Jay Harvey Upstage

Wallarab plays an arrangement as Buselli looks on. When Indy Jazz Fest introduced  "The Gennett Suite" to the world in concert to mark the 2017 centennial of recorded jazz, there were no plans to record Brent Wallarab's composition at the time . That lack has finally received compensation in a splendid two-disc account ( Patois Records ) that marks another centennial: the contribution of Gennett Records to the historical jazz discography. The label was an offshoot of the Starr Piano Company in Richmond, Indiana. Performed anew by the durable, much-admired Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra , the suite's sections celebrate Hoagy Carmichael, Joe "King" Oliver's band featuring Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Jelly Roll Morton, with a relevant side tribute to the Gennett-recorded New Orleans Rhythm Kings and its hit version of Morton's "Wolverine Blues," an influence on the short-lived cornetist Beiderbecke (1903-31). To take the venerated...

With a milestone having been reached in his main academic association, Mark Cudek appeared at the Indiana History Center with the Peabody Consort in "A Tale of Two Centuries" to launch the 2023 Indianapolis Early Music Festival. Though he's continuing his position as the festival music director, Cudek has retired from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. With different personnel, the Peabody Consort has been engaged at least twice before here under his direction. He participated in Friday's program (playing variously cittern, guitar and percussion) with six young musicians, and made or oversaw the arrangements for this ensemble. Mark Cudek and the cittern, one of his specialties The two centuries involved are the turns from the 15th to the 16th and from the 16th to the 17th. The music was organized into compatible sets, each with a pleasing shape of anticipation and closure.  The periods present contrasts of texture, with extremes of polyph...

Having just turned 80, Kenny Barron long ago confirmed his eminence in modern jazz piano. On Saturday night, he concluded a two-day run with his current trio at the Jazz Kitchen. There was not a scintilla of evidence that the pianist's skills have diminished over many decades of distinction as both sideman and bandleader. Kenny Barron played four sets over two nights. Up to now, I've known his work only from recordings. But that was enough to make his Jazz Kitchen engagement a can't-miss event. Barron is the sort of outstanding pianist that if you came across something in a record bin led by a player you weren't familiar with, you'd shell out for it just from seeing the pianist's name as a band member. In the second set, he opened with his own "Lullaby." A long unaccompanied introduction unfolded with a series of tasty chords from which the melody gradually emerged. In his solo, after bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Savannah Harris joined in, his ...

If there were aspects of last weekend's blend of stagecraft and musical elan that approached the ISO's artistic advisor ponders Shakespeare. marvelous, the concluding production in the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra' s two-part Shakespeare Festival put both a crown and a jester's cap on the Classical Series. Following upon the romantic tragedy "Romeo and Juliet" with Prokofiev's ballet score, this time the Shakespearean vehicle is "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the comedy interweaving fairyland and social connections high and low. Mendelssohn's incidental music ties it all together in concert performance. Any presentation that comes off needs to revel in the kind of confusion and sideslipping characteristic of dream life.  The sacrifice in this case had to be any emphasis on the perils of young love, especially when family elders get in the way. Four scurrying young people, trying to master internal spats, could hardly be stuffed into a c...

Guitarist Tomas Janzon is properly peripatetic. The Swedish-born guitarist Tomas Janzon endured the globally mandated pandemic suspension as a New York jazzman, following his initial U.S. residence in Los Angeles dating from the mid-'90s. His career has encompassed frequent travel as a teacher and performer, so "Nomadic" (Changes Music) sheds light on aspects of a wanderer's way of life. Vibraphonist Steve Nelson is his sideman travel buddy in this attractive 11-tune set, with two rhythm sections of bass and drums: Jeff Littleton and Tony Austin; Hilliard Greene and Chuck McPherson.  The opening track establishes the bandleader's amiable control of his band. The rhythmically intricate "Out Door Valley" finds Nelson essential to the shaping of this piece, which also brings forward Janzon's personality as a soft-spoken yet subtly assertive soloist. Involved in six of the tracks, Nelson varies the placement of his instrument's prominence to emphas...

Filling in the current gap in the music directorship of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , Jun Märkl has duties as artistic advisor I'm not privy to, though it's clear he permits himself to don a provisional music director's mantel from time to time. The current weekend devoted to Sergei Prokofiev's ballet score for "Romeo and Juliet" is an excellent example, and it will be succeeded next week by a program in similar format that will bring extra stage life to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." There are so many ways a Shakespeare festival can be done, and this is the ISO's version as it brings its current Hilbert Circle Theatre season to a close. The Russian composer had difficulty bringing off an acceptable version for the ballet, as the ISO's program notes explain. He fashioned three orchestral suites from the engaging music he created for dancers to interpret, and concert performance of excerpt...

High school was so long ago for me that people in their 40s look like youngsters, and it takes some effort to remind myself that they have learned what high school is like nowadays from their kids (and that was even a few years back for some of them). Textual interpretation: The boss Heather and teacher Ms. Fleming It's important to remember as well  that "Heathers, the Musical" is a highly stylized view of the American secondary public school. It touches on problems common to adolescents in groups, but for the sake of drama the issues are highly charged and the dangers are extreme before any happy ending is possible. It's peppy entertainment with a moral: working through difficulties while young goes better if you leave room for compassion and understanding to develop. So the happy ending ensues with a more positive energy than is expended in the first number, "Beautiful." Eclipse, Summer Stock Stage 's  program for burgeoning theater professionals, has...

Desperate Prior Walter casts eyes heavenward.  Indy Bard Fest has an ambitious production in "Angels in America," a two-part play by Tony Kushner that has become representative of the fight for sexual identity and respect amid the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. It is a big, baggy monster, and it's fortunate that Indy Bard Fest is up to the task of representing it with the technical and performing elements thoroughly meshed to excellent effect. At Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts , the audience gets to be drawn in separately, its endurance tested, with the first part roughly in alternation with the second. "Millennium Approaches" is recommended for a full understanding of "Perestroika," and so performances continue through July 1. Kushner stuffs so much into this seven-hour theatrical triumph that he blends two types of focus: analysis and advocacy. The mid-1980s firmly anchors the time and setting of "Angels," and the playw...

The harem materializes out of 'Scheherazade' mist. There's a freshness that David Hochoy has communicated to his well-prepared dancers over the past 32 years that has shown up regularly in Dance Kaleidoscope productions.  It's no wonder that it can be summed up, as associate director Stuart Lewis told the audience at Thursday's first intermission, this way: "You never know where your next inspiration will come from." Hochoy's open-ended encouragement of finding something new in creating and performing contemporary dance has made his long tenure as DK artistic director a monument in the local performing-arts scene. This weekend, in a show with autobiographical resonance, marks Hochoy's conclusion in that role, with the lion's share of new pieces in DK repertoire being his creation. The main stage at Indiana Repertory Theatre is the site of this milestone, and may be experienced through Sunday. As the main creative force behind the company, Hoc...