Jay Harvey Upstage

The Cohen-Rutkowski Project in full cry  I suspected it would be good to catch the Cohen-Rutkowski Project again at the Jazz Kitchen , but I'd forgotten it had been so long ago as the Covid-emergent era of November 2021. It proved well worth a return visit, as this well-stocked, mutually supportive group commendably  held down the one-set Sunday night spot at the club yesterday. Co-leaders Rich Cohen, a hearty virtuoso on alto and tenor saxophones, co-leads the group with composer-pianist Chris Rutkowski. For this visit, a guest of star quality, Mark Buselli, helped Cohen fill out the front line. The trumpeter-flugelhornist also took a turn on congas, and it would have been a shame if those drums had been  onstage only for show, as this established jazz academic also sports a learned elbow and a sliding wetted finger to alter the pitch in solos.  The rest of the rhythm section consisted of equally capable drummer Chelsea Hughey  and  bassist Joe Tyksin...

A comedy that poses the immediate threat of a foreigner's execution has a steep hill to climb toward the happy ending everyone expects in the genre. That's why Shakespeare's title of this early play is an important signal of what's needed for the audience to process a parade of implausibilities. Among comedies, then, this one is in a class by itself: "The Comedy of Errors."  The saga of the twin Antipholuses displayed in IndyShakes production. The Indianapolis Shakespeare Company has lopped off the title's definite article, perhaps so the play will appear more loosely generic.  And when Act A Foo Improv Crew appears in the marketing, potential attendees are justified in wondering if this is some sort of adaptation of Shakespeare's play. riffing on the theme of mistaken identity undergirded by verbal and game-playing spontaneity.  Deliberate, rather than accidental,  mistakes of this kind have unfortunately become a serious matter. American citizens and...

Sam Rivers in action  It was understandable that Sam Rivers would be hailed as an elder statesman of jazz long before his death at 88 in 2011. He had a career of restless, inspired collaboration and his personality as both saxophonist and bandleader was firmly stamped on the vast realm of post-bop jazz. It was a fertile area for exploration, and Rivers affected a host of younger players, including, briefly, the well-established Miles Davis. He had a loose sense of form and ensemble balance, but it was by no means mindless free-for-all thinking that animated him. One writer described his big-band writing as a cross between Duke Ellington's range of work and John Coltrane's "Ascension," a superficially chaotic ensemble that included Indianapolis' Freddie Hubbard. The common bond (between Ellington and Coltrane) fed into Rivers' artistry partly through trust in the individuality of his sidemen as both ensemble members and soloists. With "Sam Rivers 100"...

Burning together: Sophie Faught Quartet at the JK  Steven Snyder's florid but grounded approach to the Hammond B3 makes him an ideal partner on his adaptable instrument for the breadth and passion of Sophie Faught' s honed technique and expression on the tenor saxophone.  You could say about the same for the other two members of the quartet the saxophonist led Sunday night at the Jazz Kitchen . This is a group thoroughly attuned to one another. Guitarist Joel Tucker and drummer Jason Tiemann, a Louisville musician who made a few Indianapolis appearances before relocating to New York City, are equally simpatico and capable of covering a wide range. The mythological symbolism behind Faught's "Ouroboros," which refers to the cycle of death and rebirth represented by a snake eating its tail, held up in performances in which the players fed into each other's renewal of energy. You feel they could go on and find freshness in any tune they might take up.  Fortunately...

Ensemble Parlamento formed in Basel in 2021.   Unusual among medieval composers for his breadth of musical accomplishment and his way with original words for his songs,  Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the focus of a concisely named program Friday evening under Indianapolis Early Music Festival auspices: "Love Hurts." The four-women Ensemble Parlamento  from Basel, Switzerland, opened the second weekend of the festival's 59th season at the Indiana History Center . The concert's subtitle elaborates on the perennial theme of the title: "Machaut and Courtly Love in the Trecento" (the last word referring to the 14th century, on the cusp of the early Renaissance).  "Courtly Love" encompasses a style of registering erotic impulse through formal art and a strict kind of manners that sets the beloved at a high remove from ordinary love affairs. His  longing   (it's usually the man's, but not exclusively as Machaut's "De petit peu...

"Ain't No Mo" trumpets a loss both wished-for and dreaded among America's black population. So the rhetoric in these eight comic sketches is coruscating and loaded with irony. A production of Jerome E. Cooper's play by the revived Indianapolis Black Theater Company was guaranteed to ruffle feathers and excite laughter, probably both appalled and free-flowing. Peaches holds forth, inviting the ticketed self-deported. The show opened Thursday night at the District Theatre . It held two deceptively opposite theatrical strategies in balance: laser like focus in every scene and a rhetorical breadth that challenged the actors individually and the director in matters of staging. So its critique of this country and contemporary black culture shone in lengthy but sharply honed detail.  The theme of loss links it all, because the premise is that black Americans have been offered free flights to Africa with a time limit intended to persuade them to act now and consider the ...

Jun Märkl:  an illuminating first season  Lots of extra attention has been paid to musicians' focusing on their concerns about the state of the world. Inevitably this can confirm their popularity and the sense of engagement music-lovers have with them. In the pop-music field, it's easy to be scolded with "stay-in-your-lane" criticism, and yet the extra attentioncitself can boost an artist's profile. The strength of thematic programming in classical music opens doors for such overtures to be well-received, though texts that serve a political or topical purpose are much rarer in the classical repertoire. Care in programming amid concern for the stresses of contemporary life is fully present in the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra' s  classical finale, marking the end of Jun M ä rkl's first season as the orchestra's music director. The German  maestro had the wit and compassion to set Arnold Schoenberg's "Friede auf Erden," an a cappella chor...