It’d been a little over a year since I first went to see The Paper Machete live magazine at the Green Mill on a Saturday afternoon. I learned from that experience that seats are hard to come by (the Wednesday evening show, at least the one time I went, isn’t as crowded), and so arrived an hour and a half before show time, which was only 15 minutes earlier than necessary to avoid unintentionally making lots of new friends among a crowd of people standing around, pressing their bodies into an insufficient amount of space.
Getting there early also affords one the opportunity to watch emcee Christopher Piatt, standing behind the bar, trying to not so subtly rehearse his frenetic Danny Kaye court jester lip-synching routine.
Piatt is a constant, but the rest of the cast of The Paper Machete changes from show to show, so it was an amazing coincidence that Becca Brown, whom I saw perform there a year ago, was again on stage, showing off her strong singing voice.
The comedy also was good, as before, but I was there primarily to see Big Red, that is Meghan Murphy, do her thing, as I have done at Theater Wit, Steppenwolf, and Venus Cabaret.
She didn’t disappoint, capping off her performance by holding the last note of her set long enough that I could have read a couple chapters of a book, had I brought a book.
Piatt, in thanking Murphy and expressing his admiration of her talents, referred to her as the personification of Jessica Rabbit, which seemed to please Murphy.
Fanboy that I am, I couldn’t resist approaching Murphy after the show as she sat at the bar drinking with friends. I introduced myself and fawned over her for a respectable, but not creepy, amount of time before going on my way.
It is said that when two koalas find themselves occupying the same tree, they will hide from each other to avoid being noticed. Some say this happens because koalas are viciously territorial, but I’d like to think they do this out of a sense of decorum, or polite comportment, or respect for the other occupant of the tree. All of which has only a little to do with the 61st Grammy Awards ceremony, where colorful plumage draws notice – plumage in the form of sequins, silver lamé, and fine silk. Oh, and music.
For Grammy neophytes, here’s a tip: there are two awards ceremonies. The first, known as the Premiere Ceremony, offers recognition to non-prime-time categories such as Best Spoken Word Album (Jimmy Carter’s Faith – A Journey for All won) and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package (“Weird Al” Yankovic won). It takes place in a right-sized Microsoft Theater auditorium with comfortable seats and two massive jumbotrons showing crisp details of everything happening on stage.
Many winners were not present, making those non-winners present feel just a little queasy about their misguided optimism. We were there to cheer on the very present Spektral Quartet and jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón, whose collaborative CD, Yo Soy la Tradición, was nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category.
Joshua Bell in background adjusting his bow tie
About 30 minutes after we took our seats, the word went up and down our row that a famous Strad-carrying member of violin aristocracy, Joshua Bell, had taken a seat directly behind us. And that’s when the koala behavior set in. No one in our row would openly acknowledge his presence, much less turn around to say hello. True, I may have imagined it, but there was a vaguely discernible sense of classical string musicians slinking down in their seats, as if to avoid notice by a fellow musician. Stay cool, friends, was the mood in our midst, though I personally cheered loudly when Joshua was announced as a contender for the Best Classical Instrumental Solo (violinist James Ehnes, who happened to be grocery shopping in Florida at the time, was pronounced the winner).
Kalani Pe’a and friends
Programs like this are best when they showcase lesser-known musicians to audiences interested in their work. A few performers stood out in this way: the larger-than-life Hawaiian singer Kalani Pe’a – sporting a glittering purple sequined jacket – served as a presenter and also took home a Grammy; Seun Kuti and guitarist Fatoumata Diawara, who dazzled us by channeling her inner Santana; and 15-year-old vocalist Ángela Aguilar, who took solo and trio spotlights with Aida Cuevas and Natalia Lafourcade. If someone knows Aguilar’s dress designer, could you please pass me that name?
Fully employed guest blogger Samme Orwig
The “big” awards ceremony was held in the Staples Center, and this was clearly a made-for-TV event. There were no jumbotrons, and the audience was, in effect, one large, living prop. For example, those watching the show at home might’ve wondered why it took the audience so long to realize that yes, it really was Michelle Obama making a surprise appearance on stage. Only a few people could actually see her clearly, and no one wanted to cheer without being absolutely sure it was the former First Lady. Once we were convinced, the crowd went wild – as they did when the other stars, whose names were announced, stepped onto the stage. Nonetheless, it was worth being packed into stadium seating just to say we saw performances by Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, and Lady Gaga – all in the same night.
Other notables inside the Staples Center included H.E.R.’s performance of “Hard Place,” which bore melodious echoes of an old song called “Perfection” by Badfinger; Brandi Carlyle’s “The Joke,” which some felt was the most moving piece of the evening, and, of course, Lady Gaga’s nuclear production of “Shallow.” One of my favorite Gaga moments had happened earlier, when she made a shout-out to her Little Monsters, causing cheers to erupt. It made me wonder why more stars don’t create a special name for their fan base, because a name like “Little Monsters” offers the type of tribal identity that humans – even if we don’t want to admit it – crave.
Samme and Clark – where’s the red carpet?
For their nomination earlier that afternoon, Miguel Zenón and Spektral were up against household names such as Eddie Daniels and a few lesser-knowns, but the 16-man Dafnis Prieto Big Band took home the Grammy. Will Spektral be in the hunt for Grammys 2020? There’s no telling, but Spektral’s next collaborative CD, with composer/performer Nathalie Joachim, will be released this coming September.
All You Need is Love, and I got 90 minutes of it, attacking my visual and auditory cortices from every direction (not to mention those parts of my brain related to long-term memory, as it has been over 50 years since the Beatles first gained our attention). The problem with the show is that, if you focus too much on one thing, you don’t notice five other things that are happening at the same time. There’s no pause, rewind, or instant replay. I’m sure there must have been a kitchen sink thrown in somewhere that I missed.
The varied and spectacular exhibitions of strength, grace, and agility by the show’s performer/athletes, as they danced, twisted, stretched, and threw their bodies around, made me think of Katelyn Ohashi, the UCLA gymnast who is the current queen of YouTube because of her amazing routine at the recent Collegiate Challenge at the Anaheim Convention Center, which undoubtedly will lead her to the greatest reward a gymnast can attain, no not being awarded a gold medal at the Olympics, or getting a job with Cirque du Soleil, but rather winning the mirror ball on Dancing With the Stars.
I first saw Cirque du Soleil when it was performing Saltimbanco under a tent in the early 1990s. For some bizarre reason my most vivid memory of that show is the guy who climbed up chairs that he piled on top of each other. I always wondered what his mother thought as she grounded him, literarily and figuratively, sending him to his room, in the hopes of interrupting him as he went about wrecking furniture in pursuit of a career in the lost art of hand balancing.
In addition to the music, special effects, and huge cast, Love features hundreds of garish costumes, not unlike what you see on the street in front of the hotel.
While others listening to classical music may try to appreciate its finer points or focus on getting inside the composer’s head, I just like the way it sounds, which leaves my brain free to wander during concerts.
Some day I might pick up a copy of Classical Music for Dummies, cowritten by David Pogue, whom I usually only think about as Techno Claus on CBS Sunday Morning, when I think about him at all, but who also is a monthly columnist for Scientific American.
It wasn’t so much during Chicago Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster Robert Chen’s brilliant violin solo at Fourth Presbyterian Church, but rather after, that I began thinking about the space itself, when Rush Hour Concerts Artistic Director Anthony Devroye, who filled in on viola with the Chen Family Quartet that day told a couple of us who had trouble seeing from the back that the quartet didn’t use the stage because the asymmetrically curved wall behind it caused acoustic problems – more science.
No science entered my head during the Dame Myra Hess concert, which featured the music of Charlie Chaplin. Quint and Aznavoorian closed with Chaplin’s Smile, from Modern Times, which reminded me of Jimmy Durante singing Make Someone Happy at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, which reminded me of its screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, who was an answer on Jeopardy this week.
In the immortal words of The Statler Brothers’ classic (not classical) Flowers on the Wall (I counted 12 on my guest bathroom wall), “Now don’t tell me I’ve nothin’ to do.”
Secretariat, widely considered the greatest race horse of all time, was nicknamed Big Red. He wasn’t part of the show at the Venus Cabaret.
But Meghan Murphy, also nicknamed Big Red, was. This was the first stop on what Murphy described as the act’s world tour – Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.
I love the Venus Cabaret, which opened this year adjoining the Mercury Theater (get it?). It’s an attractive space, with its own bar, and without a bad seat in the house, though there was some glare off the screens behind the stage, which I didn’t hesitate to tell management about when they sent me a survey after the show.
In honor of Big Red, the bar offered a couple of red drinks, one with vodka, one with whiskey. I wonder what they’d have at the bar if Michael Lee Aday (Meatloaf) were performing there.
Though there was some new material in this, their eighth annual show, Big Red and the Boys pleased the crowd by performing the group’s “standards”, like Get Your Holiday On, often encouraging the audience to sing along.
Big Red also broke out her holiday costume, complete with well-placed lights outlining her physical assets. The costume, along with the boys’ flashing bow ties, came in handy when Murphy occasionally had a hard time finding her spotlight, which just served as another excuse for some of her off-the-cuff, contagious humor. Murphy, whose website describes her as actor, singer, dancer, and badass, always seems to be having a good time on stage.
I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of perverse show could be created by combining Big Red’s with the play next door, Avenue Q, having Murphy as Lucy, who is described as “a vixenish vamp with a dangerous edge.”
I was expecting two pianos (piano duo versus piano duet), but what I got instead was two women, playing selections from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, on one piano, at the same time, hands flying everywhere, occasionally crossing over each others’ hands, and bodies, with such grace and, at times, glorious frenzy, that one had to watch, not just listen, to fully appreciate the experience.
Speaking of pedals, when I asked the women after the performance how they determined who would play which side of the piano during their duets (it varied), Belsky told me she really likes to use the pedals and that that often affects their decision.
It hadn’t occurred to me watch their feet during the performance, though I did pay attention to who was turning the pages (it also varied, with one incident of an accidental double page turn that was quickly remedied without interruption to the music), so I don’t know if Belsky was pulling my leg. She had displayed a wonderful sense of humor during her introductions to the songs.
Both women in Estrella were born in Russia, so I have no idea why they chose a name that the Urban Dictionary defines as a totally cool Spanish girl (I also should have asked them that), though I concede that they seemed cool, even though their music was hot.
I missed Saint-Saens’ Romance. Op. 36, but got to the hall in time to hear sustained applause for Sophia Bacelar (cello) and Noreen Cassidy-Polera (piano), which got me thinking about the dynamics of audience applause. I found a study that spoke of it in terms of a disease, saying that “Individuals’ probability of starting clapping increased in proportion to the number of other audience members already ‘infected’ by this social contagion, regardless of their spatial proximity. The cessation of applause is similarly socially mediated, but is to a lesser degree controlled by the reluctance of individuals to clap too many times.”
Midway through the first movement of the second piece, Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 19, paramedics from the Chicago Fire Department showed up with a wheeled emergency stretcher, which they pushed up the middle aisle to a row near the front, where they loaded a man onto it, then reversed their course, pushed the cart back onto the elevator, and disappeared, all silently, in a matter of moments, and without causing the slightest interruption to the musicians, neither of whom lost concentration or looked up, perhaps so focused as to be unaware of what was transpiring 10 to 15 feet in front of them. Brava!
As for the man who was removed, from a distance he didn’t appear to be in any great discomfort. Perhaps he just needed a ride to a meeting (he had a briefcase with him) or perhaps, because I had arrived a few minutes late, I was unknowingly in the middle of the filming of an episode of Chicago Fire.
Or, as the sonata was, according to the program notes, among the first of Rachmaninov’s major pieces after he went through hypnotherapy to overcome writer’s block, perhaps the music itself has hypnotic qualities, and there were no paramedics. Is that Rod Serling I see in the corner?
The show opened with a parody of Cabaret from the Boomer Babes, Pam Peterson and Jan Slavin, whom I mention because I know Pam and she asked me to mention them.
Liberace would have fit right in. There was more glitter on stage and in the audience than at a sixth century Mayan temple.
It’s not allowed in jail. Apparently it can be used to smuggle in Suboxone, which is a drug, not a deli sandwich.
Glitter never goes away. I can vouch for that, as I’m still having nightmares about it days after the event.
You can unstick glitter on your body with oil and a cotton ball. But then how do you get rid of the oil on your body? You could try in situ burning. But that seems like a bad idea on your skin.
Glitter is used on fishing lures because fish also like shiny things. I felt a little like a fish out of water at the event in my non-sparkly blue jeans, but my personality was luminous and the Park West had no problem accepting my charge card.
The show was long, in part because the organizers apparently felt the need to give everyone their moment on stage. And not all the performances were glittering. They ranged from hysterical to let’s talk about something us.
I was happy to see Anne and Mark Burnell perform, having enjoyed them at a Fourth Presbyterian Church noon hour concert over the summer.
But the highlights were Hilary Ann Feldman, Cynthia Clarey, and Caryn Caffarelli singing about their longing to eat cake instead of salad, while eating cake, and Jeff Dean telling us about the travails of a young caveman whose predilections didn’t fit in among his contemporaries.
The big screen above the stage was used to zoom in on the musicians, along with showing the occasional picture of something related to the music, like a shot of the score. And while there were a couple photos that left me wondering as to their relationship to the music, I thought this was a wonderful addition, though I noticed, in some closeups, that a couple of the chorus members needed dental work.
Yes, I went to a concert that featured a chorus, but I only stayed for two of their numbers, and got to hear three other uninfected pieces, including Autumn from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which I, and doubtless countless others, never tire of, no matter how many times we hear it when we’re on hold on the phone.
On the other hand, listening to the chorus repeat the word “rejoiced” six times in a row in Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” reminded me of how agonizing it was to hear the Beatles repeat the chorus of Hey Jude 19 times in a row at the end of that song, unless, I guess, you were stoned.
Another thing I noticed was that the violinists bobbed their heads differently (and apparently for different reasons, as I discovered). I wonder whether violinists sitting next to each other ever bang heads. When holding auditions, do orchestra leaders ever consider whether the seat they have to fill needs someone with a left or right head bobbing tendency. Have they ever thought of choreographing the head bobs, like a Temptations dance routine?
In regard to his Symphony No. 59, the program wrongly showed Hayden’s life as being between 1770 and 1827, which turns out to be Beethoven’s life, whereas Hayden really lived from 1732 to 1809. I wonder if those guys ever got each other’s mail. And I wonder if heads will roll, which is apparently a song by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, speaking of repetitious lyrics by the Beatles, as opposed to bob, as a result of this mistake.
The Chicago Cellar Boys played my kind of music at the Cultural Center – Fats Waller, Count Basie, and Jelly Roll Morton, among others. (I may have to check them out on a Sunday night at the Honky Tonk BBQ in Pilsen.) When I saw Andy Schumm take one hand off his clarinet and pat his head, looking like he was trying to keep a toupee on, I was mildly amused, until I realized he actually was signaling the other musicians about something, I knew not what. So I looked it up. I found “8 Jam Session Hand Signals That Every Musician Should Know”, which explained to me that a head pat “denotes a return to the beginning.”
This is one of the many reasons that I could never be a jazz musician. Isn’t it enough just to be able to improvise on your instrument, which I can’t? You also have to memorize signals as if you were a third base coach waving off the bunt and implementing the hit and run. It’s one thing to be able to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time, after years of practice, but pat your head and play an instrument, way out of my league. I don’t chew gum either, unless I’m seated.
I slid over from the Cultural Center to Millennium Park for the Second-line Procession led by Mystick Krewe of Laff, featuring the Big Shoulders Brass Band. it wasn’t quite like the Krewe du Vieux I once witnessed in New Orleans (here there was no float with a keg on it serving the crowd and nobody in the group was borderline naked), but it was fun to join with them as they marched around the park, playing traditional Dixieland jazz, leading an entourage of people like me making videos with their phones. Next year (or maybe tomorrow) I’ll bring some beads.
