Jay Harvey Upstage

 Joe Henderson came out of Lima, Ohio, with an evident curiosity and receptivity to anything he could do on his tenor saxophone. He went from the northwestern Ohio city to the regional jazz mecca of Detroit, where he studied music at Wayne State University and began honing his professional associations. He never drew in the artistic boundaries close to what he was used to. There was always some new way of reaching out beyond his hard-bop roots. Joe Henderson in the '70s In one of producer Zev Feldman' s most illuminating presentations of live club dates by modern masters of the music, we get an extended exposure to what Henderson was like in the welcoming environment of Chicago's Jazz Showcase. The engagement came in February 1978 with a bassist (Steve Rodby) and drummer (Danny Spencer) well known in the venue. The quartet was boosted by the burgeoning eminence by a rising star at the piano, Joanne Brackeen.  "Consonance" is the two-disc set available to the worl...

More evidence came forward this weekend of Jun Märkl's knack for programming, though more wasn't required. The music director's long view of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's classical season rests on the firm support of each program's integrity and balance. In macro and micro terms alike, he's got a fine track record.  The newly popular late-afternoon time of each weekend's concluding concert is proving popular, as I found out firsthand Saturday when the orchestra played music by Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens and Fauré. Three of the five works allowed four principals to speak musically with a French accent. Märkl thus underlined his sensitivity to French distinctiveness with the same insight and radiance that he has long lent to the Austro-German mainstream. Painter in sound: Claude Debussy Especially revelatory was the sole piece after intermission, Debussy's  suite "Images," which slowly cohered from separate tone pictures that illustrate ...

New staging: Vamp and title character in 'An American in Paris' Rediscovery of the alchemical result of dance and live music together is especially welcome in the fourth collaboration of Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra . Opening night of "American Sound" Friday certified the partnership's strength once again at Schrott Center for the Arts. The national theme includes a couple of pieces set to American music with the signature styles of the current DK artistic director, Joshua Blake Carter, and his predecessor, David Hochoy, making welcome returns in the company's schedule. The difference is the animating presence of the ICO, conducted with sparkle and precision by its music director, Matthew Kraemer. Yet the real treat was to get further acquaintance with DK rehearsal director  Sean Aaron Carmon  in his new work, "City on Fire." The piece takes its title and the theme behind its movement from the ensemble number signaling ...

Ebene Quartet paid its third visit here with different personnel  In "The Pilgrim's Progress," Mr. Facing Both Ways is an allegorical no-no in the strict Christian terms of someone who cannot resist looking on both the sacred and profane paths forward. This amounted to one of the author John Bunyan's warnings against waywardness. In musical terms, the evidence of a divided consciousness may also be labeled a fault. Yet Claude Debussy succeeded in forging a new musical style that has amazingly found acceptance among music-lovers with conservative tastes for almost a century and a half. Still, innovation is basic to everything he wrote.  My predecessor as music critic for the Michigan newspaper I worked for long ago memorably dismissed  "impressionism" (a term Debussy rejected but continues to adhere to his music) as "the petering-out of well-worn romantic trails."  But such a performance as the Ebene Quartet laid down of the French composer's St...

 The artistic directors of Ronen Chamber Ensemble designed a program this past weekend where they brought in a guest string quartet to nail down a program titled "Americana" firmly in masterpiece territory. Gregory Martin, Alastair Howlett, Jennifer Christen Oboist Jennifer Christen and flutist Alastair Howlett invited Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra colleagues to play Dvorak's "American" Quartet (no. 2 in F major, op. 96) for the second half of concerts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the University of Indianapolis. I heard the latter Monday evening after a circuitous drive to the city's south side, thanks to construction along I-65 South. It was worth the extra travel to hear ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin head the guest musicians on the first violin part, with Ziqing Guo on second, Zhanbo Zheng, viola, and CJ Collins, cello.  Lin's leadership, showing his usual connection to the emotional heft of a score on top of technical security, was spectacul...

Residents, stranded passengers reflect on what they've been through.  Disaster generates a leap across barriers of strangeness and reserve in "Come from Away," the final production of Indiana Repertory Theatre 's 2025-26 season. Visited Sunday at the last performance of opening weekend, the award-winning musical  had attracted an audience obviously primed to enjoy an uplifting show.  Its hundred-minute run time requires an extraordinary amount of emotional buy-in. But by now the public comes in already enthralled by the story of how a small town in Newfoundland played generous host to thousands of stranded airline passengers on September 11, 2001. I was well advanced into middle age on that disturbing day, but the audience that "Come from Away" can now attract includes many young people for whom 9/11 takes on the aura of myth.  Like most myths, 9/11 carries a great burden of sorrow. This show touches on that burden often, but the primary emotional payoff is ...

In the tango spirit: ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin  Thematic unity helps symphony programs to cohere in attracting audiences, and who can resist the lure of dance underpinnings even when you're expected to stay in your seat for a concert?  This is what unifies "The Rhythm of Dance," this weekend's Classical Series concerts by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra . There's significant relief, however, in the inclusion of Schubert's deep-delving masterpiece in two movements, Symphony No.8 in B minor ("Unfinished"). The theme is carried out by Richard Strauss's magnificent, sweeping "Rosenkavalier" Suite, with its famous waltzes, by the "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires," by the Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla, and by "Dance of the Paper Umbrellas," an appetizer by the contemporary Uzbekistan composer Elena Kats Chernin, a piece of childlike buoyancy and tenderness similar to the Rossini/Respighi ballet, "La Bo...

My first exposure to the remarkable French pianist Michel Petrucciani was a record marking his early outburst onto the international jazz scene as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1982.  Despite the rapport with audiences Lloyd had dependably, I never warmed to his playing, which seemed a bit like John Coltrane watered down for jazz-curious hippies. It takes an assertive pianist to carve out a firm profile in any quartet led by a saxophonist (classic case in point: McCoy Tyner with Coltrane). The freedom Petrucciani displays in this two-disc set takes the form of a loosened, more expansive style that eliminates the need to compete in facility and impact with anyone else on the bandstand.  The pianist's performance on this gig displays the torrential energy typical of his playing, his strong hands belying the fragility of his body, which was hobbled by a brittle-bones disease (osteogenesis imperfecta) that subjected him to frequent injury and...

One of the landmark small groups in jazz was the nonet that also gave birth to a new branch on the living jazz tree. The growth of a way of playing and writing that owed nothing to bebop and very little to the fading swing era came about in three recording sessions in 1949 and 1950, later to be packaged as a Capitol LP titled "The Birth of the Cool." Kent Hickey put together ensemble for centennial tribute.  Miles Davis was the leader, and his style in these settings raised his profile in the jazz community. This is his centennial year, and so Kent Hickey,  a trumpeter from a much younger generation and one of local renown, took up the birthday banner to lead nine musicians re-creating "The Birth of the Cool."  The band sounded great Tuesday night at the Jazz Kitchen . The driving sound of something new still adheres to "Move," a Denzil Best composition that led off the performance, as it did the original LP issue. That's not counting the short appetiz...