Jay Harvey Upstage

The inimitable Steve Turre as "shellist" If Indianapolis were ever to erect a jazz Mount Rushmore, it would be universally agreed to represent Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, and Freddie Hubbard in perpetual stone. Their legacies have never been lost sight of here, and the latter two have their niches in the current  Indy Jazz Fest .  The Freddie Hubbard tribute portion of the 2024 official kickoff Saturday was intense, but carried too much compacted energy to suit the confines of the Jazz Kitchen . Taken as a whole, the evening's schedule suggested the expansive vibes of the outdoor extravaganza that historically was always risky from the standpoints of weather and financing. At the risk of sounding like a kindergarten teacher, what I heard last weekend used its outdoor voice, not much of its indoor voice. It was clear that time constraints were part of the difficulty. It's not just that Hubbard, one of a handful of universally acknowledged jazz masters from Indianapol...

Your word is "sconce." Spell "sconce." Past master Rona Lisa Peretti supervises the bee. May I have a definition, please? A bracket candlestick or group of candlesticks. Could you use it in a sentence for me? On the way up a side aisle after the opening night performance of "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," I rammed my right shoulder into a sconce. Sconce, s-c-o-n-c-e. That's a real-life example generated from my exit experience Friday night at Indiana Repertory Theatre. Fortunately, the hurt didn't last long, vanishing overnight. My weekend bit of doubles tennis wasn't notably affected today, being about as chockfull of errors as usual. From now, on, I will be more careful watching things attached to walls I move next to.  In the actual event recalled in my example of a spelling-bee sentence, two aspects of the hazards I ran into long ago on the classroom spelling-bee level occur to me. One is the dumb-bunny risk of confusing it w...

Bria Skonberg leads the charge on trumpet Wednesday.  The direction she's traveling in musically with her current recording picks up on Bria Skonberg' s link to Louis Armstrong, her first trumpet idol as a budding musician in far-off Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Now she's established on the New York jazz scene and building devotedly on the legacy of Armstrong's hometown.  Heading a quintet at t he Jazz Kitchen scheduled as an appetizer for the Indy Jazz Fest, which officially kicks off Saturday, the trumpeter-vocalist lost little time in performing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." For the second set, she sang and played the song, third on the set list,  as if there was no doubt that she knows. And indeed, that current CD is titled "What It Means." I trust her as a true believer in her inspiration from Satchmo: She pronounces his first name as he did, sounding the "s." (Remember his late-in-life hit, where he begins...

Claire Wilcher plays a contestant pleased with her Constitutional savvy. The two founding documents of this country used to occupy different places in my estimation. As a young student, the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence swayed me more (though I once had to sit down in a classroom spelling bee for rendering "of" as "o-v," mindlessly hearing the word's sound of "f" in my junior-high head).  Later, the exaggeration in the document's complaints against the Crown turned me off: such a ton of special pleading. "A decent respect for the opinions of mankind"?  Oh, come on! More like a scorned elite's justification of rebellion on steroids. In college, the Constitution gained stature with me because it avoids rhetorical flourishes, and I'm so pleased it never mentions God as the guarantor of any of our government's structures or the people's rights. (Are you paying attention, Christian Nationalists?)  And then there a...