Category Archives: Music

Barry Johnson, General, Music

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy” to the rescue!

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OK, you know I’ve been moaning about this election and the Death of Democracy, ad nauseum. But it’s a sunny October Saturday, and courtesy of my brother-in-law, a little hope just blew in, a reminder really, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy. Now, I can’t embed this video for you (I’m just not that good a hacker), but I heartily recommend following the link.

I think what makes me happiest about this song is how Cohen links this very abstract idea, democracy, with what it’s like to knock around on the ground in U.S.A. (or anywhere, really). And I especially like his suggestion of the erotics of democracy! (Its toward the end.)

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Opera’s chamber of horrors: ‘The Medium,’ well done

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As the intrepid Mr. Mead has reminded me, a lot of cool-sounding stuff is pounding the boards of Portland’s performance spaces right now:

Bucky Fuller, Adam Bock, Dead Funny, Guys and Dolls, and despite the mixed reviews I’d like to see Artists Rep’s Speech and Debate — there has to be a reason it was such a can’t-score-a-ticket hit in New York.

But last night as I headed to The Someday Lounge, Halloween was on my mind. And not just because of the weekend trip to the pumpkin patch on Sauvie Island (corn maze, plump gourds, rowdy kids, horrific traffic) but because it was opening night of Opera Theater Oregon‘s The Medium, Gian Carlo Menotti‘s hour-plus 1946 psychological thriller of an operatic melodrama (the word, remember, means simply drama with music).

These days, when people think of Menotti they tend to think of his autocratic reputation in the legacy of the two Spoleto festivals, in Italy and South Carolina. Or they think of Amahl and the Night Visitors, his 1951 television opera, which has become a Christmas-season staple. But although Christmas is coming, the goose ain’t fat yet. This is the time of haunts and ghouls, and The Medium is in perfect pitch with the season.

Continue reading Opera’s chamber of horrors: ‘The Medium,’ well done →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Language, Music, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: cool nicknames, a new guy at the Met

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One of our favorite Portland writers, Fred Leeson, has a sweet cover story in the inPortland section of today’s Oregonian on Sweet Baby James Benton, the smooth-singing jazz guy who is one of the last links to the great old days of the city’s North Williams Avenue jazz scene.

That scene was pretty much wiped out, along with the thriving black neighborhood that nourished it, by the midcentury sweep of urban renewal that also obliterated the bustling working and ethnic neighborhoods of south downtown, which at least led to the terrific Lawrence Halprin fountains that will be celebrated this weekend.

But enough of the heavy stuff. What we’re thinking about now is cool nicknames (Benton was being called Sweet Baby James at least a decade before James Taylor wrote that unavoidable song).

Jazz and blues and pop music have ’em. Count Basie. Duke Ellington. King Oliver. (Do we detect a pattern here?) Big Mama Thornton. Wild Bill Haley. Doctor John.

Football has ’em. Crazy Legs Hirsch. Whizzer White (who whizzed all the way to the United States Supreme Court bench). Night Train Lane (who gets honorary musical billing, too: He was married to the great Dinah Washington).

Baseball has ’em. Three Finger Brown. Big Poison Waner. Little Poison Waner. Stan the Man Musial. Moose Skowron. Catfish Hunter. Blue Moon Odom. Nuke Laloosh. (We don’t count sportswriter inventions such as the execrable “Splendid Splinter” for Ted Williams, or even “The Bambino” for George Herman Ruth: “Babe” was quite enough.)

We confess to a longstanding if not deeply felt regret for our own un-nicknamedness. A few people in our youth called us Hopalong: Although it’s true we once created a whole Hopalong Cassidy comic book with a fresh storyline by carefully cutting apart several old Hoppy comics and rearranging the panels in a way that fit our desires, the monicker was tied more directly to our unorthodox running style, which included a couple of hops and a jump. And a few people, knowing both our middle name and our family roots in the rural South, refer to us as “Bobby Wayne.” But those aren’t real nicknames. They don’t stick.

So, the big question: How about you? Got a favorite nickname for a public or semi-public figure? (Arianna Huffington, it seems, has annointed Sarah Palin with “The Trojan Moose,” but we have a feeling the honoree should actually be willing to accept the honor.) Something you were tagged as a kid that has sadly (or not so sadly) drifted away? A name you’d really like to be known by, if only someone else would get the ball rolling? Hit that comment button. All of Art Scatter really, really wants to know.

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THE CHANGING OF THE GUARDS:

Big news at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which some of us consider one of the coolest spots on Earth. Thomas P. Campbell, a late horse in the running, has been selected to replace the venerable Philippe de Montebello as director and chief executive. Campbell is 46 and widely respected by those who know him; his specialty is European tapestries. Montebello is 72 and has run the Met, extremely well, for 31 years; he retires next year. With Campbell, the Met went in-house and chose someone with impeccable professional credentials — no sure thing in the go-go museum world, where directors, like college presidents, are often chosen more for their ability to haul in the bucks than for their artistic or academic chops. Of course, Campbell’s going to have to raise tons of money, too. Good luck! Carol Vogel has the story in the New York Times. Plus, a compelling analysis from the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, is leaving Moscow for New York to become artist in residence at American Ballet Theater: The internationalization of the ballet world continues apace. Again, The Times has the report.

And up the freeway in Seattle, Gerard Schwarz has announced he’ll retire as music director of the Seattle Symphony in 2011. He’s 61 now and will have been at the helm in Seattle for 26 years , guiding the orchestra, among other achievements, into its splendid home at Benaroya Hall. His leavetaking will not exactly be met with wailing and gnashing of teeth by a number of orchestra members, who have chafed under his autocratic leadership. But others at the symphony are stout defenders, and he’s put this orchestra on the map. A lot of potential replacements are going to consider this a plum job. Reports from the Seattle Times and the New York Times.

Barry Johnson, Music

Wanted: Portland Jazz Festival sugar daddy

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We’ve added a couple of updates below, as jazz bloggers around the country start to weigh in on the collapse of the Portland Jazz Festival.

Today’s paradox: Portland has a small and by some measures thriving jazz scene; and Portland can’t keep a national-class jazz festival going to save its buttons. Today’s announcement — that the Portland Jazz Festival will “cease operations” next week unless a sponsoring sugar daddy is found who will take a $100,000 plunge — was one of those depressing pieces of news that reminds us just how fragile our arts bubble is. It’s hard for me to imagine this year without Ornette Coleman in it, and Ornette was here only because of the PJF. He came at just the right time for me, just as I was thinking seriously about the problem of creativity, and I loved his utter pragmatic dedication to sustaining his creative flow.

Jazz is one of the most frequently employed metaphors for creativity: the way it adapts and re-adapts, uses and reuses, improvises on the spot; the paradoxes it supports in the ordinary course of business, like its insistence on being in the moment and above the moment at the same time; its recognizable collision of technique, inspiration, individual play and teamwork; and well, we could go on. And maybe on that ground alone, as a metaphor, never mind the music and its place in our cultural history, I would argue for the PJF. We are beginning to understand how critical imagination and its practical application are to everything we do, especially in a city like Portland, which must live by its wits, not by its oil fields; jazz allows us to think about that in an especially delightful way. Somebody in Portland designed a better boot after hearing Ornette, I’m sure of it!
Continue reading Wanted: Portland Jazz Festival sugar daddy →

Barry Johnson, General, Music

Classical music and the Portland Cello Project

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I’m not sure why I’m so fascinated by the problems of classical music. Possibly it’s just that it’s hard not to root for an art form that seems to be running so against the drift of the culture itself. I say seems not to waffle but to suggest that it’s not too late for a little adaptation.

A William Weir story in the Chicago Tribune today starts with an account of the difficulty composer Kenneth Fuchs has broadcasting his music out into the world — and Fuchs is well-known as far as contemporary composers operating in a “classical” context go. He then suggests that the answer for Fuchs may be to get his music out of the “classical confines.” I disagree with him that the death of classical music stores is a good thing, but his suggestion that the blurring of genre lines that separate classical from other kinds of music does sound right. He then cites a few new-music organizations such as Bang on a Can and the Wordless Music series as examples of moves in the right direction, as well as cellist Matt Haimovitz, who couldn’t be more popular among the country’s few remaining classical music critics because he is so involved in both genre destruction and operating outside traditional classical music confines.

This leads us, inevitably to the Portland Cello Project, which went to the top of Amazon’s classical music chart this weekend per the group’s website. Congrats! I’ve listened to Cello Project’s CD a lot the past couple of months, and it is a movement in genre-blurring all by itself, a mix of hip-hop, folk, indie, old classical and new classical, by turns witty and moving. The PCP invited several other excellent local musicians to play on the record, so if you’ve been lagging behind the local music scene a little bit, the CD helps catch you up.

Maybe it’s simply a matter of what’s in a name. “Classical music” just doesn’t work very well for me. No thanks, I want to say. On the other hand, Mozart’s Quintet in C Major or the Mahler Nine? Huzzah! Right now, I’m listening to one of the concerts in the Worldless Music Festival, via their website (the link’s above). Is it “classical”? Not completely — Chopin and Scriabin, yes, but also French composer Colleen’s eerie music and the indie band Beirut. But it is surprising, complex, engaging to ear and mind and heart. The jump from one form to another isn’t jarring, not in these days of the iPod shuffle. And that perhaps is one of Weir’s points in the Tribune today: Part of our brain wants desperately to categorize things; the other part happily disregards those categories in practice.

Bob Hicks, Dance, Environment, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

A bridge too far: Connecting Portland’s performance halls

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“While you’re catching up on weekend papers,” our blogging compatriot Mighty Toy Cannon of Culture Shock writes, “I’d be interested in your comments on the Oregonian editorial regarding the renovation of the Schnitz and the possible enclosure of the Main Street Plaza (Saturday, August 30).”

As Mighty Toy points out, the editorial got lost not only by running on a Saturday but also because it was buried beneath the flurry of news about vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin (pre-grandma version) — and wasn’t that an artfully worded baby announcement, by the way.

The editorial’s gist is this: Even though most Portlanders could care less about the symphony and opera and ballet, these things are important to our economy and our sense of civic pride. The city’s most prominent performance space, downtown’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, is in need of big fixes — at least $10 million, maybe a lot more — partly because its acoustics are subpar, and it’s used 60 percent of the time by the Oregon Symphony, a group for which acoustics are exceedingly important.

So far so good. But then the editorial gets down to what really seems to excite its author: the possibility of reviving the idea of some sort of bridge between the Schnitz and the theater building that houses the Newmark and Dolores Winningstad theaters right across Main Street. It’s an idea that was part of the original 1982 blueprints for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts but was scrapped for financial reasons. And it would include permanently blocking off Main between Broadway and Park Avenue to create a plaza that would connect the two buildings.

“In the offing now,” the editorialist writes, “is an opportunity to finally connect the two buildings, to animate their too-often-dormant lobbies, to cleverly create downtown’s long-sought ‘gateway’ to its cultural district.”

OK, first a little history. When the performing arts center was being planned in the early 1980s, it was all to be built on land donated by Evans Products adjacent to Keller Auditorium, which was then known as Civic Auditorium. That plan would have created a Portland version of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts — an arts cluster near downtown but not quite at its center. And except for the old Civic, all the halls would be built new, so the acoustics and seating would be up-to-date and you wouldn’t run into any of the surprises and compromises that go along with historical renovation. (The Schnitz at the time was known as the Paramount, and was a shabby onetime vaudeville and movie house that was being used for rock ‘n’ roll concerts.)

But downtown business and political interests pushed through a swap so the new center would be housed instead along a stretch of Broadway that had become run-down, creating an economic spur to help the center of the city out of its recession doldrums. The Paramount, with all of its problems, became the key player in the switch, and the city took over the block across from Main to build its two smaller theater spaces. Economically, the plan worked like a dream (for the business district, at least: the arts center itself, and the companies that used it, still suffer because the center’s financial structure covered only the costs of construction, with no regard for maintenance or operation).

Flash forward to 2008 and the latest push to create a “gateway” to the cultural district, which also includes the Oregon Historical Society and the Portland Art Museum along the South Park Blocks. And forget for the moment the nasty realities about actually funding any sort of project, because that’s a subject far too complex for this post. As the Oregonian editorial stresses, it would require plenty of individual, corporate and foundation support in addition to tax money.

Continue reading A bridge too far: Connecting Portland’s performance halls →

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, Food, General, Music, Visual Art

Pre-Labor Day Scatter: Red shoes, hot peppers, art scams

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So here it is just hours before Labor Day (to be celebrated by much of America by a trip to the mall, where many people will be working for minimum wage or a skoosh over it) and this corner of Art Scatter is thinking about a few things.

Such as Josh White, who is playing on the stereo (we reveal our age by using such an antiquated term), who has just finished singing and playing “Strange Fruit” (if you think Biilie Holiday‘s astonishing version is the whole story, give this one a listen) and has moved on through his hilarious, haunting “One Meat Ball” and is now into his definitive “St. Louis Blues” and — hold it — a killer “Careless Love.”

And Art Scatter’s wife’s amazing ability with a dirty martini.

And the hot peppers of Hatch, New Mexico, where his 92-year-old father lived for two years in the 1920s, and one of which has entered a soup still simmering on the Art Scatter stove, and which (the town, not the pepper) this corner of Art Scatter did not visit on a recent eight-day trip to Santa Fe and environs, which experiences this corner of Art Scatter will discuss shortly. (A shout-out to Southwest Airlines, perhaps the last of the decent air carriers.)

And now Josh White is singing “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” and this corner of Art Scatter could almost die happy.

But not before recommending a few things.

Such as Alistair MacAulay’s excellent revisit to the 1948 Michael Powell/Emeric Pessenburger movie The Red Shoes, which Friend of Art Scatter First Class Martha Ullman West has recently promoted as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you’ve done what we often do on holiday weekends and let your newspaper sit untouched, do pick up your Sunday New York Times.

You’ll also find in your Sunday Times a wonderful story by J.D. Biersdorfer about a late 18th century art scam that pulled in the American painter Benjamin West and eventually other leading painters with its promise of revealing the secrets of the great Venetian ancients. It was, of course, a hoax, of P.T. Barnum proportions. A ruefully delightful tale.

Finally, check out Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row’s challenge to the Portland art scene in the Sunday Oregonian, a piece bemoaning the city’s lack of a contemporary art center to goose the city’s art scene and push it into the national mainstream. We couldn’t agree more. The city that thinks it’s cool has a long way to go, and it’s lucky it has a few people like Row to speak the truth to its press-ageantry-lulled sense of self-satisfaction.

Happy Labor Day!

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Those tasty Tuesday hotlinks, well-scattered

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While you continue to hone your answers for the “movies that move me” confessional below — more! we want more! (it’s kinda getting a little Bruno Bettelheim-y in there) — we have some refreshing links from home and abroad.

Let the celebrity conduct Maybe this is “only on the BBC” but a new reality show is hoping to bridge the gap between classical music and pop culture by enlisting some UK celebrities, most notably drum’n’bass inventor Goldie. The key moment in the Scotsman’s story: “A giant, shaven-headed fellow with an imperious demeanour, he is dressed in a yellow T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Gold teeth glint from his mouth. Yet the moment he launches into conducting, I – and the entire orchestra – are spellbound.” And now I’m thinking who I’d reallywant to see conduct the Oregon Symphony…

Kindle, the new iPod? Wired speculates on the fate of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which apparently is starting to gain traction in the universe. I’ve briefly pondered its fate before on Scatter, and Wired is rather dismissive. But still…

Art in The Oregonian Because of my professional affiliations and all, I don’t usually do this, but I gladly send you off to four recent visual arts stories by my comrades: Bob Hicks takes on Andy Warhol at the Maryhill Museum, D.K. Row on Portland sculptor/icon Lee Kelly, and Inara Verzemnieks on the 100th Monkey Studio’s mischief art show and on Caldera’s Hello Neighbor street art project.

And now, without further interruption, descend one post and tell us about your movie past!

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Ashland report: fabulous cockroach, deadly deceiver

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Sure, Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is a brilliant conception, one of the touchstones of 20th century thought. But when it comes to literary cockroaches, my heart belongs to Archy. A free-verse poet, an ink-stained wretch, a nervous moralist of the demimonde, an insect in love with a slatternly cat, Archy first saw the light of print in a 1916 column by New York Sun journalist Don Marquis, who stuck by the little fellow and his feline companion, Mehitabel, through hundreds of columns and a few book collections until Marquis’ death in 1937.

If The Metamorphosis is a comic nightmare vision of the dehumanizing essence of modern culture, Archy and Mehitabel is a sadly knowing comic ode to optimism, and as such, a much more American tale. Life on Shinbone Alley, the little fetid corner of New York where Archy and his pals hang out, has a mythic quality, and the myth that comes to mind is Sisyphus: always reaching for the top, always falling back into the same old muck, always dusting off and starting the journey again. For Mehitabel the sensualist, hope is just another alley cat away. For Archy the world-wise, despair and joy are almost the same thing, and like a Beckett character but with a good deal more joie de vivre, he can’t go on, yet on he goes.

Archy, as Marquis tells the tale, just showed up one night in the Sun newsroom and, choosing Marquis’ typewriter because the columnist seemed “a little less human” to him than most humans (a race with which he held little truck), proceeded to relate the stories of Shinbone Alley. To do this required a good deal of physical pain. Archy climbed onto the keyboard and flung himself headfirst onto the keys in order to type out his first-hand reports of life on the dangerous but always fascinating streets. He wrote everything in lower-case because he couldn’t hit both a letter key and the shift key at the same time. At least he didn’t have to worry about an editor, and that alone endeared him to the corps of semi-anonymous reporters who flung their own heads against the immutable forces of the newsroom in order to record straight the tragedies and comedies and everyday occurences of the strange boisterous brute that was the big city.

What brings Archy back to mind is a visit to the Oregon Cabaret Theatre in Ashland, a spiffy space carved out of a onetime Baptist Church building just a couple of blocks away from the grounds of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The cabaret’s current show is a revival of Archy and Mehitabel, a lightly jazzy, hipsterish 1950s musical adaptation of Marquis’ columns. A sly fusion of the strain of sardonic optimism that flavored the United States of both the 1920s and the 1950s (decades in which a lively underworld put the lie to the official order of standardized moralism), Archy and Mehitabel provides a pleasantly raffish break from the shows at the Shakespeare festival and also fits neatly with them: After all, like the classics that the festival embraces, the enduring qualities of Marquis’ cockroach and cat are built upon a masterful scaffolding of words, words, words. (The festival and the cabaret have always enjoyed a sort of cross-fertilization of talent. In Archy and Mehitabel, stalwart festival actor Michael J. Hume is the highly effective taped voice of Don Marquis, setting the stage with brief interludes of narration.)

Continue reading Ashland report: fabulous cockroach, deadly deceiver →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Ashland report: singing twins, a military hero gone wrong

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In 1938, when Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart, George Abbott and George Balanchine brought The Boys From Syracuse to Broadway, no one had ever before made a successful musical from a Shakespeare play. And Boys, a free and breezy adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, was successful. Its jazzy score landed several songs — Falling in Love With Love, He and She, This Can’t Be Love, Sing for Your Supper — in the Great American Songbook, to be picked up and played around with by interpreters as diverse as Mel Torme, Oscar Peterson and Sonny Rollins.

But while Boys paved the way for such later hits as West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate, and helped inspire many more musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, including Arne Zaslove’s popular Twelfth Night with Gershwin tunes for the old Bathhouse Theatre in Seattle in the 1980s, it hasn’t had a lot of revivals. New York’s Encore series of staged musicals produced and recorded a top-flight version in 1997, but a 2002 Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company was by most accounts (I didn’t see it) badly botched.

Too bad. I’ve listened to the music a fair amount, but I’ve seen a production of The Boys From Syracuse only once, years ago at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, and it’s left me longing to see it again ever since (like another Rodgers & Hart show, 1940’s Pal Joey, which also has a terrific score and is rarely revived).

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s new outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors isn’t The Boys From Syracuse. But it is a free musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy (which was itself an adaptation of a Plautus comedy from ancient Rome), and it has its considerable charms.

Continue reading Ashland report: singing twins, a military hero gone wrong →