Jay Harvey Upstage

Listening on NPR to a pair of experts examine the respective stances of the United States and Russia on dealing with Syria, I was puzzled by a couple of words new to me: "deconflict" (verb) and "deconfliction" (noun). From context, I inferred these terms have to do with the problem NPR's reporter had identified minutes earlier: getting the two nations' militaries "to talk to each other so that they can stay out of one another's way." George Orwell, guardian spirit of language This may well be the only area of agreement and cooperation apparent as Syria continues to be violently riven and subject to an endless civil war in which the influence of the Islamic State — anathema to both the U.S. and Russia — continues to grow. My online dictionary finds "deconflict" to be military language for "reduce the risk of collision between aircraft, airborne weaponry, etc. in an area by coordinating their movements." As they attack I...

The conditions were well nigh perfect — the best acoustical environment for a jazz concert as I've ever had the pleasure to bask in at the University of Indianapolis . The sound was balanced, crisp and well-blended among the four musicians. Even better, of course: the music Monday night in the Lilly Performance Hall of the DeHaan Fine Arts Center was first-rate. The occasion was Freddie Mendoza 's local debut in the spotlight, though he's made some local appearances as a sideman going back several months. Mendoza is a trombonist and euphonium player from Texas who has succeeded Harry Miedema as UIndy's director of jazz studies. Having just taken up his duties there, it was fitting that he also make a public display of his credentials as a player. Freddie Mendoza, new at UIndy. He was accompanied by Steven Jones, piano; Nick Tucker, bass, and Kenny Phelps, drums. He praised this team in both halves of the two-hour concert, saying they "made my job easy....

It always seems a gala occasion when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra gets native son Joshua Bell on the schedule as soloist. As often as he has returned here, he's been solid gold at the box office. Joshua Bell is always good for business at the ISO. So much the better that on an officially Big Deal program — the annual "Opening Night Gala" — the Bloomington-born and Indiana University-trained superstar violinist graced the stage of a packed Hilbert Circle Theatre. The ISO was conducted by Krzysztof Urbanski, beginning his fifth season as music director, and ensemble-in-residence Time for Three  shared the spotlight with Bell. The vehicle for his guest appearance with the ISO was a work written with him in mind by William Brohn, "West Side Story Suite." Leonard Bernstein's well-known score is treated in this work to a transformation that highlights musical (specifically violinistic) values rather than the arc of the drama, and that's how i...

The title character of Richard Bean's "One Man, Two Guvnors," Francis Henshall is one of life's "overwhelming underdogs," to borrow a phrase from the late Yogi Berra. Francis Henshall points to someone of absorbing interest. A washed-up washboard player in a skiffle band who accidentally becomes a bantam-rooster bodyguard, Henshall ends up in the employ of two men (one of them only apparently so), both of whom have secrets they strive to hold close. He is forced to keep his divided loyalties firmly divided.  But his craftiness is applied more with  desperate energy than cunning. To this assignment Nathan Robbins brings exuberant vitality, as seen in Phoenix Theatre' s opening-night performance Thursday. Robbins displayed the physical skills — part mime, part acrobat — of the great silent-film comedians. The scene in which Henshall's argument with himself becomes a knock-down, drag-out fight was an astonishing tour de force. In addition, t...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/books/c-k-williams-poet-who-tackled-moral-issues-dies-at-78.html Satirical Elegy In Memoriam C.K. Williams C.K. Williams found his second and third thoughts as valid as his first. The death of another honored American poet, of course, does not put much of a dent in the American preoccupation with the sort of thing that irritated him no end And I do mean "no end," as this was a bard who could seem to go on and on even in a short poem, especially one that was cast in long lines Even looser and baggier than Walt Whitman's (his idol's) at his loosest and baggiest. He was capable of discipline, but distrusted it as if there was something dishonest about leaving things out, so that focus for him meant only that stuff (read: "everything") Which lay in or near the path of "this entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness, this wedge of want my mind calls self, this self which doubts so much and...

A local landmark of the start of each musical season is the Gala Opening Concert at the University of Indianapolis, conducted by Raymond Leppard, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra conductor laureate and a city resident since his days as its music director, starting in 1987. His international reputation was well-established by the time he came here, through his long association with the English Chamber Orchestra, his many recordings, and his sometimes controversial adaptations of early Baroque operas. Now, with nearly a third of his long life associated with Indianapolis, Leppard's rare podium appearances carry a perceptible aura. Ordinary music-making becomes transfigured; "on the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / Become the figures of heaven," as the poet Wallace Stevens notes in the first lines of "To an Old Philosopher in Rome." Raymond Leppard turned 88 in July. "The figures of heaven" figure largely in Antonio Vivaldi's ...

Will he be the GOP's man in '16? For the past few hours, the essence of what follows has been up on Facebook. Such a longish status report seems to mean that FB is resisting my attempt to touch up a few places, so I'm making a blog post out of it. Originally, I figured this kind of lark lowers the dignity of my blog. Then, I found I was having a hard time figuring out what that means. Anyway, many of you remember John McCain's fragmentary parody of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" several years ago. It was lamentable both as policy and as satire: "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." Now I'm adding hardly any more distinction to the tiny genre as I reflect on the roiling Republican field (now shrinking slightly) of presidential hopefuls, tweaking the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda." I've encountered some punditry over the past few months suggesting a boomlet in favor of Mitt Romney might be in the offing, despite his sound...

A jazz festival should have a certain amount of messiness when it comes to summing up the music, so what follows has no bearing on what seems to have been a well-run finale to Indy Jazz Fest 2015. The messiness is all in my head, a condition to which five-dollar beers made only a slight contribution. (Pause for eye-rolls) Placement and continuity of the acts on two stages (outdoors near Yats, inside at the Jazz Kitchen) presumably depends on more than artistic direction. Overlapped timing not only nudged me to hear incomplete sets, but also probably resulted in not quite grasping some artists' design of their time onstage. And of course I was selective in any case, satisfying both curiosity and expectation in ways I can't explain. It's a festival thang. Scott Routenberg, Jesse Wittman, and Cassius Goens entertain. Adept management of the allotted 75 minutes was shown in the afternoon by the Scott Routenberg Trio. The pianist, who teaches at Ball State University, pr...

Last spring when Krzysztof Urbanski' s fifth season at the helm of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra was announced on the Hilbert Circle Theatre stage, he spoke respectfully and with a tinge of awe about his decision to program his first Mozart symphony since becoming the ISO's youngest music director. Having engaged major concert artist (also a native Pole) as the guest soloist featured in that audience Krzystof Urbanski seemed to get what he wanted out of his long-delayed ISO/Mozart debut. magnet Beethoven, Urbanski placed Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor after intermission in his first appearance on the podium here since June. (The program will be repeated at 5:30 this afternoon.) The great G minor couldn't have sounded better. The first movement established the work's tragic cast, with its main material immediately introduced in a manner both tentative and assertive. That sounds contradictory, but it's part and parcel of this symphony's emo...

A theater company can assure itself of good advance buzz by putting a certified hit on the schedule, and there's no hit more durable in the world of small-scale theater than "The Fantasticks." The young lovers consider only the happiest options. A production calculated to win Hoosier hearts is under way in the Studio Theatre at Carmel's Center for the Performing Arts, where it is being staged through Sept. 27. As seen Thursday, this version of the Tom Jones/Harvey Schmidt musical fantasy gets both the down-to-earth and ethereal aspects right. Neatly designed and musically shipshape, Actors Theatre of Indiana's  "Fantasticks" is best of all vividly fleshed out in characters and their interactions through an allegory of love's eternal pleasures and perils. Directed by Bill Jenkins, the show has the ingratiating informality of the original, overlaid by the mystery and artifice so essential to the lesson the story imparts. That lesson can be ...

Alto saxophone mastery honed in the fruitful fields of hard bop got a star outing Wednesday night at the Jazz Kitchen , when Bobby Watson was joined onstage by the all-star Indianapolis Jazz Collective. The first of two sets presented by the 2015 Indy Jazz Fest displayed the 62-year-old musician's sensitivity and flair. "Hard bop," though a term best applied to the long, productive history of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (of which Watson was musical director for years), seems restrictive when applied to Watson. "Soft bop" conveys the wrong message, but Watson's tone, while intense, sends warm, inviting messages with nothing hard about them. Hearty and imaginative: Bobby Watson at the Jazz Kitchen. Especially impressive was his solo feature, the standard "These Foolish Things." Backed by the Collective's rhythm section of pianist Steve Allee, bassist Nick Tucker, and drummer Kenny Phelps, Watson first stated the theme alone with a...

The nature theme was lightly applied in the Ronen Chamber Ensemble's season-opening concert in Hilbert Circle Theatre's Wood Room Tuesday evening. Christoph Nils Thompson A horn tune always places the listener in a forest, as co-artistic director Gregory Martin reminded a capacity audience before the performance of the program finale, Brahms' Horn Trio, op. 40. And Till Eulenspiegel answers "a call of nature" briefly in Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," an arrangement for violin, horn, bassoon clarinet and contrabass, which opened the concert. Touching more substantially on the natural world was the piece being premiered, Christoph Nils Thompson's "Borchert Quintets: Five Poems for Woodwind Quintet." Thompson, assistant professor of music media production at Ball State University, read each of the poems in the original German and his own English translation before the corresponding quintet was played. Th...

With deep Indianapolis jazz roots, Pharez Whitted has credibility all his own. Trumpeter Pharez Whitted, a forceful master of his instrument and a galvanizing bandleader, paid a visit to his hometown Sunday evening, courtesy of the Indy Jazz Fest. The Indianapolis-born Chicagoan brought with him his current band, and the Indiana Landmarks Center's Cook Theater rocked and throbbed to its music for nearly two hours. Contributing to the voice emphasis of this year's festival, Whitted welcomed onstage, for a few numbers each, singer Opal Staples and rapper John Robinson. Robinson got an outing almost immediately, during a roiling original, "Everlasting." He provided a controlled torrent of rhymes on the theme of colors, projecting clearly and shaping his words visually with a compact vocabulary of gestures. His raps favor building up over tearing down. After a soaring eulogy to "The Tree of Life," which embraced a stunning Whitted solo, Robinson and th...

Dr. Lonnie Smith can always be counted upon to add some mystery and humor to his funk-defined Hammond B3 artistry. His second set for Indy Jazz Fest at the Jazz Kitchen Friday night was an apt demonstration. Dr. Lonnie Smith is at one with the B3. One of the few jazz musicians you can accurately say chooses to appear on stage in costume rather than just clothes, the turbaned, bearded and robed organist has a look almost as indelible as his sound. It all comes together as something more substantial than branding, topped by an affable stage personality and true spontaneity. Any hints that "space is the place" for him as it was for the enigmatic Sun Ra are quickly dispelled. Smith goes his own way, but his music always speaks to the people on a broadly accessible level, with crucial assistance nowadays from guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg and drummer Johnathan Blake . The "doctor" is more a nickname than a title, which befits a musician who doesn't stand o...

It was more a tip of the fedora than a full-scale salute or ring-a-ding-ding genuflection, yet the opening night of the 2015 Indy Jazz Fest served the purpose well enough of memorializing a popular singer who practically invented "the standard" — Frank Sinatra. In the centennial celebrations surrounding Sinatra's birth, this was decidedly a modest tribute attended by a large crowd in the  Lilly Performance Hall of the University of Indianapolis' DeHaan Fine Arts Center. But it was not without style and panache. True, it came close to diluting those qualities in an enthusiastic but poorly arranged finale, "New York, New York," with the three guest singers uneasily distributing phrases of the durable show-stopper. Keynote address: They paid homage to Frank Sinatra and launched a voice-centered festival. Everything that led up to that song, however, displayed a fine collegial spirit in addition to showing off the personal styles of the vocalists: Rick V...