Jay Harvey Upstage

Sam Rivers in action  It was understandable that Sam Rivers would be hailed as an elder statesman of jazz long before his death at 88 in 2011. He had a career of restless, inspired collaboration and his personality as both saxophonist and bandleader was firmly stamped on the vast realm of post-bop jazz. It was a fertile area for exploration, and Rivers affected a host of younger players, including, briefly, the well-established Miles Davis. He had a loose sense of form and ensemble balance, but it was by no means mindless free-for-all thinking that animated him. One writer described his big-band writing as a cross between Duke Ellington's range of work and John Coltrane's "Ascension," a superficially chaotic ensemble that included Indianapolis' Freddie Hubbard. The common bond (between Ellington and Coltrane) fed into Rivers' artistry partly through trust in the individuality of his sidemen as both ensemble members and soloists. With "Sam Rivers 100"...

Burning together: Sophie Faught Quartet at the JK  Steven Snyder's florid but grounded approach to the Hammond B3 makes him an ideal partner on his adaptable instrument for the breadth and passion of Sophie Faught' s honed technique and expression on the tenor saxophone.  You could say about the same for the other two members of the quartet the saxophonist led Sunday night at the Jazz Kitchen . This is a group thoroughly attuned to one another. Guitarist Joel Tucker and drummer Jason Tiemann, a Louisville musician who made a few Indianapolis appearances before relocating to New York City, are equally simpatico and capable of covering a wide range. The mythological symbolism behind Faught's "Ouroboros," which refers to the cycle of death and rebirth represented by a snake eating its tail, held up in performances in which the players fed into each other's renewal of energy. You feel they could go on and find freshness in any tune they might take up.  Fortunately...

Ensemble Parlamento formed in Basel in 2021.   Unusual among medieval composers for his breadth of musical accomplishment and his way with original words for his songs,  Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the focus of a concisely named program Friday evening under Indianapolis Early Music Festival auspices: "Love Hurts." The four-women Ensemble Parlamento  from Basel, Switzerland, opened the second weekend of the festival's 59th season at the Indiana History Center . The concert's subtitle elaborates on the perennial theme of the title: "Machaut and Courtly Love in the Trecento" (the last word referring to the 14th century, on the cusp of the early Renaissance).  "Courtly Love" encompasses a style of registering erotic impulse through formal art and a strict kind of manners that sets the beloved at a high remove from ordinary love affairs. His  longing   (it's usually the man's, but not exclusively as Machaut's "De petit peu...

"Ain't No Mo" trumpets a loss both wished-for and dreaded among America's black population. So the rhetoric in these eight comic sketches is coruscating and loaded with irony. A production of Jerome E. Cooper's play by the revived Indianapolis Black Theater Company was guaranteed to ruffle feathers and excite laughter, probably both appalled and free-flowing. Peaches holds forth, inviting the ticketed self-deported. The show opened Thursday night at the District Theatre . It held two deceptively opposite theatrical strategies in balance: laser like focus in every scene and a rhetorical breadth that challenged the actors individually and the director in matters of staging. So its critique of this country and contemporary black culture shone in lengthy but sharply honed detail.  The theme of loss links it all, because the premise is that black Americans have been offered free flights to Africa with a time limit intended to persuade them to act now and consider the ...

Jun Märkl:  an illuminating first season  Lots of extra attention has been paid to musicians' focusing on their concerns about the state of the world. Inevitably this can confirm their popularity and the sense of engagement music-lovers have with them. In the pop-music field, it's easy to be scolded with "stay-in-your-lane" criticism, and yet the extra attentioncitself can boost an artist's profile. The strength of thematic programming in classical music opens doors for such overtures to be well-received, though texts that serve a political or topical purpose are much rarer in the classical repertoire. Care in programming amid concern for the stresses of contemporary life is fully present in the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra' s  classical finale, marking the end of Jun M ä rkl's first season as the orchestra's music director. The German  maestro had the wit and compassion to set Arnold Schoenberg's "Friede auf Erden," an a cappella chor...

  Isaiah Thompson preaches to the people.  In a busy weekend, I was happy to find room for Isaiah J.  Thompson  and his late set Saturday at the Jazz Kitchen . The 2023 winner of American Piano Award s' Cole Porter Fellowship came back to the scene of his triumph with his current quartet, using his substantial repertoire centered on "The Book of Isaiah," his latest recording. With him on the bandstand and in complete rapport were Julian Lee, tenor sax; Felix Moseholm, bass, and David Alvarez III, drums. Talking with ease to the crowd as he shared his musical and religious values in the same tidy package, Thompson made good on the jury's decision two years ago here.  He has his own approach to the jazz piano, saturated in the strong communicative value of music in the black church, with an assertive and technically accomplished personality to put the music across.  His harmonic palette is thicker from time to time, but it's hinged to the simple declaration ...

The bad luck superstitiously attached to Friday the 13th seems to have bypassed the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , thanks to a buoyant world-premiere concerto that brought downstage as soloists two of the ISO's most impressive principals: oboist Jennifer Christen and bassoonist Ivy Ringel. Hanna Benn is comfortable across genres. There was also the uplift and excitement of an extraordinarily busy Indianapolis weekend. But Hanna Benn 's "A Through Line," composed to be first performed as the International Double Reed Society wraps up its 54th conference at Butler University , signals in its very title the kind of connections that can give imaginative focus to an extraordinary few days. The double concerto, with the accompaniment of strings plus sparingly used percussion, is an ISO commission. Its three movements embrace a spectrum of lyricism for both solo instruments. In program notes plus a pre-performance onstage interview conducted by ISO music director Jun Mär...

Visual and musical arts collaborate seldom in a "live" setting, yet the Hickey-Shanafelt 9ollective's "The Kaleidoscope Suite" made a compelling case for exploring artistic sharing across genre boundaries at the Jazz Kitchen a year-and-a-half ago . With fund-raising completed and recording sessions in Bloomington representing the band at its best level, the disc by that name, which also includes four independent pieces, is publicly available now ( 9ollective.com ).  Hickey-Shanafelt 9ollective in action at the Jazz Kitchen Arrangements are the work of the two bandleaders, trumpeter Kent Hickey and conductor-pianist Alex Shanafelt. The four-part title piece, tracing significant signposts along the color spectrum, is introduced by a selection of works indicative of the band's range and the way it substantiates different aspects of nine-piece jazz-band aesthetics.  "Hindsight" gets into its gently nostalgic theme with a brief guitar introduction that...

With a tease that attaches a label to Dance Kaleidoscope 's season finale, "Under the Covers" directs attention to something that might seem a little more spicy than gracefully intimate.  Yet the world premiere of a work of that title by artistic director Joshua Blake Carter has different points to make.  Joshua Blake Carter The title puns upon the term for pop hits that are recorded by other interpreters, originally called "covers"  in the 1950s because the record industry meant such releases to present marketable white singers in versions of previously released material recorded by blacks. Covers are now a common practice that presumably has no purpose of obscuring one set of musicians for the sake of another.  The British singer James Blake, recording in his own voice and minimalist style hits by Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Roberta Flack and others, pours a soothing oil of falsetto-topped vocalism over well-known songs.  Carter has taken six of these covers, and ...

Ju-Fang Liu is also active as a teacher. Ju-Fang Liu made a strong national impression early in her tenure as principal bass of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Alex Ross, the distinguished music critic of The New Yorker, touring major orchestras around the country, praised Liu's playing of the famous double-bass solo that opens a movement of Mahler's First Symphony.  She has built upon her fortuitous elevation to national media prominence by leading her section with aplomb in more than two decades since. Along the way, she got acquainted with  music by former colleague James Beckel , who retired as ISO principal trombonist in 2018. Beckel's compositions have ranged across symphonic pops repertoire as well as contributing to "serious" modernism of a conservative bent. Across this spectrum, his style communicates well on first hearing, and he clearly knows orchestral sonority from the inside out, attesting to his near half-century as a first-chair player.  The...

Honing its craft over the past decade-and-a-half, the Pete McGuinness Jazz Orchestra spreads its wings Pete McGuinness Jazz Orchestra further in "Mixed Bag" ( Summit Records ). The eleven pieces are drawn from the leader's muse as well as the library of dependable standards (e.g., "Body and Soul" and "Django"). A trombonist compelled to stop playing because of "embouchure dystonia," McGuinnessnow has  to rely on his band charts individualized with occasional vocals to hold on to his performing acumen. McGuinness' arrangements can cast a chiaroscuro light over their themes. "The Dark Hours" is relaxed but slightly gloomy, yet a lengthy sax solo by Tom Christensen convincingly lends a vital glow to the wee-amall-hours atmosphere.  The solos are dependably well-placed throughout the set. Chris Rogers' flugelhorn gets additional flair from the way the ensemble supports it in his "Rebecca," even though the band almost ...

The way the Phoenix Theatre production of Terry Guest's "Oak" enfolds the play in all respects makes a strong case for a piece of theater that manipulates its audience comprehensively. Pickle shouts her frustration to Big Man, her brother. But that's typical of the mystery/horror genre, which requires investment in its premise that every situation that tests a realistic grasp of life also invites engagement with the supernatural. Neutralizing incredulity has to involve some overstatement in the presentation of character. Set in the deep south, far in spirit and somewhat geographically from the modern urban sprawl of Atlanta, which beckons like a distant gateway to mecca, "Oak" focuses on a malign spirit pervading the tree of the title and its nearby creek. Phoenix Theatre' s black-box stage (Basile Theatre) is the multi-media setting of the production, which runs through June 8. Attendees walk into a darkened space with swampy growths dangling from above...

Derrick Gardner and the Jazz Prophets in full cry at the Jazz Kitchen  A common understanding of prophets is that they predict the future. But prophecy also encompasses telling the truth, as Old Testament prophecy reminds us. So Derrick Gardner's longstanding name of his bands as the Jazz Prophets surely wants to lay claim to the truth-telling function. It's doubtful any creative musician wants to trumpet to the world: "My music may be insincere, but it's pretty good." Truth provides the heartbeat. So we can take Derrick Gardner and the Jazz Prophets as truth in labeling. The fact is substantiated by a couple of discs that originated here a few decades ago during the the heyday of Owl Studios.   And it was further confirmed Friday with the band's return to the Jazz Kitchen. The sextet is directed by Derrick, a fiery trumpeter, with his brother Vincent as first-class trombonist. Completing the front line is saxophonist Rob Dixon, whose local prominence was salu...

I don't often embed conductors' names in my memory if there's no clear evidence I will see Keitaro Harada displays a splashy style on the podium. them in action again, but I made an exception years ago when Keitaro Harada led the Cincinnati Opera production of Missy Mazzoli's "Song from the Uproar."    A striking chamber opera with a theme that's become even more pertinent in the years since  — free choice of individual  identity— the 2017 Cincinnati production was conducted by Harada, a task that he executed faithfully given a piece that must have been difficult to put together.  Going back to my review (linked above), I was hoping to find blurbable language about Harada, but  I was impressed with him in the context of the production's success, especially the composition and the star's show, mezzo-soprano Abigail Fisher. So I was prepared to be impressed Friday night by Harada's debut at the Hilbert Circle Theatre, where he conducted the Ind...

A salutary look at cultural and environmental loss, flecked with characteristic humor, put into David Bellman came back to town to play with current Ronen members and guests. perspective a deeply resonant pair of pre-modernist English works Sunday aftternoon as the Ronen Chamber Ensemble opened its season's finale at St. Paul's Episcopal Church . Michael Schelle's "Kurashikku" was like auditory cataract surgery, clarifying the vision of a few classic themes dear to composers and painters for centuries. The title is Japanese for "classic," and those time-honored themes are "Old Buildings," "The Babbling Brook," "Deep Dark Forests," Rainbows and Sunsets," and "Furry Four-legged Friends." Each movement has a parenthetical subtitle of its own, pointing to a 21st-century undercutting of the sentimental attachments artists make to such images. For the first movement, we learn we ought to regard "old buildings ...