Jay Harvey Upstage

 All sorts of jazz statements can be folded within the contemporary big band, and composer-pianist Neal Neal Kirkwood shows zest for personalizing big-band sound. Kirkwood displays much of the variety of texture, tempo, structure and expanse possible in this veteran musician's first big-band album. "Night City" ( BJU Records)   The new disc brings together compositions he's written for large ensembles over several decades. His sense of jazz history, with some evident roots in Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, is of a high order, as is his penchant for borderline "classical" orchestration and tone poems such as "The Light of Birds," which concludes the disc. Of the several long cuts, I was struck by his evocation of urban sensory overload in the title track, which evokes a couple of firends meandering together around the city. The surface randomness turns out to be tightly constructed, with bits and pieces sensitively juxtaposed.  But my favorite was ...

  "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" has moved around the country since its premiere in 2015 in Philadelphia. Last night it was time for the opera to make a one-night stand in Indianapolis, the hometown of star soprano Angela Brown, who has made a specialty of the role of Addie, the musician's mother. The Indianapolis Opera performance was placed at the architectural crown jewel of the historic center of Indianapolis night entertainment and black social life, Madam Walker Theatre . And among the visiting stars who used to play in the clubs in and around Indiana Avenue was Charlie Parker, one of the founding fathers of bebop. Charlie Parker sings of his devotion to his sax.  Parker's life featured moments of triumph and recognition by fellow musicians who saw that bebop swept the cobwebs away from the Swing Era, while at the same time narrowing jazz's public approval by removing the genre from its crucial link to social dancing. Harmonies were thrust away from their ...

Ann and Rachelle size each other up before ordeal. The witticism credited to poet-critic Randall Jarrell that academic battles are vicious because the stakes are so low has dated rather surprisingly in our era, when larger social tensions raise the stakes significantly in the educational field. The struggle is pitched up toward a weaponized resolution in Idris Goodwin''s "Blackademics."  Fonseca Theatre Company opened the one-act drama Friday night in a production brimful of hip-hop buzz and scrutiny of black sisterhood and academic ambition. The 21st-century stakes are indeed high when higher education's focus on diversity is subject to whims of administrative fashion and political power centers. There are no more tempests in teapots of the kind Jarrell made fun of in the mid-20th century. The focus on African-American literature that Rachelle, an ambitious young teacher, has developed turns out to be too narrow to secure her career as "people of color...

 Far from my favorite place to see theater in Indianapolis,  Shelton Auditorium  may well be the proper home for  Southbank Theatre 's ambitious production of "Man of La Mancha." The steep pitch of its stadium setting in an expanded semicircle in straight-back pews evokes both sacred and secular traditions. Messages of import, matters for both study and meditation, are at home in such a venue. The stark beauty of the environment has to contend with compromises in comfort and perhaps even safety. Entertainment nonetheless also claims room in Shelton, where this company is in residence. That value is upheld in the way the cast invests controlled energy in the prize-winning musical under the direction of Marcia Eppich-Harris. The peak results in Thursday's opening-night performances were those of Paul Hansen as Cervantes/Don Quixote, Jessica Hawkins as Aldonza/Dulcinea, and Anthony Nathan as Sancho Panza. Alonso Quijana on way to real knighthood under the Golden Helmet....

In his concise oral program notes from the stage, Camden Shaw proposed a theme linking the three pieces the Dover Quartet played in its concert Wednesday night for the Ensemble Music Society. Dover Quartet on the move The string quartet's cellist admitted that it's a stretch sometimes to impose a thematic interpretation on a program, but he ventured that the music by Joaquin Turina, Leos Janacek, and Franz Schubert has in common the composers' attempts to "work through something in their minds." The vagueness of that wording nonetheless applied well to what the Dovers offered the audience at the Indiana History Center. He was alluding to how dangerous life's tasks, whether self-imposed or not, can be to carry out or even move toward resolution. Composers work with problems that aren't purely musical, in other words, and they do so through mastery of their craft. By extension, these chronologically distant masterpieces apply well to the magnified uncertaint...

Anthony Kniffen had a helpful composer chat. Wynton Marsalis has grown his musical footprint to become the Bigfoot striding across the jazz-classical landscape. His initial impact as a 20-year-old trumpeter seesawing between jazz and classical performance soon resulted in a decision to stick to jazz. But in making that choice, the now 62-year-old New Orleans maestro as a composer has looked for long-form stature and ensemble splendor in a genre not known for sustaining long forms. Jazz packed with extended solo flights — a la John Coltrane — is not structurally substantial. So there often needs to be programmatic content, particularly on African-American themes, to provide breadth of expression. Marsalis' model has been Duke Ellington, notably in such works as "Black, Brown, and Beige" and "Harlem." Marsalis made his mark on this tradition with "In This House, On This Morning," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Blood on the Fields," and "From ...

Caught up, as one inevitably is, in Michael Schelle's gift for musical plays on words, I've borrowed that privilege and stretched it to label the concert he called "Schelle, Sasaki, and Friends" in a wretched pun on the French title of Olivier Messiaen's "Visions de l'Amen." Butler University's longtime composer in residence avails himself of the amenities of his professional position, in the dictionary sense of "something that conduces to comfort, convenience, or enjoyment." These human amenities are students, former students, and Jordan College of Arts colleagues, plus his wife Miho Sasaki, assembled for a riotous kaleidoscope of short pieces. They are presumably a far cry from those in the P.D.Q. Bach cantata "Iphigenia in Brooklyn," with its poignant recitative lines "and in a vision Michael Schelle sizes things up. Iphigenia saw her brother Orestes, who was being chased by the Amenities." Collectively Schelle g...

Fedchock taking care of J.J. business As a fledgling trombonist, my youthful idea of jazz trombone swung between two poles: Jack Teagarden and J.J. Johnson. Off to the side, more as a model of pristine tone and fluidity than jazz chops, stood Tommy Dorsey. So, when I moved to Indianapolis in 1986, part of the excitement was establishing a home in Johnson's hometown. He started out here, he ended up here, and this year is his birth centenary.  To celebrate that, the well-regarded New York trombonist and arranger John Fedchock was brought in Sunday night to the Jazz Kitchen , fronting a quartet of local/regional stalwarts: pianist Steve Allee, bassist Jeremy Allen, and drummer Sean Dobbins.  That lineup delivered on a promise of a proper tribute to Naptown's trombone native son. Especially winning was Fedchock's detailed placing in bandstand remarks of the tunes the quartet offered: their places in the Johnson discography and  the honoree's stature as a model of adapting...

No less an innovator than Steve Jobs , who also had his useful demons, may have spoken the key to the Randy connects with Taylor after his fashion. perils of the creative process faced by Taylor, the struggling playwright who frames the action of Casey Ross' new play, "Bat in the Wind." The Catalyst Repertory production opened over the weekend at Indy Eleven, Indy Fringe , where it will run through March 17. "Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs said. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it — they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while because they were connecting experiences they've had to something new." Taylor re-creates his role from a shorter 2023 Fringe festival version of the play; Dane Rogers takes the other role as Randy, a boozy neighbor washing up as flotsam and jetsam on life's ruder shores. Taylor's attempts at making thea...

 Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 follows in its authentic American fashion the precedent established by Yue Bao was trained in Shanghai and at the Curtis Institute. Beethoven's Third ("Eroica") of shifting the expressive weight of the symphony form to the finale.  And though that weight seems obviously centered early in the movement by the familiar "Fanfare for the Common Man," it is elaborated in a detailed, virtuosic kind of heaviness. Thus it relieves the superficial impression that this is all a little bit too much by the time of the brass-and-percussion peroration. So it was scrupulously handled Friday night as the Chinese conductor Yue Bao made her Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra debut. The intricacy of motivic interplay, which she already had managed well in the tricky rhythmic zest of the second-movement scherzo, wasn't sped through or simply illuminated in brilliant flashes. She was attentive to the sharp-edged contours of the music from the fi...