Adios, Chavela

World-renowned Mexican cantante Chavela Vargas (who was born in Costa Rica but migrated to Mexico as a young teen) died yesterday, at 93 years of age.

Vargas’ classic rancheras, rendered in her uniquely soul-wrenching, gravelly, hard-drinking voice, will live on in the absolute force of nature that Mexican culture still is, despite the NAFTA-driven disaster of trashy transnational sweatshops, junk food, cable TV porn and the drug war.  Vargas counted Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pedro Almodovar among her close friends – and she was a major inspiration to a younger generation, especially Mallorcan diva Concha Buika (who, with Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, recently recorded a spectacular Vargas tribute album, El Ultimo Trago [Wea International, 2009]) and world music goddess Lila Downs.

The Mexican press is overflowing today with poetic tributes – if you read Spanish, see http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/08/06/espectaculos/a16n1esp  
  I won’t try to repeat the prose of Vargas’ paisanos, but I woke up this morning with an overpowering desire to share one of her signature songs (this version recorded in 2009) with my readers, so here it is:

Dios botik, as they say in Yucatec.  Thank you.  Que en paz descanse.

                                                                       --------   Susan Kepecs

Ben Sidran's Brand New Music at the Cardinal Bar

                                                                                                         SKepecs©2012

by Susan Kepecs

I went to Ben Sidran’s Salon for Secular Humanists, Arch Democrats and Freethinkers at the Cardinal Bar late last Tuesday afternoon.  This year’s incarnation of said event began on Recall night, but this was the first chance I’d had to get down there.  Just in case the news hasn’t reached you, the Salon runs every Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30 from now through August.  Our world-famous homey’s joined by two more red hot Mad City musicos, both longtime collaborators who grew up playing music with Sidran’s similarly talented son, Leo – of course I’m talkin’ about Nick Moran on bass and Louka Patenaude on guitar.  Rounding out the sound is versatile percussionist Todd Hammes.  He’s new in town; I don’t know much about him, but a quick Internet search shows he’s been getting around.

On Tuesday fourteen new Sidran-penned tunes made their debut. They're for an album he’s recording in New York next month, a Leo Sidran production. The songs, though still in workshop stage, swung smooth as silk. Sidran can jazzify Bob Dylan, rock Jewish liturgical music, and serve up sustained spoken word music history lessons while tickling the ivories. But Tuesday’s two sets were classic, no frills – just those trademark conversational vocals over straight-up blues / boogie / bebop piano.  Moran’s commanding standup bass and Patenaude’s inimitably inventive guitar licks synched seamlessly with Sidran’s style.  I found it impossible not to dance, though I did my little jitterbugs in the hallways since the Cardinal’s lovely dance floor was totally taken up with tables.

“I’m unabashedly going back to simple,” Sidran said when the band broke between sets.  “I’ve made 30 records.  I don’t care how hip this one is.  I’m going for a haunted sound.  Miles’ Kind of Blue is haunted – you can memorize it, hear every note in your head. Same with Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”  What I’m after is authenticity – that’s what’s gonna survive.  The simplest chord progressions.  Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” – that chord progression’s 300 years old. That’s why that new song sounded so familiar. Brand new music, same old song.  What could possibly go wrong?" 

That last line’s not just a rhetorical question, it’s a lyric – and maybe the title of the forthcoming album, too.  It goes with a jivey, uptempo tune that riffs on sentiments straight out of the blues: “Hey, how’s that new car workin’ out for you?  How’s that new job workin’ out for you?”

But the simplicity’s deceptive.  “Harmonically, what I’m playing isn’t much more sophisticated than Jimmy Reed’s basic chord progressions, but there are moments in the solos that are like stepping into an empty elevator shaft,” Sidran said.  “It’s the sly, ‘60s way of blues and bebop.  Mose and Monk did it.  Brand new music, same old song.  The lyrics are familiar, but they’ve got a very contemporary feel.  ‘How’s that new job workin’ out for you?’  We’ve been here before.  People are panicked.  These are tough times.  But you know, the way we win is by feelin’ good.” 

                                                                             SKepecs©2012

What feels good, Sidran contends, is clapping on the backbeat.  And that’s what the last song of the second set was all about.  

"There are people today who want us to be afraid,” he says into the mike, rocking out a blues on the keys.  “The world is coming to an end.  Tell you what – if it is coming to an end, the appropriate response is to clap on 2 and 4!  That’s right!  Rhythm!”

He tosses some Monkish, dissonant chords into the groove, then picks up where he left off with this improvised spoken word song that’s aimed smack dab at the still a little down-at-the-mouth, post-Recall audience: “I don’t know why, but I’m thinkin’ about Tommy Thompson right now.  This man is tired – but he’s out there fightin’.  Why?  Cuz the spirit don’t die!  I’m thinkin’ about Russ Feingold – he gave us 30 years, he got himself a girlfriend, he’s gone.  It’s not forever – it’s about now!  Let’s say a meteor falls on the Cardinal Bar – what’s the appropriate response?”

The people put their palms together and yell back “Clap on 2 and 4!” 

Say yeah.  See you there next week?

Dance Review: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at Overture Hall

by Susan Kepecs

Tuesday night’s concert by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was like a litmus test to see whether twentieth century American modern dance has a future a decade-plus into the twenty-first. How to approach the legacy of this artform now that its master choreographers are gone has been a matter of great debate.  Martha Graham’s company plies revived works in the name of teaching a new generation some dance history.  A concert of restored works by multimedia pioneer Alwin Nikolais, the Ririe-Woodbury Nikolais Dance Project, seen at the Wisconsin Union Theater in 2007, was nostalgic but weary.  And Merce Cunningham’s company took its final bows at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on New Year’s eve, 2011.  Only the Ailey company, among the great pioneers, has moved on under new directorship and with a substantial repertory of works by choreographers who’ve emerged since the master’s passing.  Last fall, Robert Battle – never an Ailey dancer, but a frequent company collaborator over the years – took the reins from Judith Jameison, who succeeded Ailey shortly before his death in 1989.  Tuesday night was the first opportunity I’ve had to see the company under Battle’s artistic direction.   

But the program was a mixed bag, dotted with disappointments.  The first piece, “Streams,” a minor but long Ailey piece from 1970 – a lushly lit leotard work with an electronic score and the sleekly angular vocabulary that was a hallmark of modern dance in that decade  (attitudes on supporting legs with bent knees, leg extensions in second position, leaps that land in falls) – was an odd selection.  It lacks entirely the powerful African-American identity of Ailey’s major works like “Revelations” (1960), “The River” (1970, a collaboration with Duke Ellington), or “Cry” (1971), the dance that made Judith Jameison a star.  In general “Streams” looked good.  But given the fabled strength of Ailey dancers, the occasional shaky standing legs supporting the arabesques on which much of the piece was built constituted a subtle flaw that could have been avoided with an extra touch of turnout.

Also on the bill were two pieces by Battle, neither of which I loved, and neither of which I’d seen before though both were made for the Ailey company in the ‘90s, under Jameison’s direction. “Takedeme” (1999) featured soloist Megan Jakel in a red top and fringed pants, doing what we used to call “sound theory” in Alwin Nikolais’ improv class in the 1960s.  Jakel’s rapid-fire jumps and poses, framed in a spotlight circle, looked precisely the way the soundtrack – Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II” – sounds.  The Chandra piece lends itself perfectly to this kind of choreography; Li Chiao Ping uses it to similar effect in her wacky holiday show, The Knotcracker.

Of Battle’s works I preferred “The Hunt” (2001), a tribal, drum-driven dance for six men in long, black split skirts lined in red satin that flared, flamelike, as the performers lept or spun, often in unison.  Heavily spiked with belly-to-belly jumps (backs arched, knees bent), flat-footed up-and-down jumps like little levitations, and wrenching upper torso contractions, the piece, with its spirit posession finale of frenzied yelling, jumping and falling, was the epitome of what New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella calls “muscle ballet.”   

The tensions and jazzlike structure of “Urban Folk Dance,” a 1990 rejection / attraction jitterbug for two couples by the late Ulysses Dove, were captivating.  It's worth noting that Dove studied at UW-Milwaukee in the late ‘60s with the Kirov’s Xenia Chlistwa (with whom more than a few of Tuesday night’s audience members also studied, either there or in Madison) before joining the Ailey company in 1973. Dove’s piece made stark contrast with “Journey,” a soft woman-spirit solo choregraphed by another late Ailey dancer, Joyce Trisler, and performed Tuesday night by Sarah Daley, one of the youngest dancers in the current company. 

But the soulful “Revelations” remains by far this company’s piece de resistance.  A dance-literate friend who accompanied me to the concert had never seen the master’s choreographic crown jewel; surprisingly, at least to me, she found it dated and ordinary. I’ve seen “Revelations,” an extremely painterly work loosely based on the choreographer’s own African-American childhood in Texas in the 1930s, many times, and I always find it lush and beautiful.  For me, the experience is akin to returning to the Uffizi for the Boticellis – an enriching act that’s worth repeat visits over the years.  Still, like the Boticellis, “Revelations” is now a museum piece. American modern dance, I’m afraid, is heading into history.

Gran Baile at Great Hall -- the Much-Anticipated Return of Sierra Maestra

by Susan Kepecs

September, 1997, was a month of momentous events. The world wept, watching Princess Di’s funeral at Westminster Abbey; NASA landed a global surveyor on Mars, the first mission to the red planet in 18 years; Steve Jobs, who left Apple in 1985, returned to the company he co-founded 1976; a violent earthquake shook Umbria, Italy, crumbling the vaulted ceiling of Assisi's Basilica of San Francisco, and with it Giotto’s ethereal frescoes.  And son cubano – the musical heart and soul of the big island from the 1920s to the ‘50s – busted out from behind the blockade and took the U.S. by storm.  The album Buena Vista Social Club, recorded in Havana by Ry Cooder and World Circuit Records producer Steve Gold, was released to rave reviews.  And another Cuban son outfit, Sierra Maestra, played the Club Tavern in Middleton, Wisconsin.  I wasn’t there.  Just back from a frivolous trip to Umbria I was doing penance, locked away in the stacks at Memorial Library to appease my dissertation deities.  Cardinal Bar owner Ricardo Gonzalez, who introduced Cuban music to Madison in the 1970s and with whom I had a Cuban salsa band in the early ‘80s, wasn’t there either – he was in Texas, attending to family matters.  So for González, and for me, and for all you other son (or salsa) smitten souls out there, this Friday night, March 23, is a momentous occasion.  After the long hiatus imposed by W. Bush’s post-9/11 visa blockade on Cuban artists, Sierra Maestra finally returns to Madison for a bodacious baile at UW Memorial Union’s Great Hall.

Yes, you can salsa dance to it, but son is not salsa.  Salsa is a U.S. invention that put Latin rhythms on the disco floors of New York at the end of the 1960s and is still super caliente.  In fact, son montuno, a jazzed-up, urban form of Cuban son originated in ‘40s Havana by the great Arsenio Rodríguez, is the strongest and deepest of salsa’s roots.  

But son – even son montuno – is old-school.  While the Buena Vista phenomenon, augmented with Wim Wenders’ (1999) dreamy documentary about Cuba’s great old soneros – the ones on the Buena Vista albums, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González and Compay Segundo – went international, Cuba’s youth culture was going wild for a new sound – fast, rhythmically unpredictable, rap-influenced timba.  

Today the Buena Vista boom is over.  Almost all of the old soneros are dead.  And the musicians of Sierra Maestra, who come from a younger generation, are heroes. There would be no more son if they hadn’t rescued the genre from the dustbins of pre-revolutionary history. The 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution wreaked havoc on the music industry.  Many musicians fled to the U.S.; the old-time soneros left on the island faded into obscurity.  By the late 1960s a new, politically-themed, government-approved singer-songwriter style of music, la nueva trova, emerged.

At the same time, rebellious Cuban youth took gigantic risks, listening to American rock and jazz fusion, officially prohibited – Castro called it the enemy’s music – but accessible on the radio via Miami.  The band Irakere, begun in ’73 by Chucho Valdés, today one of the world’s greatest Afro-Cuban jazz pianists, created a groundbreaking mix of dance-worthy jazz fusion that coexisted with la nueva trova because, as Paquito D’Rivera once told me, “Fidel knows nothing about music.  He prefers sports.” 

And then, in 1976, a group of students at the University of Havana decided to play son.  They called their band Sierra Maestra, after the mountain range in eastern Cuba where both son and the Revolution were born.  Juan de Marcos González, who grew up next door to Compay Segundo (and who sought out the old-time soneros, introducing them to Cooder for the Buena Vista project), was a founding member.  “People thought son was old folks’ music,” Marcos told me some years back when I interviewed him in Havana, “but because we were at the university we were able to influence our generation.  They got to like son.”

Marcos, who plays the trés, a double-strung Cuban rhythm guitar, went on to lead the Afro-Cuban All Stars, whose first album was part of the Buena Vista series.  That always-evolving big band last played Madison (Overture Hall) in March, 2009.  Meanwhile Sierra Maestra keeps on keepin’ on, playing traditional son in its many-splendored varieties.  Today, five members of the original nine are still with the outfit.

How has the group changed over the years? Eduardo Himely (bass) and Alejandro Suárez (percussion), both with Sierra Maestra since the beginning, fielded that question and a few more, from Havana via email:

CulturalOyster: How has the group evolved?

Himely: Besides Alejandro and me, the original members who are still with us are Carlos Puisseax (güiro), Virgilio Valdés (vocals, maracas) and Luis Barzaga (vocals, clave).  Our newer members are Emilio Ramos (trés), Eduardo Rico (congas, bongos, cowbell), Jesus Bello (vocals) and Yelfris Valdés (trumpet).  I think the personnel can change, but not the project’s central objective.  On that we’ve been firm – we play son.  Of course there are modern influences in our sound – despite trying to faithfully reproduce themes from the 1920s and ‘30s in the 1970s, the result is a bit distinct from what you would have heard earlier in the century.  Sierra Maestra’s never been afraid to use genres or instruimental formats that aren’t exactly classical.  On some of our songs we use electric instruments; we’ve been known to do jazz fusions and Afro-Cuban descargas that aren’t strictly son.

CulturalOyster: Like the descarga “Anabacoa,” on Tibiri Tabara (World Circuit, 1997) or “Sangre Negra,” on your 2010 (SASA Music) album Sonando Ya, which was nominated for Best Traditional Tropical Album at the Latin Grammies that year. 

Himely:  Yes. Our willingness to play outside the box has helped us achieve our own sound, which can be very difficult when you’re dedicated to playing a certain type of music.   

CulturalOyster: Son cubano has a lot of variation, and a long history.  Tell me about that.

Suárez: It’s very difficult to synthesize the evolution of son, the most popular and important genre of Cuban music.  Son was born in Oriente – the eastern part of the island – and according to most musicologists its closest relative is the changüi, a rhythm native to Guantánamo, on Cuba’s eastern edge.  By the end of the nineteenth century changüi had spread across the island, carried by the mambises [guerilla fighters] during the War of Independence.  As changüi, or early son, evolved, it adapted to the regional music played in different parts of Cuba. By the early twentieth century son appeared in the cities, in new formats – trios, quartets, septets. In the 1920s, with the advent of the phonograph, son started to be recorded, and it became popular in urban dance halls along with new foreign dance music like the Charleston.

The early small-format son bands usually were composed of the trés, six-string guitar, various percussion instruments and marimbula [a hollow wood box with metal tongues that sort of sounds like a string bass].  By the late 1930s musicians started experimenting, replacing the marimula with standup bass and introducing trumpet and piano.  In the 1940s son bands reached their maximum expression – the most famous was Arsenio Rodríguez’ band.  The bands of that decade added a second or even a third trumpet, tumbadoras [congas], and montunos [looping, syncopated piano vamps], to the delight of the dancers.  This format, the son montuno, remained popular against the new dances of the 1950s – the cha-cha-cha, the mambo, etc. 

Today the son montuno [mostly in the hands of Sierra Maestra] persists, with new shadings like the occasional addition of trombones and saxes.  And much to our satisfaction, you can still hear the original sound behind it, played on the trés, guitar, and bongó. 

CulturalOyster: Since the 1990s, everything in Cuba is timba, timba, timba.  If you want to go dancing in Havana, that’s what you get.  Here in the U.S., too, Latin youth flock to clubs to dance to timba.  In Cuba you only find son in the streets of Santiago, or by the Cathedral in la Habana Vieja, where the tourists go.  So I want to know – how is Sierra Maestra doing in Cuba?  Have you managed to inspire a new generation of soneros on the island?

Suárez: Like you say, almost everything on radio or TV in Cuba is timba.  In the ‘80s, when our band took off, a number of son groups came along, some more popular than others.  I can say that Sierra Maestra influenced the generation that followed us, keeping the word for the next generation.  I can mention names – Jóvenes Clásicos del Son, Septeto Turquino, el Son del Nené – though they’re not big-name groups.  Sierra Maestra hasn’t escaped relative obscurity, either, though we did a national tour last year to commemorate our thirty-fifth anniversary and were thrilled to discover that Sierra Maestra is very much loved and respected.  We weren’t able to do a mass event, say, playing in a public plaza, since we lack an adequate sound system, but the people still love our music. 

So there you have it.  As my friend Victoria Gutiérrez said to me one night a couple of months ago, sitting at the Cardinal’s bar talking about what’s happening in Cuban music in general and the upcoming Great Hall baile in particular, “Sierra Maestra – son el son.”

Mini Review: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the Union Theater, Thurs., March 1

by Susan Kepecs

I wasn’t going to write a review, thanks to a bad back and doctor’s orders not to sit at the computer this week.  But three days after Bela Fleck and the Original Flecktones played the Union Theater, I’m still obsessed.  “Sunset Road” (from the concert, but originally recorded on the band’s first, eponomyously titled 1990 Warner Brothers album) loops continuously through my head.  While trying to do other things I find myself surfing the web, hunting YouTube videos – none of which do justice to the sheer genius of this band live in performance. But here’s a goodie, shot in Prague in ’09, featuring the original Flecktones – Fleck himself, the banjo maestro; piano man / blues harpist Howard Levy (aka Skokie Slim), and the Wooten Brothers – bass boss Victor and the indomitable FutureMan, inventor of the amazing Drumitar:

For the Mad City show wildman bluegrass fiddler and frequent Flecktone collaborator Casey Driessen joined the quirky quartet on several tunes. 

The Flectones’ unique sound defies classification, so I’ll just call it jazz. Thursday night the band carried off some of the most simpatico improvisation you could ever hope to hear. These players are alchemists wielding a host of harmonic structures and a bag of tricky time signatures, melding genres you know well into sparkly new material.  Sure, it’s hip to mix styles these days, but it's the Flecktones who're blasting the phenomenon we call music into the future.  No wonder the title of the new Original Flecktones album (Entertainment One Music, 2011) is Rocket Science.

Here’s how the blastoff sounds, rendered in brief, inefficient words: Fleck’s fleet-fingered licks travel full-circle, welding bluegrass, bop, and hints of the banjo’s West African roots.  Levy tosses snippets of “On Wisconsin” and Bach Cantata No. 147 ("Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring") into a Chicago-style blues harp solo that sounds like a whole band all by itself; he plays a wry stride piano run, then stretches out on a Monk-like solo, sneaking in a sole montuno.  Wooten’s funky, funky slap bass synchs with a thousand heartbeats, weaving whole cloth from a diverse, full-house audience.  FutureMan dances out polyrhythms, Drumitar in hand, sitting on a cajón that sports a pair of metal castanets for added nuance.

And that's not all.  The Flecktones play more for the joy of it than for the money. They ran at least twenty minutes over the standard 90-minute show before tearing into their finale, a Flecktoned take on the Beverley Hillbillies theme. The crowd, cheering throughout the show, went wild. Two roaring standing ovations brought two rafter-raising encores.  That’s proof enough for me.  The Union Theater, which shuts down for rennovation this summer, re-opens in fall, 2014.  From my opinionated perspective, the Flecktones belong on the bill for the grand re-opening season.

Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Will Vanquish Winter's Chill

                             John Mosca on trombone, second row, second from right

by Susan Kepecs

Real jazz is a rebellious artform.  It pushes against conventional boundaries.  And as often happens in periods of popular resistance, there’s a jazz renaissance afoot – you can see it in the rising generation of talented leaders playing straight-ahead bop like Rudresh Mahanthappa and Ambrose Akinmusire, and even in the increase in jazz programming at Madison clubs and theaters.  There hasn’t been this much good jazz outside the Latin canon since the revolutionary 1960s.  Of course, the new wellspring of not-pop didn’t bubble up on its own.  Among the handful of robust currents that's borne the bop banner along unbroken is a big band, the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, which takes the Wisconsin Union Theater stage next Saturday, Feb. 4.  The UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra opens.

In the ‘60s, when the VJO got its start, there weren’t a lot of jazz orchestras left.  Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who usually worked in small combo format, produced a few orchestral works back then, and a few big jazz bands have formed since – the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra began playing in the mid-‘90s, and yes, the Madison Jazz Orchestra is even older than that.  But only the VJO – originally the Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra – is a direct link to those few whopping big bands of earlier decades that lasted past the World Wars; Jones worked with Count Basie for a number of years, while Lewis toured with Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman.  But rather than reiterate what you can find on the VJO’s website, http://www.vanguardjazzorchestra.com/ (also take a look at the nice rundown on the band’s current players by Isthmus Jazz Series Coordinator Ben Ferris, himself a member of the UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra, on the Union Theater’s Green Room blog, http://uniontheater-greenroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/vanguard-jazz-orchestras-outstanding.html), here’s my short interview with jazz educator and VJO lead trombone / director John Mosca, whose precise answers to my questions provide the whole story in a neat nutshell:  

CulturalOyster: You’ve been with the band since ’75 – both Jones and Lewis were still there then.  What was the music like when it was closer to the swing roots of big band jazz?

Mosca: I used to go to the Village Vanguard as a teen and stand in line to get in – that line ran down to the end of the block.  When I got into the band Thad and Mel were both still there, but Thad left for a job with Danish radio a couple years later.  Mel was with us till he passed in 1990.  One key thing they brought was the concept of swinging – it’s elusive but essential – it’s the ritmic feeling we generate that comes from Thad’s music and Mel’s drumming.  Now we have John Riley on drums – he was a tremendous student of Mel’s, and he keeps the swing consistent.  The band feels good playing that way.  There aren’t that many veterans of the original band left, but we do keep the music going in the same vein.

        Thad and Mel also pioneered changes in the way big bands work.  They gave equal weight to the written aspect and the improvised aspect.  That was a big innovation.   Thad took inspiration from Coltrane [Thad’s younger brother, Elvin, was Coltrane’s drummer when Jones and Lewis started their orchestra] and opened up the solos – they were a lot longer than they were with the old big bands, like Basie’s.  We’ve tried to preserve the original precepts we learned from Thad and Mel.  When somebody’s soloing with a trio it’s a bona fide small group experience.  But we also enjoy the big ensemble, and people want to hear the big band play, so we mix that up a lot.

CulturalOyster: What’s changed more recently?

Mosca: We’ve kept the older repertory current – we still play a lot of Thad’s stuff, that’s where the band lives.  But what’s different is that now more of our music is true composed.  This is a back and forth pattern that’s happened in big bands over the years.  There used to be much more written music before the ‘60s.  When [the recently deceased] Bob Brookmeyer came on [as composer/arranger] he went back to a more true composed idea, though with a very modern slant.

        And there’s a generational turnover – that’s one of the great elements, each generation adds different qualities.  In terms of arrangers, Jim McNeely, who’s a tremendous pianist, has really stepped up to take his place alongside Brookmeyer and Jones.  McNeely was there with Thad and Mel and there with Brookmeyer – he really absorbed their lessons.  He’s a great swinger and he can write that way, but he can also stretch out and do other things.  There’s never been a surplus of great writers – they’re treasures.  Though there are quite a few young writers doing good work.  I like some of the things Maria Schneider does – I’m feeling kind of optimistic about the future of orchestral jazz.  The big thing is the loss of performance and recording opportunities that nurture this kind of talent.  All of us have to devote a great deal of time to trying to do business and to generate places to play.

CulturalOyster: I’d always rather experience jazz in a nightclub, club, sitting close to the music with friends and a drink in my hand.  How do you feel about playing under the proscenium arch?

Mosca: The club is the generator where you work things out.  That’s where the music is created and polished, but sometimes it’s nice to bring it out, to have room to play, to blow into a bigger space.  We do try to set up up as close to the front of the stage as possible – we’ve run afoul of firelaws by going past curtain laws.  But we’re pretty successful at creating something of the Vanguard experience on the big stage.  This brings up another issue, though – now that so many club gigs are recorded digitally or streamed, the club engagement itself is in danger.  People are less likely to go out on a limb if they can sit at home and find everything for free on their computers. 

CulturalOyster: Is there anything else I should know?

Mosca: We’re looking forward to Madison.  It’s been a long time since we were there.  Hopefully, the weather will be – well, tolerable!

        [UW School of Music prof] Richard Davis is a VJO alum – we’d love to have him come up on the stage.  We still have some music written exclusively for him.

        And oh, yeah – you can add that we’re all good union members!

Picking Tickets: Spring, 2012

by Susan Kepecs

I’ve been so excited about the Million Signatures, and so bummed out about the Packers’ loss to the Giants last Sunday, that I almost forgot about the performing arts this week.  But when the snow started to fly and the thermometer hit zero I locked myself inside with the websites for the city’s main performing arts palaces.  After poring over what’s on tap, I’ve compiled my ticket picks.

Among the several opportunities to see dance performance, only Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Overture Hall, March 27) is on my list.  The Ailey company will look somewhat different than it did last time it was here, at the old Madison Civic Center in 2002.  Artistic director Judith Jameison, who took the reins from Ailey in 1989, right before he died of AIDS, retired last year.  Her hand-picked successor, Robert Battle, is controversial – never a member of the company, he’s an outsider of sorts, though he choreographed several works for it while Jameison was at the helm. Battle has brought in nine new dancers, plus a number of new repertory works – though there’s no new choreography on the pre-announced Madison program. By audience demand Ailey’s “Revelations,” modern dance’s greatest hit, is on the bill for every stop in the 2012 North American Tour, which begins in February.  The rest of the program changes up; in Madison it includes a lesser Ailey work from the 1970s, “Streams,” and two pieces Battle made for the company’s male dancers, “Takedeme” (1999) and “The Hunt” (2001).  I haven’t seen either of these works, but The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella – by far the best dance writer in the country – depicts them as heavy-handed muscle ballet.  I suspect this will not be my favorite Ailey company performance, but it’s an important one.  The reviews of Battle’s first season have been mixed, though he’s only beginning to reveal his hand.  What he does in the next few years will reveal whether modern dance, a twentieth-century innovation, has a future.  Among the greats, Merce Cunningham’s company has closed up shop; Martha Graham’s has become a mere legacy troupe.  Paul Taylor is still in command, though he’s 80-some years old.  Only the Ailey company, always bold, is striking out in a new direction.

From the bounteous music options, I’ll take five.  In the ‘60s, pianist Herbie Hancock (Overture Hall, March 15) was (along with Horace Silver) the potentate of hardbop piano.  The hippie jazz freaks of Miffland were head over heels in love with him; we wore the vinyl rings off his greatest hits, “Watermelon Man,” “Cantaloupe Island” and “Maiden Voyage;” all three are permanently etched in my memory banks.  In the ‘70s Hancock followed Miles Davis, with whom he played while becoming a leader in his own right, down the fusion rabbit hole. In the decades that followed, Hancock experimented with pop and hip hop and ended up with a pair of schlocky albums stacked with guest stars like Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Chaka Kahn and Juanes – River: The Joni Letters (Verve, 2007), an ode to Joni Mitchell (who appears on the album, which somehow won a Grammy), and The Imagine Project (Herbie Hancock Records, 2010).  So why is Hancock on my list?  Chalk it up to old times’ sake, plus advertising – the video clip posted on Overture’s website, which I think is from 2006, shows the veteran hardbopper playing, yes, “Cantaloupe Island.”  His band for this event is TBA, and there’s no telling what tunes he’ll choose, but there’s no doubt he can still just play jazz, when he’s so inclined.

On the other hand, the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (Wisconsin Union Theater, Feb. 4) – the very sophisticated Monday night house band at Manhattan’s eponymous West Village club – has always played honest-to-god jazz.  This big band, with its 15 heavy-hitting players, was born in ’66 of the fortuitous collaboration between two forward-looking orchestral jazz giants: trumpeter and composer / arranger Thad Jones, who’d been a soloist with swing king Count Basie, and drummer Mel Lewis, who honed his chops in Stan Kenton’s jazz orchestra.  The VJO brought big band jazz straight into the postbop epoch, and despite huge changes in the times and personnel, it’s still true to its own brand of big band swing.

The wacky, whip-smart, genre-busting jazz fusion band Bela Fleck and the Flecktones stops in Mad City (Union Theater, March 1) on its much-touted reunion tour.  Banjo master Fleck and the Wooten brothers (“Futureman,” inventor of the drumitar, and virtuoso bassist Victor) have been together since the band’s very first gig on PBS in 1988, but this is the first time they’ve played with pianist / harmonicist Howard Levy since 1992.  There’s a new album, Rocket Science (E1 Records, 2011), to go with the tour, though the promo lit implies the band’ll mix new tunes with hits from the three albums they made before Levy split. 

         Nigerian saxophonist / vocalist Seun Kuti and his high-energy brass and percussion rich big band Egypt 80 (Wisconsin Union Theater, April 12) blew the roof off the WUT on their US debut tour in June, 2007.  Kuti told me in an interview then that he’s not as wild as his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late, legendary king of Afrobeat and revolutionary politics.  Maybe not, but like Fela, Seun is the consummate activist, taking the stage in support of myriad African causes.  This month he's been in the midst of the Occupy Nigeria movement, performing his take-no-prisoners political songs onstage in Lagos during mass protests against the end of the fuel subsidies that help keep prices down for the underpaid masses – President Goodluck Jonathan’s concession to deregulation demanded by the IMF.  A week into the protests Jonathan restored part of the subsidy, but count on Kuti to keep up the good fight. 

         I saved the best – my personal favorite – for last.  When the going gets tough, as it will when state GOP challenges to the Recall signatures plus all those right wing corporate-funded ads aimed at the national presidential race heat up, we get the orishas’ blessings, right on time.  Straight from Havana, Sierra Maestra – the group that rescued Cuban son from the dustbins of prerevolutionary history in the 1970s and has carried la musica forward ever since – plays Memorial Union’s Great Hall on March 23.  I’m listening to their latest CD, Sonando Ya (2010, SASA Music), right now.  It takes me to my happy place, despite the freezing fog outside.  Yo soy sonera de corazón – I live to dance to Cuban son.  You will, too.  Aché.