Category Archives: Music

General, Journalism, Laura Grimes, Music, Visual Art

Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story

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Rick Bartow: Crow's Delusion (He Who Must Be Obeyed). Courtesy Froelick Gallery

By LAURA GRIMES

Today my current first husband and I can legally drink. We’ve been married 21 years.

We can’t legally drink and celebrate together because I’m spending our special day with my mom. But it’s not the special days that make a marriage special. It’s the everyday little things. Like laughing and teasing. Like coffee together in the morning.

The first Christmas we spent together, my current first husband gave me a coffee maker. Sweet? I was pissed. But I gotta admit, that coffee maker was our loyal morning friend for 20 years, part of many a happy moment. Good memories are made of many a happy moment. Good marriages, too.

There’s one moment, though, that I will always hold dear.

***

My current first husband wrote a post recently and described a certain look in my eyes. Damn, but he beat me to it. Because little did he know that I have been working on a certain story that has just such a look, albeit a tad bit different and a shade bit farther … and on a certain somebody else. Actually, I’ve been tooling this story around in my head for many years. But a recent event swept through my brain like a tornado in Kansas and collected all the disparate thoughts, lifted them up, swirled them around and plunked them down again.

***

I met Rick Bartow a few weeks ago, and now I understand.

I understand a story I first started hearing years ago.

Rick Bartow. Courtesy Froelick GalleryIt was early 2002. Mr. Scatter and I and the large smelly boys – who were not so large and not so smelly back then – were driving several hours north to visit family. To visit my mom, in fact. The not-so-large not-so-smelly boys must have been blessedly quiet in the backseat for a long stretch of road. We’ll just chalk that up to divinity and not ask why.

Mr. Scatter had recently visited Rick at his home and studio in Newport, Ore., for research to write a story. He had been typing away on it for a few days. But he was at loose ends. I could tell. Because he was talking about it incessantly, as much to figure out a throughway for the story as he was just plum excited.

He was trying to get his arms around a giant octopus and he hadn’t quite figured out how to land it.

***

After meeting Rick and seeing him perform, now I know why. Rick and two of his musician buddies did a show with Portland Taiko on July 2. Mr. Scatter is on the board of Portland Taiko, so even though I was looking forward to finally hearing Rick, I figured it would be an evening of smiling and shaking hands. I fretted about taking the right handbag.

It had been a blistering hot day and the event was taking place on the roof of the DeSoto Building in the Pearl, above Froelick Gallery. Frying came to mind. But by evening, the temperature had cooled to balmy, a slight breeze had kicked in and the sky was an uncanny even blue, deepening darker as the night wore on and lending a crisper backdrop for a half moon that lifted and slowly shifted through the show. It was magic.

Rick was even better. He was immediately open and generous, a magnetic guy who took a blues song and elevatored it down to deep dark basements faster than you can push a button. His songs were earthy and mystical and wrapped in rich, complex storytelling. He didn’t hold back.

What a gift. He talked of his past substance abuse, Vietnam, friends who have died, the beginnings of songs, the ends of songs. He wasn’t afraid of ugly. And he wasn’t afraid of sweet.

His stories unspooled for anyone lucky enough to have a seat. Friends. Strangers. He opened up for everyone. It was the gift he gave.

Afterward, Mr. Scatter and I chatted with him. I asked if he ever played at the Blues Festival, which was happening at the same time at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. He said no, he just can’t take the crowds. His nerves get to him.

I understand that, too. He seemingly wears all of his nerves on the outside. He takes in everything, absorbs it, feels it, and gives it back. For someone to perform like that, he must be perceptive to the slightest vibrations. And when you’re that sensitive, when all your pores are open to everything that comes in, crowds can be overwhelming. It’s too much all at once. There’s a lot of good in there, but the bad comes with it.

I want to say that Rick is a big man, but that doesn’t sound right. He’s a big spirit. At once gentle and rough.

Continue reading Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Music

Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away

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What makes your head so red?
Tell me, what makes your head so red?
I been workin’ so long in the hot hot sun,
it’s a wonder that I ain’t dead.

My father used to sing that sometimes, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar, head tilted back for the high notes. Just a snatch of a song, I always figured, part of something bigger, but that was the part he sang. So do I, now, when it sounds in my head, a short burst that makes me think of high heat and hard work in fields that I have rarely known.

Hot enough for ya?Today, in the throes of an infernal Pacific Northwest heat wave that has the thermometer rattling up toward 107, that red-baked head is on my mind again. Kind of blue, kind of hot, an oddly triumphal moan, mixed of resignation and endurance and somehow coming out on the sweet side of things: I ain‘t dead.

I come from a singing family. (And a whistling family, too, for that matter.)

My father tended toward old country-style things, like “Goodnight, Irene”:

“Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town.
Sometimes I take a great notion
to jump into the river and drown.”

Or “Froggy Went a-Courtin'”:

“Without my uncle Rat’s consent,
I wouldn’t marry the president!”

On rare occasions he’d pull out his old battered guitar and strum. More often he’d just start to sing.

My mother had a pretty, Jo Stafford sort of voice, and her songs were more from the pop charts, often with a ’40s derivation, definitely pre-rock ‘n’ roll:

“Shrimp boats a-comin’, there’ll be dancin’ tonight!”
“It was fiesta down in Mexico, and so I stopped a while to see the show …”
“Your Daddy’s rich, and your Mama’s good-lookin’ …”


My father is 93 now, and my mother is 89, and they don’t sing much anymore: The old vocal cords just aren’t what they used to be. But for most of my life I remember singing as an utterly casual yet plainly important part of their lives. They had seven kids and not a lot of money and precious little time to themselves, but singing they could do. Singing was a pleasure, and to most of their children they passed it along. To me they even passed along a certain taste. I’m much more likely to start singing “Hey, good lookin’, whatcha got cookin’?” or “If I’m gonna marry it’s the butcher boy for me!” or even a rollicking old church tune than anything by the Beatles, much less Madonna or Cheryl Crow or Smashing Pumpkins.

Our town was surrounded by dairy and berry and bean farms and it rained a lot and in winter we got silver frosts with icicles hanging like troll-knives from the eaves. Summers were short and warm and grew things that got us out in the fields, rustling through strawberry bushes to earn clothes money for the coming school year. The music in the fields tended toward the tin beat of transistor radios and pop-40 tunes: “Call my baby lollipop, tell you why, his kiss is sweeter than an apple pie …”

People made their own music. That’s always been and always will be, despite the corporate push to turn us all into spectators for carefully controlled musical spectacles. (Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; apparently he never saw MTV.) People made music at church. They made music on the porch or in the back yard. Kids gathered on sidewalks and chanted their proto-raps: “Made ya look, ya dirty crook, ya stole your mother’s pocketbook!” “Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Miss Suzy went to Heaven, the steamboat went to Hello operator, please give me number nine  …”

Continue reading Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, General, Music

Monday links: Romancing the Rose Quarter

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TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLET GAME: Remember the flap over Memorial Coliseum? Tear it down? Fix it up? Turn it into the doorway to a suburban-style, cookie-cutter entertainment and shopping complex? Build a minor-league baseball park in its place, with a concession stand serving grilled architects on a bun?

Portland Memorial ColiseumNiel DePonte has another idea, and you can read about it on this morning’s Oregonian editorial page, under the headline Imagine the Rose Quarter Performing Arts District. I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth at City Hall now. Or is that the sound of stonewalling?

But DePonte — Grammy-nominated percussionist for the Oregon Symphony, music director and conductor for Oregon Ballet Theatre, president and founder of MetroArts, Inc., which is helping to find and train the next generations of artists — has some good ideas. And right now the Coliseum in specific and the Rose Quarter in general need some good ideas. Give it a read. And if you like the idea, or parts of it, pass it along.

FAREWELL TO FRANK: This morning’s New York Times has a good appreciation of Frank McCourt, the New York Irish character and sweet writer who died Sunday at age 78. In 1996 McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, his harrowing yet tender memoir of Ireland and America and poverty and drink and survival, and it became a phenomenon, staying near the top of the best-seller lists for two years.

A lot of bad writing’s been committed in the name of memoir. Let’s take time, then, to celebrate a man who did it right — who told the tale more for his readers than himself, and told it with an innate understanding of what storytelling means.

MTC TURNS 100: … and we’d be not just remiss but downright dumb to not point out Mighty Toy Cannon‘s perky celebration of his first century of blogging at Culture Shock. He’s mighty frisky for an old guy. Some writers have got in trouble for misrepresenting the past. MTC niftily sidesteps that problem by brazenly misrepresenting the future. Or is he dead right? Check back in 2109, when our great-grandkids might be comparing him to Nostradamus. Congratulations, old-timer.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General, Music

Why I like coffee shops on a Sunday morning

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First, on a day like today, there’s the walk. Just four breezy blocks beneath a cat-stretch sun and here’s our neighborhood coffee shop — Caffe Destino, where Ralph the Owner has been known to laugh and accuse Mrs. Scatter and me, as we’ve sat facing each other tapping away on dueling laptops, of playing Battleship.

John Dodge at Caffe DestinoNo computer screens today, though. On most Sunday mornings Destino offers a bonus: Guitarist John Dodge sits on a stool in the corner by the kids’ toys, small amp propped on a chair beside him, and gives the French blend and bagels a musical setting. It’s melodic, and just the right decibel, and a bit Robert Browning-ish in its simple elegance: All’s right with the world.

Destino sits on the corner of Northeast Fremont and 14th in Portland and has big towering windows that let the sun stream in, but today the place is sleepy: The weather’s so good that most people are out and about, not inside anywhere.

“A quiet morning,” Dodge comments, smiling. And then he begins to play Goin’ Home, one of the loveliest melodies in the American songbook. And I think about how this beautiful song, which many people believe is an African American spiritual, is actually the theme from the second movement of Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, his Symphony From the New World, which he wrote in 1893, during his four-year stay in the United States. The great Czech composer was fascinated with what he heard of Native American and African American music, and predicted that a new American serious music would be built on the foundation of black music. In a way, he was right: It’s called jazz.

So a Czech composer embedded a song on an American theme into a European-style symphony, and it became one of America’s foremost “folk” tunes, because the nature of American culture, like the English language, is to borrow and adapt from everywhere. Czech, Chinese, West African, Brazilian, Russian, Afghani: Once it arrives here, it’s all part of the mix.

People wander in, often with children, who are a regular part of the Destino blend. A sudden squall at the counter declares an emergency: A young lady has spied a cinnamon roll and it’s become her heart’s desire. Except her dad’s said no. Eventually, reluctantly, she settles on a grilled cheese.

Continue reading Why I like coffee shops on a Sunday morning →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Music

Big Ben turns 150: Where does the time go?

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Big Ben at dusk, 2004. Photo: Andrew Dunn/Wikimedia CommonsToday is the 150th anniversary of Big Ben’s first chime, and artdaily.org has a charming report on the celebration, which was highlighted with the playing of a new composition by Benjamin Till that involves ringing nearly 200 bells across central and east London. Some hadn’t been sounded in 60 years.

It was July 11, 1859 when the big clock bell on the tower of the Palace of Westminster first rang. (Originally “Big Ben” referred to the bell, not the clock, but most people have come to think of Big Ben as the whole package — bell, clock, and tower.) It’s had a few outages since then, including wartime blackouts, fire and maintenance, but Ben has come to be the heartbeat and certainly, with its bell and Quarter Chimes, the sound of London.

And, my, but it’s English: Through thick and thin, come rain or shine, we will soldier on. (Or is that the U.S. Postal Service?) I love that the bulldog nation’s timepiece is also its signature sound, and that the anniversary has been made into a musical event.

Till based his new work on the macabre yet oddly beloved nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, which fresh-scrubbed British lads and lassies have been chanting for ever so long. The lyrics refer in riddle form to the sounds of church bells across the city:

“Oranges and lemons” say the bells of St. Clement’s.
“You owe me five farthings” say the bells of St. Martin’s.
“When will you pay me?” say the bells of Old Bailey.
“When I grow rich” say the bells of Shoreditch.
“When will that be?” say the bells of Stepney.
“I do not know” say the great bells of Bow.
“Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Chip-chop chip-chop — the last man’s dead.”

At which point, I suppose, there won’t always be an England anymore. At least, not an England with a head on its shoulders.

I’m not English (although some of my forebears were) but I think what I like most about Big Ben isn’t its storied British steadiness and precision but its imprecision. Compared to modern electronic and nuclear timepieces, Big Ben marks the time with the unsteady gate of a drunken folk dancer. The computer on which I’m typing would have a massive coronary if its internal clock were suddenly to coincide with Big Ben’s beat.

On the other hand, Ben is musical. His inconsistencies are his art. He reminds us that for most of life, close is not just good enough, it’s preferable. I come from a time and place where the answer to “What time is it?” was “quarter past three,” not “3:17.” So you were two minutes off. So what? Were you timing a missile launching? Ben has hands. Hands are human. To be human is to alter your gait, just a bit.

So ring those bells. Syncopate that sound. Music’s not a metronome. And life moves forward through its mistakes, not its consistencies, which can only wish they were as interesting as hobgoblins.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket

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Hansel and Gretel, illus. Arthur Rackham, 1909. Wikimedia CommonsThe smashing success of last Friday’s Dance United gala benefit notwithstanding, it’s a Grimm world out there right now for Portland’s arts organizations: There go Hansel and Gretel, trailing bread crumbs as they traipse into the thick of the woods, and here come the birds, pecking away at the crumbs so there’s no trail out again.

There must be some way out of here. What Hansel and Gretel and the Oregon Symphony and Oregon Ballet Theatre and all-classical radio and Portland Center Stage and the rest need is a financial GPS.

For arts groups here and elsewhere, the fissures of the global economic meltdown have become a chasm, a canyon carved by the raging River Deficit. Given the state of the financial union it’s astonishing that Oregon Ballet Theatre has managed to almost wipe out its $750,000 emergency shortfall in less than a month. Celebrate this as a victory, because a victory it surely is.

But the sobering truth is, it’s only the beginning. Now the hard, tough work begins. And it’s going to be extremely difficult keeping up the sort of adrenalin that has at least temporarily pulled OBT back from the brink.

This string of financial crises has predictably pulled out the trollers, the mocking wise guys who laugh and declare that if arts groups can’t survive in the marketplace, they deserve to die (presumably, like Bank of America and General Motors). These loudmouths understand nothing about the not-for-profit world, or if they do understand it, they despise it with every fiber in their rugged-individualist, social-Darwinist bodies. Ignore them. They are happiest when someone shouts back.

Even among arts people the current crisis has inspired a lot of hand-wringing about “dead art forms” and the possibility that in an age of radically new media and runaway-success popular art forms,  people just don’t care any more about things like dance and serious music.

I don’t buy it. In a way, the “traditional” arts have never been more popular. The Oregon Symphony, which has piled up a $1.5 million deficit in the just-ending fiscal year, sold more tickets in the just-past season than ever before. OBT is playing to packed, enthusiastic houses. Portland Center Stage keeps extending its Storm Large musical hit, Crazy Enough. Radio market share at KQAC, Portland’s all-classical station, is booming. As I make the rounds I see good-sized crowds at fringe events, too, from puppet shows to new vaudeville to cold readings of new play scripts. Dance and classical music, for all their financial woes, are undergoing a renaissance sparked by rigorously trained and exquisitely talented young performers — the very people who are supposed to have defected to American Idol and Twitter and “reality” TV. What’s more, they’re extending the boundaries of their art forms, reinterpreting them for today’s world even as they keep their heritages alive.

And audiences have responded. If there’s a crisis — and there is — it isn’t a lack of enthusiastic audiences, who are finding ways to continue to participate even in the midst of their own financial travails. The thirst for art is real, and our greatest hope for long-term optimism.

So what’s the problem?

Continue reading Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket →

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Music, Television, Theater

Apologies from Mr. Scatter, who’s able to lunch today

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Cole Porter/Wikimedia CommonsArt Scatter feels a bit like Cole Porter’s Miss Otis, who regrets she’s unable to lunch today. Not that Mr. Scatter drew his gun and shot his lover down, or got strung by a mob from the old willow across the way. Far from it.

But Mr. Scatter realizes he’s been incommunicado for a full week now, and considering the unspoken compact between writer and reader, that’s … well, impolite. Mr. Scatter apologizes.

Truth is, I’ve been busy. For one thing, my mother-in-law just concluded a week-long visit from the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. Contrary to ten thousand Borscht Belt jokes, this was a good thing. I enjoy my mother-in-law tremendously; she has a wicked sense of humor (as does her daughter), and she folds laundry. She was in high spirits, too, celebrating this week’s landslide vote in Port Angeles in favor of saving the town’s community swimming pool from the budget ax. The city councilman who dismissed the drive as the plaything of “a little special interest group,” she said darkly, will be returning to civilian life soon.

Then, I’ve continued my duties as a Dungeons & Dragons dad. No, I don’t play the game. I’m just the chauffeur, carting six fifth-graders to their after-school D&D session and back home again. Two things I’ve learned about fifth-grade boys: They crack a lot of flatulence jokes, and they really know the subject. I crank the windows wide. My reward is a stop at a wired-up coffee shop — Albina Press, usually — while I’m waiting for the lads to slay their orcs. Gory halleluja.

Chez Scatter also hosted a drop-in bash for a few dozen friends and neighbors, and the house survived quite nicely (our friends are older than they used to be), although I think the dishwasher might have come close to a nervous breakdown. Somehow we also ended up with more wine than we started with, which is a pretty sneaky way to stock the cellar. Potlatch!

I spent a share of my time quietly approving the labors of our friend Mat, who hung a swing and a climbing rope from the magnolia in the front yard, and our friend Amy, who briskly applied scraper and paint brush to the side of the house. Their rewards shall be great.

I made a pot of beans, and discovered they’re pretty good if you throw in a container of mango salsa. I grilled some asparagus. I had a bloody Mary. I ate my fair share of a fresh apple pie. I played parcheesi. I bought an urn to hold my walking sticks.

I missed both of Ichiro’s home runs on the tube in a rare Mariners win. I saw, for the first time, parts of Dancing With the Stars. Somebody who looks like Tonya Harding is the new champ; can’t understand how she beat out the short-haired Fabio. Cheesy choreography, Ice Capades costumes. Apparently the show’s been on for eight years. It’s a hit.

I saw a show about a trombone-playing clown and the end of the world. I took in a smashing concert by Portland Taiko. I hit a few galleries. I talked to a couple of editors and wrote a couple of stories.

I finished Half a Crown, the final book in Jo Walton‘s fascinating alternate-history trilogy about England after it makes a separate peace with Hitler and sinks into fascism. I read Hood River writer Craig Joseph Danner‘s new novel The Fires of Edgarville (to be reviewed soon in a Publication of Modestly Large Circulation) and half of Dean Kuipers‘ new book about the radical eco- and animal-rights movements, Operation Bite Back (ditto). I read with deep pleasure my sister‘s droll new (and still unsold) kids’ story about a cake to beat the blues, a book I hope will join her Jitterbug Jam as an NYT best-of-year. I read a few chapters of Tolkein‘s The Two Towers aloud with my son. I listened to a recitation from my other son of great comic-strip punchlines from Zits. I dipped briefly into Samuel Pepys (who is best approached a dip at a time). I watched Ms. Scatter rush to finish Chaim Potok’s Davita’s Harp before book club time. I wondered why the New York Times story about how credit-card companies want to start socking it to “deadbeat” customers who actually pay off their bills every month never mentioned that the card companies already make a good chunk of money off those “unprofitable” sales from the merchants’ fees. And that made me wonder whether F.D.I.C. stands for “freeloaders dunning innocent customers.”

Oh. And today I was able to lunch, with Ms. Scatter, just up the street at the sunny Cafe Destino. I had a multigrain bagel with cream cheese and tomatoes, and a big mug of French roast. Miss Otis was nowhere to be seen.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Bing bong bang: Here comes the weekend

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It’s almost here, and whatcha gonna do? Weekend planning’s SO much more complicated than it used to be, partly because in Portland there are so many more choices than there used to be. So here are a few of many, many possible suggestions:

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Portland Taiko. Copyright Rich Iwasaki/2008PORTLAND TAIKO’S “A TO Z”: That’s not A to Z, the negociant-style Oregon wine blenders. It’s A to Z, Ann to Zack. Portland Taiko‘s first big concert of the year will be a drum-banging stroll down memory lane with Ann Ishimuru and Zack Semke, back for a reunion gig with the company they founded 15 years ago. The repertory for these two shows, at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday in the Fir Acres Theatre at Lewis & Clark College, will be drawn from the troupe’s first decade. Big drums, sweet violin, a rousing, joyful noise. Come join the fun.

Bias alert: I’m a member of Portland Taiko’s board. Then again, if I didn’t really like what this company does, I wouldn’t be on its board.

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Aurora Chorus“WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY”: But in Portland, rowdy women make very good music. In two shows Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m. at St. Mary’s Academy Theater, the 100-plus-voice Aurora Chorus will raise the roof with a program celebrating “women in history who boldly colored outside the lines and didn’t care what was written into their permanent records.” Among those ceiling-busters are locals including Portland police chief Rosie Sizer, artist Lillian Pitt, and Gennie Nelson, founder of Sisters of the Road.

The Aurora Chorus is led by Joan Szymko, who’s been misbehaving her own historical path in Portland and Seattle for many years, creating a rambunctiously engaged musical career that’s also seen her lead the Seattle Women’s Ensemble and the women’s chamber ensemble Viriditas, and act as musical director for the irreverent acrobatic and aerial theater artists of Do Jump! Extremely Physical Theatre. Through a quarter-century or so Szymko has also been a serious and talented choral composer (she has more than 50 octavos in publication), and this spring the American Choral Directors Association chose her as composer for next year’s Raymond W. Brock Commission, a task that’s gone in the past to the likes of Daniel Pinkham, Gian Carlo Menotti, Gwyneth Walker and David Conte. Excellent, if possibly ill-behaved, company.

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TRIPLE-THREAT TICKETS: You’ve got your Third Angle. You’ve got your Third Rail Rep. And you’ve got your Three Sisters. Somewhere in there lies an exceedingly un-square root. Let’s take ’em one at a time:

Third Angle New Music Ensemble with Jennifer Higdon: As I type I’m listening to a recording that Third Angle artistic director Ron Blessinger gave me of Philadelphia composer and double Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon‘s Celestial Hymns and Zaka, and I’m liking it a WHOLE lot.

higdon_pcard_webIt’s jangly, insouciant, nervous, brash yet somehow introspective music. It’s thoroughly American. And it’s accessible, which in this case means not dumbed down but smart and extroverted — speaking, like Gershwin and Copland and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and many others, in a voice that would actually like to be heard by an intelligent general audience. Makes me think of Bartok crossed with Charles Lloyd, maybe because of the clarinet and flute.

What’s more, from everything I’ve heard and read, Higdon’s a delightful person, exactly the sort of public ambassador that contemporary classical music (I know; that sounds like an oxymoron. Can you think of a better way to say it?) needs. This concert, with Higdon on hand and Third Angle playing music by her and some of her talented former composition students, is at 7:30 p.m. Friday in The Old Church. Should be a barn-burner.

Fabuloso at Third Rail Rep: I caught this last Saturday on its opening weekend, and it’s an odd little duck of a play, with just the right quack to put its appeal over. John Kolvenbach‘s closely cropped comedy is about two couples — one staid and settled; the other impossibly improvisational — who somehow wind up sharing a one-bedroom apartment. It’s about growing up but not giving in, and maybe even about deciding to have children, and in spite of its extremities it’s a sweet domestic little waterfowl when you get down to it.

Fine performances by Third Rail regulars Stephanie Gaslin, Philip Cuomo and Valerie Stevens, and a true bell-ringer of exuberantly controlled excess by Tim True. Tim gets the juicy parts, but there’s not a touch of self-indulgence in what he does: The show would fall flat if he didn’t stay in tune with the other three instead of winging off into the wilderness on his own. Once again from Third Rail and director Slayden Scott Yarbrough, a model of ensemble theater. Things start almost itchy-slow, but that’s part of the geography of the play, which soon enough goes bang-bang-bang. It’s worth catching, and you have through May 31 to do it.

Three Sisters at Artists Rep: In one corner, Anton Chekhov, subtle and masterful progenitor of contemporary drama. In the other corner, Tracy Letts, brash Steppenwolf rabble-rouser and Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of August: Osage County.

How does Letts handle Chekhov in this world-premiere translation? “This Three Sisters starts as a drama about quiet desolation, then takes the quiet behind the barn and shoots it,” Aaron Mesh writes in Willamette Week.

Not sure what that means, but it sure makes me want to see the show and find out. It keeps brawling through June 14 at Artists Rep.

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THE HUNCHBACK OF MANTUA: Better known as Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi‘s operatic potboiler from 1851 that’s fabled for the nefarious duke’s lilting La Donna e Mobile, which everyone knows and comparatively few realize comes from Rigoletto. (Nor do most people know it’s one of the most flippantly sexist pop tunes ever written, but then, that’s the duke: What a guy. If you’re sensitive, it’s best not to understand Italian — or to read the supertitles.)

Portland Opera‘s current production, which ends with performances Thursday and Saturday evenings at Keller Auditorium, is straightforward and traditional and, despite a problem here and there, a welcome affirmation of what a gorgeous score Verdi wrote. Good, solid drama, too: The three hours muscle their way through with no flabbiness. In theater and opera, if you’ve got a hump or a limp or a big nose you tend not to get happy endings. Think Quasimodo, Rigoletto, Cyrano, Richard III. Well, there is Tiny Tim. But he can’t sing, and Rigoletto can. Huge difference.

I caught last Friday’s opening night performance and fell in love, once again, with the score. David Stabler’s positive-with-reservations review in The Oregonian seemed spot-on.  Two more chances to soak in that glorious sound.

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Barry Johnson, Film, Music

Fear no description: a little loose music talk

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The Large Hadron Collider On Friday night, the Portland experimental music group Fear No Music performed a selection of short pieces that went with a selection of short films and video. We were there.

Even for those of us without much technical training (which would include this department of Art Scatter), a literature of sorts exists to talk about music in non-technical terms. Histories, biographies, reviews, learned opinion expressed in lay terms, received opinion that belittles as it’s grudgingly given, even sharp new opinion that cuts things open from new angles — an apparatus of sorts exists if you want to access it.

All of this involves sentences. You know, the atom of writing. But sometimes the music itself is sub-atomic. In fact, one of the threads of the past century — our immediate history, musical or otherwise — involves something we could call the sub-atomic. And sometimes our sentences don’t seem up to the chore of describing these minute and evanescent phenomena, especially a series of them.

So, right, we are preparing to use our sentences to talk about Fear No Music’s latest combine — recently created experimental visuals (video/film/etc.) and some musical experiments of the past century (and most of them on the more recent end of the time-line, though a Webern string quartet on the program was composed exactly 100 years ago). The program was called “Parallaxis: music and moving pictures,” and it was assembled (or curated) by Fear No Music and Leo and Anna Daedalus of Helsinqi media studio.
Continue reading Fear no description: a little loose music talk →

Bob Hicks, General, Music

Bang the drums loudly (Take 3)

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Photo: Rich Iwasaki, copyright 2003

People talk about how making a movie is mostly about standing around and waiting. But all performance arts have those quiet times — the quiets before the storms — and before a recording session it’s a busy quiet. You’re not just getting yourself ready, the way you routinely do before any performance. You’re making sure the instruments and recording apparati are just right, too.

One night not too long ago I drove out to the theater at Clackamas Community College near Oregon City, where the drumming ensemble Portland Taiko was in the last stages of recording its newest CD, and it made for one of the more intriguing hurry-up-and-waits I’ve sat through in quite a while. I was invited not as a working journalist but as a friend of the company: I’ve recently joined Portland Taiko’s board, marking the first time, after decades of observing arts organizations, that I’ve taken a hand at actually making decisions to help one do its work.

Recording sessions are funny things, and this one, for the CD Rhythms of Change: The Way Home, which will be released in August, is no exception. In order to get those precious moments of surging, melting sound, everything has to be prepared just so. Which generally means laying down an undergrowth of electrical wires, erecting a small forest of microphone booms, placing and re-placing baffles and makeshift mufflers (an old blanket might do the trick), arranging and rearranging the positions of players and instruments so that sometimes the people playing can neither see nor hear one another. The focus is up there, above the seats, behind those glass doors in the booth. That’s where everything has to balance and play right.

On this night the ensemble is getting ready to record  a piece called Slipping Through My Fingers, by artistic director Michelle Fujii, that features not only the array of drums that are central to taiko but also a violin, which alternately leads and counterbalances the sound. Except that most of the drummers can’t actually see the violinist, Keiko Araki, who is standing far stage left, hidden from view by a mini-wall of sound-directing barriers.

The drums range from a little bigger than trap size to the looming odaiko, a fatter-than-a-bass drum sitting on a gorgeous wooden stand. All of these hand-fashioned drums are beautiful, from their stretched skins to their burnished wooden finishes to their finely polished metal stays and tuners. But on this night, beauty — that is, visual beauty, which is of no consequence to a sound recording — doesn’t count. Most of the drums are wrapped inelegantly in white T-shirts to keep any metal parts from rattling. (You’d also better not cough, and your shoes had better not be squeaky.)

Continue reading Bang the drums loudly (Take 3) →