Jay Harvey Upstage

 A mellowness supporting the drive of Skip Grasso' s music on "Becoming" will make his music attractive Skip Grasso composes with charm and wit. in the background for some listeners. But then, a lot of listening today to all kinds of music is preferred when taken in as background. If you pay steady attention to "Becoming," the rewards are nonetheless there. The melodic emphasis is reinforced by a tendency to have piano and guitar share an emphasis on the tunes, echoing the vibes-and-piano parallelism of classic George Shearing.  Supporting this sound is the amiable bass playing of Harvie S. On the opening track, it's good to hear his upright bass in a solo, but overall he is underrepresented in the mix, though he is well worth hearing in accompaniment. On the other hand, the estimable veteran Billy Drummond is often a little too prominent, lending to a slight, persistent imbalance, despite the drummer's tastefulness. "Harvie Livingston Seagull...

Caelan Cordello delivered first-class piano jazz.   A personal take on the mainstream of post-bop piano impressed a capacity audience during the first set of the Premiere Series performances Saturday night by Caelan Cardello. Following the usual format of hour-long sets including bassist Nick Tucker and drummer Kenny Phelps, Cardello is the fourth of five finalists in the 2023 American Pianists Association jazz piano competition.  He is spending the better part of two weeks in Indianapolis, with the Jazz Kitchen trio appearance climaxing the end of the first week of residency.  The New Jerseyite has  the unusual story of being first exposed to music while in the womb — the ultimate in early-start stories among musicians (attendees learned about it in the program book). Many years of post-birth training later, Cordello is more than ready to display his absorption of the modern-jazz tradition in a keyboard style that spans generations easily and puts a personal stamp o...

ICO guest conductor Kazem Abdullah has Indiana roots. Eminent in their respective eras as musical standouts upholding the accomplishments of women, Louise Farrenc and Jennifer Higdon were represented by major works in Saturday's concert by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra titled "Winter Playlist." Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts also welcomed two guest artists; Kazem Abdullah on the podium and Bella Hristova as soloist in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor. Farrenc enjoyed an early 19th-century career as a scholar and performer with a solid family position in French musical life. Her Third Symphony (also in G minor) was unpublished in her lifetime. The ICO filled the second half with this piece, an overall cheerful work despite its minor mode and suggestions of Romantic gloom and shadow along the way.  Those moods were all set in a buoyant sort of language reminiscent of Felix Mendelssohn, especially in the elfin scherzo (third mov...

The Adagio introduction to Mozart's String Quartet in C major, K. 465, no longer appears to be flecked with "mistakes," since so much of the "dissonance" that provides its nickname was embedded in music through the century following the composer's death in 1791. New York Philharmonic String Quartet nearly filled Landmarks Center. What remains is the expressive contrast that is so common in Mozart's music. Thus, the flowing statement that the New York Philharmonic String Quartet made as it launched its concert at Indiana Landmarks Center sounded natural and of a piece with all that followed.    The white-key tonality emerges supreme in this work, and the consonance proved also a hallmark of how these four principals work together. Like the best full-time string quartets, these musicians are used to processing all-points bulletins from the music played around them in their workaday jobs with the New York Philharmonic. Their success as a unit is keyed to ho...

Dave Stryker has honed his trio mastery with Jared Gold and McClenty Hunter. Since joining the adjunct faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, Dave Stryker has anchored his national reputation as guitarist and bandleader in Bloomington. But his long association with major artists in New York City had moved him into the top rank of jazz guitarists decades ago. On Strikezone Records, his masterly, seasoned organ trio makes a major statement with "Prime," evincing  his affinity with organist Jared Gold and drummer McClenty Hunter. The title tune finds all three players contributing essential output and verve to the music.  This rapport is characteristic. Stryker's compositions (eight of the nine on this disc) are varied, but the overall impression is of a keenly focused ensemble. Gold has a dry, sometimes pointillistic organ style that opens up many avenues of harmonic and melodic dialogue with the guitar. There can be a touch of nicely smeared, bluesy ...

Francesca Dego gave extra animation to Mozart.  A couple of masterpieces by teenagers bulk large this weekend at Hilbert Circle Theatre as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra welcomes two fascinating guest artists: conductor Asher Fisch and violinist Francesca Dego . The program's third piece offers insight into Fisch's skills and rapport with an orchestra new to him. Robert Schumann ascended quickly to mastery as a literary-minded romantic whose calculated maturity got caught up in the mental illness that was to bring him down in middle age. His Overture to "Manfred," put well into the context of the composer's affinities by the program notes (Marianne Williams Tobias), represents his conflicted attitude toward viability in the theater. The overture survives, amid a clutch of cast-off pieces inspired by Lord Byron's isolated hero — a manic-depressive with obvious resonance for Schumann. The ISO opens this program with the work, and Fisch's regard for it...

Sophie waxes eloquent about Nicodemus as skeptical Leah listens. When Huckleberry Finn resolves to light out for the territory at the end of his book, he does so to escape the limitations of civilized life as conceived in mid-19th-century Missouri. Mark Twain's story makes it clear Huck has also learned much about white-skin privilege along the way, and despite its daunting and frequent use of a now-banned word, the novel has much to teach us still about the heavy toll racism takes on all Americans, even those who endorse it. Seen from the present day and with a setting somewhat later and to the west, Pearl Cleage's "Flyin' West" is an explicit drama about the damage to the souls of black folk (W.E.B. Du Bois' phrase) in the post-slavery decades, as Jim Crow laws increasingly gripped the defeated Confederacy. The playwright holds up the historical example of 1890 Nicodemus, Kansas, through the fictional stories of three sisters and an elderly "aunt,"...

 In the spring after  the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Esquire magazine published a long Unforgettable, iconoclastic cover reassessment of the slain president by Tom Wicker, titled as a gentle warning: "Kennedy Without Tears." This weekend's program as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra resumes its Classical Series could well be called "20th-century Music Without Tears." The allusion in this case refers to the remaining wariness of the ordinary classical patron about musical modernism: Will I weep with regret that I attended this concert? The resistance is tempered somewhat if there's a commissioned new work on the program, since everyone gets at least a bit excited by novelty. But what Jacob Joyce chose for his podium swan song to the ISO is unlikely to spur any anguish or gnashing of teeth. Instead, the tears are buried within the music, and that's part of the appeal of Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes, Samuel Barber's "Knoxvi...

The post-pandemic ache to spread our wings seems to be rising, along with air-travel costs and concerns about safety and scheduling. For those inclined to bypass the hassles, it might be past time for imagination to take over. Dance Kaleidoscope has set for this weekend sojourns to seven of the world's architectural and archaeological wonders, heritage sites for all humanity.  "Wonders of the World" opened Thursday at Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts. The show celebrates the cultural landmarks with new or revived choreography by David Hochoy and Stuart Lewis. Invited to Wednesday's dress rehearsal, I also took in opening night. The tour is both refreshing and mind-boggling. Images of the sites are projected during spoken introductions to each by the choreographers, who are DK's artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively. All "Wonders"  performances are preceded by brief demonstrations of student troupes under the ...

Pacifica Quartet is in residence at the IU Jacobs School.  So much of personal interest to the performers is conveyed by the music and the program notes included with "American Stories" ( Cedille) that it's a little amazing not to find the names of Pacifica Quartet personnel anywhere in texts accompanying an inviting new CD by the ensemble now in residence at Indiana University in collaboration with clarinetist Anthony McGill. They are Simin Ganatra and Austin Hartman, violins; Mark Holloway, viola, and Brandon Vamos, cello. Recent changes in the makeup of the quartet are just part of the reason the name of every performer in this recording should have been included. That aside, what "American Stories" comprises are four works by living American composers, each of them with programmatic content. Richard Danielpour, the  most established of the composers, is represented by "Four Angels," a title celebrating the 1963 sacrifice of four girls in Sunday ...