Jay Harvey Upstage

The veteran bassist Rufus Reid is steeped directly in influences that stem from the favorable position jazz once enjoyed in popular culture: He first encountered the music of Horace Silver on a jukebox in Birmingham, Ala., in the early '60s. Reid has both an old head and a young heart — an impression based on his second set Saturday night at t he Jazz Kitchen. when he told that story. Rufus Reid rendering righteousness Fresh from an appearance Friday at the Chicago Jazz Festival, the 70-year-old master fronted a trio with pianist Steve Allee and drummer Steve Houghton. A nearly full house reveled in the comfortable vibe created by this compatible threesome in a half-dozen tunes, plus an encore suitable for a jazzman who's seen a lot: Eubie Blake's "Memories of You." Indianapolis jazz fans know how capable Allee is of creating and sustaining a performance's atmosphere. So it was no surprise that the leader let him open a couple of the tunes unaccompan...

Rob Dixon, one of the mainstays of the Indy Jazz Fest as both performer and organizer, says that the absence of the smooth-jazz and fusion sides of the music in this year's schedule was no snub. Local jazz stalwart Rob Dixon "We know that smooth jazz is popular around here," he told me last week, "so it isn't due to a lack of effort" that programming for the 10-day festival emphasizes mainstream acoustic jazz. Dixon explained that fellow saxophonist Dave Koz, a major smooth-jazz figure, had set his popular jazz cruise to Alaska for about the same time, and that made a lot of the genre's big names unavailable. It put such conceivable ornaments to the IJF schedule as Jonathan Butler, Chris Botti and Earl Klugh out of the picture, even though the Koz cruise runs just through Sept. 12. But some of the bestin  local jazz will be featured, however. Dixon had a few things to say about a program he's involved in Sept. 17, featuring a new group, t...

Looking at a new contribution to local culture from the perspective of 10 years, Pauline Moffat sees Pauline Moffat has guided IndyFringe from the start. the one she has led from the beginning as part of the mainstream. That may seem to challenge the very name of her enterprise: IndyFringe , whose signature event started life 10 Augusts ago as the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival.  Though the "fringe" image may still apply to aspects of its sometimes avant-garde and raunchy  entertainment, IndyFringe now makes a firm claim to having added to downtown Indianapolis' cultural stature. "I believed it would take us 10 years for us to be seen as part of the culture," Moffat told me Wednesday. Extraordinary sponsorship came this year from BMO Harris Bank (festival naming rights) and Indy Eleven Soccer (a new theater and "Trailhead" facility). "Once you've hit that point in terms of exposure and the numbers who've come to the festival...

Theatre on the Square has built a justified reputation as the home for "out-there" shows, especially on its main stage. Its proportions are unusual, long on width and short on depth. If they are well-staged, action-packed shows can revel in all the room from side to side, while seeming to unfold practically in the audience's laps the whole time. Four Humors' "Lolita: A Three-Man Show" and Zach Rosing Productions' "The Great Bike Race" displayed their comfort in that space Friday night. (There is just one more chance to see these shows before the IndyFringe festival ends Sunday; catch up with the schedule here .) The competition is fierce and (mostly) mustachioed in "The Great Bike Race." Rosing, a local wizard of technical theater, outfits Zack Neiditch's script with multimedia splendor in "The Great Bike Race."  The show is loosely based on the prophetically dishonest 1904 Tour de France. Undercutting the compe...

Freshly escaped from the troubled Metropolitan Opera organization, where he was the orchestra's principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill now occupies the corresponding position with the New York Philharmonic. (McGill was interviewed this week on the Tavis Smiley Show .) Chicagoan Anthony McGill performs on Chicago's label. This luminous recording of the two best pieces for clarinet and string quartet will  raise his artistic profile beyond the reach of the audiences of those two great musical institutions. Cedille Records released in June his collaboration with the Pacifica Quartet on Mozart's Quintet in A major and Brahms' Quintet in B minor. The emotional and technical synchronization between the string quartet and its guest is consistent and delightful. The repetition of the main theme in the first movement of the Mozart features well-coordinated tugging at the tempo. The interplay between first violinist Simin Ganatra and McGill in the slow movement couldn...

"Live On Air With Poet Laureate Telia Nevile" (Theatre on the Square Stage Two)  is one of those IndyFringe shows with a perfect matching of concept and detail. Like many of the shows that are strutting their stuff a half-dozen times on and around Mass Ave through Sunday, it makes a virtue of eccentricity. If you're not at the far edge of the search for identity and self-expression, you're not at the center of the Fringe persona. That's OK, too, because even Fringe festivals need their outliers, their flashes of ordinariness. In the case of "Live On Air," Nevile creates a comic microcosm focused on a lonely suburban girl's passion for poetry, expressed over a pirate radio station. She puts the "try" in "poetry," she declares, and her efforts are both trite and insightful, whimsical and plaintive. The show is never dull. Telia Nevile goes live with poetry. Her sweet-voiced storytime segment  is a "West Wing"-ins...

Where else could you see a sentimental love story, a gay cabaret, and a magic show, all in one evening? That is the beauty of IndyFringe . You don't have to love everything you see, but you will definitely find shows to urge your friends to see, and some shows you may want to come back and see again. In the course of exploring your options, you might find some shows that did not meet your expectations, but that is OK, and it doesn't diminish the value of IndyFringe. Chicken and Petunia dance into love. "Petunia and Chicken" at the 800 Bloc Theatre, created by and starring husband and wife team Karim Muasher and Carrie Brown, is a love story based on the writings of Willa Cather.  They are part of Animal Engine Theatre Company in New York, and devised this show when they were engaged, so love was on their minds. With just a hat, a scarf, and two spoons, they manage to conjure up scenery and props, including farm machines. The entire scenario is always clear, incl...

"All that matters is what you hold on to when you walk away," Jeremy Schaefer sums up at the end of "Not a Destination," his show at the Phoenix's Basile Theatre. A good motto for smoothing over the effects of life's changes and disruptions, but I've always found that one of the benefits of good art is the powerful impact you feel in its presence. If you hold on only to a vague memory of its effect on you, that's enough. What matters most is that you felt something when you were experiencing the art. An amplified "now" is the real payoff, and it's immediate. I'm getting a lot of that at the 2014 IndyFringe Festival. Schaefer's show is a well-written series of autobiographical episodes. His motto is, of course, a tight fit for each of us as we live our lives. Each of his episodes focuses on a personal journey taken as a young adult. All are grounded in memories of his solitary playtime, with its imaginary world, at his childh...

One-person shows are popular at IndyFringe , probably because they are inexpensive, plus you don't have cast quarrels about interpretation. Vulnerability is a common theme, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, but obvious. Two one-person shows that I saw Monday night both dealt with vulnerability, and in the periphery, dancing. "Exposure: Dancing with Vulnerability," at the Phoenix, written and presented by Diane Black, did not feature any startling revelations, and in fact Black admitted that she wondered why she wanted to do this, and her therapist wondered too. But after she signed up in February, she knew she would go through with it. "The Actual Dance," at the 800 Bloc Theatre, written and performed by Samuel A. Simon, was all about the vulnerability a husband feels when his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer. Program illustration for "Exposure" Black's simple soft-shoe dance opened her show, with her dressed in a somewhat sk...

Internet search engines have made it irresistible to bone up on areas of knowledge that are beclouded just when we may need them to be clear.  Some of the urge for clarity may be laid to vanity: If you found it out on Google, do you have to tell anyone how you got to seem so well-informed? Of course not. Go ahead and post that definitive status report! Write that e-mail reply that nails the issue conclusively and silences your Tea Party uncle for a few minutes! It's been a point of honor with me to blog without Googling except when it seems necessary to get a quote or reference exact.  If I have a fact-related notion in my mind and it is just a little overcast with doubt, getting some Google reassurance within nanoseconds is acceptable without acknowledgment. This is by way of preamble to reviews of three shows that may or may not nudge you to acquire some information beforehand. I'm here to say that whatever you know about gaming, Mary Todd Lincoln or "Alice in Wonder...

Three shows I saw this weekend reminded me of the hurts we inflict on ourselves as we search for who we really are. To be defined by others — perhaps even from birth, and certainly later by social constructs —  is for many people unsustainable. The niceties have to be overthrown. For the men of Wabash College, that may mean the behavioral constraints that define "gentleman" in traditional terms. For a young, passionate libertarian, the crisis may take the form of a night in jail or selection as a delegate to a Republican convention. For the young of both sexes in a sexualized culture, it may be a brutally obscene attempt to reconcile their desires with an identity they can claim comfortably as their own. Such conflicts, serious as they are, generate much of the anarchic quality of comedy, including a strain of blasphemy that has ancient roots.  I have an LP called "A Medieval Christmas" that ends with a realization of French music from the Feast of Fools. The ce...

Warning to IndyFringe fans: Study your program book carefully and thoroughly examine the times listed for each performance. There I was on Sunday, waiting to enter the IndyFringe Basile Theatre and be charmed by the "Magic of Kayla Drescher." As if to get me even more "fired up," a street performer suddenly appeared on St. Clair Street and juggled with fire— three at once, behind his back, over his head, around and around in truly amazing maneuvers. Finally the theater opened and the crowd entered for the 3 PM show, and I was really ready for more magic. All of a sudden I discovered that I would not see Kayla Drescher's magic show but instead Ben Asaykwee in "My name is _________." (The magic show was at 7:30 and not 3 PM!) However, I still saw some magic in the way Asaykwee honestly portrayed troubled veterans, and brought their  problems, separate from what they endured as veterans, to life. Asaykwee became each veteran in turn, each with a di...

IndyFringe varies, and while we expect that  when it is good, it is very, very good. Word must get around fast, because people were streaming into Cook Theatre Friday night for the second IndyFringe performance of "Fruit Flies Like a Banana" by the group Fourth Wall. A best guess is that no one left disappointed, and that everyone had fun watching these zany musicians go through their contortions and circus-type choreography as they play music. Note: their musicianship does not have to take second place to their delightful shenanigans. They design the show to move fast so they can complete their assigned task in 60 minutes with a visible timer so the audience knows they are on track. The introduction to this show informs us that Time flies like an arrow . . . Fruit Flies Like a Banana. Thus we learn that everything they do might just tip reality. The basic theme, "21 Things They Won't Teach You at Juilliard," briefly stumbled when they asked the audience ...