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Beckie Menzie and Tom Michael, cabaret – Fourth Presbyterian Church – July 13, 2018

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I was ten minutes late for the performance because I was tied up on a conference call (yes, even in retirement, there is the occasional conference call). I wish the call had gone longer.

I know Menzie and Michael perform together a lot around town and that, in addition, Menzie is a sought after arranger and accompanist. But how do you make I’ve Got Rhythm boring? Did the fact that it was Friday the 13th have anything to do with it? How about the partial solar eclipse in India today?

I imagined Gershwin turning over in his grave, which, since we were in Fourth Presbyterian’s courtyard, made me think of Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which I’m sure I’ve never read (or wanted to), but probably have seen as a Jeopardy answer numerous times. I tried to take my mind off such thoughts by visualizing Sutton Foster tap dancing to the song. That always helps.

According to Wikipedia, cabaret “is mainly distinguished by the performance venue, which might be a pub, a restaurant or a nightclub with a stage for performances.” That was the problem. The church didn’t serve alcohol.

I would have gotten up and left, but it was hot and I had a seat in the shade, so instead I pulled out my cell phone and checked my emails. It also helped that a couple seemingly mutant pigeons (at least by their odd coloring) landed on the fountain in the middle of the courtyard, and one of them did its best imitation of the Drinking Bird toy for several minutes.

I’m not a religious person, but, since I was at a church, I decided to pray during the final song, McArthur Park (voted in 1992 as the worst song ever recorded), and my prayers were answered, as there was no encore.

Music and Poetry – Rush Hour Concert – July 10, 2018

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I went for the music and suffered through the poetry.

I could have just skipped the program altogether, but the scheduled gypsy music sounded promising, if unpronounceable – Hullámzó Balaton, Op. 33 (Jenő Hubay), Dža more (Sylvie Bodorová), Zigeunerweisen, Op. 20 (Pablo de Sarasate), Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor (Johannes Brahms) (okay I can pronounce that one), and, in fact, was beautiful and extremely well-performed by the Civitas Ensemble.

Someone from the Poetry Foundation recited the poetry between the musical selections. The first poem was short. The second was longer and more complex. The third was much longer and dealt with the horrors of World War II, so, not really fun. I would have preferred it if at least one of them would have started with a line like “There once was a man from Nantucket.”

I took a poetry writing course in college. The best part of the class was the experiment the students conducted on the professor. The professor had a habit of wandering around the classroom as he spoke, which led us, pranksters that we were, to attempt to manipulate his behavior. So we selected a corner of the room as the spot to which we wanted to lead him and proceeded, in a noticeable way, to pay a lot more attention to him when he approached that corner than when he went anywhere else in the room. Eventually we got him to curl up like a ball by the window in the selected corner, seemingly without the slightest recognition of what we had done. So, while I may not have learned to appreciate poetry, my psychology class was fruitful.

Tchaikovsky and Bolcom – Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – July 7, 2018

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I claim no expertise when it comes to classical music, but I know what I like. The Chicago Tribune critic, Howard Reich, didn’t like the Grant Park Symphony’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony the night before, but I very much enjoyed the piece.

On the other hand, Reich raved about William Bolcom’s Symphony No. 4. I guess I can’t disagree, because I didn’t stay to hear it after the intermission, originally because I saw the scariest hyphenated word in the English language as part of the piece’s description, that is mezzo-soprano.

I don’t do mezzo-soprano. I’d rather hear the Archies do Sugar, Sugar. Given that a mezzo-soprano would be singing, I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand the lyrics as sung, which, upon reading them in the program, would’ve been a saving grace.

My pre-concert decision to leave at intermission was reinforced by two couples I overheard while riding the bus to the concert. One couple had been to the same performance the night before and said they were coming back only for the Tchaikovsky, as they hadn’t liked the Bolcom. Take that Howard.

Bolcom is a Pulitzer Prize winner, among many other accolades. I don’t care. I didn’t like his piece, Remembered Fathers, when I heard it performed on June 26 at the Rush Hour concert.

And, though I hadn’t remembered at first, it turns out that Bolcom also composed the opera A Wedding, based on the 1978 Robert Altman movie, which was the first and, I hope, last opera I’ve ever attended. I had an amazing seat, in the 12th row, just across the aisle from Altman himself, who may or may not have dozed off once or twice during the performance. I unfortunately, stayed awake the whole time.

The Buddy Holly Story – American Blues Theater at Stage 773 – July 6, 2018

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Spoiler alert – Buddy Holly dies. He does, however, return to play two encores.

Interestingly enough, the big number at the end of this show is a Chuck Berry song, Johnny B. Goode, which is made even more interesting by the fact that the last song Holly actually played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake Iowa, before his ill-fated decision to fly to the next destination so he could get his laundry done (couldn’t he just turn his underwear inside out?), was a different Berry song, Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

This reminded me of the Chuck Berry Greatest Hits double album I owned in college, from which my roommate, Wasil Pahuchy, Jr., accidentally broke one of the records. Though Wasil could have squashed me like a bug (and could chug a pitcher of beer, for what that’s worth – ah, Friday afternoons at Kam’s), he lived in mortal fear that I would retaliate against him for destroying my most prized possession.

I never saw Buddy Holly in concert (I did see Chuck Berry on three occasions), though I have seen the Gary Busey movie and three different live productions featuring doppelgangers, of which this was my favorite, with the lead at one point playing a guitar while holding it behind behind his neck, which, if you’re interested, you can learn to do on the Guitar Player website.

The Buddy Holly story would be unbelievable if it weren’t true, but the music is the reason to go. I don’t know who had more fun, the performers or the audience.

On the way out, an audience member asked a cast member, who had come back out on stage to put away his guitar, whether the producers of the show had looked for musicians who also were actors, or actors who also were musicians. His answer was “yes.”

Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – June 23-29, 2018

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The weather was perfect on June 23rd. The guest soloist, Natasha Paremski, pounded the piano like she was trying to hurt it (it was, after all, Rachmaninoff), but it sounded great. Her hands were a blur. And she even played an encore, showing another side of her skills on some Chopin.

On June 27th, the weather was perfect again, just like it always is in Chicago. The guest flute soloist, Adam Walker, sported a neatly-trimmed beard, which made me wonder whether it created any playing problems. I couldn’t find anything about floutists, but did find some suggestions about facial hair from a professional trumpet player, who says, for example, that a soul patch pads the bottom of your lip and an untrimmed mustache is going to hurt. I played the trumpet, badly, for about ten minutes when I was a kid who was on the verge of starting to shave. Perhaps there was some incipient stubble that held me back from stardom.

June 29th was yet another perfect day, if you enjoy a heat index over 100 degrees, and who doesn’t? So I wasn’t going to let the unbearable heat stop me from seeing Johannes Moser, the guest cello soloist, perform Dvorak’s cello concerto, some other time, when my eyelids aren’t sweating.

So we instead opted for the air conditioning at Andy’s Jazz Club and sat through two sets before they kicked us out two hours after our two-hour limit at the table had expired, which was just as well as we already had lost some of our hearing thanks to an overeager trumpet player, unencumbered by facial hair.

Fulcrum Point New Music Project – St. James Rush Hour Concert – June 26, 2018

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The last movement the horns-only group of Fulcrum ensemble members played was labeled in the program as moderate swing. That designation didn’t mean a thing. I don’t know what the notes looked like on paper, but there was no swing feeling to the piece at all, which was too bad because I only suffered through the preceding 25 minutes of the concert, the best part of which was the faint sound of the church bells in the distance at the top of the hour, in the hope that I would enjoy the ending.

My mind wandered from the start, wondering why the French Horn player had his hand stuck up his bell. (No, that’s not a colloquialism used by the author of Sex and the City and Us at the Writers Museum last week.) Was he looking for something he dropped in there, like a note? Probably not, as I learned from a website that described the positioning and musical function played by the inserted right hand, which got me to wondering why it said right hand. It turns out that the french horn is “almost totally a left-handed instrument, and furthermore unique in that respect amongst all musical instruments.”

My research into the french horn also led me to frenchhorn.net, which has a joke about C, E-flat, and G going into a bar, which helped alleviate my suffering.

Watching the trombone player reminded me of the Final Jeopardy answer on June 11, which was “In playing this instrument whose early version was called a sackbut (again, not a term from Sex and the City), it’s about 6″ from A to B, about 7″ from C to D.”

I also observed that the tuba player briefly inserted a mute into his instrument, which made me pine for an all-muted concert, where the sounds could be left entirely to my imagination.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong – American Writers Museum – June 19, 2018

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I saw, maybe, two episodes, of Sex and the City, but I wasn’t oblivious to its popularity. Jennifer Armstrong has written books about The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Seinfeld (she says she writes cultural histories and has been called a tv anthropologist), so I figured she’s probably got a sense of humor, which is why I went to see her discuss her new book, Sex and the City and Us.

For better or worse, I learned a few things (that everyone else in the audience seemed to know already based on the constant head nodding). I generally knew about the impact of the show on the consumption of cosmopolitans and a heightened awareness of shoes (Armstrong suggested that the Carrie Bradshaw character proved that you could be dark and twisty and still like shoes), but now I know about the show’s effect on the world of cupcakes (the museum provided some bite-size cupcakes for us).

Armstrong also delved deeply into the adult education provided by the show, rattling off a series of sex terms that the show introduced to its viewers (sorry, I didn’t write them down).

According to Armstrong, all the sex in the show was based upon true stories that happened either to a writer of the show or someone a writer knew first hand. Carrie Bradshaw wondered about a lot of things (see “Everything Carrie Ever Wondered About on Sex and the City”). I wonder which came first, having a lot of sex stories, which qualified you to be one of the writers, or getting hired as a writer and then having to go out and have weird sexual encounters.

And, I wonder, is it really true that Mr. Big was so named because of his “status as a ‘major tycoon, major dreamboat, and majorly out of [Carrie’s] league,'” rather than, well, you know? And, was he the same Mr. Big who was Boris Badenov’s superior on Rocky and Bullwinkle?

 

Science Friday – Harris Theater – June 16, 2018

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I went to a taping of the NPR show Science Friday at the Harris Theater, which would make a good bomb shelter if things don’t work out with Kim Jong-un.

Unlike some of my friends, I’ve never been an NPR junkie. Over the years my listening has been limited to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me; Car Talk (gone); and Whad’ya Know (gone), for which I was part of a test audience before they went on the air in 1985. I was selected to compete in the quiz and, when interviewed by Michael Feldman, made some wise crack response to him that he didn’t appreciate because he was supposed to get the laughs. No big deal as I figured the show was a rip-off of You Bet Your Life that had no chance of succeeding. Sure enough, it only lasted 31 years, so there!

The Science Friday taping included a segment on urban coyotes and a description of how, in the 19th century, they used to make Indian yellow paint from the urine of cows that were fed mango leaves. They didn’t discuss the effect on humans of eating mango. The show also included a disappointing Second City skit about the bidding war over a meteorite that fell to earth in Park Forest, Illinois in 2003. I would have rather seen scenes from The Blob.

The best part of the evening was Eugenia Cheng, the Scientist-in-Residence at the School of the Art Institute (cool job), who gave a reasonably understandable explanation of the intersection of music and mathematics as it relates to piano tuning (the twelfth root of two comes into play), played a couple piano selections, and engaged in a discussion with another mathematician about math as an art (even though the show isn’t called Art Friday). I would go see her speak again anytime (watch a video of her on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert).

The American Writers Museum has a Science Friday program coming up in August that I plan to attend, so I guess I’m heading toward becoming a groupie.

Five Venues – Seven Programs – Eleven Days – June 5-15, 2018

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In anticipation of the upcoming Make Music Chicago day on June 21, here’s a recap of the musical performances I’ve seen recently (not counting the Porchlight Revisits 1975 I already wrote about).

On June 5th I got a taste of the Rose Colella Quartet, along with the Cajun shrimp risotto, at Andy’s Jazz Club.

On June 8th I attended the noonday concert at Fourth Presbyterian Church, featuring pianist Mio Nakamura. I hadn’t been there in a while, in part because some recent programs were organ music. Other than people who play the organ, the phantom of the opera, and Johann Sebastian Bach (and he’s dead), who likes organ music?

The next evening I stopped by Millennium Park to check out the Chicago Blues Festival. The sound of a harmonica lured me, like a sailor to the Sirens, to the Wrigley Square stage to watch Chicago Wind, featuring Deitra Farr and Matthew Skoller. I wasn’t injured, but I thought there was a faint smell in the air that suggested that others around me may have [been] wrecked.

The next afternoon I went to see a Crossing Borders Music program Honoring Refugee Composers at St. James Cathedral, featuring music of composers from Syria, Armenia, Iran, Croatia, Germany, and Uruguay, the number of whom, unfortunately, about equaled the attendees.

Two days later I went to the Rush Hour Concert at St. James, where John Macfarlane (violin), Anthony Devroye (viola), Brant Taylor (cello), and Kenneth Olsen (cello) performed Anton Arensky’s String Quartet in A Minor. Wonderful music, but I longed for the folding chairs they used to add in the back, which I find more comfortable than the pews.

Afterward I went to Jazz on the Terrace at the Museum of Contemporary Art, getting there during the break between sets. Sadly, I liked the recorded music they played during the break better than the live band, so my stay was short.

Finally, on June 15th, I enjoyed the Grant Park Music Festival at Millennium Park, featuring music of Gluck, Mozart, von Weber, and Elgar. This year’s new security measures were painless, as I didn’t bring any laser pointers, drones, or firearms with me.

Printers Row Lit Fest – June 9, 2018

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Because of the morning rain, I didn’t get the early start I’d hoped for and ran out of time to enter the flash fiction mystery writing contest put on each year at the fest by the Mystery Writers of America, which I also missed out on two years ago when they ran out of time before I could read the story I wrote that day. It was probably just as well since my only experience regarding mystery writing is the mystery as to whether I’ll think of anything to write.

Some friends and I couldn’t get into one restaurant by the fest because it was too crowded and got kicked out of another, which was mostly empty, because they didn’t like our limited order. No mystery as to why they didn’t have more customers.

The only program I saw at the fest was Chris Nashawaty, the film critic at Entertainment Weekly, author of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, in conversation with Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune.

It was interesting and fun, with the best moment being when an audience member told Nashawaty that he had been a Chick Evans Caddie Scholarship recipient and that Caddyshack was the anthem for golf caddies everywhere. Nashawaty then asked how many former caddies there were in the audience and at least a dozen people raised their hands. The audience roared its approval of itself.

We learned about a cocaine-laced production, which was almost entirely improvised, and had no coherent structure until they came up with the idea of tying together, more or less – mostly less, the seemingly unrelated comedic scenes by adding more shots of the gopher. Despite the mostly unkind initial reviews of the film, the rest is history. Except for the cocaine, this sounded a lot like my life, so I’m shopping for a gopher who can sing I’m Alright.