Jay Harvey Upstage

  The predecessor to the Jazz Kitchen was aptly named in the case of alto saxophonist Jim Snidero : The Place to Start was where he appeared with organist Brother Jack McDuff 43 years ago, he told the audience at his latest return visit Sunday night. Steve Allee, Peter Washington, Jim Snidero, and Jason Tiemann in action Sunday evening. It was indeed close to the start of his durable career, shortly after he established himself in New York. Being in McDuff's band vaulted him to familiarity among jazz fans when he was starting out. "I was 12," he added drolly. Now in his mid-60s, Snidero has had a number of illustrious associations over the years, and is well-represented in recordings. His latest, "Bird Feathers," lies behind his current tour, which takes him around the Midwest with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Jason Tiemann. Indianapolis stalwart pianist Steve Allee completed the group at the Jazz Kitchen stop. The tribute focus to Charlie "Bird...

Master of intricate but clarifying arrangements for big band, tenor saxophonist-composer   Sean Imboden ranges over a wide emotional and sonic landscape in "Communal Heart." Scheduled for release on April 26, the new recording is hard to summarize briefly, but two neighboring tracks in the middle can be described to give some idea of the music's expanse, and the outstanding quality of the Sean Imboden Large Ensemble (SILE).  Sean Imboden builds his band's fine book. "Certified Organic," whose title suggests both authenticity and unabashed virtue-signaling, moves quickly into attitude with trombone-section moans and edgy, repeated notes. Joel Tucker lays down a scorched-earth guitar solo, and with a key change, the kind of shift Imboden is fond of; John Raymond remains pesticide-free and nurturing in his trumpet solo, yielding finally to an ensemble climax that's lent extra energy by Cassius Goens' drums. Imboden steers clear of sentimentality in the ...

The venerated sixth music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra once gave a Baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan newspaper interview in which he casually labeled what he and the orchestra were up to as "entertainment." Raymond Leppard never hesitated speaking his mind publicly, but after reading that interview I asked him why he labeled the art of classical music a form of entertainment. He shrugged: "It was just to epater le bourgeois," he said, using a phrase connected with decadent art movements in the late 19th century that translates as "to shock the middle class." He knew he was striking a blow against stuffiness. To consider high art as designed to entertain is much more acceptable to me now than it used to be.  The evolutionary cognitive scientist Steven Pinker concluded that music had no adaptive purpose in human development and pungently described it as a treat developed for the purpose of pleasure: "auditory cheesecake." I...

In the cross-hairs of the #MeToo movement is the issue of academic integrity and the special status of higher education under withering 21st-century scrutiny. Peer education: Getting into the sensitive-guy thing. Though most recently the target has been the limits of free speech with respect to the Middle  East conflict, permissible talk slides over into questions of permissible action on American college campuses. That's where "Sensitive Guys" trains its sights.  With the deliberately abrasive casting of women and non-binary actors as college students identifying as men or women, MJ Kaufman's play opened this past weekend in a Theatre Unchained production at the IF Theatre , where it will continue through March 15. The comic potential of such a show is never hidden or obscured by the serious issues of personal identity and autonomy. The long one-act play may have you laughing ruefully at times, but that's because it's so stirring, especially on the matter of...

We can easily dismiss as a matter of coincidence the presence of two Russian masterworks on an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra program introduced on the day the prospect of the United States becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin's Russia burst onto the scene. So much for world politics, I hope. It does seem unusual, however, that the ISO is returning to Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" in just under three years . Both times have featured female guest conductors, as the ISO joins a trend encouraged by pioneering maestra Marin Alsop. It's no longer rare to see a woman on the podium of a major symphony orchestra. In 2022, Ruth Reinhardt conducted "Scheherazade" here; this weekend it's Valentina Pelegg i, an Italian trained in Europe and now music director of the Richmond (Virginia) Symphony Orchestra .  Valentins Peleggi makes local debut this weekend. Both reconnect the ISO with Rimsky-Korsakov's tone poem inspired by the "Arabian Night...

Albert Einstein tries to take the measure of an inquisitive visitor. With the recurrent controversies about biopics and their devotion to the truth on their subjects, it was tempting for me to "work up" Albert Einstein before seeing "Relativity," an absorbing one-act play that opened at Shelton Auditorium Thursday night in a production by Southbank Theatre Company. I chose rather to see how the narrative constructed by Mark St. Germain would wash over me, allowing the full dramatic arc of "Relativity" to take hold and shape my response to it. Only today did I connect with a factual account of Einstein as physicist, celebrity, and person through the Encyclopedia Britannica.  St. Germain is a practiced adapter of famous lives to stage treatment, and "Relativity" in this production gives a gripping account of the nagging mystery about Einstein's life, specifically about a daughter who seems to have disappeared. In "Relativity," she sh...