I have performed in a talent show once before. The James Buchanan Middle School First Annual Talent Extravaganza. I got roped into it because I was the second-chair clarinet in the eight-grade band. First chair had to join the jazz ensemble, and second chair had to join the Dixieland ensemble. Mrs. North decided that the talent show would be a good way to get a concert for both groups out of the way without having to go to the trouble of actually organizing a full concert on her own, so it was smart from her standpoint.

Part of the stated purpose of the Talent Extravaganza was to boost the student body’s self-esteem by “letting” us perform in front of our peers. That meant that the show had to be held during school hours. Whoever was in charge of it realized, at least, that no junior high school student would come to school after hours to watch a talent show solely to boost his classmate’s self-esteem. So it had to be held during school hours.

The school was also going through one of its instruction time-counting kicks, though, so it was pretty much impossible to have any assemblies or special events that would impinge at all on those 47 minutes of classroom instruction that each teacher received and guarded with their life, even if they used it for teaching us how to fill out word searches or something like that. So, because the administrators had not even the tiniest understanding of how junior high school brains work, they scheduled the talent show to run in the lunchroom, during lunch.

They took out one of the long tables to accommodate the stage area, making everyone angry: other tables had to accommodate the displaced kids, and depending on social status, some of those tables developed refugees of their own who had to nurse their hurt feelings at seeing how tenuous their hold on their social standing was. They tapped Mr. Nichol, the lunchroom attendant, to emcee the event, leaving no other rule enforcement in the room.

And most blindingly: By performing at lunch, we were facing a captive audience heavily armed with goulash, chili, peas, applesauce, and half pints of milk.

The Dixieland ensemble was up second. First was Jamie, our heroic mentally challenged special-needs kid who really, really liked performing “American Pie.” The catcalls were mocking at first, but, well, it’s a long song and by the end, the crowd was pretty riled up. (Jamie didn’t realize this, of course. He thought he did quite well.)

We were the first and last of the non-special acts. The food started flying before we had even gotten our music stands set up. By the time we’d made it through “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey,” word had somehow made it to the principal, who shut the show down with a stern lecture at the performers about how being pelted with food could cause the school serious liability.

The only positive to come of the show was that my second key got irrevocably stuffed with applesauce, so I could finally quit the stupid instrument.

I don’t do talent shows. I don’t perform in them, I don’t attend them, and I try not to even think the words.

*****

A lot of my fiction has some spark of inspiration from a true story, but not this one. Inspiration from this passage from Exile Issues, a monologue by Carla bemoaning the talent show that she is about to be required to perform in, comes from two true stories.

First was the band-playing-at-lunch-at-school part. That happened in 8th or 9th grade (although I played trombone) and the results were only slightly better than you would expect from a performance by unpopular kids in front of junior high school students armed with poor-tasting but aerodynamic foodstuffs.

The second part comes from high school. Periodically—homecoming and things like that—we’d have an afternoon-long celebration with activities miscellaneous and varied. I think it was senior year when each of these started to include karaoke, and every time, the mentally challenged kid did perform the classic and extremely long “American Pie.” As I recall, the audiences were rather supportive for him in real life, but in fiction if the characters are treated well it’s not comedy, so there you go.

Why is there a talent show in the book in the first place? Well, Nathan, the titular transdimensional exile has enlisted the support of a pair of humans to help him get home. It’s a long process, and so he believes he’s being thoughtful by planning entertainment such as this for the little band to take part in.

The Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Western Australia presents

CASSWA Christmas Soiree

5pm, Sunday 6th December 2009

Churchlands Senior Highschool Auditorium

20 Lucca St, Churchlands

Music for saxophone quartet, clarinet quartet, clarinet &

piano, bass clarinet & electronics and more!

Performers to include Just Sax, Phil Everall, Catherine Cahill,

Allan Meyer & others.

Tickets available at the door.

FREE for CASSWA members;

non-members $10 / $5 concession

To download the pdf flyer for this concert click below

CASSWA Christmas Soiree

CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK
28-11-09
They started and finished their continuous set with intense, tumbling pieces that had the same individual instrumental ingredients delivered in remarkably similar fashion. But what a difference! At the beginning it was like watching three musicians, each locked in their own little world, pouring out their own ideas for, it seemed, their own satisfaction. There could have been invisible walls between them; there could have been one between them and us.

On the left, Henry Grimes plucked urgently and nervously at the strings of his double bass to produce a low burbling thrum; in the centre Andrew Cyrille had set up a constant flurry around the drum kit that, likewise, formed a fairly uninterrupted swathe of strikes and scrapes; to the right Paul Dunmall poured out torrents of notes from his tenor saxophone in a stream broken only momentarily by the regular pauses needed for an intake of breath.

On and on they went, in isolation. Or so it seemed to me.

But just over an hour later they did the same kind of thing, except this time what I heard was a band – the three musicians still doing what they do best and, more specifically, the only thing they do, but now doing it in tight-knit accord with each other. Both pieces were a bit like the musical equivalent of a monochrome Jackson Pollock paintings (in dark grey upon dark grey, perhaps), except that the first time it had just been a murky mess while the second time light played across the surface, the layers gleaming. The difference is hard to express, but easy to feel. It’s the difference between wanting to leave and being glad I’d stayed.

In between, Dunmall played clarinet and came worryingly close to playing a tune; Grimes did one of his unfathomable arco solos, read a poem which linked the now to to the origins of the world, and played violin. His violin playing reminds me of no one so much as John Cale playing viola with the Velvet Underground.

The most magical moment for me came when Cyrille started a groove (or as near to a groove as free jazz gets) with stick on stick, varying the pressure of the hit and so producing an almost melodic variation in note and tone. He built this motif up and spread it subtly to the rest of the kit while Grimes held a rhythmic scrape and saw on violin and Dunmall conversed with the two of them on soprano. The sound of Dunmall’s bagpipes – again it’s a torrent of notes but this time uninhibited by the need for breaths – added a nice earthy and strangely British touch to what had been music not of any particular country or even of this earth. It’s somehow stranger than that – a kind of intergalactic buzz, rattle, screech and squeal of the spheres.

The encore was almost a blues, almost that jazz that is – what would you call it? – “fenced in” rather than “free”?

It’s occurred to me recently that going to a concert is no longer the huge attraction it once was. In the past, concerts were opportunities for connection with other performers, with friends and colleagues (both on the stage and in the audience), and to be moved or transfixed by the music.

Nowadays, I feel more reticent to head out. Perhaps this is a result of too many Melbourne Festival tickets bought for performances that failed to please. Perhaps it is a delayed reaction to the many, many orchestral concerts I went to, in the days that I worked for an orchestra. Mostly though, I have to confess that it is a response to the growing sense that I often have after going to a concert (or any other performance) of a kind of blankness, when I wake up the next day and have absolutely no reaction to it. It is simply…. nothing, really. An experience that hasn’t really impacted on me (in the true sense of the word) in any way. It isn’t about ‘like’ or ‘dislike’.

It seems a ridiculously tall order, but I want my performance-going to be life-changing. I want to come home and have it rolling over in my head, again and again. Questions, or issues, or ideas, or challenges, or puzzles to ponder. Or delights, or a remembered experience of connection with the music and the expression of the artists.

It has become a kind of assessment tool, in a way, prior to buying tickets. “Will it be worth it?” by which I mean the investment of effort and the time on my part, rather than the actual cost.

Last week I went to the Melbourne Recital Centre to hear the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra perform three works under the baton of Sir Neville Marriner. Andrew Marriner (his son) played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.

How was this concert for me, given the above criteria? Well, I know that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the company I was with, and I very much enjoyed the orchestra’s playing, as I haven’t heard them for quite a few years.

I loved Andrew Marriner’s performance of the clarinet concerto. It’s a piece I know very, very well, and it was truly a delight to hear such familiar lines being performed so well. There is a delightful fluency, or lightness, in the writing. (I know, it is silly to comment on the delicious craft of Mozart’s writing as we all know he was a genius… but truly, this is such a wonderful piece, and as I listened to it I was reminded of this again, and again, and again…). I enjoyed noticing some of the interpretive decisions Marriner made – his choices in articulation, or in cadenza. I know that he studied with the same teacher I studied with for a year, so I listened for ‘Hans-isms’ in his playing too.

But here is the life-changing bit: it made me want to go straight home and dig out my well-loved score of the concerto, and my Music Minus One CDs, and play it again! I think this is a fine concert experience to have. It reminded me of how I loved playing this piece, way back in my classical performing days, how much I love its phrases, harmonies and structures still, and that these are still there for me to return to, whenever I want.

I haven’t yet had time to get my clarinet out, but I shall, very soon. And I am looking forward to revisiting the Mozart Concerto when I do.

On another note, I realised that night that the traditional concert length no longer suits me. I would have been happy to go home after the Mozart, as there was so much to digest and process from the experience of the first half of the concert. This is absolutely not meant as a disparaging comment on what took place in the second half. The second half of the program was a new work by the Melbourne-based composer (and virtuoso organist) Calvin Bowman. He wrote a song cycle, English in tone and turn, with echoes of Finzi, Delius and even Michael Head and Warlock (to my ears) which was absolutely gorgeous, filled with light and shade and colour. We had the treat of hearing the songs performed by a lovely soprano, Jacqueline Porter… so really, it was all quite delightful.

However, as we walked to the car, I commented to John my companion that the first half of the concert now felt like a distant memory, our heads were so full of the most recent piece we had heard.

Thus, I find myself fully in favour of shorter concerts that allow patrons adequate time for reflection and digestion. Or perhaps concerts with a dinner break between the first and second halves.

Shabaka Hutchings (Pic: Russ Escritt)

Jazz Club
The Rainbow, Digbeth, Birmingham
26-11-09
Many bands like to take their time and build to a big finish – not this trio of saxophonist/clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings, electric bassist Neil Charles and, for this gig, Seb Rochford on drums. We were in at the top, at the centre of a churning storm of free jazz intensity, Hutchings on tenor howling and screaming with double notes, harmonics and overblowing, Charles hitting thumb slaps and strumming chords simultaneously, Rochford stirring around the kit playing those accents only he can.

It was pretty full-on for the first three quarters of the set with pieces like Surman Part 2, and even when Hutchings finally switched to the gentler clarinet and tunes like The Forest the storm only abated temporarily.

There is a great amount of delicacy there in the digits of the band’s debut CD, Night Time On The Middle Passage (Babel BDV2982) and the band played nearly all material from it, but in live performance, and in the cruder ambience of the Rainbow’s back courtyard, delicacy needs to give way to power and intensity and, quite rightly, that’s the side of the band it chose to accentuate.

And what intensity! For those of us who remember the young Shabaka Hutchings standing tentatively at the side of the stage awaiting Andy Hamilton’s encouragement, or rising from his chair in the Walsall Jazz Orchestra saxophone section to play a quietly powerful solo, the man who on Wednesday evening turned his silver tenor into a raging bull elephant has come an awfully long way and grown immeasurably in stature. He is surely now one of the most original voices on his instrument(s) in this country today.

The man he most strikingly reminded me of was Pharoah Sanders – for his sheer instrumental force, for his expertise way up in the higher reaches of the tenor saxophone, and also for the way he worked away at fairly simple melodic phrases. So many modern saxophonists are keen to rip up and down the instrument, fitting in as many different notes as quickly as they can. Hutchings can do that if he chooses to – thankfully he chooses to quite rarely and so those lightning runs are always eloquent contrasts to the power of a piece like Chief, in which he restricts himself to a single note for a fair amount of the time, relying on tonal and rhythmic variation to give the interest.

Charles is an original player, too, using quiet wah-wah and a lot of chordal work. He could have been louder for a lot of the gig, but that is a minor carp. Rochford is not this band’s regular drummer but he fits in just fine, having just the right melodic sense and trans-stylistic abilities to do free rhythms when they are needed, or a kind of jazz metal or hip-hop when that might be appropriate.

Very strong playing, especially from Hutchings, but employed to bring out strong writing, too, and that makes it even more rewarding. Great band, great gig.

Hmm. The NME’s review really enjoys pissing on Mr. Bellamy’s parade. The best bits on The Resistance usually occur when the band push their sound to polarising extremes. Hence why “I Belong To You (+ Mon Cœur S’Ouvre À Ta Voix)” is an absolute riot, in spite of its threat to break into Elton John doing cabaret at any given moment. Yes, Bellamy’s French accent resembles a daytripping tourist on acid. Yes, there is a celebratory “Woo!” at the beginning that belongs firmly on Broadway. But, as with so many of Muse’s best songs, it is the wavering on the right side of ridiculous that is the song’s making. Understandably therefore, the clarinet solo near the end is a work of genius – beautifully written; played with just the right tone and character; interlocking marvellously with the rest of the music.

So why, after all this star-struck amazement and wonder, does the band then have to ruin their credibility with utter rubbish like “Guiding Light” – a song so mediocre and in thrall to U2 at their very worst that it should be locked up in a secret cupboard in the headquarters of Magic FM.

Muse – I Belong To You (+Mon Coeur S’Ouvre A Ta Voix)

No, not those kind! This is a reminder that an exceedingly exciting trio plays the Jazz Club, the monthly get-togethers for intrepid jazz explorers at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth, Birmingham, tonight. It sometimes feels in this behind-the-pub courtyard that this might be what it was like in those New York lofts in the 1970s and ’80s – gritty, cutting edge, filled with the excitement of listening to jazz’s future being made here and now.

Providing the excitement this evening is Zed-U: Neil Charles on bass, Shabaka Hutchings on clarinet and, for this gig, Seb Rochford on drums. Among many really interesting young British jazz groups this is one of the most interesting, experimental yet accessible with it. Doors open at 8pm,, the music starts around 9pm, and it’s just £4 on the door to get in. This is a Birmingham Jazz gig. Read my review of Zed-U’s album, Night Time On The Middle Passage, here.

Darryl Harper playing smooth tunes onstage at Creative Alliance

Let’s see….did something I’ve never done before Friday night. Went to a jazz concert at the Creative Alliance, just east of Patterson Park on Eastern Avenue, to see jazz clarinetist Darryl Harper. What a talent he is….he had gathered some great local jazz guys in for a concert and the music was smooth, smokey…very blues. Darryl’s latest album is Stories in Real Time….you can hear  some selection by clicking here…and the Creative Alliance has many unique offerings… for music lovers, film lovers, classes for adults and children, including a 4 week Saturday session of running away to join the circus…”Admit it–your child is amazingly gifted and you’ve dreamt of creating a circus act together. Now’s your chance! Aerial superstar Lizzie Lyra introduces parents and kids to the circus arts: acrobatics, partner balancing, hooping, trapeze.” Come on people! You don’t see that everyday….

OK…saw Twilight…I’m in…all in.  And now I’m ready for New Moon….maybe over the holiday weekend. But I also want to see Precious….I’ve heard it is simply amazing….and Blind Side….also supposed to be just wonderful. It could be a good movie marathon weekend!  I love doing double features with a snack in between. Time to get my movie on. 

Oh, and I made some mean pork belly for dinner one night..(which is the new foie gras, or some people say). Not that I was  foie gras eater…I wasn’t, but I do love properly prepared pork belly. I used a variation of  Jamie Oliver recipe that I found on someone else’s blog….thank you very much….and it was luscious. Just absolutely fantastic. Still have some leftover in the frig. Wait for me…no matter where you are, I will find you!

Clarinet Thing — Cry, Want (BC, 2009)

Clarinet Thing, Beth Custer’s all-clarinet group, has existed for 20 years but only has two CDs to its credit (to my knowledge) and plays only rarely.  When a show popped up at Yoshi’s last week, I figured I practically owed it to the band to show up.

Not as long-form or abstract as ROVA, not as ethereal as Chris Speed’s “The Clarinets,” not as metal as Edmund Welles, Clarinet Thing might have a closer analogue in the World Saxophone Quartet. They do get into some freeform improv and some wild free-jazzy soloing, but it’s all unapologeticly jazz at heart, down to the Duke Ellington covers that showed up on their first album.

Cry, Want draws more on Jimmy Guiffre and Carla Bley for inspiration (the title track is a Giuffre cover).  At the Yoshi’s show, billed as the CD release party, we got treated to lots of original compositions from the new disk, some covers, and a couple of tunes that are apparently being prepped for the next CD, which might be out in just six months.

A few of the pieces from Cry, Want that they played:

“Iluku,” Brown’s piece about his father, who was given that nickname while living in Africa as a boy. Lots of old-time jazzy counterpoint, a pleasant tune.

“Who Died and Where I Moved To,” a Ben Goldberg piece with a playfully sneaky beat, bluesy chord changes, and lots of catchy old-jazz borrowings in the individual parts. A highlight of the show and the CD.

“Polestar,” another Goldberg piece, this time gossamer and lovely.

“2300 Skidoo,” a Herbie Nichols composition that shows how he straddled contemporary and future jazz traditions in his time.

And versions of “Night in Tunisia” (stunning) and “Crepuscule with Nellie” (during which Custer lost her place and couldn’t locate the proper sheet music page in her folder — an experience second only to the time she forgot to put a reed in her clarinet, she said).

As for the newer stuff, Custer trotted out two parts of a five-part suite inspired by Buckminster Fuller.  It started out nicely enough but without the abstract or geometric aspect I’d expected, considering this was the guy associated with geodesic domes and buckminsterfullerene.  But then they kicked into some wild improvising and a quirky riff that kept reappearing.  Better.

The group also did a waltz, “Sweeping Staircase,” that comes from one of Custer’s silent-film scores. And the show closed with a bit of Brazilian choro music by Pixinguinha.

As for the lineup of Clarinet Thing: Custer, Sheldon Brown, and Ben Goldberg are still around from the previous quintet formation (which put out the album Agony Pipes and Misery Sticks in 2005).  Peter Josheff and Ralph Carney are out, replaced by longtime local jazzster Harvey Wainapel. The four of them sat in the usual arc formation, like a string quartet would, and they took turns introducing their songs on the mic. It was a casual show, a fun air.

Goldberg spent most of the night on the contra-alto clarinet, which resembles a one-legged tuba (it’s got a stick to help the performer hold it at mouth level). The other players covered nearly every other type of clarinet between them, including a lot of bass clarinets.

Fun concert overall, and a nice CD that of course has a similar sound.

And if you want to hear what they sounded like live on KPFA a couple of weeks ago, click here, but do it fast — that archived show will expire Thursday, Nov. 26.

Two hugely contrasting gigs in as many days – contrasting in so many ways but both with a great deal to recommend them.

On Tuesday, 24 November, a singer who has shifted an exceptional number of CDs and can fill a large auditorium but still continues to, in her own inimitable way, confound showbiz expectations.

The jazz fraternity can be sniffy about singers, especially ones who are on the margins of jazz and, to use the jargon, “shift units”. They should make an exception for Madeleine Peyroux; she is the real thing. She has paid her dues on the streets of Paris, has the uncanny knack of sounding about 70 years old and as if she has stepped out of a past jazz/blues era, and maintains very high standards, both for herself and her musicians.

And on her latest album, Bare Bones on the Universal label, she has moved in a subtly new direction and devoted the whole album to original songs.

She is a quietly compelling live performer and rarely have I heard anyone lay back so far behind the beat without getting lost. Not sure who is in her touring band but last time out Jon Herrington, who also tours with Steely Dan, was on guitar.

She is in the newly refurbished Butterworth Hall at the Warwick Arts Centre from 8pm. Tickets are £25 and £22.50 from www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

On Wednesday, 25 November, a young band that has probably shifted an unexceptional number of its first CD, but which deserves to sell vast quantities because it really is that good. Zed-U is bassist Neil Charles, clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings and drummer Tom Skinner.

The band’s album, Night Time On The Middle Passage, on the Babel label, reveals a most original sounding trio, combining some boisterous, freeish jazz with electronics and North African-influenced trance-blues.

It’s very impressive stuff, combining power with great subtlety, and Hutchings, especially, is electrifying live. Oh, and for this date Seb Rochford replaces Tome Skinner on drums.

No large and newly refurbished concert hall for Zed-U; they are at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth from 9pm. This is a Jazz Club session, from Birmingham Jazz, and entrance is just £4 on the door.

And maybe one day Zed-U will be filling the Butterworth – we can dream! More at www.birminghamjazz.co.uk

Before both of those is a not-really-jazz gig that should be an absolute joy. The Japanese pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is at Symphony Hall on Sunday,  22 November, with just a piano and his gorgeous tunes.

If he plays Amore, the opening track from his new Decca disc, Playing The Piano, that will be enough. You might remember the song from his best-selling album Beauty (and including the Arto Lindsay lyrics: “Good morning, good evening where are you?”). The solo piano version is heaven distilled into a few minutes.

There aren’t many tickets left, but just being in the same hall as the man should be enough. Go to www.thsh.co.uk

Veteran author, jazz critic and broadcaster Neil Tesser writes about clarinetist/composer James Falzone’s quartet KLANG, its recent release, Tea Music (Allos Documents), and its current Midwest CD release tour, in a new post for his Chicago-themed column at Examiner.com.

“The album is on my short list of top Chicago jazz discs for 2009,” he declares. “Like Goodman and Hampton before them, Falzone and [Jason] Adasiewicz exploit the shared sonorities of their instruments, but to wildly different ends, with a gauntlet of post-modern strategies and tonal extremes. It’s a captivating disc from start to finish…the quartet improvises with invention, authority, and elegance. And with [Jason] Roebke and [Tim] Daisy (two of the most versatile new-music artists in the Midwest) on hand, the rhythm section pulses with brains as well as the appropriate brawn.”

KLANG’s tour continues this week, with dates in Ohio and Wisconsin, concluding on Sunday with a hometown gig at The Hungry Brain.

It’s fun being short.

Yes.

You can date all the guys

It’s absolutely fantastic!

But is it really?

No.

It’s not really that fantastic after all

But hey

I’m cuddle-sized.

I don’t really know what’s gotten into me today

It’s like someone ignited a molotov cocktail

That had been brewing in my skull

I painted in red and yellow today.

I doubt myself, somehow

I see purple spots in the trees

Do you?

alice.

I stopped going to LaFayette Concert Band rehearsals when Heather started working Tuesday nights. She no longer does, but I haven’t gone back. Between the dojo and Kenny’s piano lessons I’m out three evenings a week plus Saturday late morning / early afternoon, and that’s enough for right now. (For similar reasons I still am not participating with Thornden Morris. I will do Wild Blue Morris early next year, but that presumably will be only one night every two weeks for three months.) Not that I didn’t enjoy the band, but I enjoy the dojo too and it’s most of my exercise program.

That doesn’t mean stopping playing clarinet, logically, but I have. I don’t get a lot out of playing solo, and even when I was active in the band I had a hard time getting myself to practice enough. Finding the time to do it was difficult, for one thing.

And now I have a different instrument to work on — one that’s more rewarding to play solo, I think, and which I can play softly at night while folks are sleeping, or while I’m watching TV, so I do practice more.

That being the case, owning five B-flat soprano clarinets seems just a little daft.

So I’ve sold three. The two Mazzeos I picked up for cheap, just to see what Mazzeo is about (and the second because the first was way out of adjustment), and the Evette and Schaeffer I bought to be my main clarinet but which later got demoted in favor of my Ridenour. I’m keeping the latter, and the Evette (because I can’t bring myself to let go of a Buffet-made instrument I paid under $11 for), and the E-flat, alto, and bass clarinets. It would make sense for me to get rid of some of them too, but I’m not going to, not for now. Especially not the bass.

I thought about titling this post “Downsizing” but that would probably have been a lie, since I’ll likely take the proceeds and buy something else to clutter the place up with. Not sure what, though. But I hear nice things about the Mainland tenor uke…

Photo by David Sampson

On Tuesday, November 17th, clarinetist/composer James Falzone and his Chicago-based quartet KLANG will embark on a six-date Midwest tour in support of their acclaimed debut CD, Tea Music (Allos Documents).

The group, which also features vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tim Daisy, will open the tour in Lexington, Kentucky and work its way back through Ohio and Wisconsin to the tour-ending hometown gig at The Hungry Brain.

Tour Itinerary:

11/17 :: Al’s Bar (Lexington, KY)
11/18 :: Thomas More College (Covington, KY)
11/19 :: Bela Dubby (Cleveland, OH)
11/20 :: Robinwood Concert House (Toledo, OH)
11/21 :: The Sugar Maple (Milwaukee, WI)
11/22 :: The Hungry Brain (Chicago, IL)