Always the artist
Ravi Coltrane is maybe not for-the-semester music. Sometimes you need a specific cocktail, to regain your dignity, or remember what love feels like, or shake off some encroaching loneliness, if only for 40–60 minutes. Ravi Coltrane isn’t good for that. If I plan on getting work done, I’ll listen to Robert Fripp, or Radiohead. Maybe if I want to feel nostalgic, I’ll listen to Tom Waits or Animal Collective. These are specific cocktails. I enjoy them within a specific context. They are connected to people I know, and places where I’ve drunk them. These songs are the way I dogear the pages of life.
INTERVIEW Destinations and playgrounds
Tamir Hendelman is a young Israeli musician and a product of the Los Angeles jazz scene. His latest Boston performance at Sculler’s Jazz Club was particularly lively, with Tim Horner on drums and Martin Wind on bass. Hendelman’s music is quite accessible, and he does a particularly good job of combining various musical influences together. Credit should also be given to Horner and Wind, who gave a decisive edge to the trio’s sound. Tamir Hendelman has two recordings released to date: 2010’s Destinations with Lewis Nash and Marco Panascia, and 2008’s Playground with Jeff Hamilton and John Clayton.
THEATER REVIEW The art of being an artist
<i>“You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking.” </i>
THEATER REVIEW Meet Hitler
I walk up two flights of stairs. The production is in a language learning center on the second floor. The decoration is sparse, the lighting fluorescent, industrial. There’s a small reception room with coffee and some chairs. The receptionist leads me around the corner to a small office room with fifteen chairs, facing inward at a single chair, and a bit table with a picture of Klara Hitler, Adolf’s mother. The windows are covered, one with a dark drape, another with a great red Nazi flag, with a manhole-sized Swastika in the middle. There are twelve of us. We are somewhat cramped. We wait.
THEATER REVIEW The art of being an artist
<i>“You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking.” </i>
What I’m Listening To
The story of jazz is a desperate struggle of birth and rebirth, of constantly trying to ride the “new,” of reinventing how we feel and relate to the world. Today’s innovators fuse genres, add instruments, at once rejecting the past and later resurrecting it. The jazz gods need constant infusions of blood to stay happy.
CONCERT REVIEW Joshua Redman at Berklee Performance Center
Joshua Redman has high notes. He has low notes. He has trills. I could go further, and talk about brilliant expressionism, the emotive quality of his playing and that of his ensemble. It’s easy to hear that he knows how to make “jazz.”
CONCERT REVIEW Experimental Antics at the Middle East
As I write this, I have yet to form a solid opinion of the Providence-based punk / showtunes / experimental outfit The Viennagram. At once the group is pretentious and unpolished. Its wisdoms are coal on the verge of becoming pearls, sometimes hitting, but often missing. It’s a spaghetti-on-the-wall philosophy, one that, for all but the most virtuosic, is better left for the rehearsal room than for the concert hall.
FESTIVAL REVIEW ‘First Night’ Celebration Electrifies Boston
I boarded the 12:30 December 31 New York-Boston bus at the Port Authority, as my peers in line scoffed “I wonder why so many people are going to Boston for New Years.” At the time, that made sense. I had initially planned to stay in New York, but convenience and fatigue turned the Peter Pan bus line into an inexpensive and only slightly sketchy hotel. I knew vaguely that there was an arts festival in Boston on December 31 — the so-called “First Night” — and that it had some pretty slick events. I was down, and I was looking forward to sleeping in a bed that belonged to me.
CONCERT REVIEW Bad Plus Play Residency at New York’s Village Vanguard
A little business, a lot of casual. The members of The Bad Plus look less like performers than the awkward guys who forgot to dress up for the dinner party that is 9:00 at the Village Vanguard. Thirty-something yuppies sip at their Cabernet Sauvignon while three dudes jam in the corner. Go to a Bad Plus show and you’ll be as likely to hear a Nirvana cover as a heavily warped version of a Ligeti composition. Bassist Reid Anderson wails out surreal, textured lines while drummer David King lays out a frenetic beat complete with baby toy tambourines and other contraptions as garnishes. Rock out with your Jazz-Purists’-Shock out. Jazz you can almost dance to?
CONCERT REVIEW Hiromi’s SonicBloom at Berklee Performance Center
I could say that Hiromi Uehara is one part Santana, one part Robert Fripp, and one part Monk, but it wouldn’t do her justice. Brought up in the Japanese conservatory environment and trained at Berklee (joining in 2003), Hiromi has carved out her distinctive musical niche by marrying her traditional, virtuosic training with an avant-garde flavor.
CONCERT REVIEW Keith Jarrett is Better Than You, and He Knows It
The trailblazer of egoism in Jazz might be Miles Davis, or perhaps Charlie Mingus; each declared jazz to be art, not just entertainment. They didn’t smile. They didn’t laugh. If you screwed around with them, they punched you in the face (in Mingus’ case).
ALBUM REVIEW Crossing Party Lines
We all love to be wordly. Shuffle through your friends’ facebook pages, and you’ll no doubt find a slew of open-minded comrades summarizing their musical preferences as “everything.” That is, everything by the Shins. Or, alternatively, Shostakovich.
CONCERT REVIEW Michel Camilo, Pure Love
Saturday night. Full house. Glasses clink and lapels straighten.
Bringing Music Back Alive - Sam Markson on MITSO
Modern classical performance is often a rigid form — a study of strict tempos, pitches, and moods. The performers take it upon themselves to recreate the vision of the original artist, and as that artist is usually dead, that recreation can become a study in accuracy rather than exploration — what <i>not </i>to play, rather than <i>what </i>to play.