Project Inclusion String Quartet – July 17 and 26, 2018 – Washington Square Park and Lake Shore Park

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If you didn’t get a chance to see the wonderful Project Inclusion String Quartet this summer at one of their outdoor concerts in various city parks, don’t worry, you can see them next summer, except it will be a whole new quartet, made up of new Fellows.

“Project Inclusion is a unique training opportunity for singers and string players from diverse backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the symphonic orchestral and choral world.” That description certainly applies to this year’s quartet, one of whom is from Havana, and another of whom, perhaps more impressively, made it to Chicago from rural Texas.

Their last concert, in Lake Shore Park, highlighted a couple of challenges of playing in the elements. First, one always has to deal with the wind. A website I found about playing outdoors notes that “[y]ou can never have too many clothespins for the wind.”

And, indeed, the quartet used the largest clothespins I’ve ever seen to hold their music in place. They could have held Shaquille O’Neal’s clothes out to dry on the line with them. This led me to find a website that lists 15 smart uses for clothespins, none of which involve clothes.

Second, while the music was delightful, the background to the Lake Shore Park performance suggested to me a Fellini movie with a John Cage soundtrack. There were children doing cartwheels on the lawn, runners doing wind sprints on the track, and dogs catching frisbees, while other dogs barked, and buses roared by.

The quartet was exposed to other Chicago ambient sounds as they introduced and performed with the Grant Park Symphony in Millennium Park on July 18. There one has to deal with sirens, cicadas, the occasional helicopter, and, in the audience, the guy sitting behind you who thinks he’s whispering.

 

Support Group for Men – Goodman Theater – July 22, 2018

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In any theater larger than a breadbox, house VIP seats, which you know are the best seats, typically do not start before row five. Yet, when you order tickets for a play online and ask for the best seats, the computer generally starts with the row closest to the stage. This makes me think that the computers are programmed by massage therapists, looking to bring in new customers with stiff necks.

If you buy a ticket close to the date of the show, you might get lucky enough to get a VIP seat that has not been taken. Such was the case for this show, which resulted in me sitting two seats away from chef Rick Bayless, or so I was told, because I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a five-man lineup, even with Lenny Briscoe whispering in my ear to pick suspect number two.

Governor Bruce Rauner also was pointed out to me in the audience. This is only worth mentioning in that my seat was better than his.

If you have read previous blogs, you know that I generally shy away from the Goodman Theater, but I took the word of several friends who had seen this show (including one whose high praise was that she didn’t walk out on it) and thus made a last minute decision to go. I was rewarded, not only with the VIP seat, but also with some laughs. Good enough for me.

The play as a whole made me think of Wild Men (though that was a musical), a 1992 play with George Wendt, Pete Burns (with whom I had improv classes), and Rob Riley (from whom I took an acting class) about the so-called men’s movement, which featured men beating drums in the woods, as opposed to men passing around a baseball bat as a talking stick in Support Group. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Mark and Anne Burnell – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 20, 2018

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My faith now has been restored in the Church’s outdoor jazz concerts, even when they’re indoors because of rain. The Burnells were a joy to see. Their arrangements were lively. There was humor and energy. Mark rocked the piano and did a great impression of a bass fiddle.

The Burnells appear at churches with some regularity. And, in addition to other venues at which they both perform, Mark’s trio regularly plays at the Tortoise Supper Club on State Street, without Anne, as a way, I suppose, of keeping the separation between church and State Street.

I haven’t seen their act before (though I would gladly see it again), so I have nothing against which to compare this performance, but they didn’t seem to let the venue restrict their playlist, which included the double-entendred (an adjective I just invented) Cy Coleman ditty, The Tennis Song, from City of Angels.

During the performance, Anne mentioned that she was wearing jewelry given to her by a couple friends in the audience, that she liked to wear the jewelry as a way of having her friends with her wherever she goes, but that she now had enough jewelry, so, if anyone wanted to give her gift, she could use some underwear. Something to think about if we get a group together to see her sing sometime in the future.

At the end of the concert, before two encores that pleasantly extended ten minutes past the scheduled conclusion of the program, the crowd rose in unison to give the Burnells a standing ovation. That seemed like no small feat given the average age of the Noonday Concert patrons (which doesn’t lend itself to them rising quickly from their seats), until I discovered that Anne also does fitness instruction for seniors.

Summer Festivals – July 15, 2018

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I could have gone to the Square Roots Music Fest, the Windy City Smokeout (where I could have eaten beef belly burnt ends, or not), the Roscoe Village Burger Fest, the Southport Art & Music Festival, or the Dearborn Garden Walk, but I chose to go to the Chinatown Summer Fair, which was free and worth every penny of that.

The Dearborn Garden Walk would have been the most convenient, but I’ve been to the Tuileries Garden in Paris and the Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island, so why would I pay $35 to see someone’s backyard?

I opted against the Southport Art & Music Festival because I had walked past it the day before, after it closed, only to encounter an unusually foul aroma coming from somewhere in the vicinity (perhaps from a surfeit of skunks) on my way to the Mercury Theater to see Avenue Q, which unfortunately was cancelled due to the illness of one of the actors. I posited that one of the puppets had tasted, after that day’s matinee, whatever I had smelled, and was now retching up felt at the local emergency room or tailor shop.

The Chinatown Summer Fair included a petting zoo of goats, but, alas, no goat yoga, which, as a result, remains on my bucket list. There also was a meager lion dance (a line dance would have been better), and a basketball shooting contest where the two people I briefly watched couldn’t even hit the rim from 15 feet. Confident that I could do better, I walked away to avoid personal embarrassment.

The Fair included a performance by the Jesse White Tumbling Team, but so does every other event in Chicago. Next year I think I’ll opt for the Square Roots Music Fest. After all, I was a math major for a while.

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.