Jay Harvey Upstage

Jazz fans around town are forever grateful for the consistent support for the music provided by the Chatterbox Jazz Club and the Jazz Kitchen, but it's always refreshing to hear good jazz off the beaten track. That was fun to do Thursday evening when "Sophie Faught & Friends" were the featured band in Coal Yard Coffee' s "Sweet Thursdays" showcase. The converted garage is a comfortably crowded place in Irvington on a narrow street of the kind the historic neighborhood specializes in. (A recurring dream of mine is of wandering lost in an Irvington-like milieu, but we won't go there.) The band's amiable name is part of the publicity for the gig I attended: This is the "Three Muses" band, to borrow the title of its art-inspired current CD: Sophie Faught, tenor sax; Nick Tucker, bass, and Ben Lumsdaine, drums. Tucker, a new resident of Irvington who puts "Sweet Thursdays" together, acted as group spokesman. He schedules bands ...

Years ago at the Indianapolis Star, a colleague of mine wrote about a speech in which the speaker used the completion of Giacomo Puccini's "Turandot" by Franco Albano as an example of how friends can successfully pick up the baton from a fallen comrade and complete an interrupted task. Not knowing opera, the reporter misheard the title as "Turnabout." And as "Turnabout" the reference to Puccini's opera got past the editors and was published. Amusing as the error was, the work with which Cincinnati Opera is ending its 2015 season is as great an example of turnabout as opera affords. The splendor of the Chinese imperial court as reflected in Cincinnati Opera's "Turandot." The hardened Chinese princess Turandot is converted away from cruelty toward unsuccessful suitors as well as her own people and toward love, which she had foresworn.  Turning her about is the unparalleled devotion to his task of Prince Calaf, in exile from his ...

Lucas DeBard, a 2015 graduate of Lebanon High School, got a slightly delayed graduation present Saturday night when he became this year's Great American Songbook Youth Ambassador — the top prize of the annual Songbook Academy and Competition. DeBard's self-possessed performance of "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" tucked in an updating apt for the age of digital social media. In his second appearance of the evening program at the Palladium, he combined two songs about dreams, using "I'll See You in My Dreams" as his main vehicle. Lucas DeBard, 2015 Youth Ambassador Basically a tenor, he had an attractive sound in all registers, with no apparent break. His stage presence was as secure as any of his peers — a group of ten finalists selected from among the 40 "all-stars" who swelled the Academy portion of the weeklong vocal seminar. (All 40 were heard to good effect, backed by a little big band, in a couple of c...

The Indianapolis Early Music Festival wrapped up its 49th season this weekend with a focus on the solo and chamber-music artistry of Rachel Barton Pine. Rachel Barton Pine The violinist capped her engagement Sunday in the second of two weekend concerts at Indiana History Center. She had appeared with her Chicago-based early-Baroque ensemble, Trio Settecento, on Friday. Devoted to English music, that concert culminated in a generous representation of Henry Purcell, England's first great composer. Late Sunday afternoon was a different story. There the emphasis shifted from the collegiality of songs and dances, artistically developed but settled in an undivided elite culture, to the era when concert life started taking on the trappings of publicity and self-conscious interest in professionalism began to take hold of the musical world. An Italian long resident in Amsterdam, Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764) showed his superiority as a violinist among his contemporaries with the p...

In stage director Chuck Hudson's striking concept of "Don Pasquale," the main character is well past believing he's as great as he ever was, that it's the pictures that got small. That Norma Desmond bitterness is only hinted at in a production that owes something to the bleak atmosphere of "Sunset Boulevard." The nostalgic, gray man-cave "The Sovereign of the Silver Screen" has built for himself is the milieu for pervasive Hollywood spoofery soon after the curtain goes up on Cincinnati Opera 's production of the 1843 comic opera by Gaetano Donizetti. The one bit of vanity clinging to the updated hero is that his confirmed bachelorhood is worth ending as he approaches 70. The way his Tinseltown career soared, then crashed and burned, is sketched in with cleverly designed film clips, made to look ancient and used as interludes. Pasquale and Malatesta look forward to the star's departure from wedlock. A star of the silents doomed...

Marlin McKay has been notably prominent on the Indianapolis jazz scene in recent years, so it's good to have CD representation from him that includes some star power throughout the band. Marlin McKay (photo by Mark  Sheldon) He is heard on flugelhorn only here ("The Look," Nostalgic Records), and his melodically focused playing, capable of assertiveness but always in the service of high spirits, recalls the flugelhorn mastery of Art Farmer. His writing is also good, from the clever fast blues "3 Peas in a Pod" to the rhapsodic but incisive "Rhyne for Lemon Vine." On the latter, Bobby Floyd's organ-playing nails down the Melvin Rhyne tribute, with some nifty reinforcement on the tune from Stefon Harris' vibraphone. The standard "Easy to Love" lives up to its title. McKay's fluency never seems glib, and his arrangement is notable for a cunning instrumental blend, especially in the coda. National star Harris gets a vibes s...

The first thing I did when the Heartland Actors Repertory Theatre's  cast list e-mail for "Twelfth Night" hit my inbox was plunge into it. Diving into the cast announcement of a major production can feel as risky and subject to second thoughts as immersion in the sea that the self-involved Duke Orsino imagines as he opens the comedy with "If music be the food of love, play on." It was already exciting to learn that Courtney Sale would be directing the show. Her focus on a show's visual significance and her willingness to break through the net of words chime thoroughly with the spirit of Shakespeare's last pure comedy. "Twelfth Night" is dependent on appearances and the friction of behavioral contrasts, jumbled together as identities diverge and converge. Sale's strengths are a perfect match for this play. Ryan Artzberger: An  actor who brings breakthrough concepts to the stage. The show opens at White River State Park with a previ...

The title song of "Morning Star" encapsulates much of the new opera's charm. Tune and text firmly evoke the bright view of romance characteristic of Tin Pan Alley, as well as the back story of so many new Americans bringing ambition and idealism to their adoptive homeland. The Cincinnati Opera production, on the opening night of the world premiere Tuesday, followed through on the song's optimism — a sturdy attitude, challenged by the dangers of hardscrabble immigrant life, which winds through the collaboration of composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist William M. Hoffman. "No one can keep you from me," the couples declare in Act 1 of "Morning Star." Sung by aspiring songwriter Irving Tashman (Andrew Bidlack) to the youngest daughter of the Latvian widow Becky Felderman, "Morning Star" draws on a genre that mixed gentility and populism in an assimilable manner. Applied to everyday life, this precarious cultural balance was maint...