Jay Harvey Upstage

You open your program for Phoenix Theatre 's "Bakersfield Mist," and on facing pages are a statement from the playwright, Stephen Sachs, and opposite it the conventional page of complete credits, production history, and setting information. Two different views of a modernist painting will be set against each other by drastically dissimilar characters, you learn, while awaiting the production's debut. When you see one of the credits is "fight choreographer" (Scott Russell), you are justified in concluding there is more than aesthetics at stake in the uninterrupted span of time ahead. Authenticity, on the other hand, is worth fighting over. And that's the terrain on which a pitched battle will ensue. Maude (Jolene Mentink Moffat) puts her case to Lionel (Joshua Coomer). Authenticity is what Maude Gutman, an ex-bartender in a trailer home under California desert sun, and Lionel Percy, a New York art expert whose help she solicits in assessing a painting she...

Most of the music on "Here With You" occupies such a high place in the estimation of clarinet players that they use it to refute joking expressions of pity from violinists and pianists about their repertoire. They have the Opus 120 Brahms sonatas, after all. McGill is principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. Anthony McGill chuckles about it in a podcast interview with James Ginsburg, founder and director of Cedille Records, which this month issued "Here With You,"  a recital disc the clarinetist performs with pianist Gloria Chien .  He's referring to the two late sonatas for clarinet and piano by Johannes Brahms. In length, they occupy two-thirds of the CD, which is completed by Carl Maria von Weber's "Grand Duo Concertant" and Jessie Montgomery's "Peace." The partnership is so solid and inspiring that the CD title is justified by the McGill-Chien bond itself, as well as its indication of the value of getting together as ...

Jazz drumming ranges from a service position in the music to a magnetic force generating everything from Jared Schonig earns a living mainly on Broadway. creation to execution. In "Two Takes" ( Anzic Records ), Jared Schonig spreads the more activist role widely by presenting original compositions in two forms: big band and quintet. Each has its own CD covering the same material set in a different order. The small group honors the combo tradition in the way it maximizes solo space. Yet Schonig's choice of sidemen doesn't parade its individuality as much as the musicians honor the new material; as an ensemble, the quintet works well. Driven by the creator/boss, they are Marquis Hill, trumpet; Luis Perdomo, piano and Rhodes electric piano; Godwin Louis, alto saxophone, and Matt Clohesy, bass.  To emphasize the solo contributions, Schonig inserts three solo drum interludes within the program of his nine compositions, and starts things off with a brief introduction to the...

 "Celebrating Mother Earth" is an old-fashioned title for a program very much focused on the present. Reinaldo Moya, commissioned composer The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra put together a couple of modern pieces to represent attitudes toward the nature that we are called to be familiar with, and anchored the unfamiliar in the familiar with a classic covering a basic fact of the natural world: seasonal change. It was "The Four Seasons," the durable set of violin concertos by the Italian baroque master Antonio Vivaldi. Saturday night's concert at Butler University's Schrott Center opened with a commissioned work, "Dark Earth: Anthropogenic Amazon," by Reinaldo Moya , a 36-year-old native of Venezuela, US-trained as a composer and now living in Minnesota. It's a shame the composer's program notes were not in the printed program; nor was there any talk about the work from the stage. You can read about the piece's significance and the proc...

Sean Chen showed nuance and insight.  Many listeners to classical music, not all of them unsophisticated, find themselves conjuring visual images not only as accompaniment to what they hear, but also as ways to invest what might otherwise remain abstract with concrete meaning. When a composer explicitly writes two sets of pieces called "Images" (which works equally well as French or English), the permission to think visually seems foreordained, even required. Of course, the drawback is that there's no way of controlling that.  And what Debussy said about "Images," which Sean Chen played Friday night in recital at the Palladium , indicates some freedom in allowing his special language of harmonies and phrases to go beyond the image suggested by each title. Why does "Reflets dans l'eau" (Reflections on the water) ever get tumultuous, for instance? Debussy must have felt impelled to go with his musical ideas and to some extent leave the reflectivene...

Terence Blanchard in full cry in return to the Kitchen To honor jazz elder statesman Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard turns to his long-running E-Collective band and, more recently, the Turtle Island String Quartet on a tour that came to the Jazz Kitchen Tuesday night. As ever, Blanchard is relaxed and inviting in his commentary from the stage. His music also seemed to connect with most of the capacity audience in the first set of a two-night stand at the club. In his chat, he showed ample respect to his sidemen and veneration for Shorter, the veteran saxophonist-composer who is actively nearing 90. Credit to Blanchard for building on his local history of audience rapport, though it can't possibly go back as far as he said: the trumpeter couldn't have been with Art Blakey when he first played the Kitchen, which has been in business since 1994; the drummer died in 1990. Blanchard is fresh enough creatively that "Absence," the recording project that he's now repres...

Kenny Phelps: Symbol (of Indianapolis jazz) with cymbal  As much as I've heard Kenny Phelps play drums around town since starting this blog eight-and-a-half years ago, I was amazed to discover after typing his name into my search window that 40 articles came up. Nearly all of them were reviews of bands in which he was the drummer of choice. If I'd been even more active, and if this were exclusively a jazz blog, I'm sure the count would be higher. Of course, before May 2013, there were countless times when his contributions to Indianapolis jazz appeared under my byline in the Indianapolis Star. So I was just as steeped in Phelps' music as many others who gathered at Madam C.J. Walker Theater Friday night to appreciate his response to a commission from the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation in a program called "Kenny Phelps presents...The Artisan." His outreach to younger players through his "Beyond the Stage" program and leadership of the Owl Music Group  w...