Jay Harvey Upstage

Steve Smith is at the center of Vital Information, Steve Smith says he wants to add some muscle to the piano-trio tradition, and the drummer has signaled the intentional transition  by titling his Wounded Bird release "Time Flies." The title picks up the bebop pioneer Bud Powell's "Tempus Fugit," the familiar Latin phrase that means the same thing. The Powell tune is one of several by composers outside the Vital Information personnel, which includes keyboards player Manuel Valera and bassist Janek Gwizdala.  George Garzone sits in on several tracks, lending the extra heft of his lusty tenor sax. A second disc, focused on this quartet configuration, centers on a loosely integrated suite, with compositional credits shared by all players. "A Prayer for the Generations" comprises eight parts. Those divisions don't carry titles, leaving the listener to interpret how the free-flowing sections fulfill the suite's ambitious title. I found "A Pra...

Bands less than big but not within small-group parameters have special attractions, eschewing the Kent Hickey leads nine-piece band with Alex Shanafelt sectional contrast and tussle of timbres of the bigs but giving room to a wider range of textures and harmonic variety than the combo. Another plus that totally lifts up the jazz spirit in such groups is the natural blurring of lines between solo and ensemble. "If writing is to be jazz writing, it should fuse the elements particular to its own tradition -- the beat, improvisation within a disciplinary frame, and its own unique feeling," arranger/baritone saxophonist Manny Albam told liner-note writer Burt Korall for the issue of "Manny Albam and the Jazz Greats of Our Time."  The title is a touch of hyperbole on this Coral LP, which I acquired as a teenager (wowed, I admit, by the all-star lineup*) circa 1960. I can't find any reference to it in either of the huge books on jazz recording I own, but I've alway...

Thomas Wilkins heads conducting at IU's Jacobs School. Thomas Wilkins, this weekend's guest conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , prefaced the second half of Friday's concert with some gently impassioned words about music that celebrates breathing — even the sanctity of breath as a measure and sustainer of our health. His focus was on the work the ISO was about to play, Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in G major. His remarks implied that we need this kind of music — its geniality, its appearance of effortlessness — especially today.  The performance delivered on meeting this need, even if the first movement felt a little more straitlaced than necessary. Let's consider this a runner's breathing, going all out. There could be no doubt of the performance's  rhythmic crispness. The ingratiating manner of the whole work was introduced, despite the presence of somberness that could be felt as a holdover of the Czech composer's tragic Seventh Symp...

Osmo Vänskä points the way toward 21st-century Mahler. An impressive 2020 release of the full Tenth Symphony, completed by Deryck Cooke from Mahler's manuscripts, built up big expectations for Osmo Vänskä 's Ninth with the Minnesota Orchestra . The recent issue of Mahler's last symphony to be solely his work fulfills those expectations in music inevitably interpreted as a premonition of death. Not intended as a goodbye to life, despite Mahler's knowledge of his doubtful health in middle age, the Ninth quickly took on posthumous stature. That there is substantial work in his own hand on a No. 10 indicates that the composer was not bound by a superstitious fear of going beyond Beethoven's venerated nine symphonies.  This recording ( BIS -2476) will attract extra interest among music-lovers who believe that only the first movement of the Tenth should remain in the repertoire as Mahler's final symphonic statement. There's a genuine farewell aura to this release,...

Fidelio (Leonore) protects Florestan from Pizarro's revenge. Although opera draws its principal strength from a theatrical milieu, it is striking how complete a version of "Fidelio" can seem when semi-staged, as the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra presented it Saturday evening. Beethoven's opera fits well into such a presentation, with the melodramatic libretto highlighting the composer's  idealistic concept of romantic love and hatred of tyranny. With costuming reduced to simple suggestions of character in context and props that can be used or ignored, except as conveniences for group positioning (as temporarily released prisoners do around the furniture), the simple outlines of the story remain intact. The disguise of a political prisoner's wife with a rescue plan as a newly hired male servant to the warden — too absurd? Not when the dramatic illusion doesn't have to be very plausible. Even better, and in such a small hall as the Schrott Center at Butler...

Taking intimate history a step away from staged documentary into essential theater, Jennifer Blackmer's "Predictor" lays bare the role of power relationships in trying to obstruct medical advancement. There are many ways of telling a real story in theatrical terms, and this new play plunges boldly and imaginatively into a tale of  cultural and marketing breakthroughs, focused on women's health care. The struggle to make widely available a home pregnancy test turns out to reveal social truths even more unpalatable than the laboratory exploitation  of animals that preceded it. Meg gets used to new work environment. American Lives Theatre 's production, which I saw Friday as its second weekend started on the Basile stage at Phoenix Theatre , is vivacious and funny as well as informative. Under  the direction of Bridget Haight,  the cast is headed by Brittany Magee as Meg Crane, a freelance graphic artist who was absorbed and nearly neutralized after she started worki...

Unaccustomed as it is to fully staged opera, the Tobias Theater at Newfields accommodates most of the Everyone's a winner: The full cast in reconciled finale of Indianapolis Opera's "The Magic Flute" essentials in Indianapolis Opera' s production of "The Magic Flute." The cast sang at a pretty high level, and the acting, while varying from character to character, had a long measure of authenticity. As seen Saturday night, the small orchestra was conducted ably by Scott Schoonover, and coordination with the singers faltered only in some passages by the offstage chorus. It was understandable that a unit set would have to serve multiple purposes, and thus presented a kind of a jumble to the eye. But all of the Mozart opera's settings are fanciful to begin with, so to see the arches of the temple representing the triumph of enlightenment amid the rocky landscape into which the hero has wandered in the first scene wasn't hard to absorb. Special effect...

The only anxiety generated by Pablo Ferrandez' s debut solo performance with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Friday night was the security of his cello's end pin. Colombian-American conductor Gonzalez-Granados Otherwise, the Spanish cellist delivered a transcendent account of Antonin Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor, in which pin slippage on the platform vanished among all other earthly concerns. Playing his Stradivarius "Archinto" instrument (1689) to maximum effect, Ferrandez wowed one of this season's largest Classical Series crowds at Hilbert Circle Theatre.  The end pin, tightened several times, held firm. So did his interpretation, both swooning and commanding as the need arose, as well as his rapport with guest conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados and the orchestra. In his pre-concert Words on Music appearance, Ferrandez mentioned his satisfaction with the heroic quality of the solo part, entering in B major after the hefty orchestral introduction i...

Anticipation works its ceaseless promises and challenges on everyday life, so it has to be also a front-and- Job interview about to go horribly wrong in "Didn't See That Coming" center aspect of the theatrical experience.  Tilted toward comedy, sensing what's about to happen is bound to involve hilarious missteps and surprises, so the title "Didn't See That Coming" perfectly represents the series of short takes Mark Harvey Levine has created in a show that opened Thursday at Fonseca Theatre. A production of the Southbank Theatre Company , "Didn't See That Coming" has a variety of settings, mounted on a circular platform revolved by hand for scene changes. It opens with specific evocations of issues theater raises internally, here applied to real-life situations. How repeatable and ordinary is the everyday, and how much might we vainly wish to vary it? How can being able to see what's coming interfere with the give-and-take we expect and...

Presenting the twilight of classicism and of romanticism  in the same program might seem like too much dusk, but the Jerusalem String Quartet cast lots of daylight on Mendelssohn, Webern, and Tchaikovsky Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center to conclude Ensemble Music Society' s current season.  The name "Webern" might have spurred an anxious chill in some patrons previously unaware that the Austrian composer's 1905 "Langsamer Satz" (Slow Movement) is a lengthy exercise in the late Romantic idiom he was soon to cast off as a student of Arnold Schoenberg. Webern would go beyond the older composer as an avatar of 20th-century modernism. (He was to be shot dead 40 years later by a jittery American soldier just after World War II.) Tight-knit Jerusalem Quartet charms audience here. Slow Movement occupied a central place in a program bookended by Mendelssohn's String Quartet No. 4 in E minor, op. 44, no. 2 and Tchaikovsky's Quartet No. 1 in D ma...

Among the more unlikely places for the new musical genre called jazz to have made a significant entrance was a piano factory with a small recording studio in Richmond, Indiana. Yet a century ago, Gennett Records won its place in history by bringing to the small town near the Ohio border some of the most significant figures in American popular music in its burgeoning jazz form, all under the provincial Starr Piano Company's umbrella. The music had burst onto the cultural scene in New Orleans and Chicago, and was soon to win its most prominent home in New York City. Among Gennett's early captures on record was Louis Armstrong's first recorded solo, on "Chimes Blues" with the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band in 1923. It gave exposure as well to Indianapolis' own Hoagy Carmichael and provided an early niche for the short-lived Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. These figures get adequate recognition in Brent Wallarab's "Gennett Suite," a centennial tribute...