Tengo and Aeomame (After Murakami)

Music for the Film "The Story"

Copyright (c) 2012 by Alexander C. Kafka. All rights reserved.

Intaglio Suite

I wrote this for a slide show of my friend and colleague Ellen Winkler's beautiful prints. She has an exhibit coming up in May. You can read more about her here. The suite is in four sections: an Asian-inflected mind-clearing introduction; a reworked version of an old tune of mine called "Rainy Day Waltz," which is a shameless homage to the second movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G; a little minimalistic piano-to-electronica divertimento; and a final, spare hymn. Overall, I was trying to reflect a visual artist's concentration, and particularly the way a printmaker enters various weird little universes through a few delicately but concertedly and painstakingly etched lines.

Precinct Seven

Precinct Seven by akafka

Delphine, Part 2

Delphine, Part 2 by akafka

Delphine

Delphine by akafka

The Woman Who Drives the Bug

The Woman Who Drives the Bug by akafka

Gravity Unbound

Gravity Unbound by akafka

Crystal Slug

Makaraba

Makaraba by akafka

Just You

Just You by akafka

JAZZARIUM

Matt Shulman; “So It Goes”; Jaggo Records
(Photo: Jimmy Katz, from http://www.mattshulman.com/)

Trumpeter/composer Matt Shulman has serious chops as a player and an imagination to match. “So It Goes” is a brave, bracing blast of innovation and spirit that reminds us that experimentation and entertainment can, in the right hands, be natural allies.

He has a dual background in classical and jazz technique and repertoire, and cites indie-rock influences Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Magnet in deriving his singing style. From a trombonist friend he picked up playing and vocalizing simultaneously for multiphonics, and he uses reverb and loop pedals for further layering his sounds. In addition to his own tunes, this album includes Rogers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Berke and VanHeusen’s “It Could Happen to You,” and Bach’s “Air for the G String.” So when Shulman’s acknowledgements begin with “the universe,” it’s perhaps not just a figure of speech.

The title number is a soulful, trippy slow swing tune that has the air of self-therapy in its alternating small-club bluesy choruses and its flailing solos. And that’s echoed by the lyrics: “Has this world come to nothing but a show / It’s been long since you’ve seen / those better days / so it goes.” It’s as if the song organically developed in efforts at consolation.

“Almost There” reaches for something illuminated and elusive. “It’s fading fast / No I won’t be last / ’Cause I know you care / We’re almost there.”

In “My Funny Valentine,” quiet trumpet loops and vocals hover in the background like the ghost of Chet Baker. In the foreground are Shulman’s vocals—like those of an even more dissolute Baker brother—and a muted horn love lament.

“Forgetting/Remembering Yourself” is a loop-rich bop trance with the rhythmic heart of a clock or, the lyrics suggest, a train. He transfers vehicles to “Truckin’,” which features fun, raw polyphonics from Shulman and a nice solo shuttle from Matt Clohesy on bass. Then Shulman takes off completely in “Zeppelin,” a primal scream of a track propelled by the appropriately named Jason Wildman on drums (yeah, I’m sure he’s never heard that before, but still—it’s so right here). The lyrics wouldn’t stand on their own too well as poetry (“I can feel the rain / I feel your pain / I’ve gone insane / You just came”) but work weirdly well in this clearly combustible context.

“It Could Happen to You” is Shulman’s chance to recall for us that he’s just a darned fine trumpet player. I don’t know the ins and outs of an instrument-bracing device he developed (the ShulmanSystem) to help apply Alexander relaxation techniques to brass playing. But whatever he’s been up to, or learned at Oberlin and NYU, seems to be working well for him.

In “Key,” we’re back in the trance-philosophy realm, and one deduces from the lyrics that it’s a love story in cymbal- and symbol-shrouded song. “A warrior / I held my perception in solitude / I needed another / to circulate / to share / there she was / a pure soul / one who knows.” I hope it’s not yet another case of the lyrics outlasting the relationship. Because their “journey together” has inspired some wonderful music. And if the other is a noncorporeal presence, all the better—he won’t need to buy it a seat on road trips.

“Air for the G String” might be an homage to Shulman’s father, whom he heard when Shulman was a kid playing solo Bach repertoire. It resonated particularly with me, too, since it was played at the funeral of my violinist grandmother. A great, sweet, spooky way to end an album.

Why do I feel compelled to add my few slight worries for Shulman? He uses the looping and sing-playing cleverly here, but I hope he doesn’t come to over-rely on them. My fear is that they’ll become a crutch, like for the subway busker with the amp effects who comes to like the sound of his own instrument too much. Already in this album I’d like to have heard more of Clohesy and Wildman, and I don’t want Shulman to shortchange those and other colleagues in future projects. The looping, particularly, also risks becoming too heavy and static sometimes, or like the alpenhorn background music for a winter Olympics TV feature.

Again, he doesn’t succumb to those pitfalls here. So far his electronic roving reminds me pleasantly of what cellist Eugene Friesen was doing in the late 1980s in "Arms Around You." But as I’m sure Shulman knows better than I, the most interesting effect of all, in the long run, is thoughtful collaboration with other like-minded and like-souled musicians. I particularly missed the keyboard component here that would have interlaced nicely with looping used a tad more lightly.

Still, this is a great album. And someday when I’m blue and feeling spiritually confined, I’ll count on it to blast me out of my doldrums.

-Alexander C. Kafka

JAZZARIUM: Reviews of Arturo Stable's 'Notes on Canvas' and Ryan Cohan's 'One Sky'

Arturo Stabile
Notes on Canvas
Origen Records

A rich Latin jazz Pictures at an Exhibition, Notes on Canvas transports us into a synesthetic realization of some of percussionist/composer Stabile's favorite works of art. Other musicians include Paquito D'Rivera on clarinet, David Sanchez and George Garzone on tenor sax, drummers Danfis Prieto and Francisco Mela, bassist Esperanza Spalding, pianist Aruan Ortiz, and Victor Mendoza on marimba, with Stable's congas, bongos, and other sounds offering calibrated, quirky, but never simply show-offy hues and brush strokes. The Cuban-born New Yorker renders Wilfred Lam's La Jungla (The Jungle), Picasso's Guernica, Monet's Impression/Sunrise, Frida Kahlo's Self Portrait, Da Vinci's Gioconda, Van Gogh's Self Portrait, La Ventana Magica (The Magical Window) by Stabile's father, Arturo Sr., Kandinsky's Composition No. 8, and Dali's Clock Explosion.

La Jungla is rhythmically lush with Sanchez's tenor sax carrying the main branch-swaying theme. Guernica is a sad fractured being featuring Garzone's mournful, bewildered tenor. Impression/Sunrise has Ortiz on a quiet chordal trek with Peter Slavov's agile bass and Stable's Cuban-box twitches giving the number a crazed-woodpecker tension. Kahlo is celebrated with the gentle gliding vocals of Esperanza Spaulding intertwined with Fernando Huergo's silky octave-leaping bass. In Gioconda, Da Vinci meets a Miles Davis kind of muted riff from Barry Ries's moody trumpet. Van Gogh's given a textured treatment undergirded by Francisco Mela's drums and Stable's restless congas. Stable Sr. is serenaded by D'Rivera's elegant clarinet--at once free and utterly precise--and Rene Izquierdo's delicate guitar. Composition #8 is stealthy and linear, and in Clock Explosion, time, under the spell of Stable's congas, is indeed combustible.

Upcoming for Stabile is a quartet album off the repertoire of pianist Frank Emilio Flynn, and trio and duet combos of Stabile's work. Give this imaginative album a listen and I think you'll join me in eagerly anticipating those projects.


Ryan Cohan
One Sky
Motema Music

The heart of this album is a suite of tone poems: "Into Being Parts I and II," "Wonder & Response," "Awe," and "Hope." Cohan is a superb composer and arranger, and a wonderfully bold, confident punch and jabber of a pianist, but with a quiet side that relishes the vulnerable ballad and the impressionistic riff. He is joined by a fabulous ensemble: Bob Sheppard on saxes and flute, Geof Bradfield on saxes and bass clarinet, Tito Carrillo on trumpet and flugelhorn, James Cammack and Lorin Cohen on bass, Kobie Watkins on drums, Ruben Alvarez on shekere, and Jean-Christophe Leroy on congas.

The suite is sweet--expansive, quirky, and spinny in a childlike way. I especially enjoyed "Wonder & Response," which has the lovely ambling feel of a quiet walk in fields near enough to be comfortable and far enough to keep the ambler alert to the everyday natural marvels he's been missing.

The sly "Double Agent" couples Sheppard's breathy burbling flute inspirations with Cohan's cool chordal maneuverings and scalar scampers. "Easy for You to Say" is an articulate musing on inarticulateness that will be instantly recognizable to any wooer who's tripped over his tongue or, in its introductory feel, to any pianist who's worshipped Bud Powell. (It might have nothing to do with wooing and Cohan might hate Powell. I'm risking a guess or two and hope you'll listen and risk some guesses of your own.) "Six Fortunes" is imbued with mystery by Cohan's pedaled pensees, Leroy's creeping congas, and a horn chart that never quite tonally resolves. "Checkmate" jogs through its urbane paces like the score to a sophisticated cop thriller. And "Lush Life," the only cover here, is delivered with a salute to Strayhorn and a reverence for Ravel.

Call me superficial, but my only quibble with this fine album is that someone--I'm presuming it's Cohan--has a bad case of hum-itis. Sometimes that's so integral to a musician's melodic momentum that there's nothing one can do. But it is distracting--at its worst, like having Ray Romano doing a little unplanned backup vocal--so if Cohan can strip it from his studio work especially, he should.

-Alexander C. Kafka

TUNE HEAD

Enter Shikari
Take to the Skies
Ambush Reality

See, this is why you shouldn't let your children attend primary school. They might meet other music-loving lunatics, bond, and form a band, as did Rou Reynolds (vocals/electronics), Rob Rolfe (drums), and Chris Batten (bass). Well, three-quarters of a band--Rory Clewlow (guitar) joined them four years ago to top off Enter Shikari, a wonderful oddity from St. Albans, north of London. During hundreds of shows, making precocious teens even more precocious, they’ve honed their strange amalgam of punk, gothic, speed metal, trance, and electronica into a distinctive sound. From rave to raving, Take to the Skies is their first full-length album, self-produced over three weeks in autumn 2006.

Take any one aspect of their sound, and it might not be that interesting. But the punk shout-singing combined with soothing choir-boy melody, the layered grit-metal guitar and mesmeric synth loops, the alternating lyricism and attack mode on vocals and song writing--all that rockets our ears into an interesting realm.

The lads could take it a bit easier on the soccer-hooligan chants and the goth-screaming (though I’m sure it goes over better live). We get it, fellas, you’re potentially scary blokes.

But these 17 tracks tip us off to the fact that you’re also musical blokes veering toward a fun, vigorous art rock, and no matter how often you growl the f-word and scream, "Walk the plank!" I won't be convinced otherwise. And I heard that lilting ballad, “Adieu,” hidden deep into your track list, you sneaky, elegiac devils. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.


The Darjeeling Limited: Original Soundtrack
ABKCO Music & Records

Speaking of strange amalgams, later this month, Fox Searchlight rolls out Wes Anderson’s latest film, and accompanying it comes this peculiar but refreshing swirl of 60s rock, vintage low-key psychedelia, music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory, and classical fare. The scenario is an odyssey involving three American brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) alternately finding and losing themselves on a trip to India.

Just how the music fits in with Anderson’s dizzying instinctual visions we’ll have to find out. But working again with his previous collaborator, music supervisor Randall Poster, Anderson has, we learn from some advance notes, reflected the brothers’ commonalities and divisions with a few lesser-known tracks from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, by some other famously complicated brothers, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. All but one of Anderson’s films, The Life Aquatic, have included Rolling Stones songs in the score. This time it’s “Play With Fire.” Peter Sarstedt’s trippily cosmopolitan “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” and the French chanteur Joe Dassin’s “Les Champs Elysees” also make cameos, as do Beethoven (Ray apparently loved the Seventh Symphony) and Debussy.

But the main ingredient in Anderson’s musical masala are short outtakes from Ray’s films, some written by Ray himself. On the album, they coalesce into alluring otherness, familiar enough to be approachable, foreign enough to play into Anderson’s disorientation session.

Meanwhile, here’s a test for you. See if you can listen to “Typewriter Tip, Tip, Tip” from Merchant-Ivory’s Bombay Talkie without dancing around your room. Seriously. Bet you can’t.

-Alexander C. Kafka

CLUED TUBE

Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends
Produced by Clint Eastwood and Bruce Ricker
Directed by Bruce Ricker
American Masters
PBS
Wednesday, 9/12/07
9-10:30 p.m.

This is a fairly interesting documentary disguised as a bland one about a fairly interesting singer disguised as a bland one.

It is typically hagiographic fare. But that's a particularly apt approach with regard to a singer whose whole career has been a frothy homage to the great American songwriters and the musicians whose repertoire and styles he's borrowed from. In a generous mood, one hears him as a brilliant stylistic blender; in a cynical mood, as the Zelig of crooners, Sinatra Lite. Either way you look at it, he's a survivor, having parlayed a postwar gig with Pearl Bailey into a Grammy-guzzling spree up through the iPod-generation with the status of senior statesman of song.

But the program is trickier than that, and so is Bennett. Editor Joel Cox cleverly cross-cuts between years of Bennett's film, TV, and live performances and the '30s and '40s film musicals that his every fiber reflexively refers to. Bennett's stage essence is the node of a vast network of American showbiz history, so that an over the top finish elicits the aura of Garland, a little impish turn brings to mind Gene Kelly, and a hand gesture telegraphs Astaire suavely flipping a cane. The film clips make that constant production of symbolic echoes explicit.

The program is too flattering by half, of course, but Bennett comes across as such a sweet guy that you can't mind that anymore than you would warm toasts to a founding partner at an office party. So you swallow the tired generalizations about the clannishness of the Italian-American stars like Bennett (born Anthony Benedetto), Sinatra, and Dean Martin. You grin at Anthony Hopkins's pretentious narration on the bel-canto legacy. You cringe that Eastwood can be such a presence in his dramatic films and such a stiff (as he also was in his blues documentary) when serving as hybrid host/interviewer. (Someone give that man some coffee!)

You yawn through the absurd accolades of Bennett's brown-nosing buddies over his visual art, which is very nice but nothing you wouldn't find on the walls of an upscale hotel. (Yes, I know, the Smithsonian shows his work--but do you think they would if he weren't a 50-million-album-selling singer?) You perk up as Times critic Stephen Holden, pianist Bill Charlap, and filmmaker Martin Scorcese talk about the inspirations for and from Bennett's music. And you marvel that the octogenarian Bennett, after sounding a little iffy in the mid-range, finds second and third wind for those high notes.

But it's those durned clips that really grab you and make sense of what Bennett does. He takes a bit of Satchmo hipster-buffoonishness, a trace of Sinatra sympathetic sad sack, a pinch of Crosby aloof amiability, a sprinkle of Bill Evans cool, and a dozen similar elements, and whips them into cream. Much is made of how Sinatra handed Bennett the scepter as king of song. But it's always seemed to me that their relationship was more yin-yang than that. Sinatra, in his surly way, drew you into his world; Bennett happily runs out to meet you in yours. As Alec Baldwin--who imitated Bennett in a fun SNL bit--puts it, Bennett reminds you that showbiz is supposed to be fun. He looks, when he performs, like there's absolutely no where else on earth he'd rather be. That in contrast to Ol' Blue Eyes, who looked more like there were any number of places he could be, he'd be a little melancholy in any of them, and just happened to run into you at this one.

Then there's the living history angle to Bennett, and, better yet, the fact that he was on the correct side of that history. Son of a New York sweatshop dressmaker, he started performing in earnest in Europe in the Army during World War II and the postwar occupation. He was demoted for being too friendly with an African-American soldier buddy.

Back stateside, having been dipped in the theater scene by a hoofer uncle, he got his first gig with Bailey, was scooped up by Bob Hope, and went on to a couple sterling professional decades, whose highlights included a mammoth 1962 show at Carnegie Hall and the recording that same year of his signature "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." He allied himself with the Civil Rights movement through his friendship with Harry Belafonte, complementing Pete Seeger roots music with an urbane rendition of "Just in Time." The same everyman that had dared in the 50s to sing a Hank Williams tune at the Grand Ole Opry in a swank New York suit suggested, through his very presence with the Rev. King, that you didn't have to be a straw-gnawing denim-clad communist to be a white man marching in Selma, just a good guy.

By the late '70s, rock-music competition, cocaine, and overspending had ruined Bennett; but his son Danny became his manager and revived him and his career. Danny, a failed musician with a head for business, did some brilliant marketing jujitsu for his pop, a failed businessman with a head for music. He kept dad doing what he always had, but in front of kids who'd never seen it before and who had a permanent headache from overamped club punk and coliseum rock. From then on, it was smartly concocted theme and duet albums for Bennett. Moral of the story, I guess: Sometimes even a survivor needs a reviver.

A winning guy found his winning formula, and, more remarkable yet in the entertainment industry, managed not to piss off everyone he met along the way. That--apologies to the Bergmans and Michel Legrand--is how you keep the music playing.

-Alexander C. Kafka

Photo © Mark Seliger; courtesy, PBS

Promo:

More on TBA in Portland, Oregon

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art calls this annual September festival "tba" aka time-based art, and most of the time, the dance and performance art that gets presented under the shrieking labels of "hot," "cutting edge," "on fire," (this year's fifth-anniversary marketing buzz words) is pretty ephemeral and probably intended to be.

Thursday's opening extravaganza, 100 give or take Portland citizens in a movement choir singing songs about the Migration of Birds composed by San Francisco's Rinde Eckert, was pleasant enough, but scarcely worth sitting on the hard bricks of Pioneer Courthouse Square for close to an hour. It was a lovely September evening and the city looked its best, but the music was close to inaudible and while the movement–flapping to remind us of birds for example–was fun, it wasn't something I'd bother to see or hear again.

Certainly "Map Me," seen on Friday night, the contribution of Belgian-born couple Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Kurt Vandendriessche, performed nude, is time based. For one thing, Vanden Eynde is pregnant–slender nevertheless–so the shape of her body will not last. It takes a kind of raw courage or perhaps total self-absorption to stand naked before a room full of strangers, even if you're using your body as a screen for projections, which may account for the nearly clinical detachment with which this pair performed. Still, the work is intensely visual and in some respects rooted in art history: at one point they look as if they'd been sculpted in marble by Phidias; at another, they resemble paintings by Lucas Cranach, minus alas those wonderful hats.

In the end, I found that while I was impressed by the craft, and repelled by some aspects of this duet in the buff–a segment in which the couple attached strings to genitals and breasts in order to, as a Sesame Street style label card read, "Join Me" was one; another in which the sound of power tools and projections of what appeared to be sheet metal workers accomplished "Fix Me" for Vandendriessche was another–"Map Me" ended up being curiously dehumanizing, and its cutting edge decidedly dull.

But on Saturday night, in Portland's most elegant theater, the teal upholstered, cherry-paneled Newmark in the Performing Arts Center, Baryshnikov danced in the beautiful work of Donna Uchizono, and the art became timeless.

"Leap to Tall, " with music by Michael Floyd and Iva Bittova and lighting design by the masterful Robert Wierzel, was commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Center and premiered last year at Bard College. The trio is certainly a vehicle for Baryshnikov, capitalizing on his classical training and skewing it to be about him as a dancer of rare talent and intelligence, one with a truly intellectual bent. At 59, he can no longer do the exuberant grand jetes and multiple (and my God precise) pirouettes that made him a superstar when he left what was then the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of the West. Nor does he wish to. In this thoughtful, considered work, he "leaps to tall" indeed with the flex of a wrist, angular arms, a rapid, perfectly controlled series of bourrees into the wings, and a small, perfectly timed jump into the waiting arms of Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick, lovely dancers both of them.

There are no fireworks here; just centered lightness and wit, a modest offering that knocks your socks off. Working with Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, as Baryshnikov has done for many years, has paid off–there are no other ballet stars who have ever been able to make the shift from classicism to contemporary work as he has; dancing as brilliantly in their work and now Uchizono's as he did in such war horses as Don Quixote. His body may be time based; his artistry is timeless.

"State of Heads," which opened the program, is arguably more innovative choreography than that of "Leap to Tall," beginning with an explosive crashing sound and a man in a white suit standing motionless stage rear center, bathed in white light Soon he is joined by two women, also dressed in white, moving extremely slowly from each wing. As they join him, they look up, heads tilted, their arms moving stridently, making you wonder what they're reacting to. The piece would seem to be about our uneasy place in the world and our vulnerability to the decisions of our heads of state. Much of the movement for Levi Gonzalez, Carla Rudiger, and Rebecca Serrell is awkward, off kilter, occasionally downright gawky. And some of it, because of composer James Lo's score, no doubt–Uchizono's musicality puts her to some degree into mainstream modernism–has a latino flavor. The dynamics of this rather mysterious trio make the viewer stay alert, you don't want to miss what comes next, and it needs to be seen more than once. Which makes it not so time based.

–Martha Ullman West


Photo: Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche, from http://www.pica.org/tba/tba07/default.aspx

JAZZARIUM

Champian: Vocalist/pianist Champian Fulton With David Berger & the Sultans of Swing
City Hall Records

This is an enjoyable romp through a bountiful 14 songs ranging from classic (Cole Porter's "Just One of Those Things") to now-obscure pop (Billy Reid's "The Gypsy") to original (Berger and Hendricks's "Never-The-Less"). Berger's band has a lot of punch within the precisely controlled and intimate framework of his sharp arrangements, which wonderfully highlight Fulton, an early twentysomething with a musicality and sophisticated delivery that belie her tender age.

A native of Norman, Oklahoma, Fulton was influenced early on by her jazz trumpeter father, Stephen, and his musician friends, among them trumpeter Clark Terry. The family moved to LeMars, Iowa in the '90s so her dad could direct the Clark Terry Institute for Jazz Studies, and Champian formed her first band, the Little Jazz Quintet, whose oldest member was 12.

She has a warm but restrained voice that brings to mind Ella's--but of course one has to add some caveats to a statement like that. It's more muted and girlish. And, not to be too Simon You-Know-Whoish about it, she's occasionally pitchy and lacks confidence sometimes in the lower register.

That's nit-picking, and only points up her youth and great promise. This is an enjoyable album, and augurs many more even-finer ones. If you're in New York, you can catch Fulton and Berger's Band at Birdland Tuesday nights.

Mike Moreno

Between the Lines

World Culture Music

Guitarist/composer Moreno's album on drummer Kendrick Scott's World Culture Music is fabulous. Melodious, varied, imaginative, and delicately produced, it features excellent playing by Moreno, John Ellis on tenor and soprano sax, Marcus Strickland on tenor sax, Aaron Parks on piano, Doug Weiss on bass, and Kendrick Scott and Tyshawn Sorey on drums.

Moreno excels in legato arpeggiatic explorations and also enjoys various overdubs and ghostly pedal effects. He and Parks have some nice doubling in their jazz-baroque lines. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on even richer orchestrations and more faith in simpler but still rich melodies in Moreno's future compositions. Just a guess. He has such a fertile musical imagination that I think it will take ever fuller and more subtle arrangements to reflect it.

Marcus Strickland

Open Reel Deck
Strick Muzik

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Marcus Strickland's new release. Even though it has Moreno on guitar, Carlos Henderson on electric bass, Keyon Harrold on trumpet, and Strickland's twin brother E.J. on drums, I found it a little tedious. These are, one and all, highly accomplished and technically formidable musicians. But I just didn't find the tunes very engaging, the jams went on a bit, and the solos sounded too often like grandstanding divorced from the group's vibe as a whole. I won't start babbling no-I-in-team adages, and besides there's a lot of I in good combos, but there really is a discomfiting feeling here of every man for himself.

"Subway Suite" had a little more heart to it, and I liked the titular tension of "Volatility," though it kind of underlined for me the nerve center I felt missing in much of the album.

Open Reel Deck also features spoken-word artist Malachi in five numbers. And while I know spoken word has a longstanding, venerable tradition yadda yadda yadda, it most often does nothing for me. I'm impressed artists like Malachi can think so fast on their feet, and I occasionally enjoy the surreal imagery that bubbles forth from the beat's imperatives. But to my ears, it distracts and detracts as often as it enhances. Just not my cup of tea, but if it's yours don't let me poison your listening. We all have our idiosyncrasies, and I'm sure some folks underline the idio in mine.

-Alexander C. Kafka

Notes from Portland, Oregon's TBA Festival

Reggie Watts

For five years now, TBA (aka Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival) has sent viewers scuttling from club to theater to gallery to warehouse and round again. Then at the end of the evening, everyone gathers in and around the Works, TBA's own (temporary) club, for eating, drinking, dancing, and conversation.

Provocative juxtapositions lurk below the surface of much of the festival: grafitti/gallery, street/stage, process/product. The Suicide Kings' In Spite of Everything casts the punch, power, and profanity characteristic of spoken word in the mold of a relatively conventional theatrical narrative. Individual texts address the experience of matters this culture addresses only reluctantly—the spiritual cost of minimum-wage labor, gang life, adolescent alienation, child sexual abuse and adult sexuality—in language of brutal beauty. Quite possibly, we viewers need the fragile container of the larger narrative—the police investigation of a high school shooting—and the piece's conventional staging to render its fearsome, fearful core bearable.

Though equally self-aware and self-referential, Reggie Watts' Disinformation inhabits the world of a very current, socially acceptable topic of discourse—ecological disaster. Sly non-sequiturs, a variety of voices and personas, ad spoofs, and crisp, spontaneous beat-boxing and b-girling create an entertaining, if not particularly challenging, performance.

Next up: Andrew Dickson's Sell Out and The Living Word Project: the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Jospeh, director of In Spite of Everything.

- Cerinda Survant

Tune Head

Julie Hardy
The Wish
World Culture Music

True confessions: Slower scat singing and lyricless vocals generally bring out my inner giggling middle-school student. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.

Yet it took jazz singer-composer Julie Hardy all of about 20 seconds to stare down that little adenoidal smirker and seduce and marvel him with her gentle but sure voice, concise intonation, calm conviction, and enticing, angular tunes, harmonies, and arrangements. Of course, it helps that she's playing with some top talents on Kendrick Scott's World Culture Music--including drummer Scott himself--who seem to get and join Hardy thoroughly.

Hardy's not lyric-phobic, and understands their power, but she also experiments with voice as instrument in a relaxed but highly disciplined way. A New Hampshire native, Hardy studied at the University of New Hampshire and the New England Conservatory, and made her CD debut in 2003 with A Moment's Glance. Her 13 tracks here combine her own compositions with standards from Rodgers and Hammerstein, Styne and Cahn, Lawrence and Altman, Warren and Gordon, and the Beatles, plus a Wayne Shorter tune to which she added words. She manages to respect the material she covers while cleverly reimagining it, for instance, taking Lennon and McCartney's "I'm Looking Through You" and turning it into a slightly surreal bewildered triplet-measured search within the lover for a love that has fled.

Hardy says Shorter's Speak No Evil greatly influenced her composing, and in "Song of the Iris," she adds lyrics that voice the tune's inquisitives, and here and elsewhere, her vocals glide into and off Jaleel Shaw's alto sax in some beautiful play and interplay. Maybe it's because of her early experiences listening to Shorter, but Hardy seems to have a special affinity for dueting with saxophone, both Shaw's and Sam Sadigursky's tenor and soprano. Her range, her tone, and her mostly vibratoless delivery work especially well in that context.

On a few tracks, she's accompanied by the exceptional guitarist Ben Monder, whose silken strumming and exquisite voicing are deeply sensitive to Hardy's delivery. Pianist Randy Ingram, bassist Matt Cohesy, and Scott on drums are a superb rhythm section. They solo wonderfully (I love Clohesy's lyrical turn, for example, on Hardy's "Patience"). But together they also form a sublimely elastic temporal and textural landscape for Hardy to traverse. Scott's drumming is simply some of the most thoughtful and sensitive I've heard. He has a deceptively low-key and quiet approach, but a veritable menagerie of rhythmic forms and sensibilities, and can seemingly bend time and bend it back within a few bars before you even realize what he's done.

This is a fabulous album that understatedly offers some real compositional, emotional, and technical treats.

-Alexander C. Kafka

Preview of Scorsese's Rolling Stones Film