It’s not a smudge on your screen. Klaudia Kudełko’s last name is spelled with a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative that adds a stroke to the L that makes it look like a T (and now I know how to make it magically appear).
The Candlelight Concert series produced by Fever (don’t worry, it’s not related to the coronavirus) presents its artists, as advertised, by candlelight, which meant that Kudełko had to know the music and where the keys were, just as if she were Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, or George Shearing.
Though Kudełko was great, I was disappointed by the fact that the candles spread throughout the room all burned (well shone, not burned, as they were battery-powered, because, after all, it was best that Kudełko’s flying fingers were the only thing on fire) yellow. In particular, I would have liked to have seen different colors of candles on top of the piano, changing in sync with the music as if part of some hallucinogenic dream (which led me to an article on “5 reasons to buy color-changing light bulbs”).
Though the colors were uniform, the candles on the piano were of different sizes, which made me hope that Kudełko also might entertain us with some variation of playing glasses of water with different levels, as in the video of the street musician playing Mozart I found. Maybe it doesn’t work with Chopin.
What does work with Chopin is the Tido Music app (which Kudełko promotes in an online video of her playing part of one of the selections she played at the concert), which hears what you’re playing and automatically turns to the next page of music on your tablet at the appropriate time! Most apps can’t hold a candle to that.
A quiet cab ride is a rarity these days, so as our early A.M. trek to the Grammy Awards started, we were grateful for the meditative ride to Midway Airport. It wasn’t until we turned onto Cicero that the driver punched a few buttons, causing the song “Sailing,” by Christopher Cross, to fill the car. It was a nice sendoff, even though we were flying, not sailing, to L.A. The official Grammy fun began on Sunday, January 26th, when our group met in the lobby of Los Angeles’s Hotel Figueroa – an attractively refurbished YWCA hotel built in 1926. Once gathered, we crossed the street to the Microsoft Theater, where the best show of the day – the Premiere Ceremony – began at 12:30. First stop? Posing in front of a Grammy backdrop.
We were there to cheer for Fanm D’Ayiti (“Women of Haiti,” nominated in the Best World Music Album category), conceived and performed by vocalist, composer, and Juilliard-trained flutist Nathalie Joachim, in collaboration with Chicago’s Spektral Quartet.
On the red carpet: Nathalie Joachim in red dress, with Spektral Quartet members Doyle Armbrust, Clara Lyon, Maeve Feinberg, and Russ Rolen, who were nominated for the third time.
We also made a point of cheering at the mention of any Chicago nominee, such as Third Coast Percussion and the Notorious RBG’s son Jim Ginsburg of Cedille Records. Nathalie, a rising star, was chosen to be a presenter in the Classical category, giving us another opportunity to cheer for her, especially as she stepped onto the stage in a stunning red dress created for her by a New York-based designer with Haitian roots.
Not long after the Premiere Ceremony began, word came that Kobe Bryant had lost his life in a helicopter accident. And almost immediately, the area surrounding the theater – just steps away from the Lakers’ home court – filled with Lakers and Kobe fans, quietly holding a vigil for their lost star. Within hours, thousands had streamed into the area, most of them wearing black jackets over Lakers jerseys bearing the numbers 8 and 24.
As it turned out, Chicago was blanked. Third Coast Percussion was bested by Quartet Attacca, Jim Ginsburg was bested by Blanton Alspaugh, and the Joachim/Spektral collaboration was bested by Angélique Kidjo’s album Celia. (Earlier in the program, Kidjo had managed to bring the entire theater to its feet with an on-stage performance of her lively call-and-response song, “Afrika.”) Being good sports, we still cheered for everyone. And though we weren’t in the theater for the presentation of the “packaging award” Grammys, the world might not complain if the awards for Best Boxed or Special Limited-Edition Package and the Best Recording Package were combined into one – or none. That would free up some space to award a new and eminently more interesting category, such as Best Christmas Song.
During the short break between the Premiere Ceremony and the later, made-for-TV ceremony in the Staples Center, we wove through the hundreds of mourners, paying respect along the way, to grab a salad before heading into the security gates at Staples. Grammy survival tip: stay in a hotel close to the ceremonies, wear incredibly comfortable shoes, pack earplugs, plan for chilly weather, and have a salad waiting for you in your hotel fridge between the awards programs. You’re welcome.
Amid the sequins, creative tuxedos, flowing gowns, and colorful hairdos, something else was on display: a generational transition. It was seen in flashback programming such as the Aerosmith/Run-DMC pairing, juxtaposed over Lil Nas X; Brandi Carlile reviving the career of Tanya Tucker; and the amazing-they’re-still-alive Osbournes as filler between younger presenters. It’s unclear that anyone in the Staples Center understood why the sloppily executed “I Sing the Body Electric,” with dancers barely hitting their marks, was chosen as a tribute to 40-year Grammy Ceremony veteran Ken Erlich, though some probably took it as a sign that someone new might be stepping in as the telecast producer. One of the best throwbacks of the night occurred during the after-party, inside the L.A. Convention Center, when disco diva Gloria Gaynor – backed by a tight, nimble band – belted out an extended performance of “I Will Survive” as hundreds – or possibly thousands – sang along. (O.K., Boomers, you will survive.)
Grammy correspondent hard at work.
If a disconnect between the generations exists, it was seen in the faces of many who looked at each other and said, “What the …?” when Billie Eilish was called to the stage as the winner of the Best Pop Vocal Album. It continued when she was named Best New Artist. And again, for Song of the Year. And Album of the Year. And finally, when she was called from backstage to accept the night’s final award for Record of the Year. At that point, a man (her dad?) seated in the front row of the main floor, next to where Billie had been sitting, literally fell off of his chair and rolled on the floor.
As we scrolled through the headlines the next morning, this short piece, quoted from Billboard magazine, caught our eye: Billie Eilish “became just the second artist in Grammy history — and the first woman — to take home the Big Four awards: album, record and song of the year plus best new artist … The first artist to do this was Christopher Cross, 39 years ago.” Hmmmm, we thought. The album was entitled Christopher Cross. And the hit single? “Sailing.”
Edward Moore “Ted’ Kennedy, known for his oratorical skills, served in Washington D.C. as a United States Senator for 47 years. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, known for his eloquence and charisma, was born in Washington, D.C. and led a jazz orchestra for 51 years.
Sophisticated Ladies is a musical revue based on Ellington’s music that ran for 767 performances on Broadway (1981 – 1983). As far as I know, there never has been a musical about Kennedy’s politics, but there was a 2018 movie, Chappaquiddick, about a rather infamous event in his life.
Sophisticated Ladies is not quite a concert, there being a whisper of a couple plot lines that don’t mean a thing, but it’s all about the music, cause it’s got that swing, accompanied by great singing and dancing, including a lot of tap. I have often expressed my love for tap dancing, but seeing this show inspired me to find an informative entry online from the Library of Congress entitled Tap Dance in America: A Short History.
Lorenzo Rush, Jr., who, when I first saw him a show, wasn’t misbehavin’, kind of is in Ladies, but you still love him, as he struts around the stage, capturing you with his playfulness and powerful voice, expressing all the emotion behind Ellington’s music, even though musical director Jermaine Hill, stationed at the piano and conducting the onstage band, is the physical embodiment of Ellington in the show.
The band and all the singers are excellent, but it’s the dancing that raises the temperature in the room, with kicks, splits, and leaps, and smack talking between the tappers that adds a layer of syncopation to the already animated beat of the music.
Sophisticated is defined as “having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture”. In a nutshell, not me, but I sure enjoyed the show.
How could little Red Ridin’ Hood have been so very good and still keep the wolf from the door? It’s a question we’ve all pondered, but who knew there was a song about it written in 1926? Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs – maybe. The Chicago Cellar Boys – definitely.
This is my second time seeing the Boys. I loved their whole set, but their revelation about that “modern child” “runnin’ wild” was one of my favorites, among a set list that included songs from the 1920s and 30s written by Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, George Gershwin, and others.
Seeing the video of Ina and her all women band also made me thing of Some Like It Hot, but, returning to reality, I also thought about the Boys’ clarinetist/trumpeter giving the beat at the start of each song, which is all fine and good, except it seems like too much to ask of everyone to play the correct notes and contemporaneously maintain the same beat for more than about three measures. I think playing very short songs is the answer.
I also noticed that the piano player held his right shoulder slightly higher than his left, which led me to a website about posture and piano playing. With all these distractions, it’s amazing that I was able to enjoy the music, but I did.
In this, the 80th anniversary of Bugs Bunny’s debut in The Wild Hare, this program of classic cartoons being accompanied live by the Warner Bros. Symphony Orchestra listed Bugs, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Michigan J. Frog, and Giovanni Jones as starring. I was glad to see that there wasn’t an insert telling me that an understudy would be filling in for any of them. I would have been disappointed at seeing Donald, rather than Daffy, playing the role of the duck.
I also was glad to see that I wasn’t the only adult in the audience unaccompanied by a child. I wasn’t counting my inner child, as it didn’t need its own seat.
The program also told me that Max Steiner composed the Warner Bros. Fanfare. Steiner was a man of many firsts in regard to scoring movies, including the use of click tracks, which the musicians at the Symphony Center were listening to on headphones, which were not merely acting as earmuffs, as I originally contemplated given the cold temperatures outside.
Steiner was a major influence for John Williams, whom, I will gratuitously mention, was played by the son of a friend of mine on the Apple Podcast, Blockbuster, which tells the story of the early directing days of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and which led me to research further and come to believe that Lucas’s film editor and wife of the time, Marcia, who won the Oscar for Best Film Editing (one more Oscar than George has ever won) was probably the real force behind the success of the original Star Wars.
Speaking of directors, the great Chuck Jones, the animation director of about half the cartoons shown at Symphony Center, was represented by his grandson and great granddaughter, who, on behalf of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, presented the Symphony Center with an original drawing by Jones of Bugs as conductor. There’s no Oscar for best animation director, but there should be given how difficult it must be to deal with temperamental cartoon characters, like Yosemite Sam.
What’s Opera, Doc?, an operatic performance even I can get behind, was greeted with cheers from the audience as conductor, and co-creator of these concerts, George Daugherty informed us that we would be hearing eight Wagner operas in the space of six minutes and four seconds, rather than 30-40 hours.
The audience also was treated to three new Road Runner shorts and the world concert premiere of Dynamite Dance, a new cartoon, based on The Dance of the Hours, created for Bugs’s 80th birthday.
Fittingly, at the end of the performance, Daugherty was presented with a bouquet of carrots.
Midway through a day that included leading a class on cheating in baseball (more on that another time), a fountain-lighting ceremony with singing in Washington Square Park, and a musical comedy that’s Duck Soup meets Of Thee I Sing (see piece on Call Me Madam), I listened to a lovely concert by Hagen and Corbin, though I found myself slightly distracted from the music itself.
I became focused on (read obsessed by) the flow of Corbin’s hands on the piano, something I have struggled with (along with avoiding dangling prepositions). My curiosity thus led me to a piano-technique website that discusses hand, finger and body motions in sufficient detail to keep me occupied through the winter.
It also reminded me of the well-known fact that a difficult part of acting is what to do with your hands. I found an acting coach’s website that says it best.
It seems that when we act, the hands are destined to flop around like a hyperactive T-Rex.
Or if they are not busy doing dinosaur impersonations, they are perhaps engaged in:
• Penguining (Flapping the arms at the sides.)
• Waitressing (Arms in a v-shape, like a waiter carrying plates.)
• The ForkLift (as above but straight out)
The other distractions were the guy behind me who spent five minutes fumbling around with batteries he was trying to insert into a camera, and a woman’s cell phone that rang loudly for an interminable amount of time (okay, maybe 15 seconds), as she fumbled to remove it from her purse and tried to remember how to turn it off. If not so rude, or maybe because of that, it might have made an amusing SNL skit, as the ring was musical and ended almost in synch with the performance. I couldn’t help but think, however, that it needed more cow bell.
Rob Gordon (from the movie High Fidelity): “Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”
So, taking the leap from a tape designed to win over a woman, to a classical music concert with, presumably, no ulterior motive other than to entertain, how does a group, such as the Civitas Ensemble, decide what to play, and, more importantly for this discussion, in what order?
The Dummies website tells us that symphony orchestras almost always follow the format: an overture, a concerto, intermission, a symphony. To apply this enunciation to Civitas, the core of which is a four-person troupe, it occurred to me that I had to apply a sort of reverse extrapolation, if that’s a thing.
Well, it turns out that retrograde extrapolation is a thing. It’s used by chemists and toxicologists to estimate what a person’s blood alcohol content was at a specific time based on test results obtained at a later period of time.
As there was no alcohol being served at the concert; no overtures, concertos, or symphonies on display; and the first two pieces were of fairly equal length, the best application of the principle I could come up with was the varying size of the ensemble playing each piece.
The program of Hungarian Masters was to start with a duet, followed by a quartet, followed by intermission, and then a sextet that included two guest artists. Quod erat demonstrandum.
However, though its performance of Erno Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C Major, Op. 37 rousingly closed the excellent concert, Civitas changed the order of the first two pieces, explaining that it decided to present the melancholy selection first and then the more upbeat music as a cheerful note heading into intermission. A sound decision I felt, but one that might represent the first sign of anarchy for dummies, if that’s a thing.
I got to experience the best part of a Seth Rudetsky Broadway Cruise without having to get on a boat, although even I have to admit that his June, 2020 Venice to Venice excursion sounds interesting. I know there are a lot of cruise bloggers, but I don’t know if any of them get free passage for their efforts. I need an agent. What’s 10 per cent of nothing?
McDonald also has a cruise next year. Perhaps that’s the one for me. After seeing the six-time Tony award winner in person for the first time, I just know we could be friends. The woman loves to laugh so much that she gets stomach cramps, and is down-to-earth enough to share that information as it happens.
McDonald also admitted to being a little loopy after driving to Chicago from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, following a concert the night before, because her flight had been cancelled due to storms. I wonder if she sings along with the radio in the car. Seth should have asked her that.
People came to hear McDonald sing, and she didn’t disappoint, hitting a note so high at the end of her audience sing-a-long of I Could Have Danced All Night that it caused the insides of a cat in the alley behind the theater to explode. However, her inner diva appeared briefly as she admitted her competitiveness over the fact that an audience member had matched the note.
McDonald’s personality glowed in stories about a beeper in her coffin in Ragtime, her improvisation in Shuffle Along, and her daughter texting immediately after McDonald’s Climb Every Mountain solo in The Sound of Music live television production to ask her about laundry.
But I’m not kidding when I say that the hit of the evening may have been her rendition of The Facebook Song, which, be warned, or perhaps encouraged, contains language that may be considered offensive.
Described as The Kit Kat Club on acid or The Moulin Rouge meets Cirque de Soleil, Teatro ZinZanni is too long, but what a hoot. Even the lobby is fun.
If you see it, be aware that it makes a difference where you sit. You don’t need to worry about blue paint or flying watermelon parts, but some of the action in the middle of the spiegeltent flows over onto a table or two, and if you’re centrally located you’re more likely to become part of the show, interacting with The Caesar or Lady Rizo, who is part Janis Joplin, part Bette Midler.
If you’re follicly challenged, you may get your scalp rubbed by various cast members, and if you’re a woman of a certain age, you might find yourself being theatrically-wooed by The Caesar, whose wild patter is reminiscent of Robin Williams. If you’re a healthy-looking young male, The Caesar may pick you out to participate in a faux competition to be his successor.
Sitting in a back booth provides relief for the stage shy. And you might, as I did, wind up in a conversation with a sixth-generation circus-family contortionist watching her ninth-generation circus-family, body-juggling, crowd-wowing boyfriend from an area behind your table in preparation for joining the show herself in a couple months when the acts change, as they regularly do to encourage return customers.
Between aerial artists, rhythmic gymnasts, and dancing waitstaff, Joe De Paul sang a little like Frank Sinatra (backed by a band that never took a break), portrayed King Kong, and partnered with the multi-talented Mr. P.P. (if you consider juggling with your mouth a talent) to leave the audience in tears of laughter from their hijinks.
My only regret was that singer Kelly Britt, hitting a ridiculously high note, failed to break the wine glass in her hand. Had she succeeded, she might have brought me over to the dark side, or as it is more commonly known, opera.
Interestingly, both Doctors Without Borders and Borders book stores, which no one was able to save (thereby making the doctors’ organizational name prescient), were founded in 1971. On the other hand, Crossing Borders Music, which put on the concert by my piano teacher, Marianne Parker, that I attended at the Chicago Cultural Center, across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, originated in 2011.
The wonderful solo concert featured music from Marianne’s new album of Haitian music, entitled Pages intimes. As I told her afterward, she obviously has been holding out on me, not teaching me everything she knows, because, shockingly, I can’t play like she can. What other reason could there be?
I then rushed over to the Art Institute, across Monroe Street from Millennium Park, to attend its annual Block Party. On my way to the Impressionism room containing Van Gogh’s The Drinkers, for a program put on by the Brewseum, I passed by Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, thereby completing my park-adjacent trilogy.
Pub historian, and Brewseum founder and executive director, Liz Garibay presented a delightful lecture to the crowd on both the Van Gogh painting and the history and culture of drinking and drinking establishments in Chicago, including the 1855 Lager Beer Riot. After this educational tasting, I now thirst for more information, which I attend to drink in at the Brewseum’s exhibition currently on tap at the Field Museum.
I ended my near-the-park Sunday by watching Mucca Pazza (which translates as mad cow) end the party with one of their unique musical performances. P.T. Barnum would have been proud of the way they closed by marching through the Monroe Street exit, helping to clear the building by leading out hundreds of visitors, who then realized that the show was over. This way to the egress.
