Jay Harvey Upstage

George Balanchine had such an affinity for music that he often thought of composers as his collaborators in an almost mystical sense. He spoke of how a work might suddenly come together after rehearsal and production travails. "All of a sudden everything looks wonderful. That's his doing," he told his biographer Bernard Taper, who then adds the choreographer's explanation: "He points to the heavens, 'Tchaikovsky's.'" George Balanchine, revered father of American ballet. The anecdote might allude to the wholeness the Russian-born choreographer lent to the Russian composer's failed third piano concerto, which in Balanchine's hands became "Allegro Brillante."  The work opened Indianapolis Ballet' s "Evening of Balanchine" Friday night in the Tobias Theater at Newfields. Even lacking the common ground of the same homeland, Balanchine probably found that Gershwin spoke to him as well from beyond the grave. In f...

The frontiers of cutting-edge jazz can be a larky playground in the post-modernist landscape. Members of Earprint ponder a contraption foreign to their music. For Earprint, a quartet whose very name reconciles nature and technology, its claim to a place on that terrain rests on sometimes laconic original tunes, whimsically titled, that are displayed in an all-acoustic format. The album title (a forthcoming release credited to Endectomorph Music ) is a thumb in the eye to a whole genre of music marketed to our parents and grandparents as soothing background. That's because any music worth paying attention to does not fall into that category as commonly understood. On Earprint's terms, "Easy Listening" in part means a quartet concept in which the  two horns don't attempt to fill in harmonies in the manner of pianoless groups of the past mid-century. Instead, trumpeter Tree Palmedo and reedman Kevin Sun set out rigorous melodic parallelism, with bassist S...

Philip Spray, emcee and violone player Under the auspices of Bloomington Early Music , a collaboration of two ensembles on Sunday afternoon played the second of two performances of its "Time's Up...Stop Fretting" program in the charming, historical setting of the Carriage House at Indianapolis Propylaeum . The first was in the organization's hometown the day before. By Indianapolis standards, the setting was ancient. Its original function was served from 1890 on until the triumph of the automobile (a history memorably traced in fictional form here by Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons"). The music reached back much further. The concert title, an inspiration of the program's pun-loving director, Philip Spray, alludes to the interplay of string instruments with fretted fingerboards and those without frets (strips across the fingerboard) that triumphed in concert music eventually. The guitar is the best-known fretted instrument today,...

Subterranean Impeachment Blues Donnie’s in his bedroom, looking for some head room, There’s homeless on the pavement thinkin’ ‘bout the government President gloats about next year’s votes He’s taking frantic notes, can he nail Dan Coats? Muttering about Sleepy Joe Biden Gaffe prone, all alone, what’s he hidin’? No norms, no forms, Trump follows no laws What he does is free of flaws. Let him explain to the president of Ukraine See if he can help with the next campaign Get loose, got the juice, tweet about fake news Don’t need a guitar to make up some new blues. Look out Trump, your polling’s in a slump God knows when, but you’re doing it again. Oh, get sick, get well, does impeachment ring a bell? Keep your base in place, hope the Wall is gonna sell. Get Barr, go far, set sail, don’t fail E-mails, Dem wails, Adam Schiff is on your tail. Look out Trump, you’re gonna get dumped By losers, voters, Constitution users ...

Amanda Gardier and her group buoyed up the schedule The party atmosphere at the annual Indy Jazz Fest finale rolls like a tsunami over the southeast corner of 54th and College as the day wanes. I skipped away from the wave earlier than I had expected, beaten down a bit from an intense self-imposed schedule over the last few days. The Block Party is a good way to end such a festival for those up to sticking it out for a wealth of music (a dozen bands on two stages), with plenty of opportunity for food and drink along the way. Yats, the Cajun-style restaurant that's long been the Jazz Kitchen' s next-door neighbor, was on hand with some of its offerings supplementing the Jazz Kitchen buffet, while the club's bar attracted a crowd shifting almost as adroitly as a band playing "Giant Steps." Thinking that my best bet was to hit the ground running at 4 o'clock, I took in the tight modern acoustic quartet led by Rich Cohen and Chris Rutkowski. This powerful...

Most frequently played works for orchestra justify that frequency by dint of a number of durable qualities. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened its Classical Series Friday night with three of them. Krzysztof Urbanski, music director of the ISO in his next-to-last season, has shown insights into oft-heard pieces many times in his nine-year tenure. I remember how much Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings benefited from his conscientiousness many seasons ago. ISO guest soloist Julian Rachlin also has extensive experience on the podium. It showed up again in what he managed to do at Hilbert Circle Theatre with Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" in the familiar orchestration by Maurice Ravel. It animated his suave presentation, sporting some excellent solos, of Jacques Offenbach's Overture to "Orpheus in the Underworld." And it took place as a result of a superb meeting of the minds with soloist Julian Rachlin in Felix Mendelssohn...