Stephanie Elliott discusses performance poet Joy Harjo

The concert by Joy Harjo with Larry Mitchell in Crowell Concert Hall has been canceled. The Wesleyan University Box Office will be in contact with ticket holders regarding refunds.

Joy Harjo. Photo by Karen Kuehn.

Wesleyan University Press has just published a fantastic new collection of poems by the powerful poet, Joy HarjoSoul Talk, Song Language has been on the table in my office for the past few weeks, in anticipation of her visit to Wesleyan. I can’t tell you the number of people who have come in for meetings who’ve said, “I love Joy Harjo!  Is she coming?”

We’re delighted to have Ms. Harjo and her longtime musical partner, rock guitarist and Grammy award-winning producer Larry Mitchell, perform at Crowell Concert Hall next week. Click here to visit her YouTube Channel.

I sat down with Stephanie Elliott from WesPress to talk about Ms. Harjo and her work. Ms. Elliott said: “[Joy] Harjo’s work is a search for truth—a questioning of purpose and identity—as much as it is an expression of beauty. Her poetry embodies a reconstruction of the tribal past, and is cause for reflection on the continuing confrontation between Indigenous and Anglo civilizations.”  When I asked her why Ms. Harjo’s poetry is so important and relevant today, she said:  “With projects like Brazil’s proposed Belo Monte dam and the development Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands threatening indigenous people in calamitous ways, [Joy] Harjo’s artistic expressions are especially timely.”

Joy Harjo’s performance invokes spoken word, storytelling, and song—punctuated by her own mean jazz saxophone. Her character-driven narratives are inspired by the traditions of her people as well as by her observations from around the globe.  According to Ms. Elliott, “her work is about healing, demonstrating how poetry, music, storytelling, and theater can bring new understanding to our lives.”  The music is jazzy and soulful and punctuates her insightful poetry in surprising ways.

Here’s hoping you’ll join us next Friday for this special treat.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

AnDa Union: A Band That Will Leave You Breathless (Sept. 23)

Music concerts at the Center for the Arts are programmed by the CFA’s Concert Committee, made up of faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students in Music, and CFA staff. We are so delighted to be opening the Crowell Concert Series with the magnificent AnDa Union, a group of young musicians from Mongolia whose virtuosity and artistry will, quite simply, leave you breathless.

Andrew Colwell, a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan whose research focuses on Mongolian music sent me a ringing endorsement after seeing them at a recent stop on their U.S. tour:

“This friendly bunch of established musicians … were a hit with the crowd, who clapped and clapped for more throat-singing, horse-head fiddle playing, and singing about what matters most: nature, horses, your beloved, family bonds, and heritage. Few bands from the Mongolian world of music–which also encompasses independent Outer Mongolia and parts of Russian Siberia–commune with their nomadic roots in the innovative and all-encompassing ways that this highly flexible, ten member band does on the international stage. To boot, few bands from the distant Mongolian grasslands of Inner Asia even make it out as far as Middletown, Connecticut.”

The tour has been organized by a group of major research universities in partnership with Arts Midwest and the Chinese Ministry of Culture.  Wesleyan is the only liberal arts college on the tour!

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

AnDa Union
New England Premiere
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall

Pre-concert talk at 7:15pm by Andrew Colwell
$22 general public; $18 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, and non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

Fall events include U.S. & New England Premieres, Navaratri Festival, Lucier Celebration

Center for the Arts Fall 2011At a time when so many of us are turning to YouTube to see performances by our favorite artists, we can lose sight of what it’s like to experience live performance. This fall, the Center for the Arts offers you a wide range of performances and exhibitions that will connect you with some of the brightest minds in contemporary art-making, transport you to foreign lands, and inspire you to think about the world in new ways—and the performers will never be more than 69 feet away!

We recognize that it has become increasingly difficult to classify a work as strictly music, dance, theater, visual art, or film as more artists are blurring the boundaries among disciplines. So we have merged our visiting artist performances into a single Performing Arts Series. We hope this will lead you to cross the boundaries of your own comfort zone and discover new artists and art forms.

Highlights of the fall season include the American premiere of the ground-breaking Italian movement theater collective Dewey Dell and the return of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement, that has been a trailblazer in taking hip hop forms from the street to the concert stage for nearly twenty years. We’ll also host two New England premieres: the astoundingly brilliant throat-singers and musicians from Inner Mongolia, AnDa Union and, continuing our collaboration with the College of the Environment, we’ll welcome Water is Rising, a breathtaking performance by a group of 35 dancers and musicians from the Pacific Island atolls, the first islands predicted to be submerged due to climate change. In November, the Music Department and CFA join forces to celebrate Alvin Lucier, internationally renowned composer who has just retired after serving on our faculty for four decades. Alvin Lucier: A Celebration features a major symposium, concert series, film screenings and an exhibition curated by Andrea Miller-Keller.

With performances and exhibitions by visiting artists, students and faculty, there is an extraordinary amount of good work to see at Wesleyan this fall, with 60% offered free to the public or at ticket prices that make us one of the most affordable venues in the state. Tickets are on sale now online. Starting at 10am on Tuesday, August 16, you can call or visit the Wesleyan University Box Office at 860-685-3355 to receive a 10% discount on your purchase of four or more Performing Arts Series events (and if you buy six or more “Performing Arts Series” events, you’ll save 15%!) Starting August 16, you will also be able to buy subscription packages for both the 35th annual Navaratri Festival (a 15% savings) as well as the Alvin Lucier Celebration (a 25% savings!)

Please join us. We appreciate that you believe, as we do, in the power of the arts to add meaning to our lives and to remind us of the capacity of the human spirit. Thanks for making Wesleyan’s CFA your center for the arts.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Jazz Great Kenny Barron’s Trio in Crowell Concert Hall

We are delighted to welcome the magnificent jazz pianist Kenny Barron back to Wesleyan tonight with the Kenny Barron Trio (Barron will be joined by Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Lee Pearson on drums). Barron was here in the eighties when his older brother, distinguished jazz saxophonist, Bill Barron was on the Wesleyan faculty.  Bill Barron arrived at Wesleyan in 1975 and started the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra.  He served as a distinguished member of the music department faculty, as well as its chair, until his death in 1989.

Kenny Barron is quite simply one of those jazz greats you need to make a point of hearing live…just last year, the National Endowment for the Arts inducted him into its prestigious Jazz Masters class of 2010.  In his words:  “I don’t think of myself necessarily as an innovator. . . But what I have contributed to jazz is keeping a commitment to the honesty of the music. I never do anything that’s too slick, and I play what I feel. I believe in having fun, which took a long time to discover—to not take myself so seriously.”  As a composer, arranger and bandleader, the Philadelphia native has spent five decades at the forefront of the jazz piano aristocracy starting out as a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s Quintet from 1962 to 1966.   An in-demand sideman in his early days on the jazz scene playing with, among many others, Chet Baker, Ron Carter, Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson, it’s his maturation as a leader that has brought him well-deserved recognition as a true jazz master.

Barron is also known as a transformative teacher (he’s currently on the faculty at Julliard). In fact, those of you who know the work of Middletown’s own Noah Baerman, may not know that his mentor and teacher at Rutgers University was Kenny Barron (look for Noah’s tribute concert to Barron at the Russell House on October 16).

Barron’s visit to Wesleyan is made possible by the Center for the Arts partnership with the Capitol Region Education Council’s Center for Creative Youth, a program for gifted and talented students in the arts.  They’ll be cheering in the audience tonight.

Kenny Barron Trio
Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Wesleyan University
$20 general public; $18 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff; $10 students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Summer at the CFA

Tickets for Kenny Barron Trio, Marc Bamuthi Joseph / The Living Word Project, and Trey McIntyre Project are now on sale! Click here to buy your tickets online.

EVENING PERFORMANCES

 

FREE NOONTIME TALKS AND PERFORMANCES

Music and Theater This Weekend: Spotlight on Cheryl Tan ’11

An interview with Cheryl Tan ’11 by Sarah Wolfe ‘12.

The Old Maid and the Thief
The Old Maid and the Thief

Cheryl Tan, a senior music and theater major, will present her senior project The Old Maid and the Thief by Gian Carlo Menotti on Sunday, April 10 at 7pm in Crowell Concert Hall. I sat down with Tan, who plays Laetitia, to discuss the performance and her process. The opera, one in a series of one-act operas composed by Menotti in the middle of the twentieth century, follows the tradition of radio opera. Tan produced the piece more as staged reading than as a traditional opera.

The story takes place in the home of two women: the old maid Miss Todd (Meghan Twible ’12) and her serving maid, Laetitia (Cheryl Tan ’11). They are visited by a beggar, Bob (Matthew Getz ’14) who requests food, “and they let him stay because they’re lonely and sad,” as Tan summarizes.  Worrying that Bob may be a recently escaped fugitive from a few towns over, they nonetheless allow him to stay in their house in order stave off their loneliness. In order to keep him there, they begin to steal from other townspeople. “It’s really about a bunch of awful people being awful to each other, which is great,” quips Tan.

Chelsea Goldsmith ‘13, rounds out the cast by playing the neighbor, Miss Pinkerton. Tan chose this particular Menotti opera because it asks for a small cast.  Originally drawn to the Italian American composer through a challenging aria she encountered, Tan decided early on that she did not want to perform a solo recital. Opera has not been one of Tan’s focal points in her time at Wesleyan, but is the culmination of her work with Voice Teacher Priscilla Gale, who specializes in the operatic style. “I’ve done a lot of musical theater, jazz, theater and taiko,” says Tan, “[but] I’ve been with [Priscilla Gale] for three years, and she’s really made my voice into what it is today. The great thing about this for me right now is that I’m singing every day. Which means everything’s getting stronger, and that’s really exciting.”

The Old Maid and the Thief offers the chance to experience a memorable performance. Sung in English, the cast features four excellent Wesleyan singers, as well as Andrew Chung ’11 on the piano. “Going to be great,” ends Tan, “Going to be so good.”

“The Old Maid and the Thiefwill be presented in Crowell Concert Hall on Sunday April 10 at 7pm. Admission is free.

News about Eiko & Koma, Brian Stewart and KaWa Hula

First, I want to thank everyone for enlivening this blog with your opinions about the work that you’ve seen at the Center for the Arts over the past month.  All of us at the CFA appreciate your comments…keep it up!  There’s nothing better than an engaged audience!

I had a wonderful trip to New York on Saturday to see the latest iteration of the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center.  Sam Miller ’75, the producer of the project, and Program Director of Wesleyan’s new Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, introduced the work and two members of ICPP’s faculty (Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace Project and Doryun Chung, MOMA) gave an introductory talk and then we were ushered into an adjacent studio to view the installation.  If you saw Raven at Zilkha in November of 2009 or at the CFA Theater last summer, you would see how Naked has grown out of that work.  The scorched canvas pressed with rice and salt now surrounds the work and the audience.  Eiko and Koma lie together on another canvas laden with earth and raven feathers.  To me, the work is about life and death, aging bodies, memory, dreams, proximity and distance.  It is visually stunning and completely captivating.  The New York Times thought so too.

I saw Evelyn Israel ’10 and Julia Cheng ’08 in the audience and chatted with them after we saw the piece.  They, too, were moved and excited to see the long line of people waiting to get in.

Those of you who attended the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s Time Has Set the Table for Tea in February will remember Brian Stewart, Professor and Chair of Wesleyan’s Physics Department, who hosted of the tea alongside the character of Edith Warner.  You’ll be interested to know that after his highly acclaimed performance, Brian went on tour with the Dance Exchange!  The company performed The Matter of Origins (which includes the stage work as Act I and the tea as Act II) at Montclair State University in New Jersey last week, and Brian reprised his role as host of the tea for three sold-out houses.

KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time
KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time

Finally, please don’t miss KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time on Friday night.  This is the first time we have featured traditional Hawaiian music and dance in Crowell Concert Hall.  The group of glorious dancers and their jovial master Kawika Alfiche are from San Francisco and received a wonderful write up in the Times for their performance at Symphony Space last week.

Our own Kehaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, gives the pre-show talk at 7:15pm.

Click here for more information or to purchase tickets online.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

New Repertoire for the Guitar

A preview by Center for the Arts Intern and Music Major Lucia Strother ’11

When you enter Crowell Concert Hall this Friday, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will not be performing traditional guitar repertoire. The vast majority of the pieces the Quartet have chosen to perform were not written for the guitar, much less an ensemble of four guitars.  The only two pieces on the program originally written for guitar were actually written specifically for the Quartet by living composers! The industrious Quartet writes all their own arrangements, and I look forward to hearing their refashioned renditions of beloved pieces written for other instruments.

The Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will play Windy, one of Piazzolla’s beloved Argentinian tangos. Piazzolla was a virtuoso bandoneon player (an accordion-like instrument popular in Argentina) and developed his own style called “Nuevo tango,” which combined the traditional tango with elements from jazz and classical music. His widely popular music has been arranged for all kinds of ensembles and instrumentation, and Yo-Yo Ma’s wildly successful 1997 album Soul of the Tango brought the music of Piazzolla to even wider audiences. It will be interesting to hear such familiar music in an ensemble arrangement that is somewhat unusual and unfamiliar to me.

An equally beloved piece, Debussy’s Petite Suite was written in 1889 for piano, four hands, and rewritten by Henri Busser in 1909 for full orchestra. It was written early in Debussy’s career, and its simple yet expressive melodies contrast much of his other work, which is more impressionistic and harmonically adventurous. The unassuming beauty of the four short movements of this piece appeals to wide audiences, so I look forward to hearing another well-known piece reworked for this unique ensemble.

A thread that runs through Friday’s program is the intersection of folk music and classical tradition. Three Finnish Pieces was written by living composer and accordionist Maria Kalaniemi, who was classically trained but focused her attention on performing and composing music based on Finnish folk music. Three Finnish Pieces will certainly satisfy Wesleyan’s population of world music aficionados.

Additionally, Joaquín Rodrigo’s Cuatro Piezas, originally composed for solo piano, extensively incorporates themes from Spanish folk music. It’s interesting to me that the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet would choose this Rodrigo piece to perform, since he composed so much music for guitar and played such a central role in establishing guitar in classical mainstream repertoire. (Interestingly, his Concierto Andaluz is one of the few pieces actually written for an ensemble of four guitars.)

The program will also feature three Baroque trio sonatas, two by Purcell and one by Corelli, both original arrangements by the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. I am eager to see the Quartet’s interpretation of these pieces. I assume that they will perform them on their modern classical guitars, the dimensions of which weren’t established until the 19th century, but it will be interesting to see whether their other musical choices, especially with regards to voicing, attempt to preserve Baroque performance practice or create an altogether different effect.

Finally, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will also perform two pieces commissioned specifically for them by living composers. A Scottish Fantasy was written in 1996 by David Crittenden, a classical guitarist (formerly a member of the Quartet) and composer based in St. Paul, MN. Additionally, the Quartet will perform Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Ghetto Strings, written in 2001. Roumain is a Haitian-American composer who combines elements of classical music with features from contemporary black popular music. I am excited to hear these two, and I’m sure they’ll be well received since Wesleyan audiences have such a voracious appetite for new music.

Friday, February 18, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$23 general public; $18 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students
Pre-concert talk at 7:15pm by Carver Blanchard, Wesleyan Private Lessons Teacher

Master Class with Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, featuring performance by Wesleyan alum Lu Yang ’10
Daltry Room (Rehearsal Studios 003)
Saturday, February 19, noon
Free admission

A Talk with Jazz Legend Charles LLoyd

William Carbone, Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, connected with Charles Lloyd prior to his upcoming tour of New England made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts. Lloyd and his quartet will play at the CFA on January 28th. What follows is a summary of their conversation:

There is a sundry collection of compositions and sounds on the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s latest CD Mirror, yet one sound rings constantly throughout: peace.  Lloyd, a veteran saxophonist, and his much younger band mates—pianist Jason Moran, drummer Eric Harland, bassist Reuben Rogers—waste no notes, uniting their songs and improvisations with an endlessly persevering focus on melody.  In those moments one might expect a burst of fiery showmanship and the thrusting forth of an individual identity, Lloyd and company sink in more deeply, creating space and allowing eighth notes to become quarters, halves, then whole; clearly, their relationship is one of absolute trust.

Hence Lloyd’s reaction when I inquired about who would accompany him on his upcoming Northeast tour: “Is this a trick question?” Unlike many, or even most veteran jazz musicians, Lloyd’s band is a band, and Moran, Harland and Reed are those who we should expect to see.

Lloyd has a condition that makes lengthy phone conversations uncomfortable, but he agreed to speak with me regarding his upcoming tour via email.  Because his biographical informational is readily available already, I chose to ask Lloyd, who holds a Masters degree in music, more about his thoughts on jazz and education, particularly in university settings. His answers were brief, yet they allowed some insight to the inclusive approach that characterizes his work.

Charles Lloyd exploded onto the U.S. jazz scene in the early 1960s, first in collaborations with drummer Chico Hamilton and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Soon after, he shepherded a quartet of newcomers: Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett and Cecil McBee, all of whom are now household names in jazz. They broke boundaries musically with their effortless intermingling of jazz and avant-garde, non-Western and rock music; demographically by engaging the young and spiritually hungry audience of the late ‘60s; economically with the first jazz album to sell one million copies; and geographically when they departed on a non-statesponsored tour of the Soviet Union.

Though Lloyd’s success was nearly unparalleled in jazz, he soon withdrew.  As he told me in our recent dialog: “I performed at Carnegie Hall when I was in my 20s, as well as the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Claude Nobs [the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival] always likes to say that I was the first international ‘star’ to perform at the Montreux Jazz festival in 1967. By the end of the 60s, I was playing in stadiums and sports arenas, but I got off the bus because I did not like where the business of music was trying to direct me. It had nothing to do with music.”

After stepping off “the bus,” Lloyd retreated to the central California region of Big Sur and for a decade recorded and performed in public only sporadically.  The few recordings he released under his own name during this period reflect both an extension of Lloyd’s inclusive view of music and the spiritual search he was undertaking in the mountains: Geeta (1973) features Lloyd on flutes and saxes accompanied by a combination of Western and Indian musicians performing both Hindu-themed material and a Rolling Stones medley; on Big Sur Tapestry (1979), Lloyd performs Chinese oboe and flutes and is accompanied only by harp. Though his time at Big Sur has often been characterized as an escape from the pressures of popularity, Lloyd also performed and recorded with the Beach Boys during this period.

Gradually, Lloyd reemerged in the 1980s, establishing a connection with the ECM record label that is now in its third decade.  Since then, his work as a leader for the label includes ensembles featuring similarly maverick jazz performers—Billy Higgins, Brad Mehldau, Cedar Walton, John Abercrombie, Geri Allen—who glide comfortably into the borderless explorations of music Lloyd says are intrinsic to his being.

“Most of my childhood was spent on my grandfather’s farm in Mississippi,” notes Lloyd, “so I was steeped in the blues. Phineas Newborn was my earliest mentor. He heard me win an amateur show when I was about nine and got me started with lessons with Irvin Reasson. Later, when I was 11 or 12, he had me join his father’s band. I stand on the shoulders of all who came before me—Howlin’ Wolf, Bobbie Blue Bland, Johnny Ace, Willie Mitchell, Bird [Charlie Parker], Prez [Lester Young] and Lady Day [Billie Holiday], Trane [John Coltrane], Mr. [Coleman] Hawkins—they are all a fiber of my expression. Everything that I am today is the sum of my life’s experience.”

Lloyd holds a Master’s degree in music from the University of Southern California but suggests that the musicians of his generation primarily “learned ‘real time’ with on-the-spot training on the bandstand.” He adds: “We had to bake a cake without the advantage of technology.  Today there are so many options that are just a fingertip away.” Other than a brief stint as a middle school teacher in the late ‘50s, Lloyd has not been a formal educator yet he notes, “I give master classes [at colleges and universities] from time to time, and the students seem hungry for information and direct experience.”

Given his stature and experience, Lloyd could easily settle into a role as an “elder statesman” and run a repertory band with a rotating cast of musicians, yet he has continuously surrounded himself with consummate improvisers who challenge him to reach new heights nonetheless. “I am a student everyday; I have a beginner’s mind,” says Lloyd. “Eric and Jason and Reuben are old souls to me. The chronological age does not impede the flow of the ancient and modern.”

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts