Jay Harvey Upstage

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 ...