Jay Harvey Upstage

 In addition to the well-crafted band arrangements of "Within Us," the silver-anniversary recording ( Mama Records ) by Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge is welcome for the generous spotlight shone upon Sara Caswell, a violinist with a prominent Indiana University pedigree, trained early in classical music before she went through IU's renowned jazz curriculum created by David Baker. Sara Caswell makes major contributions. She gets several solo outings in the course of the eight pieces, some of them setting the stage for Owen's extensive ensemble thoughts. She introduces the deliberations of "Trail of the Ancients" with trenchant musings, and when a regular tempo is established and guitarist LaRue Nikelson sets a pattern, she supplements his recurring contributions in deft phrase endings. Later, Caswell soars, and the tasty voicings for the ensemble make a perfect setting.  After a guitar cadenza, there are exchanges between the two soloists to put a cap on a me...

Five days in Mexico City offered a chance, hosted by my son William, to visit Zinco Jazz Clu b in the central historic district. If you're a jazz fan in Mexico City with time to spend away from the many attractive tourist sites, check out the Zinco web site for its varied schedule of performers. Fausto Palma covers a wide musical sweep. Multi-instrumentalist Fausto Palma and Petra, a quintet, presented a varied opening set Saturday evening. The club's atmosphere embraces low lighting under a low ceiling, and the cozy vibe is inviting. Palma and his men played original music keyed to his mastery of several string instruments whose provenance is wide and cross-cultural. The leader began by featuring the oud, a Turkish lute, and we also heard numbers focusing on a close relative of the Indian dilruba, called sarangi. Palma's virtuoso shredding of the electric guitar early in the set brought to mind the personal expansion of the Jimi Hendrix style that John McLaughlin achieved ...

Tamino and Pamina reach trial's final stage. To begin with, Monostatos would need his comic villainy whitewashed. It was easy to assume this in advance of attending "The Magic Flute" in Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music production, which began a two-weekend run Friday night. And so it was. The reigning Priest of the Sun's bad hire could no longer whine about his blackness or his ugliness, as the libretto to Mozart's masterpiece has it. In an era where it is controversial to darken the features of a white tenor singing Otello, there would be no way to adhere to the original in that respect.  But more central to the story is the way it upholds patriarchy, albeit of an enlightened and ethical kind. There are hints of  IU's different direction well before the arch-villainess Queen of the Night and her adherents are symbolically embraced in the realm of her nemesis, Sarastro. That's the staged equality of this production's final scene, capping...

Host Matthew Socey was right to proclaim from the stage of Garfield Park's MacAllister Amphitheater Akiko Tsuruga shows Hammond B-3 mastery. that events like the Indy Jazz Fest are permanently indebted to the pioneering example of George Wein, who died last week at the age of 95. Wein founded the generating event, the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1954 and went on as impresario of many other music festivals around the world. In his marvelous memoir, "Myself Among Others: A Life in Music," a common theme of his signature jazz festivals was the mixture of musical artists only distantly related to jazz and exponents of the music celebrated in the label "jazz festival." So it's not a departure from the Weinian model that the IJF has long followed suit, subtly thumbing its nose at the tendency of jazz fans to dig a moat around their favorite music. This year's event, a return to concert performances outdoors, is liberally populated with representatives of jazz...

Returning to its home stage for live performances, Dance Kaleidoscope is prepared again to bring its virtuosity to the main stage of Indiana Repertory Theatre as the troupe makes a season-opening splash with "Breaking the Surface." Seen at a dress rehearsal Wednesday night, the program struck me as a gathering of choreographic responses to music that treats repetition as both idiom and structure in the first half and as a polarity worth challenging in the second. Performances run tonight through Sunday. Coincidentally reading a book of essays by Thornton Wilder, I'm struck by his robust defense of Gertrude Stein, an avatar of linguistic modernism. That literary iconoclast is still remembered for "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and for her consistent, often harder-to-unpack opposition to prose conventions. Literature had become overburdened with description, she warned us, and written language was stifling how to represent ways we really think and behave...

Posed for success: Paul Whiteman (center) and his men  Some of the earliest peeks into the workshop of early jazz were made by European composers, but countrymen of the jazz pioneers here also tried their hands. Encouragement came from the visionary Paul Whiteman, a giant Westerner who "formed his own 'jazz' orchestra in Los Angeles and hit upon the idea of writing out parts for his musicians instead of the usual improvisation." The concise quotation comes from the program notes of  Francis Corciata, president of the Leo Sowerby Foundation, accompanying Cedille Records ' release of "Leo Sowerby: Paul Whiteman Commissions & Other Early Music."  The scare quotes around "jazz" are called for, but not in disparagement of Whiteman's musical vision, The young Leo Sowerby was a rising force in Chicago music. which was respectful of what jazz brought to orchestral music. Even so, he headed in a different direction, picking up the innovative ge...

  Leading up to Labor Day, my miscellany of 2021 Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival events spread over three days suggests I might as well go for the laughs first. (I took a breather Sept. 4; what follows are some impressions from shows I saw Sept. 3 and 5. ) The spirit of spontaneity is uppermost in the Fringe tradition, so that a high priority is not put on polished performances. Encountering rough-around-the-edges shows can be welcome, and the muse of comedy typically gives an inviting nod to presentations that embody human foibles in addition to pointing them out. At the Indy Fringe Basile Theatre Sept. 3, I took in an old Fringe favorite, the locally based troupe of young black comedians known as Act a Foo Improv Crew . The company was dependably bonded internally, with Daniel A. Martin the master of the revels, calling out the improv games and selecting from among the five-man crew assembled onstage, all on the edge of their seats when not assigned to cavort.  The tro...

Bandleader Scott Reeves with his two mellow horns. A faculty jazz outing from 2005 at City College of New York receives a welcome first issue, thanks to trombonist-composer Scott Reeves ' work with Brian Montgomery, a Grammy-winning recording/mixing engineer, who isolated the instruments and remixed them. "The Alchemist" ( Origin Records ) is a title that could well be applied to the blend of science and magic that produced this resurrected version of music performed in concert 16 years ago. Some of the slightly off-kilter chemistry within the band is front and center in the churning boogaloo piece that gives its name to the recording. The leader's devotion to two instruments with mellow, mid-range timbres — alto valve trombone and alto flugelhorn — is enhanced by his choice of simpatico sidemen: guitarist Russ Spiegel, pianist Mike Holober, bassist Howard Britz, and drummer Andy Watson. Reeves acts as his own duo partner, with one horn overlaid on the other, in the s...