Jay Harvey Upstage

 On Christmas Eve eve, which some social-media wag has dubbed "Christmas Adam," Kenny Banks Jr. Kenny Banks at work, bringing lights to the keyboard returned to the Jazz Kitchen, where he first attracted widespread attention here. That splash was in the Premiere Series of the American Pianists Association jazz competition in 2018-2019 , when he was one of the finalists. Hearing the second set Saturday night, I was pleased to take in his pixieish, magpie range of bits and pieces of music he was able to relate to whatever he announced before or after. He had the joy of sharing the bandstand with two musicians hired for that competition's series of trio appearances at the durable jazz club: bassist Nick Tucker and drummer Kenny Phelps. The bond held, clearly.  It was Phelps' gig officially, but in his gracious introduction, he made clear that Banks would be shaping the performance. The seasonal thrust was evident in the first piece, with considerable tweaking of the f...

Osmo Vänskä will finish his career as a guest conductor   Long ago I was excited by my first exposure to Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" (No. 8 in E-flat major) through Georg Solti's 1971 recording, which I own on open-reel tape.  Troubles with my tape player have sidelined that recording for years, but it paved the way for my first concert experience of the work a couple of decades ago at the Cincinnati May Festival, led by James Conlon. The impact was mighty, but the thickest musical textures were too massive, almost clotted, to appreciate fully.  My experience with a CD version came first with the Chandos recording Leif Segerstam conducted with Danish choral and orchestral forces . It was evident, despite some excellent interpretive decisions, that properly balancing the many performers carries inherent difficulties over to recording if the artistic and technological sides of the project aren't kept clear and distinctive.  My first impression hearing the ...

David Commanday built quickly upon two guest-conducting stints with the CSO. Transitions toward new artistic leadership in the arts sometimes proceed at a glacial pace. Hiring a music director of a professional symphony orchestra is a process fraught with trials, delays, and second guesses. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra has been without a head of its conducting staff since Krzysztof Urbanski's tenure ended several years ago. Not so with the appointment of David Commanday to lead the Carmel Symphony Orchestra . His predecessor, Janna Hymes, departed for a similar post in Arizona just before the current season opened. There was a sudden vacancy at the top as the CSO's Oct. 7 seasonal launch approached. After the native Californian was brought in from his base in Illinois to conduct the first CSO concert of 2023-24, "the musicians of the CSO fell in love with Maestro Commanday at their first rehearsal," executive director Anne Marie Chastain said in a statement De...

It's impossible to be much more disarming than Ben Asaykwee is in the "Director/Creator's Note" to "A Christmas Carol Comedy. "   Writing in an ebullient holiday spirit, he calls the District Theatre production "dumb" several times. And it would be uncharitable to disagree. Scrooge has reason to be apprehensive. With a huge cast encompassing a variety of local theater experience and stature, Asaykwee has lovingly thumbed his nose at Charles Dickens' venerated novella, which is amply familiar in theatrical form via Indiana Repertory Theatre 's annual production in Tom Haas' adaptation.  The comedy ranges over the variety of wit Asaykwee is capable of, from punning and satirical jabs through a vast gift for parody and on to slapstick and an abundance of generic self-consciousness. It was all mildly amusing to me; others in the audience on opening night Friday found it uproarious. Full disclosure here: I admire Dickens' original just  ...

In my six years of checking in with Sean Imboden's development as a composer and leader of sizable jazz groups, I have appreciated the wisdom of his identifying the group as "Large Ensemble" instead of "Big Band." That's no reach after upward mobility in the form of wishful thinking.  Someone walking in on an Imboden gig and seeing a crowded bandstand will orient their ears to what they see: several each of reeds, trumpets, and trombones and a conventional rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. That says "big band," and leads to expectations of dialogue among instrumental choirs and blends that shift toward the outcome of intensifying the unanimous swing factor. Sean Imboden conducts his 17-piece Large Ensemble at the Jazz Kitchen.  Heard in the second set Friday night at the Jazz Kitchen , the Sean Imboden Large Ensemble  (or SILE, but never "siloed") set out a powerful agenda with "Certified Organic," which amounted...

Rarely does an encore confirm with such insight a performer's artistry as in Wednesday's debut appearance The street-wise Isidore String Quartet here of the Isidore String Quartet under Ensemble Music Society auspices. You could see the value in how the group uses the first fugue in J.S. Bach's "Art of Fugue" as a way to reconnect in rehearsal with its characteristic identity and in sound checks before concerts. (It must be a successful habit: The Isidore this year won an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and last year the Banff International String Quartet competition in Canada.) That's the rationale that cellist Joshua McClendon offered the capacity audience at the Indiana History Center. The successive entries of the four instruments (which is also the arrangement used by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in a controversial recorded orchestration of Bach's final work) prioritizes mutual listening from the first note onward in each ...

Fond memories of the "old" Phoenix seasonal show give a buzz like rum in the holiday entertainment egg nog. That treat has been newly spiked by Ben Asaykwee and Claire Wilcher in "A Very Phoenix Xmas Returns." Unlike the much-missed founder Bryan Fonseca's annually curated anthology of sketches by a variety of The cast in full cry for the season's joys and otherwise writers, the new show relies on the creative fecundity of the two collaborators and their zest for performing, with the cast filled out by Carlos Medina Maldonado and Shawnte P. Gaston.  As seen in the second performance Sunday afternoon on the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center' s Basile stage, the show refracts Hoosier holiday phenomena through a satirical prism. The humor is broad and goofy, with a large admixture of trenchant wit. The show is not without heart, however, chiefly in the implied advice to take what remains significant to you in how Christmas is celebrated and tolerate the res...

Wes Montgomery reflecting the joy he brought to his music.  Zev Feldman's restorative efforts on mainstream jazz from decades ago have yielded several CD albums on the Resonance label representing Wes Montgomery, the most enduring and influential jazz figure to have come from Indianapolis. The latest, "Maximum Swing," representing the guitarist at New York's Half Note with the Wynton Kelly Trio, is the third that I'm familiar with. I'm fond of "Echoes of Indiana Avenue" for its connection with Montgomery's roots in his hometown. Here I want to use as a point of comparison "Live in Paris: The Definitive ORTF Recording,"   the product of a concert engagement in March 1965 with pianist Harold Mabern as the main collaborator. Filling out the central group before a highly receptive French crowd are bassist Arthur Harper and drummer Jimmy Lovelace, with a special appearance by tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin on "Full House" and ...

Meadow Bridgham's program notes on a new CD by Richard Ratliff, emeritus professor of piano at the Meadow Bridgham University of Indianapolis, make explicit their* debts to musicians they've known directly and remotely.  Such explanations are an aid to encountering new music. They might make it difficult not to overdetermine a response to it. But over the course of Ratliff's performance, the composer's unique personality shines through; it's not a web of derivations. "Seventeen Years & Other Works" comprises Bridgham compositions for solo piano. Those who access the recording (www.bridghammusic.com) will get an apparently first-rate introduction to a composer of deep Indianapolis roots.  A tribute to a piano teacher, the late John Glennon, goes by the intimate name of "John's Dream." It sets out an open-ended feeling with some implicit characterization of a hard-to-reach personality. The music rises to a plane of peacefulness while still...

It's been less than three months since I heard the Steve Allee Big Band at home in the leader's son's Steve Allee: rapport with the public in word and deed durable club, but I missed it already. Absence not only makes the heart grow fonder; the musical appetite salivates as well. It was time for a pre-Thanksgiving feast.  So, with a full house at the Jazz Kitchen Saturday night, I luxuriated in the latest from the 17-piece ensemble. Midway through the second set, I thought here's a big band with the collective chops of one of those West Coast aggregations with personnel seasoned in lucrative studio work (at least in the days before synthesized cinema pablum) who seem ever ready to let loose delivering jazz. Think of Gerald Wilson, Terry Gibbs, Bob Mintzer, and even the Tonight Show band under Doc Severinsen.  I know those only from recordings, but here we have that performing glory among Hoosiers (a few of them honorary) with the advantage of drawing from the stellar ...

Ryan King and Nancy Ambrose King, concerto partners with the ICO.  The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra took on extra players Saturday night for a program featuring a work by its current composer in residence, the prolific Miguel del Aguila.  Besides the temporary hires, two guests were on hand solely for that piece, "Concierto con Brio": oboist Nancy Ambrose King and clarinetist Ryan King, two prominent Michigan musicians who happen to be mother and son. Music director Matthew Kraemer chose program mates for the double concerto that made good use of the extra players, ending with a mixed spectacle by Jacques Ibert, a 20th-century Frenchman with a kind of a one-hit wonder status as the composer of "Escales" (Ports of Call), an attractive Mediterranean travelogue. More about his "Tropismes pour des amours imaginaires" below.  As for the del Aguila piece that centered all this robustness of concert personnel, it brought the duo rapport of the guest soloists im...

Many indications of how Brooklyn Rider stands out from the abundance of young string quartets were  confirmed for me by how they managed to make two discs of Philip Glass interesting. Brooklyn Rider in an upbeat pose at the opposite pole of the Schubert it played. That was several years ago, and to my ears, the preparation — to the point of artistic triumph — of music of "repetitive structures" (which the composer prefers to "minimalism") must pose almost more of a challenge to players than even the high modernism of Elliott Carter and others. To this listener, the challenge never went away, but I have been  moved to great admiration of this ensemble out of its commitment across broad musical terrain. The musicians (Colin Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman, violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Michael Nicolas, cello)  put both old and new music into personalized contexts, allowing for maximized expressive distinction over time.  Brooklyn Rider's name puns on "Blau...

Deft arrangements for a nine-piece band, sparkling with capable solos and a bulk of new pieces, have Hickey-Shanafelt 9ollective (with slightly different personnel) outside Jazz Kitchen so far in its young life consistently characterized the Hickey-Shanafelt 9ollective (pronounce the "9," but see it as a stand-in for "C"). On Sunday night, its fourth appearance at the Jazz Kitchen introduced "Kaleidoscope Suite" to the club's patrons. The climax of the set began when Kelsey Behl approached an easel set up on one side of the bandstand and started work on a blank surface as the band also got to work.  With the random, bright-colored patterns of kaleidoscopes as inspiration, she introduced parts of the spectrum, guided by the designed progress of the suite written by co-leaders Alex Shanafelt and Kent Hickey. Dominance passed from yellow ("Alchemy") through red ("Ardent Passage") to blue ("Liminal Current"), capped by a sum...

Carmen's body language works on Don Jose's soul. There could be more of an issue deciding whether Georges Bizet's "Carmen" might better be titled "Don José" than the minor matter of whether the "j" in his name should be pronounced the Spanish way or in the French manner, like the "s" in "pleasure." (The latter is correct, by the way, given the French libretto.) As Layna Chianakas, the director of Indianapolis Opera' s current production, points out in her program note, the action and the musical development highlight changes in the love-besotted Spanish corporal's character, while the tempestuous gypsy remains the same throughout. The fascinating puzzle about Carmen is whether her oft-proclaimed devotion to personal freedom has a chance against the recurrent, and decisive, power of fate. This show uses a few telling gestures indicating Fate is boss. The flower that the combative cigar-factory girl flings at Don José ...

When monarchy was in flower,  tangles of succession disputes embroiled nations and changed history. They tended to revolve around family tension and personal ambition. James Goldman's "The Lion in Winter" scrutinizes the challenges a strong 12th-century English king faced with kinship difficulties to the point of family dysfunction and hegemonic decay. Southbank Theatre Company opened a riveting production of the play on Thursday night in Shelton Auditorium . The language is elaborate, with many barbed, witty exchanges. Becky Schlomann has brought out of her three-dimensional cast thorough commitment to the relentless maneuverings of characters close to Henry II, who in 1183 is approaching the end of a thirty-year reign and trying to steer the way to a succession that will preserve his kingdom. Troubles of his own making have centered on his womanizing appetites and emotional distance as a King Henry II roars his need for control to the heavens. family man.  The crucial...

A recent discovery new to this continent makes the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's pre-Yuletide Celebration program this weekend especially exciting. Nadia Boulanger's Fantaisie variee for Piano and Orchestra had been performed in North America by only  Dariescu strives to represent women in repertoire. one orchestra, the Houston Symphony, before Friday night's Hilbert Circle Theatre concert. Its champion, Romanian pianist  Alexandra Dariescu , is on hand as soloist, as she was in Houston. The final performance is this afternoon at 5:30. The French composer (1887-1979) is best-known as an influential teacher, whose Paris studio attracted many young American musicians about a century ago, including Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, and Aaron Copland, and continued to provide a sort of finishing school for composers internationally for decades. Fantaisie variee was composed in 1912, and over its 20-minute length shows an eclectic gift for blending aspects of French romant...