Monday, January 26, 2015

Dance Preview: Madison Ballet's Repertory I


Rachelle Butler rehearses with General Hambrick.  © SKepecs 2014


by Susan Kepecs
Madison Ballet’s Repertory I concert, next Fri. – Sat. (Feb. 6-7) at the Bartell, is, like last season’s Rep I, a guest choreographers’ showcase.  The goal of inviting dancemakers with different approaches is to shake things up and to break the dancers out of their comfort zone, stretching their technical and interpretive skills.  At the same time, the process expands the company’s reach in the dance world by bringing new artists into the fold.  It’s always fascinating to see Madison Ballet’s adept dancers explore other realms – though like all experiments, this kind of concert is a leap into the unknown.
That tension makes Rep I especially exciting.  There are four dances on the program, one by Madison Ballet artistic director W. Earle Smith, one by UW-Madison Dance Department Chair Jin-Wen Yu, who’s set works on Madison Ballet before, and one each by choreographers brand-new to the company.  One is General Hambrick, who’s worked with Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, Texas Ballet Theatre – where he danced with Smith – and on Broadway.  He was in Cats!  And Phantom of the Opera!  Currently, Hambrick teaches at West Virginia’s School of Theatre and Dance.  The other newcomer is Jacqueline Stewart, director of Jaxon Movement Arts, an urban, avant-garde company based in Chicago and New York. 
“This program’s a great evening that showcases the dancers doing different kinds of movement,” Smith says.  “It’s the eclecticism of the program that makes it successful – it’s an evening anyone would be intrigued and entertained by.  The movement in the Stewart piece is unique, and fun – it makes me think of going out nightclubbing, and the dancers enjoy doing it.  In General Hambrick’s work, the movement, in the context of the abstract narrative he sets up, is really well done.  Jin-Wen Yu’s dance gives the dancers the opportuny to explore the sense of bolero, of Spanish music.” 
Smith’s own piece, “Nuoto,” is the program finale. It’s unmistakably Smith – neoclassical choreography, the Italian music he loves so much, the tongue-in-cheek humor – on the order of his “La Luce D’Amore,” from last season’s Repertory II, but fluffier, sillier, and with a ‘20s beach theme.  “I really didn’t want to choreograph anything new, after doing Dracula last year,” he says.  “That was such a huge project.  But as the months progressed I decided no, I want to do one new piece – but I don’t want to be too serious about it. 
“I don’t do comedy, but I wanted to do something light.  I always start by listening to music while I’m on the road or lounging around, and I came across a number of Italian baroque pieces I’d collected and for some reason they made me think of swimming.  And then I found this old photo of all these people in crazy beachwear taken on the Mediterranean somewhere in the ‘20s or ‘30s, and it really spoke to me.  I gave the photos to Karen (Brown-Larimore, Madison Ballet’s costume designer), and she’s done an amazing job designing costumes in that style.”
“Nuoto” uses the whole company, and uses it very well.  Of course, Smith knows these dancers better than any outside choreographer could, and he’s a master at showing them off.  There’s plenty of action – allegro, petit allegro, male bravura – in this very playful piece, composed of small segments featuring different combinations of dancers, with working titles like “beach towel,’ “jig,” “rubber duck,” and “tour jeté.”
Yu’s piece, “Un Bolero Azul,” is one of his earlier works exploring Latin themes.  (“Transit,” shown in last season’s Rep I concert, was set to tangos, the result of a research trip he made to Argentina in 2012).  “Un Bolero Azul," Yu says, was originally choreographed in 2001, and set on soloists at Nashville Ballet. Like “Transit,” “Bolero” mixes a luxurious balletic look with angular, postmodern, sometimes floor-based vocabulary.  Last fall, Yu set this work on Madison Ballet’s Shannon Quirk and Phillip Ollenburg for his “In Tune” concert at H’Doubler Performance Space in Lathrop Hall. This time it’s done by Annika Reikersdorfer and Jackson Warring, on whom it will look quite different.   
Stewart’s urban-contemporary work, “Jiffy Pop,” is a leap in a different direction.  It’s the anti-ballet, though it plays to Madison Ballet’s dancers’ strengths.  Originally it was made for contemporary / modern Thodos Dance Chicago.  “But it’s reshaped for Madison Ballet,” Stewart says.  “There’s lots of new material in a contemporary ballet vocabulary.” 

Jiffy Pop in rehearsal.   © SKepecs 2014

“Jiffy Pop,” set on six dancers, is an exploration of pop culture and postmodern theory.  Its point of departure is “gaze theory” – “the way dancers (or the subjects of a painting, or a photograph) are objectified by the viewer,” Stewart says.  This exploration of postmodern theory draws on pop culture; it’s built on actions and poses that are deliberately bizarre.  Some segments are marked off by an enormous picture frame moved about by a dancer (in this performance, the very striking Shannon Quirk); this device commands the audience’s gaze, directing emphasis toward certain movements onstage.

"Brother's Keeper;" Cody Olsen and Shannon Quirk.
© SKepecs 2015
Even in rehearsal, under harsh lights and in studio clothes, Hambrick’s piece, “I Am My Brother’s Keeper,” looks mystical, almost spooky – and somehow, at the same time, playful, even joyful. (Guys!” Hambrick calls out during rehearsal, “smile when you’re throwing each other around!  I don’t mean a fake smile, I mean really smile!”)
There’s thick emotional content here, laid on the abstract narrative Smith refers to above.  You can read the story with your own imagination, but to me it’s about the complexities of human (or alien!) relationships.  The choreoraphy, too, is exceptionally expressive.  Hambrick uses a meld of Balanchine-isms and Ailey-isms that’s addictive to watch, and it pushes the dancers to try familiar steps in new ways.  “I want you guys to be more dangerous here, Hambrick says of a partnered attitude turn.  “When you lean out, it’s really beautiful.”



Monday, January 19, 2015

Musica -- ¡con mucho aché!


Juan de Marcos (L) at the Cardinal on Feb. 10 with Richard Hildner (guitar) and Nick Moran (bass)
© SKepecs 2015
Here’s some huge, thrilling news.  Next fall – September / November 2015 – Juan de Marcos González, the world’s leading authority on Afro-Cuban music and leader of the legendary Afro-Cuban All Stars, will be the UW-Madison Arts Institute’s Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence.  Marcos was in town last month – Feb. 10 – 12 – for a pre-residency visit.  I wrote a substantive article about this late winter musical feast (which happily coincided with a concert by the Pedrito Martínez Group at Overture's Capitol Theater) for the Greater Madison Jazz Consortium’s new website.  The article was posted right on time, a week before the events, but without explanation the GMJC removed my piece from their archives shortly afterwards.  Since I own the rights to this work and it's part of my portfolio, I'm posting it, a month after those eventos cubanísimos, on CulturalOyster, in the name of preservation.
-- SK

**********************************************
February's Afro-Cuban Music Feast

“Y en la vida se debe andar derecho,
Rendir tributo a quien se lo merece
Con la imaginación crear lo bello
Y que sea distinto, diferente!”

“In life one should play it straight,
Pay tribute to whose who deserve it,
With imagination create what’s beautiful –
And let it be distinct, different!”
– Juan de Marcos González, from his song “Distinto, Diferente,” on the eponymous album (World Circuit, 1999).

 by Susan Kepecs
There’s nothing in the world as bold and bailable Afro-Cuban music. The thrilling syncopation of its basic rhythmic patterns, clave and tumbao, are gifts from the Orishas – the ancestral spirits of West Africa who crossed the Atlantic on slave ships and landed on the biggest Antillean island. The Orishas are the most dynamic of deities, and though Afro-Cuban music is unmistakable in any of its forms, it’s constantly evolving. Juan de Marcos, renowned leader of the Afro-Cuban All Stars, is a master innovator, as is his younger counterpart, Pedrito Martínez. Both will be in Madison the second week of February, giving us a chance to check out the state of Afro-Cuban music in early 2015. The Pedrito Martínez Group plays Overture’s Capitol Theater on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7:15 PM. Marcos, the UW-Madison Arts Institutes’ Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence for fall, 2015, thanks to the efforts of Willie Ney, Executive Director of the UW-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives – what a coup! – is here to meet the community at a reception in his honor at the Cardinal Bar on Feb. 10 (5-7 PM), and to give a pre-residency talk at Overture’s Wisconsin Studio (it’s up on the third floor) at 6 PM before Martínez’ concert on Feb. 12.
Both Marcos and Martínez were born to this music. Marcos hails from Pueblo Nuevo, Centro Havana, a veritable hotbed of urban son y rumba. His puro – “pure one,” a Cuban term of respect and honor for father – sang with dance bands all over Havana (sometimes with the sire of son montuno, Arsenio Rodríguez, or with piano potentate Ruben González) – and led a chapter of the secret men’s society, Abakuá; its sacred Nigerian drum rhythms are rumba’s heartbeat.
For a while Marcos' family lived next door to the late, great sonero Compay Segundo, whose song "Chan Chan," sung by Ibrahim Ferrer, is opening track on the original Buena Vista Social Club album (World Circuit, 1997). "When I was about 10, my puro bought me Compay's guitar," Marcos says. "But music didn't pay. He didn't want me to be a musician. He always had various jobs besides his gigs. He was a guaguero [bus driver] and a stevedore on the docks. And he was a leftist – a union leader." So Marcos ended up with a doctorate in engineering, though he organized his first band, Sierra Maestra (most recently in Madison in 2012, though by then Marcos was no longer involved) during his student days. Fortunately for us, Marcos ultimately gave up engineering for music.
It was Marcos who brought the old soneros, then more or less relegated to the dustbins of prerevoltionary history, to the attention of Ry Cooder and Nick Gold. From that collaboration came the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon (http://www.buenavistasocialclub.com/), with its famous Wim Wenders film and its fat handful of group and solo albums recorded on the World Circuit label at the end of the 1990s, including the Afro-Cuban All Stars’ first album, A Toda Cuba Le Gusta (World Circuit, 1997).
Today Marcos brings together several generations of Cuban musicians, now scattered across the globe thanks to the limitations of the island’s political economy, to perform and record under the Afro-Cuban All Stars banner. He also uses his astute eye for talent producing albums by the best of Cuba’s next-generation players. One of his outstanding successes in this role was the 2007 production (on his own label, DM Ahora!) of the landmark debut album by leading Cuban rapper Telmary Díaz, who melds Afro-Cuban rhythms with urban slam poetry.
Martínez grew up in the section of Centro Habana called Cayo Hueso, like Pueblo Nuevo a cradle of son y rumba. Martínez learned to play as a youngster in the streets. “He comes straight from the source,” Marcos says, “he developed by playing with rumba’s greatest protagonists.” Since 1998, though, Martínez has lived in New York. He was a founding member of Afro-Latin New York fusion band Yerba Buena before branching out on his own. The Pedrito Martínez Group’s first, eponymously titled studio album was released in 2013 (Motéma Music). It’s a chart-buster, the top Latin jazz seller on both iTunes and Amazon.
 Martínez is the whole package – a superb percussionist (he won top honors in the Thelonious Monk Institute Afro-Latin hand percussion competition in 2000), a tremendous vocalist, and a surprising innovator. His instruments of choice are the tumbadoras (congas) and the hourglass-shaped, double-headed batá, the sacred drum used to call up the Orishas.

Given its folkloric roots, Afro-Cuban music is organically linked to dance. “It’s important,” Marcos says,” to speak of rumba as a music / dance complex, encompassing several relatively distinct rhythm and dance styles. But the term ‘rumba’ also applies to any fiesta at which these genres are played and danced. By extension, in Cuban slang when someone throws a great party, even if the music is reggaeton or heavy metal, people say “yesterday there was a great rumba at Pedro’s house.”  
But if Afro-Cuban music is for dancing, it’s also dazzlingly complex. Jazz is intrinsic, says Marcos. “In rumba, in particular, improvisation is and always has been key. It goes back to the abolition of slavery; the flow of blacks between New Orleans and Cuba led to a certain confluence of ideas and styles.”
In New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish Tinge.” In Cuba, you can see it in the early twentieth century rise of the French-inspired Afro-Cuban danzón orchestras, which got their characteristic, stately sound from violins, flutes, and piano, mixed with bass and timbales. “Since that time,” Marcos says, “open solos for piano and flute have been part and parcel of Afro-Cuban music. Moreover, with the signing of the Platt Ammendment, which made Cuba a quasi U.S. colony [it was repealed in 1934, though heavy U.S. investments in Cuban land and the sugar industry remained until the 1959 Revolution], American capitalists living on the island and their allies, the elitist Cuban oligarchs, demanded to stay on top of the latest foreign fashions.”
By the 1920s, Marcos continues, U.S. jazz orchestras, like those led by saxophonist Ted Naddy and violinist Max Dolin, were common in Havana. Eventually, these leaders began using Cuban musicians – it was cheaper than bringing in and manitaining complete ensembles from the States. This musical interaction reached its peak in the 1940s, with the explosion of Afro-Cuban jazz – son y rumba now threaded with the structures of blues and bebop that originated in the African-American experience, like the call-and-response patterns of trading fours or eights.

Marcos’ talk on Feb. 12 – essentially a preview of his fall residency on campus, which will include a public lecture / concert series on the order of the John Santos Latin jazz residency of 2004 (also a Ney initiative) – will put all of this in context and perspective. “The talk’s about the history, development, and musicology of Cuban music since the eighteenth century,” he says. “I’ll go from Cuban baroque composers like Esteban Salas and Juan Paris, whose works stem from European rather than Cuban forms, through today. It’s a panoramic overview that, when I get to the present, will pay special homage to the artists we’re going to invite to Madison during my residency, and to their particular styles.”
As a musician Marcos takes a similarly broad tack with his Afro-Cuban All Stars shows – and there surely will be one this fall, the first since March, 2009 (the All Stars also played here in April, 2000). “What I try to do in my concerts,” Marcos says, “is approach the greatest possible number of genres, to reveal the panorama of popular music in my country. I’ll play very traditional [late nineteenth and early twentieth century] genres, like danzón and contradanza, and go from there through son y rumba to timba” [an Afro-Cuban style invented by a new generation of rebellious youth invented during the island’s post-Soviet crisis in the 1990s, which opened the island to tourism and all the outside influences that brought, including hip-hop and the multiethnic, multicultural cross-currents of New York].
“I’m not going to say that I’ll play a lot of timba,” Marcos continues, “or that I’m going to include Cuban reggaeton. But sometimes in my arrangements I incorporate a few measures of that and of Afro-Cuban hip-hop.” He also uses elements of funk, swing, or anything else that feels right. I’ve posted a few recent videos of the Afro-Cuban Allstars on my blog, CulturalOyster (http://culturaloysterwut.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-taste-of-february.html) – there’s also one of Martínez there – to give you a taste.
“In general,” Marcos says, “I think music is all one thing, and it’s atemporal – only the quality and the richness of the language is what speaks, what’s transmitted to the spectator.”

If Marcos – professor and musician – embodies the spirit of innovation in Afro-Cuban music over the long term, Martínez is the music’s U.S. present. Before he left Cuba he played with an amazing slate of rumberos, from the deeply traditional Muñequitos de Matanzas (who were here as part of the John Santos residency in 2004) and the late, great conguero / composer Tata Güines, plus batá master Pancho Quinto, one of the pioneers of the open, jazzlike, heavily improvisational, polyrhythmic rumba called guarapachangueo that evolved out of guaguancó, one of the three traditional twentieth-century rumba genres, at the end of the 1970s in Havana.
The ‘70s were a revolutionary period in Cuban music. The sounds of yankee imperialism were prohibited, but young conservatory players who are legendary today – like Chucho Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, and Arturo Sandoval – held clandestine radio parties on late-night rooftops, absorbing jazz-rock fusion and other styles coming out of the States. From this illigitimate crack in the iron curtain sprang new, experimental Cuban bands – most prominently Irakere, which included, at the time, Valdés, D’Rivera, and Sandoval. Folkloric rumberos like Pancho Quinto, exposed to these new influences, started opening up the way they played guaguancó, and guarapachangueo was born.
Guarapachangueo, like timba, incorporates incorporates elements of hip-hop and the multiethnic, multicultural cross-currents of New York. It has the young energy of timba, and sometimes resembles it, but it’s more rooted, and more rumba than anything else. And Martinez is the guarapachangueo virtuoso in the Big Apple. He’s been something of a star since he arrived in New York 18 years ago – the list of musicians he’s worked with is a knockout – but today he’s at the top of his game.

Nobody else sounds like Martinez, though he’s very modest. “I don’t think I’m a creator of anything. But I’ve been schooled by great rumberos and I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to play guarapachangueo here in the States and to raise its profile. At heart I’m an Afro-Cuban folkloric player, a rumbero from the marginal streets of Havana. I never studied in school. But I’d describe my music as Afro-Cuban with a lot of New York.
“A lot of rumberos were here before me,” Martínez continues. “How many came here in the 1960s? But I represent my generation. I came to the U.S. at a good time for Cuban music, and it’s my responsibility to keep the Cuban flag flying and to keep the music moving ahead. I’ve played with Paquito D’Rivera, with Eddie Palmieri; I worked for several years with Wynton Marsalis, who’s on my latest album. I’ve worked with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon. I’ve had the opportunity – and the curiosity – to play African music, Brazilian music – to know and share sounds from so many places is a great advantage. I absorb other music, other harmonies, for my own use. I try out new sounds – if they don’t work they go, but if they click they stay. I’ve learned a lot this way.”
Martínez’ band – it’s a quartet, but it sounds so rich and full you’d swear there were more than four players – is international, too; pianist Edgar Pantoja-Aleman is from Santiago de Cuba, but bass player Alvaro Benavides is Venezuelan and percussionist Jhair Sala is from Peru. “I don’t want to impose my own folklore or any specific sound on the others,” Martínez says. “Each of them is a leader in his own right, with his own band and his own ideas. Each contributes his own themes to my group. Together the music we make is very complete, and we play con mucho sentimiento.”
If this description makes the Pedrito Martínez group sound like just another altermodern world beat band, it’s not. Despite the confluence of influences Martínez cites, its sound is completely, unmistakably, Cuban. Yep. That’s the power of the Orishas.  



El Cantante del Pueblo (AC All Stars, song by Tirso Duarte)



(song by Juan de Marcos)

Sometimes I use some swing or funk with Afro-Cuban percussion, as I do here (below) 
                                                                          ---- Juan de Marcos




         And here's Pedrito Martnez (who's played with everybody who's anybody in New York and recorded for a number of years with the Afrobeat / Latin fusion band Yerba Buena, of which he was a founding member)  in a  video of a tune off the debut studio album for his own quartet, The Pedrito Martinez Group (2013 Motema Music).  The fabulous, cubanísima keyboardist in this clip, Ariacne Trujillo, has gone on to make her own mark, but her replacement, Edgar Pantoja-Aleman, is emerging in his own right as a force on the Cuban music scene in New York.
¡Aché!