City. America may be in freefall, but we get to go out and dig some of the most exceptional music on the planet. At least we still have that!

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The following piece first ran in Isthmus on Nov. 30, 2006. I'm including it here in case you don't know much about Palmieri. It's got all the background information I left out of the short preview of Friday night's concert, above.

Jazz you can dance to

Latin music king Eddie Palmieri brings salsa-style energy to a combo setting

By Susan Kepecs

It may be a cold, dark December, but the Sun of Latin Music — the one and only Eddie Palmieri — lights up the Wisconsin Union Theater on Saturday, Dec. 2, at 8 p.m. For this second of three concerts in the season’s Isthmus Jazz Series, Palmieri, best known for scorching salsa, plays his mambos jazzeado. At 70, with 200 compositions, 50 recordings and eight Grammys in his kit, the fabled Nuyorican bandleader/ pianist has pretty much cashed in his dance orchestra for a seven-or eight-man combo. But no matter which mode he’s in, Palmieri mixes Afro-Cuban dance rhythms with monumental American music better than anyone else on the planet.

I live to dance on clave, but let’s face it — salsa’s old-school. Some of its brightest stars — Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Ray Barretto — are gone. Rubén Blades is Panama’s tourism minister now. Willie Colón’s gone political activist and talks of retiring his trombone. Sure, a handful of ’70s salseros like Blades’ piano man Oscar Hernández and trombone icon Jimmy Bosch are trying to rescue the genre from the chintzy late-’80s “salsa sensual” of Marc Anthony’s ilk. Even Palmieri, who’s been swinging on the jazz side since the early ’90s, made a short salsa comeback at the start of the millennium. Mostly, though, style trumps substance in today’s highly commercialized Latin dance music. The scene’s been usurped by electronics — heavy recordings, flashy clothes, souped-up dance moves and a younger generation’s beats: timba, reggaetón and — the latest — salsatón.

On the other hand it’s an auspicious age for Latin jazz. In recent years some terrific players have come through town — Omar Sosa, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, John Santos and Poncho Sánchez, to name a few. But history puts Palmieri at the head of the pack.

The lineup for the WUT show includes four longtime Palmieri regulars: second-wave post-boppers Brian Lynch (from Milwaukee) on trumpet and Conrad Herwig on trombone, plus Nuyorican rhythm kings José Clausell on timbales and Little Johnny Rivero on congas; bongocero TBA. Eddie Resto, who’s played with Palmieri in the past, is on bass. That’s a smokin’ Afro-Latin rhythm section plus personnel for modal harmonics and adventurous solos, but it’s not Cubop. Don’t leave your dancin’ shoes home.

Palmieri — Spanish Harlem born, South Bronx-raised — is a direct musical descendant of the original Afro-Cuban mambo kings, Arsenio Rodríguez, José Curbelo and Machito, who played big-band Havana dance music at Harlem clubs in the roaring ’40s.

The first U.S.-born Latin music king — the late, great Nuyorican timbalero Tito Puente — always said if it’s Latin jazz, you can dance to it. That wasn’t always true, even in Puente’s day. As a category, today’s Latin jazz covers a lot of ground, but Palmieri shares Puente’s philosophy. For him, and for players like Poncho Sánchez or Mad City’s own Tony Castañeda (who plays a Latin dance party for ticketholders in the UW Memorial Union Rathskeller after Palmieri’s set), the partitions between Latin jazz, mambo and salsa are porous.

Palmieri was born in 1936 to working-class Puerto Rican parents. “My dad,” he says, “was an electrician, a radio and TV repair man. He could do anything — he was unique. My mother was a seamstress. She loved music. I had uncles who lived in our building. They had a band that played typical Puerto Rican music.”

Palmieri was 11 when he started studying classical piano with the barrier-breaking, Juilliard-trained African American composer-pianist Margaret Bonds, at her studio in the Carnegie Hall building. Always versatile, at 13 he played timbales in his uncle’s band, Chino y sus Tropicales. But the biggest influence was his older brother Charlie, who became known as “el gigante del teclado” (the keyboard giant).

“My brother would come home with records by the big bands — Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, Duke Ellington and the Latin orchestras of the time. The favorite was Machito, who was extraordinary, with René Hernández from Cuba on piano and the young Tito Puente on timbales.

“It was exciting, growing up then. It was before TV. Latin music was on the air constantly. You could hear Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez all day long. We don’t have that kind of radio any more.”

In ’48 Puente put together his own conjunto, the Picadilly Boys, with a three-trumpet frontline and Charlie Palmieri on piano. The Picadillys soon became Tito Puente & His Orchestra and — along with the Machito and Tito Rodríguez orchestras — made the Palladium Ballroom at 53rd and Broadway the epicenter of mambo and cha-cha-cha.

“The live mambo scene was really happening,” Palmieri says. “That was the greatest dance that ever came out of Cuba. Vicentico Valdés was Puente’s vocalist till he started his own conjunto in ’54. From ’56 through ’58 I did summer gigs with him. We’d play the Palladium four nights a week, and in September Machito and Puente would come back from the Catskills and excite us all with the new music they’d bring back.”

Palmieri got a big break in ’58, playing with Puente’s main rival, Tito Rodríguez. Eisenhower was president, Elvis was king, Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was at its peak, and Sam Cooke was set to release “Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha,” which brought the dance, American-style, with the break on the wrong beat, to TV-watching teenyboppers like me.

Two years later political events put a new edge on American culture. The Cuban Revolution was fresh from triumph. Thousands of displaced Cubans flooded Miami. John F. Kennedy was elected president. Lunch-counter sit-ins kicked off civil rights activism in the South. Berry Gordy Jr. started Motown Records in Detroit. In Manhattan, the brand-new John Coltrane Quartet recorded My Favorite Things. And Eddie Palmieri forged his own edgy new band, La Perfecta, featuring a three-trombone-plus-flute frontline. He called the sound, which broke the typical trumpet-based conjunto format and added flute from Cuba’s popular charanga orchestras, “trombanga.” La Perfecta reportedly played the Palladium four sets a night, four nights a week from its inception till the famous ballroom’s final night in 1966.

A mainstay of La Perfecta’s shifting lineup was trombonist Barry Rogers, a Bronx-born Jew of Polish descent. Rogers was hip to straight-ahead jazz, and partly through his influence Palmieri started adding modal harmonics to what became his signature sound.

“I came to jazz late,” Palmieri says. “I wasn’t interested before ’cause I was so into the music coming out of Cuba in the ’50s. But those extraordinary jazz pianists — Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner — they knew the piano inside out. They were great pioneers with those fingerings and harmonic structures.

“I took the structures of their chords. I’ll utilize Monk’s dissonance and those big McCoy Tyner fourths in a piece with vocals. It becomes quite a challenge to present those harmonic structures in my solo and keep things interesting for the rhythm section at the same time, but jazz harmonics make salsa interesting to the ear.”

“Azúcar,” on the hard-to-find Azúcar pa’ ti (Tico, 1965), is an early example. “We played that tune all over town. It was a hit before we recorded it. In the studio back then you had to keep your tunes to two minutes, 45 seconds, so they could put 12 on an album. The A&R man at Tico was Count Basie’s manager. He said ‘play it like you play it,’ and we did. It went 8:38 and was released that way. It wasn’t called Latin jazz, but it was free format, with vocals. That was the first time I accompanied myself, soloing freely with my right hand, playing over the chords. It became one of the biggest hits I’ve ever had.”

In ’68, after nine albums, La Perfecta broke up, broke. In the heart of the hippie era Latin/funk fusion reigned. Palmieri recorded boogaloos and antiwar anthems with various lineups, most famously the all-star Harlem River Drive outfit, featuring Charlie Palmieri at the organ.

I admit it — I’ve been in love with boogaloo since the ’60s. But Latin purists hated it, at least back then. Puente said it stunk. Barretto called it a curse. Palmieri blamed isolation from Cuba for this low point in Latin music.

In the early ’70s Palmieri reclaimed his mambo roots with a vengeance, putting out a series of albums with shifting big-band lineups that usually included Rogers on trombone. The Sun of Latin Music (’74) and Unfinished Masterpiece (’75) won back-to-back Grammys. There’s still some funk on these discs, but mostly they’re a mix of straight-up salsa spiked with Palmieri’s trademark dissonance and tunes in the “Azúcar” mode — jazz jams that morph into mambos like “Un Día Bonito” (on Sun) and “Adoración” (on Sentido, from ’73).

Those recordings blasted Mad City into the salsa age. In August of ’75 Ricardo Gonzalez, who’d recently opened the Cardinal Bar, kicked off its first-ever Latin dance night with “Puerto Rico,” off Sentido. In December of that year he launched “La Junta” on fledgling WORT radio. On his first playlist were “Puerto Rico” and the beautifully bailable “Kinkamache” from Unfinished Masterpiece.

By the end of the 1970s, Dominican merengue had replaced Cuban-based salsa as New York’s favorite Latin dance beat. But if salsa was going down, it went in style. In ’81 Palmieri put out a self-titled album with a big, rich orchestral sound. Everything sizzles. In particular, “Ritmo Alegre” is the nostalgic motif of my many noches latinas at the Cardinal Bar.

For Palmieri the next decade was mixed. He picked up a couple of Grammys but lost both his brother and Barry Rogers. He reworked some earlier hits. In ’93 he came roaring back, invigorated, with Palmas, the first of a breakway, small-format, instrumental trilogy that includes Arete (’95) and Vortex (’96). Lynch, Herwig annd Clausell, at the heart Palmieri’s Latin jazz combo, have been with him ever since. The “new” sound is really the old setup, mellower and minus vocals. “I know how to take an instrumental mambo and make it jazz,” Palmieri says. “We do the top of the composition so the rhythm underneath’s more danceable. That makes it exciting for us to play, and no matter how free-form we start out, we always end with a compelling mambo coda.”

The trilogy’s danceable, dissonant recordings gleam with Palmieri’s nuanced solo piano and high-end brass. On Palmas in particular there’s a touch of Art Tatum in Palmieri’s right hand; Lynch sounds like a Latin Lee Morgan.

There’s a pair of drop-dead-gorgeous cuts — “Doña Tere” and “Iriaida” — on Vortex, dedicated to Oya, orisha of angry winds. Of the two, I love the latter. Palmieri hits some gospel chords. There’s a hint of synth, making the piano sound like an organ at a black Baptist Sunday service. He plays a run of casual riffs like a classical pianist improvising, tickling out a few blue notes with his right hand. The bass comes in slow and takes over the theme. Palmieri punctuates on piano, building suspensefully toward a three-chord guajeo. The percussion kicks over, the sax slips in, the bass goes funky and oh, baby, it’s boogaloo cha!

Palmieri’s latest CD, Listen Here, Best Latin Jazz Grammy winner this year, features illustrious guest soloists. Conguero Giovanni Hidalgo brings out the hidden clave in Eddie Harris’ original ’68 hard-bop boogaloo of the album’s title cut; Regina Carter’s violin adds a charanga charge to Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream”; Donald Harrison’s alto sax swings on Palmieri’s “EP Blues.” Palmieri’s signature cadence on piano gives Cubop standard “Tin Tin Deo” a whole new life. It’s a good album, but it’s no Vortex.

Palmieri still takes trips on the salsa side. El Rumbero del Piano (’99), with Herman Olivera on vocals, is pure sabor. La Perfecta II (’02), again with Olivera, brings back the trombanga sound and revisits some vintage tracks. From ’02 there’s also Obra Maestra, the only work Palmieri and Puente recorded together. Puente died shortly thereafter. Palmieri released one more salsa disc, Ritmo Caliente, in ’03.

“For me it’s a complete responsibility to keep the music going in Tito’s direction, with a Latin orchestra and vocalists,” Palmieri says. “But it’s hard to keep it up. There’s not the audience there used to be. Clubs like the Palladium don’t exist, and the ones that do hire young bands. The genre’s reggaetón.”

Plus it’s just too expensive to travel with a full orchestra. “I’m always on the road,” Palmieri says. “I was in South America this month, and we’re going to the West Coast after Wisconsin. The band stays employed that way. We’ve been very well accepted in jazz festivals all over the world. Latin jazz is the fusion of the 21st century.”

Expect Palmieri to be in Palmas mode Saturday night. The style’s a balancing act onstage, says the Sun of Latin Music. “People yell requests — ‘Vámonos pa’l monte!’ ‘Adoración!’ I have to stop and explain, this is jazz! We don’t have a vocalist!”

A Question for You, Readers!

2010-10-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Today there should be a review of Ballet Hispanico in this space. Having written a preview that was simultaneously cautious and hopeful, I was looking forward to seeing whether the concert matched my somewhat mixed expectations, or not. But due to circumstances beyond my control – I was sick! – I missed the show. So I hope you’ll fill me in. I’d love to get your critical opinion. Was it a wonderful concert? Or not quite what you hoped for? Which piece did you like best, and why? Were the dancers as beautifully trained as you’d expect for a major New York company? Do you look forward to seeing Ballet Hispanico again? I really want to know. The comments box, below, is just waiting for you! Many thanks in advance for your input,

Susan Kepecs

¡A Bailar!

2010-09-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

photo by Cheryl Mann

By Susan Kepecs

Last time Ballet Hispanico was here – at Overture’s predecessor, the Civic Center, in 2003 – the venerable old New York company looked worn out. But the country’s most famous Latin dance performance troupe comes back to Madison (to the Union Theater this time) on Saturday, Oct. 2, with a new lease on life. Eduardo Vilaro, a principal dancer with Ballet Hispanico in the ‘90s before he founded Chicago’s lovely Latin company, Luna Negra, in 1999, returned to the Big Apple last year to take the reins from retiring artistic director Tina Ramírez.

Vilaro, who left his native Cuba at the age of 6, a decade after the Cuban Revolution, grew up in New York and has family there. It was time to go home, he says. “I started something new in Chicago, and it was a tough decision, but I left Luna Negra with wings to fly. Ballet Hispanico offered me the opportunity to work with more resources and to have more impact. I decided to go for it while I still have the energy to take on a challenge. Also, my moving back to New York opened the door for another Latino choreographer in Chicago [Spanish dancemaker Gustavo Ramírez Sansano, who has history with both Luna Negra and the Windy City’s best-known contemporary company, Hubbard Street Dance] to develop.”

Vilaro’s vision, he says, isn’t to change Ballet Hispanico, but to strengthen it. He’s turning the organization into a dance resource center with a strong educational component and links to Latin dance outfits across the country “so we can help each other, because Latin culture is all about family.”

And he’s creating the psychological space Latina/o choreographers need to create important new work. A lot of Latin dance performance (with the exception of that by folkloric companies like Ballet Folklórico México) strikes me as either spiffed-up ballroom or contemporary / modern dance without much of a Latin edge. Vilaro himself is a hell of a dancemaker, and one of the few Latin American choreographers in the U.S. ever to create a seamless blend of Latin style and formal dance idioms. It’ll take much more of this for dance performance in the U.S. to look like the national population. Though most of the four repertory works on Saturday night’s program have Latin themes, only one – and it’s not one of Vilaro’s – was made by a Latin choreographer.

Vilaro’s own dances should start showing up in Ballet Hispanico’s repertory soon. “I’m not quite there yet,” he says. “You get into a new place and it takes a year to get yourself set up. I had a lot on my agenda and wanted to impart my vision to the organization first. But it’s coming – I’m finally starting to plan my own creative work in the context of Ballet Hispanico.”

Meanwhile, it’ll be interesting to discover how the pieces we’ll see – most have received mixed reviews over the years – fare under Vilaro’s direction. Given his natural enthusiasm, I’m hoping they’ll look fresh.

These dances, as a package, commemorate Ballet Hispanico’s 40^th anniversary, and represent distinct stages of its history. As the evening progresses, Vilaro says, the mood goes from raw to dancey to somber to celebratory. In honor of the Mexican bicentennial (despite the fact that Mexico has little to celebrate right now), the first piece is “Tres Cantos,” a 1975 ode to Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors by the late, legendary African-American choreographer Talley Beatty. Vilaro danced in this work himself during his earlier Ballet Hispanico days, but says he chose it for this program mostly because he wanted to bring the sound of Mexican composers – Carlos Chavez and Silvestre Revueltas – to the stage.

“Tres Bailes,” set to a tango score, is a contemporary ballet from the late 1990s choreographed by Jean Emile, whose dance resumé includes Alvin Ailey, Nederalands Dans Theater, La Compañia Nacional de Danza in Madrid and Cirque du Soliel.

“Farewell” was choreographed in 1992 by the late Christopher Gillis, a dancer with the Paul Taylor Company in the 1970s. “It’s a beautiful duet,” Vilaro says, “and one I used to perform.”

The finale, “Club Havana,” from 2000 – the company’s current signature piece – is by Cuba-born choreographer Pedro Ruíz. “It captures the magic of Cuba in the ‘40s,” Vilaro says. “You’ll love it. It’s just beautiful.”

A Gringa's Guide to the Madison World Music Festival, Chapter 7

2010-09-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

By Susan Kepecs

Music, the universal language, can bridge all kinds of cultural divides. So it follows that the Wisconsin Union Theater-sponsored Madison World Music Festival is a unifying force, and boy, can we use that right now. I don’t expect any Mama Grizzlies to show up, but the Tea Party might learn to transcend its xenophobia if its goofy throngs attended this event instead of following Glenn Beck to the National Mall. The seventh annual MWMF features a brilliant lineup of African, Afro-Caribean and Afro-Latin bands, plus a few eclectic surprises. I’m offering a handful of relevant observations, below, but for the full schedule of events and locations – times and stages change depending on the weather – go back to the WUT website http://www.uniontheater.wisc.edu/Season10_11/musicfestival.html.

The wingnuts could use some attitude adjustment, and Dja Rara, a Brooklyn-based Haitian parade band (see the Green Room blog for more) just might do the trick. Back in January, after the western end of the island of Hispaniola was devastated in a major earthquake, TV evangelist Pat Roberton told Fox Noise that Haiti’s African slaves had liberated themselves from French colonial rule in 1791 by making a pact with the devil. Evidently Satan set up the temblor to call in his chips. But Dja Rara’s rhythms represent the gods of the African diaspora. Under MWMF auspices the band hits diverse spots around town before performing at the fest’s main stages – the Memorial Union on Friday and Willy St. on Saturday.

From the Spanish-speaking end of Hispaniola – the Dominican Republic – comes Joan Soriano, the rising star of Afro-Dominican bachata who tells his story in Adam Taub’s new documentary film, “El Duque de Bachata.” Bachata, born in the 20^th century, blends rural Afro-Dominican dance music with the sinuous rhythms of Cuban bolero and son. There’s a whole school of slicked up, watered down 21^st century bachata that doesn’t appeal to me, and I’m a salsera at heart anyway, but my hips can’t resist Soriano’s percussive guitar playing and gritty, old school style. Since Soriano’s sure to send everyone into bachata delirium, his act’s the perfect festival finale Saturday night.

But bailando bachata’s an opportunity we almost missed, thanks to our nation’s immigration paranoia. Right before Labor Day, Union Theater marketing director / MWMF artistic selection chair Esty Dinur got a panic email from Soriano’s manager saying the American ambassador in the Dominican Republic was about to deny band members their visas, since he didn’t believe they were bona fide artists. They ended up having to perform for embassy officials to prove their legitimacy.

Another performer who was on the original bill – Pietra Montecorvino, a glamorous Italian songstress / actress with a spellbinding, urban, take no prisoners voice – was denied her visa altogether. “Living in the European Union with its open borders and governments that support cultural exchanges, her agent didn’t appreciate how immensely complicated it is to get into the U.S.,” Dinur says. The agent dragged his heels, and by the time the application process got started it was too late to buck the U.S. Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy.

While we don’t get a dazzling Italian diva, we do get Barbara Furtuna, an all male a capella quartet from the once-Genoese Mediterranean island of Corsica, ceded to France in the 1760 Treaty of Versailles. Barbara Furtuna means “cruel fate” in Corsu; it’s the title of a traditional resistance anthem about 18^th century Corsican freedom fighters exiled after trying to overthrow French rule. That may sound like obscure history, and yes, Corsican polyphonic song has medieval roots. But this quartet sounds absolutely ambrosial. Its second album, In Santa Pace – a mix of long-loved songs plus the group’s own compositions – is as soulful as African-American gospel and calming like an offering for world peace.

When it comes to pushing peace, Kenge Kenge – musical masters from Kenya’s Luo tribe whose traditional tunes have a light Afropop edge – kill the competition. Like Kenge Kenge, Obama’s father was Luo – a fact that led right wing megaphones Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich just last week to spew out the notion that the President rules the country “according to the anticolonialist dreams of a Luo tribesman.” If only that were true! Check out Kenge Kenge’s pre-2008 election video, “Obama for Change”
and imagine Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gettin’ down to this tune in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. If that can't change the world situation, nothing will.

The rest of the three-day program’s like a global summit on cultural diversity. The most exotic ensemble on this year’s bill is Ordo Sakhna – nomadic, storyteller musicians from the Silk Route crossroads of Kyrgyzstan.

Three hot young bands – two from the U.S. and one from Romania – create 21^st century global sounds from diverse perspectives. La Santa Cecilia, from Los Angeles, a band with Mexican sensibilities and instrumentation, throws everything from Miles Davis, Klezmer and the Beatles into its mix, though Latin American influence prevails. The Sway Machinery, out of New York, bills its hard-driving mix of klezmer, Afropop and blues as “post-cantorial.” And from Romania comes Mahala Rai Banda, mixing traitional Gypsy tunes and Roma pop with reggae and other genres. Their latest CD, Ghetto Blasters, is a chart buster.

And then there’s Cimarrón, from the grassy eastern plains of Colombia’s Orinoco Basin. This has been cattle country since the Spaniards set up shop in the 16^th century, but today the region also hosts paramilitary violence, narcotraffic and transnational oil extraction. Miraculously, joropo, the joyful, percussive, harp, guitar and maracas-driven dance music born of indigenous, Spanish and African traditions in the colonial crucible of these livestock lands, survives. Cimarrón – seven virtuosos who showcase the syncopated, foot-stomping sound around the world – is my personal bet for best of the fest.

Picking Tickets

2010-09-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

By Susan Kepecs

Don’t tell me the recession’s over! In the good old days, before the economy crashed, the performing arts plates at the city’s big theaters were piled high – almost every week I found more than one sumptuous morsel on my menu. Despite the brand-new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research claiming the downturn ended in June, 2009, this fall at the theater follows last year’s pattern. Overture, flailing in its financial fix, sticks close to the mainstream, and while the Union Theater offers tasty treats, its 2010-2011 season’s small.

Here’s what’s going to lure me out as the days turn colder. I’m starting the season with the best bargain in town – the Wisconsin Union Theater’s always exuberant Madison World Music Festival (Thurs., Sept. 23 – Sat. Sept. 25). This year’s fest features a full-fledged feast of African, Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean genres ranging from rootsy to global-poppy, plus a few treats from Europe and the U.S., and it’s free! Check the schedule on the mother ship, the WUT website: http://www.uniontheater.wisc.edu/Season10_11/musicfestival.html -- and I’ll post my picks in a day or two, after I finish digesting the banquet of sample CDs that’s piled on my desk.

Next up on my agenda is Ballet Hispanico (WUT, Oct. 2). The venerable New York troupe looked tired last time it was in town, in 2003. But its new artistic director, Eduardo Vilaro, who formerly headed Chicago’s Luna Negra Dance Theater, is just what the doctor ordered. I haven’t yet seen the company under his leadership, but Vilaro’s a standout dancemaker. I’m disappointed that none of his works are on the bill, but even so, my expectations are high.

On Oct. 8, legendary folk singer and progressive political champion Joan Baez plays the Union Theater. Baez, who first performed at WUT in 1962, is approaching her 70^th birthday. Sure, her voice has aged, but she still packs the sterling authenticity she started out with when old boomers like me were young and innocent. We’re still waiting for the day when the state of the world reflects the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome,” but the faithful will surely gather at this event to pay homage to the message.

And oh, my stars, master composer / pianist Eddie Palmieri, the Sun of Latin Music, brings his mambo-ized, post-bop edged, smokin’ Latin jazz back to the Wisconsin Union Theater (Nov. 5), following a five year absence. The lineup (sax player TBA) includes the talented young bassman Luques Curtis, Milwaukee-born Bryan Lynch on trumpet, plus Nuyorican rhythm kings José Claussell on timbales, Little Johnny Rivero on congas and bongocero Orlando Vega.

Over at Overture, spring looks better than fall for dance, and I’ll report on that later. But River North Dance Company (Capitol Theater, Nov. 20), a Chicago contemporary dance staple, finally replaces the endless string of annual performances by the Windy City’s other big-name company, Hubbard Street. It’s not a huge change – River North’s choreography sometimes borders on cliché – but it’s a great opportunity to see what else is going on south of the state border, and the company’s dancers are stunningly trained in the modern-cum-jazz idiom.

Real mariachis are always on my wish list, but for the last couple of years Overture’s served up mariachi lite instead. So I’m delighted that Los Angeles-based Mariachi Los Camperos – the group’s spirited holiday show at Overture Hall in December, 2006, brought the house down – returns this year on Nov. 11 (in the Capitol Theater). La comunidad gets another opportunity to belt out the chorus on great mariachi standards like “Cielito Lindo,” “El Rey,” and “Volver.” ¡Ay ay ay!

Local troupes are toughing out the times, and in fact 2009-2010 was one of the best seasons ever for Mad City’s own performing arts scene. I expect 2010-2011 to continue that trend. There’ll be some surprises on the Latin music front this fall. Look for my report on a brand-new band – Brazilian, with a twist – in the next few weeks.

In dance, I’m curious to see what Kate Corby & Dancers – once a Chicago based interdisciplinary dance theater that’s been tied to Madison since Corby took a faculty position in the UW Dance Program two years ago – cook up in H’Doubler Performance Space on campus (Oct. 7-9).

Li Chiao-Ping works magic with parodies of classical ballets. Gó, a sort of Swan Lake in combat boots from years back, is one of her all-time top works. So I’m intrigued by the announcement of her new full-length work, “Knotcracker,” coming up for the holiday season (Dec. 3-5, Overture’s Promenade Hall).

And even though The Nutcracker is a sappy old ballet, and I think I've reviewed it at least a thousand times over the course of my arts writing career, Madison Ballet’s Christmastime production (Dec. 18-26, Overture Hall) is on my list – our city’s first bona fide professional ballet company, entering its fourth year, is very much on the rise, and that’s thrilling to see.

That’s my two cents worth. But remember, there’s a comments box, below. What are you looking forward to this fall?

About Picking Pearls

2010-09-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

By Susan Kepecs

In the age of slicked-up, dumbed-down cultural common denominators like “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars,” the more sophisticated performing arts need strong voices to stay in the public spotlight. I’ve been speaking my piece on the arts for a long time. I’ve published in various local, national and international media, but if you recognize my byline it’s probably because, during the last decade, as a freelance contributor to Madison’s alt weekly, Isthmus, I wrote regularly about dance of all sorts, jazz both Latin and straight ahead, Cuban son y rumba, Afropop, and the broader ever-shifting phenomenon we call world music. I’ve covered popular bailes in the local Latino community, the socially conscious hip-hop of Youth Speaks and the UW-Madison’s First Wave initiative, plus other topics in need of more press. While I regret the decline of print journalism, I’m thrilled to have this ticket to ride the new technology train. I’m known for being opinionated, but I hope you are, too. To survive, the arts desperately need engaged audiences. So let’s talk. There’s a comments box waiting for your words, below.

Of course, there’s information and/or misinformation behind all opinions. As an engaged reader, you have the right to evaluate mine. So I’ll tell you a little about the sources that shape them. I’m a first-wave boomer; I grew up in a musical family, on the south side of Chicago. My mother was an opera singer who hoped I’d be a dancer. I’ve spent huge chunks of my life dancing, though dance was never my career. I have an MFA from the UW-Madison Art Department and a UW-Madison Ph.D. in anthropology. On the heels of my undergraduate years in hippie Miffland, I did a stint as a cocktail waitress at a funky jazz club – a bastion of postbop and seedy characters in the Alphabet City segment of Manhattan’s East Village. I’ve lived and worked in Latin America, and at the start of the ‘80s, long before the Latin music craze hit the U.S. (and thanks to both my pal Ricardo Gonzalez, owner of the Cardinal Bar, and the Mariel boatlift, which brought some 12,500 Cuban refugees to the U.S.), I had a Cuban salsa band right here in Madison. I got my start as an arts writer then, too – for a couple of years I was a regular freelance contributor to the Wisconsin State Journal.

I’ve seen some of the great performances of my life at the Wisconsin Union Theater. Among the amazing artists from my past with WUT, Joan Baez, Habib Koite, Eddie Palmieri and Dianne Reeves return this season, and I’ll report on them. But this blog isn’t just about the Union Theater. By starting a dialog about the performing arts I hope to promote the sifting and winnowing that’s at the historical heart of the University’s mission. And by providing space for this project under University auspices, Union Theater cultural arts director Ralph Russo and marketing and communications director Esty Dinur are standing up for the freedom to pursue all angles, unconstrained by the commercial forces that shape so much of what’s left of journalism. Russo says he hopes this blog, like its classical music companion, Jacob Stockinger’s The Well Tempered Ear, will “float all boats,” raising the profile of the performing arts across the community and beyond.

So I’ll fish for pearls in the city’s fertile culture beds, from the performing arts palaces anchoring State Street (the Union Theater and the Overture Center) to the sundry smaller venues, festivals and studios that make Madison vibrant. I may occasionally stray into related areas. For example, radio’s on my radar – stations like La Movida, WPR, and of course, WORT, do heavy lifting when it comes to pushing the performing arts.

I can’t promise to cover everything, or that I’ll post as often as my prolific colleague Jake over at the Ear. There’ll probably be times when I won’t write for weeks. But I’ll keep you posted on promising events, and I’ll always preview my top picks. I’ll do post-show reviews, though some may be short. I’ll be on the lookout for local surprises. I’ll profile artists, review juicy CDs, and poll people in the community on pertinent topics. I think linking the arts to broader concerns adds relevance, so you’ll often find my thoughts framed by current events. And please, participate. I’m happy to entertain your story suggestions, and eager to know what you think.

CulturalOyster

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Picking Tickets: Spring, 2012

The Best of 2011

Madison Ballet's Best Nutcracker Yet

SoLe Sanctuary: Hoofers' Last Hurrah

Footwork Phenomenon: Savion Glover Returns!

Terence Blanchard Runs the Voodoo Down

Picking Tickets for Fall, '11

High Holy Music

Reflections on the Madison World Music Festival's Eighth Incarnation

A Gringa's Guide to the Madison World Music Festival, Chapter 8

López-Nussa Rocks the Cardinal Bar

Isthmus Jazz Festival Shimmers in Summer Heat

The Divine Dianne Reeves Returns to WUT

Madison Ballet's Midsummer Night's Dream Delivers

Acoustic Africa Brings On the Sprits

Madison Becomes Hotbed of Politics and Performing Arts

Madison Ballet Romances the Audience, Sometimes, in its Annual Valentine's Day Show

A Little Sunday Night Mambo Jazz

Union Theater’s World Stage Series Gets Set for St. Paddy’s

Angelique Kidjo Invokes the Spirits

The Best of 2010

Madison Ballet's Nutcracker: Gorgeous, with a few Glitches

Li Chiao-Ping's Knotcracker Knocks Sox Off

Madison Ballet's Big, Bright Season

The Mambo King Returns

Recommended Reading

A Question for You, Readers!

¡A Bailar!

A Gringa's Guide to the Madison World Music Festival, Chapter 7

Picking Tickets

About Picking Pearls