Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, from left Kris Davis, Daryl Johns, Immanuel Wilkins, Kewku Sumbry; taken from stream and edited
Immanuel Wilkins Quartet at Smalls
I mentioned APAP in last week’s writeup. Generally, in one of these years when I’d be in New York for mid-January, soaking up the remnants of arts presenters’ bounties, I’d be catching between 6 and 20 sets over a few days of Winter Jazz Fest. WJF’s excellent pivot of panels and performances is going on through March, but I caught a few streams that gave me some of that feeling.
The set that gave me the heftiest dose of that energy came from a stalwart of the classic NYC clubs and at the vanguard of this new digital era, Smalls. Immanuel Wilkins (also a standout on Joel Ross’ astonishing record last year) and one of our finest alto players, lead a striking quartet with Kris Davis (who closed out my previous New York trip with an explosion) on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums.
The group wove together songs into unbroken suites, building landscapes and shifting them. Simmering, glistening ballads jostled with ecstatic classic fire music. Long, screeching cries curled like smoke into gorgeous melodies. Textures played out and expanded, then splintered and came together.
This set was everything I want from a band coming out of the jazz tradition. It made me miss New York, it made me miss walking down to Dick’s Den on a good night, and it made me miss being in the room; at the same time, it reminded me how lucky I am to have this option.
From left: Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, Shazad Ismaily; taken from stream and edited
Love in Exile at Jazz Gallery
Jazz Gallery continues to present a wealth of fascinating programming in its streaming iteration and I was enthralled by their trio this week of pianist Vijay Iyer, multi-instrumentalist Shazad Ismaily (both of whom I’ve seen many times) and vocalist Arooj Aftab whose name pricked my consciousness when she played a Big Ears but I’d never seen.
This was an astonishing, glowing hour of music. Mostly working in these slow, unfolding oceanic tempos, the trio displayed an uncanny telepathy. On one piece, Iyer’s exploded flurries of his classic diamond hard-and-glistening attack into spaces left by Aftab’s silky melodies and Ismaily’s circular, hypnotic bass. Another used that tempo to expand into a rich, cinematic, baroque ballad, riding accumulations into a majestic cascade.
Other pieces had Ismaily bringing in a droning keyboard tone to underpin a dual longing between Aftab and Iyer. Beautiful and beguiling.
Espíritu; shot taken from stream and edited
Espíritu at Under the Radar
Caught up on the rest of the previous week’s Under the Radar and my favorite piece, Espíritu, came from the Chilean company Teatro Anónimo and the pen of Trinidad González.
It focuses on – mostly young – people grappling with the deep sickness of ennui and hopelessness. As one character says early on, “We are just a group of useless people with a great plan to stop the destruction of the world.”
That plan staggers and stumbles, people are wracked by cruelty and driven into impoverished fantasies that pass that cruelty on through jagged vignettes. Lines like “People yell at me and that makes them happy…Sometimes they think they’re making love but it’s something different from love. Do they dream?” and “If I were your father I’d burn that notebook and send you off to fight a war,” haunted me for days after seeing this.
If I were managing a company, I’d program a double bill of this with Matt Slaybaugh’s The Absurdity of Writing Poetry but there are probably dozens of plays about fighting despair with art, even, especially, when it feels hopeless, this would productively spark against. It made me miss UTR, made me miss NYC, and made me miss the theaters where I first loved work like this in the Wexner Center and at Available Light.
My TimeHop reminded me that last year, and three years ago, I was in NYC for festivals around APAP, which is always one of the most invigorating parts of any year I work it in.
From left: Kirk Knuffke, Gerald Cleaver, James Brandon Lewis, taken from stream and edited
James Brandon Lewis, Kirk Knuffke, and Gerald Cleaver at Arts for Art Inc, 01/06/2021
Of the overlapping black music traditions, relatively few hands dig into the fertile intersection between R&B and free jazz. Arts for Art – a storied non-profit that hosts the annual Vision Festival among other services to the culture – kicked off their 2021 with one of the finest examples of the sparks that fly when those two forms hit one another: a trio of sax player James Brandon Lewis, cornet player Kirk Knuffke, and drummer Gerald Cleaver.
As Lewis said in the post-set discussion, “Charles Gayle and Grover Washington, Jr. both came from the same place I did, Buffalo.” This trio wove excerpts of the Bill Withers classics “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Just the Two Of Us,” the latter a collaboration with Washington and a massive hit, along with Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll Be Free” into an unbroken 45-minute meditation and exultation.
Lewis’s liquid tone and Knuffke’s sharp, jabbing punctuation aligned on deep hooks like the revolving “I know” section of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” building up the tension and exploding that feeling into a bonfire of abstraction. That jousting coiled into a mournful funeral march before clicking into a more urgent, insistent gear.
Through all of these changes, Cleaver’s drums commented and steered the ship. The one section where he slid into head knocking funk beats felt like an unexpected blast of sun cracking velvet clouds, then as soon as I grasped it, he and the trio were onto something else.
Everyone in this trio intimately understood both musical forms and used the tropes for their cathartic power as well as misdirection. They didn’t shuffle free playing and dance music; they burned them into something fresh and personal.
Under the Radar, presented by The Public Theater
One of the brightest lights in my personal APAP – and the conduit for many of my favorite things at the Wexner Center every year – is the Public’s Under The Radar fest. This international sampling of moving, riveting performance art and theater pivoted brilliantly to online this year. I’ve checked about half of it so far and there hasn’t been a dud in the bunch.
From the innovative Instagram component of Rich Kids
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran by Javaad Alipoor
This two hander – which won a prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – featured Alipoor and Kirsty Housley narrating – with dazzling imagery the self-destructive microcosm of the idle rich in Tehran. In doing so, they draw out heartbreaking truths about the decline of civilizations, the scars of colonialism, and the blur between long-term consequences and immediate decisions.
Full of poison-dagger lines I was still chewing over days later like “There isn’t an anthropocene that connects us, there’s a scar that divides;” vaporwave summed up as “A ghost made of bits and pieces of a past that never quite was;” and a description of Dubai as “It’s like long generations of the past returning eternally to party with them.”
From left: Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran. Taken from stream and edited
the motown project by Alicia Hall Moran.
One of our finest American singers, plumbing the rich terrain between Opera and popular music, Alicia Hall Moran assembled a ferocious band for this, including her husband Jason Moran on piano, Reggie Washington on bass, LaFrae Sci on drums, and Thomas Flippin on guitar, alongside fellow powerhouse singers Barrington Lee and Steven Herring.
Moran drew connections between the Motown songbook and classical “art music,” giving both sides equal weight without sanding down either’s essence, and wove them into a crushing portrait of desire. An aria from The Magic of Figaro sparked off the Holland-Dozier-Holland classic “Sugarpie, Honeybunch.”A torturously slow “Heat Wave” was a languid blast from better seasons. A “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” drew every nuance out of that Stevie Wonder classic without bogging it down. If I see something better this year – even after theatres open – it’s been a good damn year.
“Are you even here? You’re a relic of a dying empire. The ghost of a glorious future that never came.”
-Sarah Gancher, Russian Troll Farm
Salt given me at Under The Radar’s Salt
Live:
I was lucky to see about 15 shows – almost all outstanding – before doors started slamming shut. These 8 grabbed me hard and wouldn’t let go. Their memories are still burned into my brain this many months later. Photos are taken from press either given directly to me or on the company/creator’s official website.
Salt by Selina Thompson, directed by Dawn Walton (01/11/2020 – Public Theatre, Under the Radar, NYC) – Sometimes – and this might be my favorite part of seeing theatre and especially my favorite part of Under the Radar, I see work by a playwright who’s new to me and the voice alone burns a layer of skin off me and makes me feel both more and differently. Selina Thompson’s personal-historical-poetic dive into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Salt, masterfully acted by Rochelle Rose, did that to me this year. I walked out babbling and as hungry for more of her work as any writing of the last decade.
Body Comes Apart by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith (01/12/2020 – New York Live Arts, NYC) – This vivisection of expectations, trauma, and freedom balanced an unsparing dedication to truth with a supernova love for the world. Body Comes Apart was a physical hour of dance, and acting was a whirlwind from which I couldn’t look away. It avoided platitudes and simplification but burned with a clarity that made its unanswered questions cut even deeper. I could have seen this three times and still tried to grasp it.
Medea by Simon Stone after Euripides, directed by Simon Stone (01/12/2020 – BAM, NYC) – I’m a sucker for the Greeks and I’d never seen Bobby Cannavale on stage. Something felt very fitting about seeing Stone’s ferocious, knives-out take on Euripides here in the same theatre I saw my favorite Hedda Gabler. The adaptations to the play were interesting, aided by vibrant video. My brain pinballed between the remarkable acting – Cannavale, Rose Byrne, Dylan Baker – and the wrenching image of ash falling on that pristine white stage, both stuck with me well after the next day’s flight home.
The Motherfucker With the Hat, photo by Nick Lingnofski
Or by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Rowan Winterwood (01/17/2020 – Actors Theatre) – Actors Theatre’s relationship with MadLab for smaller-scale indoor plays continued to bear fruit this year, even as they had to cancel what looked like an exciting outdoor season. Or was a delightful drawing room sex romp around the fascinating historical character Aphra Behn (played brilliantly by Michelle Weiser) with crackling support from Andy Woodmansee and McLane Nagy as the other legs of the triangle. Winterwood’s sizzling direction made this a hot, funny winter diversion when I needed it most.
The Motherfucker With the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Chari Arespacochaga (01/23/2020 – Short North Stage) – Short North Stage doesn’t always get enough credit for their dark, low-to-the-ground plays in the Green Room. Their Motherfucker With the Hat was another triumph in that lane. Arespacochaga directed it with the right mix of Greek tragedy and cage match, a stellar cast orbited around a volcanic Raphael Ellenberg.
The Bridge Called My Ass by Miguel Gutierrez (01/25/2020 – presented by the Wexner Center) – Gutierrez’s bilingual piece mixed puns, everyday action, and flights of fancy into something I’d never seen before. I didn’t always understand it but I was always enraptured.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, photo by Jeff Busby
A Doll’s House Part 2 by Lucas Hnath, directed by Michael Garrett Herring (01/30/2020 – Red Herring Theater) – There have been a few times I’ve seen a Columbus production I felt improved on New York, and this was the most recent example. Herring stripped away the ba-dum-bum sitcom rhythm that sank the Broadway version of this for me the night I saw it and made Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen glow like a bruise. All stellar performances, especially Sonda Staley’s for-the-ages take on Nora.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes by Back to Back Theater (02/13/2020 – presented by the Wexner Center) – One of my favorite previews I’ve ever written. I was so glad I held off, skipping this at Under The Radar so I could go into it cold when it played my town. A more complicated bit of metatheatre than the first work of theirs I loved, Ganesh Vs The Third Reich, but brillant and arresting. A look at how much “acting” we all do in making our voices heard and how much marginalized people have to work past just to get their voices heard, to not be seen as a monolithic interest. If this was the last live performance I saw, I went out high.
Online:
We Need Your Listening, screenshot from stream and edited
Theatre feels like a circuit between the stage and the audience, even more than music, to me. But for me, this immediate, physical art reaped the greatest rewards as companies tried to find ways to make work that still felt like theater while wholly embracing the new media. I deeply hope many of us can find ways to continue to make things accessible after we can all gather in a room again.
It would be a true shame for these opportunities for people with disabilities or other reasons not to be part of the physical exchange of energy, to finally get a wider range of options and then have them taken away.
Things that moved and inspired me with virtual theatre:
Zoom readings run by local stalwarts Krista Lively Stauffer and Tim Browning with their Virtual Theatre Project gave me the chance to catch Douglas Whaley’s phenomenal The Turkey Men (I missed its premiere run when I was in Italy last year), revisit the terrific Red Herring two-hander Thicker Than Water, and dip into remarkable work from our astounding pool of talent.
Established companies pivoted with aplomb and grace:
Abbey Theatre’s The Sissy Chronicles, photo provided by Joe Bishara
Short North Stage revisited shows they’d loved and couldn’t find space for in their schedule previously like the moving early Andrew Lippa John & Jen and the delightfully raunchy Off-Broadway hit by Howard Crabtree and Mark Waldrop When Pigs Fly. They also used their connections to get new material for these revivals while also building new work like Quarantine With the Clauses.
New CATCO Artistic Director Leda Hoffmann met the challenge of her first season in town coinciding with the pandemic and excelled with marvelous Idris Goodwin shorts, Plays For an Antiracist Tomorrow, bringing in legacy CATCO artists as well as fresh blood, then acclaimed Julienna Gonzalez adapted her Detroit Christmas Carol into a Columbus version under Hoffmann’s direction.
Joe Bishara came into his own with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre giving life to exciting pieces from artists like Mark Schwamberger and Nikki Davis.
Red Herring provided astounding social dramas and made steps toward a hybrid experience.
The plethora of archival work was an embarrassment of riches, from American Conservatory Theatre’s take on Lydia Diamond’s Toni Stone to the Goodman’s hilarious and heartbreaking Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls or The African Mean Girls Play.
The Elaborate Entry of Chad Deity, screenshot taken from stream and edited
The New Group, Play-Per-View, and more presented riveting reunion readings, giving new life to great plays from past seasons. I especially loved Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian, Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entry of Chad Deity, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.
I was in awe of groups that created new work from tools not intended for this purpose. Magic came from relatively straightforward narrative work like Mona Mansour’s The Beginning Days of True Jubilation, Theatre of War’s Antigone in Ferguson, and Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm. to more ephemeral work like We Need Your Listening by Velani Dibba, Ilana Khanin, Elizagrace Madrone, Stephen Charles Smith, Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane’s Come Together Revisited, and Theatre Mitu’s </remnant>.
Antigone in Ferguson, screenshot taken from stream and edited
Even in the dark times, there was still joy if you looked, and I am as grateful as ever people took on these burdens to bring it to us.
Fall is benefitting from more seasoning to groups trying to make work in this difficult time and time to adjust to the new tools and circumstances. Almost like a real October, I was excited by more than I had time to fit in even if more of it was on my own couch. This week does not look to let up. What are you all enjoying?
From left, Bobby Floyd and Byron Stripling. Screenshots taken from stream and edited
Music:One Night Only, an annual fundraiser for the Jazz Arts Group
I don’t go to the Columbus Jazz Orchestra as often as I probably should, but every year brings a reminder of what a stellar organization we’re lucky to have. As the current director – great trumpeter, damn fine bandleader, and one of the best cheerleaders for jazz or any music any city is lucky to have – Byron Stripling said in his introduction, Ray Eubanks created a fantastic nonprofit that’s benefiting this city with its relationships with touring artists, composers, and soloists and especially its world-renowned education program.
Usually this great event either falls on a Pink Elephant Friday or when we’re out of town so taking part delighted me – and the execution warmed my heart. It’s hard to beat a house band like the Bobby Floyd Trio. They provided muscular and delicate support to Stripling on swaggering classics like “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” and “When The Saints Go Marching In.”
Fruits from the educational arm of JAG provided highlights throughout the program. Floyd played jubilant, three-dimensional organ behind young phenom Micah Thomas (who I saw bring the house down in a CJO performance with John Clayton and Joshua Redman and has a debut album collecting raves this year) on “Maple Leaf Rag.”
A tight quintet of Columbus Youth Jazz Orchestra alums who are setting local stages on fire these days, including George DeLancey and Reggie Jackson, tore through Hank Marr’s epic late-night anthem “Greasy Spoon.” Another nod to Columbus history came with vocalist-on-the-rise Sydney McSweeney blowing the roof off on the Frank Loesser standard “Never Will I Marry,” whose definitive version came from legendary Columbus diva Nancy Wilson.
This was a stunning reminder of the beautiful jazz scene nurtured in this town, where it stands right now, and will be whenever we come out of this and can all be together.
From left: Laura Benanti, Antonio Banderas and Orchestra, IMAKEMADBEATS. Screenshots taken from stream and edited
Music: Tuesday Communing: Musicians for Marquita presented by Third Man Records and Moving Forward by the Public Theater.
My favorite season still drenches me in a little taste of the Fall FOMO. With that, I flipped back and forth between two streams that epitomize what music and theater can do at their best, a sense of community, connection, and transcendence.
Third Man Records in Nashville threw an old-school telethon, replete with cheesy counting board, phone bank, and an enthusiastic host in Cocaine and Rhinestones host Tyler Mahan Coe, to benefit Senate candidate Marquita Bradshaw.
Between raising over $15,000, they packed these three hours with a dazzling cross-section of current Tennessee music, poetry, and comedy. Standards and classics made an appearance, including Kathy Mattea’s nuanced take on Tom Paxton’s “Whose Garden Was This,” Steelism’s gorgeous pedal steel-driven instrumental cover of “People Get Ready,” Logan Ledger’s stirring read of “Walk Through This World With Me,” and Lolo’s epic “Ooh Child.”
Hip-hop, probably the most prominent genre people my age and younger associate with Tennessee, showed up strong, including the fun, disco-tinged instrumentals of Memphis’ IMAKEMADBEATS, an excellent tune from Daisha McBride, and others. I regret not catching the name of the first act – drop it in the comments if you were more on the ball? – another instrumental hip-hop act started the evening off with one of its highlights: a cut-up of Bradshaw’s speeches interwoven with toffee-sweet-and-crunchy synth lines and stutter beats.
One highlight of this was the proximity of the artists, and the leveling the telethon interspersed superstars like Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Robyn Hitchcock and Emma Swift, or Margo Price with lifers like John Paul Keith – who brought the house down with his topical “I Don’t Want to Live in a World Like That” – freak-folk stalwarts The Cherry Blossoms and the duo of John McCauley and Vanessa Carlton.
These artists rubbed (virtual) shoulders with on-the-rise acts like the singer of Thema and the Sleaze, Caitlin Rose (who I’ve been a massive fan of since The Stand-In and her new song “We’re Only Lovers and They’re Only Lies” made me even hungrier for a new album), Caroline Spence, and Birds of Chicago.
Everything about Musicians for Marquita was so charming and so well done that I felt a pang when I flipped to the other good choice that evening, but I got rewarded when I did.
It’s a rare year when The Public doesn’t make my year-end list – this year’s going to be no exception with some stellar stuff from Under The Radar in January. Their more polished benefit was full of sincere gushing – from stars like David Hyde Pierce, John Leguizamo, and Phylicia Rashad – we all feel in our hearts.
The Public also made time to acknowledge what we’ve lost in time and gathering, with a lovely song from The Visitor (which was in rehearsals when the order came down) and a preview of Under the Greenwood Tree, which would have revived its 2017 production for all of New York at the free Shakespeare in the Park series.
The music was less the focus here, but everything was brilliantly done, including Antonio Banderas and Laura Benanti’s duet for the ages on A Chorus Line; Sting with “Practical Arrangement,” a witty ballad from his own Public-aided musical The Last Ship; and a heart-wrenching closer I missed the performer’s name on, from a musical adaptation of Disney’s Hercules, with the echoing line “Though it hurts to be human, count me in.”
From Left, Colin Gawel with Sam Brown; Marcy Mays with Andy Harrison and Sam Brown
Music: Marcy Mays and Colin Gawel at Ace of Cups.
Pulling along that thread of “count me in,” went to see my first live music (aside from a few songs for Anne’s birthday the Stockweliots’ back yard) since the shutdown, on the patio of the last bar I was in before everything closed (and the home of the most shows I’d seen before lockdown), Ace of Cups.
It was slow going before local hero Kyle Sowash stepped up to book some shows on Ace’s patio and this went a long way to provide a template for safely throwing shows for intimate crowds in these times (I’ve also heard very good things about Natalie’s efforts in this direction). We caught two great friends who also did a lot to represent Columbus music to the outside world in the mid-’90s.
Marcy Mays, Ace owner and one of my favorite Columbus songwriters, opened with a set of raw magic on her electric guitar, backed for about half of it by veterans Andy Harrison on guitar and bass (doubling on sound) and Sam Brown on drums. Mays hit Scrawl classics like “Please Have Everything” (which she announced was inspired by the late D. Boon) and “Your Mother Wants to Know” along with tunes by her more recent bands like The Damn Thing and a blistering song by her underrated hard rock juggernaut Night Family (featuring what Harrison called “a dose of cock rock ridiculousness” on a perfect over-the-top solo).
Gawel picked up Mays’ smoking gauntlet, and gave us one of his best, most focused solo sets in recent memory. Opening with new material could be a risky move with as beloved a catalogue as his, but his opening gambit, “Sensational Things,” was as good a song as he’s written, finding a sweet spot in the kind of paean to finding peace and stability that’s even harder to write than it is to live. Most of the other new songs were also winners, especially “Standing On the Rocks” with a big, infectious hook I still have in my head writing this the next day.
Gawel filled the rest of the set with Watershed crowd-pleasers including his tangy Kinks riff “Small Doses”, “Mercurochrome”, and aching ballad “Over Too Soon” and highlights of his Lonely Bones/Bowlers’ work with “Superior”’s undeniable hook and the cajun shuffle “Chemotherapy.”
He also sprinkled some brilliant covers through the set. “Over Too Soon” turned into a humid version of one of the best Replacements’ songs, “Swinging Party.” An appropriately caustic version of The Kinks’ “Property” prompted “God, I have to do something sweet after that.” And his encore started with a righteous version of Columbus rock godfather Willie Phoenix’s “Hey Little Girl,” returning Sam Brown to the drums.
Screen of Distance 