Jay Harvey Upstage

Pianist-composer Steve Allee had new music to share Saturday. Steve Allee continues to write some of the most engaging, agreeably knotty pieces on the local jazz scene. There were a number of such compositions — their concentrated swing linked to perky melodies — on the first set he and his adept quintet played Saturday night at the Jazz Kitchen, the successful SoBro nightclub-restaurant run by his son David. The players on hand to enhance the introduction of these pieces are all familiar faces — some of them over decades, others over just a few years. Among them was another bandleader-composer of distinction, saxophonist Rob Dixon, whose featured works had a similar  bounce, elegance, and accessibility. Both men are contributing new pieces inspired by paintings that will be displayed July 19 at an Indy Jazz Fest fundraiser called "Jazz on Canvas." One of them heard Friday night was Dixon's "Ragsdale," named for a local artist and distinguished by a th...

 A septet of unprepossessing-looking  musical gentlemen took the stage for the late-night show Friday at the Jazz Kitchen . They hadn't gone far into the sole set of their club debut before it became obvious the Rad Trads had blown their polite newcomer status all to scatteration. The Rad Trads take care of business at some other gig. They strutted, bounced, and boogied while knocking out straightforward songs in some fairly intricate (memorized) arrangements. They never forgot they were there to entertain: no long solos, no narcissistic displays of instrumental prowess. One song after another, high-octane all the way. They just brought it. Based in New York and newly emerged from the South into the Midwest on an extensive tour, the young band quickly put a stamp  of exuberance on a range of soulful music. Their vocals, distributed mainly among three of them, were punctuated by the band's well-coordinated four horns, resting on a solid foundation of guitar, elec...

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) pointed toward music's postmodern future even as he anticipated the intervening reign of modernism. The Italian pianist-composer, looking back with intensity toward J.S. Bach while bursting with Romantic afflatus, had a mystical idea of the equivalent meaning of all music: "All melodies, heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously — they are themselves the souls of millions of being in millions of epochs." Out the window goes the "historicist" interpretation of music, that it either has to follow the true line of progress, whatever that means, or fall quickly into irrelevance. In defiance of Robert Browning, Busoni's reach may often have exceeded his grasp.  In "The Great Pianists," Harold Schonberg aptly titles his Busoni chapter "Dr. Faust at the Keyboard." Jeni Slotchiver makes common cause with Busoni. Jeni Slotchiver, in the third volume of her "Busoni the Visionary...

A celebratory take on "Wild Rover" in honor of Ireland's historic vote Friday. Posted by Jay Harvey on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Opera in Indianapolis is reaching out in new directions to find an audience that will support it adequately, and "Crescendo" — a musical term that instructs the player(s) to get louder by a more or less extended "less than" sign — expressed the hope the result will be "more than." That was the title of Friday night's program at White River State Park , where Indianapolis Opera and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra joined forces in a concert of mostly familiar excerpts from opera and musical theater — from Rossini through Stephen Schwartz. Kirk Trevor, newly named maestro emeritus of the ICO since his retirement earlier this month after 27 years, conducted. He was in fine fettle, leading more than two dozen numbers, getting estimable results from the orchestra, the Opera chorus, and four apt guest soloists. The sampling was a generous smorgasbord, which could have been just a little skimpier to allow for more spoken context-setting of several of t...

Stability in jazz tends to be looked upon with suspicion. It brings with it the dangers of falling into a John Patitucci at the Jazz Kitchen May 18. rut, which can be defined as a groove that has started gathering cobwebs. John Patitucci is a player who exudes stability of the good sort. His new CD is titled "Brooklyn" in honor of the New York City borough where he was born and raised. He referenced it several times in his second set Monday night at the Jazz Kitchen , to which he brought the "Brooklyn" group. Though he soft-pedaled his faith and his family, the unaccompanied encore he wrote in their honor, "Tesori" (Treasures), put a seal on those values, as did several "God bless you(s)!" he directed at the enthusiastic audience. Further evidence: With his drummer, Brian Blade, Patitucci has been a member for about 15 years of the Wayne Shorter Quartet, which played a concert at the Palladium in March . (Pianist Danilo Perez, another re...

Orchestra music directors' tenures rarely exceed a quarter-century, so when the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and Kirk Trevor concluded his 27th season at the helm of the ensemble Saturday night, the milestone was worth celebrating. Gifts, testimonials, and several champagne toasts highlighted a post-concert reception at the Schrott Center for the Arts, Butler University. Bella Hristova drew upon her heritage in encore. Bella Hristova, laureate of the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, was the soloist for the season-ending concert. She was heard in Nicolo Paganini's sturdy, showy, episodic Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 6. Hristova displayed the virtuoso command the score requires. Her harmonics had a steady sheen, articulation was varied and well laid out, and the interval leaps in the fast movements had a high degree of accuracy.  Her choice of first-movement cadenza was not to my taste — chockful of trills and laborious ornamentation of...