October 2011
5 posts
Sunday night MJF: Miles by Blanchard; Sonny...
Sunday night was my night for listening, not thinking about what I was hearing or writing so I’d remember… so this way I heard the most exquisite performance of the music arising from the collaboration of Miles Davis and Gil Evans as an all-star (really!) orchestra played music from Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. Breathtaking. Vince Mendoza led the orchestra like...
Strollin' MJF Sunday Afternoon
The dappled light spilling through the trees just seemed the perfect filter for a hazy start to the last day of the festival. People seem lazier and laid back, everything slower and a bit less frenetic than Saturday’s jollity. No slowing down the music, though. Listening to KUSP while driving to Monterey, a colossus of sound propelled me down Highway 1 as I listened to the Next Generation Jazz...
Night of the Piano
When night falls at the Festival, the mood changes, the lights of the booths and venues bring everyone into sharper focus while the fog softly hugs the grounds. A good weather day and a not too chilly night blessed this Saturday event and prepared the way for the more cerebral straightahead piano trio of Geri Allen.
The set in the Lyons Arena Stage began with Allen in a slightly somber and...
Afternoon highlights Berklee Flamenco Ensemble
Saturday afternoon was packed with opportunities to hear great music up really really close and to nibble at performances in a half dozen venues, sipping on smoothies or adult beverages or aromatic caffeine drinks while meandering. So I enjoyed Huey Lewis and The News, demonstrating even to the purists that jazz pumps through the heart of rockn’roll. Then I checked in with a fine big band...
Joining a party in progress: Saturday at Monterey...
I arrived Saturday to a party in progress. The strains from the Arena Stage were almost irresistible but first—the atmosphere and a little walk. Delicious people of all races and ages, about 50% over 50 I’d bet, speaking lots of languages, dressed in a smile-inducing panoply of costume, from hipster to resort wear, from ethnic to sportif, from black churchwear to Sierra hiking…and everyone...
July 2011
3 posts
9 tags
Hairspray Teases a Smile from a Stone
Oh stop, Cabrillo Stage, you’re hurting my smile muscles, and you’ve done it before! Now, with a great-looking, full-tilt production of Hairspray, Cabrillo dances, sings and storytells its way right Over-The-Top to the intersection of crooning Elvis and the dazzling Supremes, with a fable of teen love, teen rebellion and teen triumph set in the Snazzy Sixties whose civil rights turmoil is...
11 tags
Museum of Art & History Gets All Fired up about...
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History @ the McPherson Center spilled from its lobby into outdoor patios and Abbott Square to “Experience Clay” last weekend. Congratulations to the museum and especially to organizer Susana Arias for such a successful program. Ceramic artists we know and love were there to demonstrate and teach eager participants, and the crowd was enthusiastic. Here’s...
10 tags
Krapp's Last Tape: Jewel Theatre and Whitworth...
A cheap overhead lamp pours merciless lumens over every moth-eaten feature, every brow-furrow and sag of eyebags, illuminates every yellowed-gray frizz of hair and shirtstain of the old man sitting at the table, center stage. Thinking….thinking…too busy thinking to arrange his features inside this intensely affectless stillness, he—the entire cast of the one-person play—gazes silent and...
May 2011
3 posts
21 tags
San Francisco art Mecca Weekend--THERE's STILL...
Briefly from this internet cafe, lots to report from a packed, exhilarating and exhausting three days swept up in SF and Oakland arts, yes it’s true, I am mentally ill: after two fantastic opening events Thursday night, a morning of deadlines in Santa Cruz and then arriving in SF in time for another look at FineArtFair in Fort Mason (again, more exciting than I expected, after the flight of...
San Francisco's Fine Art Fairs a welcome art...
A quick note on Thursday’s previews of the extraordinary trio of San Francisco’s art fairs: Go! We visited two last night and were not efficient art consumers in that we never made it to the third but saw it as it closed, packed as the others were—what a dazzling triad! SF Fine Art Fair in its second year at Fort Mason was exciting and successful, in spite of the breakaway of...
15 tags
PacRep's Eurydice a Quest for Meaning
With many charming moments, memorable imagery, skilful acting and stagecraft all supported by artful scenic devices turning the black box Circle Theatre into a beach, a penthouse and later the uncertain banks of the River Styx, PacRep Theatre’s Eurydice remains an outline sketch of something that could be extraordinarily beautiful.
It’s safe to count on the acting with PacRep—and this play is...
March 2011
2 posts
Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits at San Jose Museum...
103 black and white portraits hang with precise tastefulness at eye level, subtly-lit, meaningfully annotated and experientially revelatory. 103 squarish rectangles, mostly a little taller than wide, all of moderate size, modestly framed, offer few high-contrast shadows, melodramatic compositions or outlandish angles, but rather flatteringly-lit head-and-shoulder shots of people against a...
A Tale of Two Cities: from Santa Cruz to SF arts
After a Friday immersed in Santa Cruz arts, particularly the riveting new work by Robynn Smith at Michaelangelo Gallery, some great sculpture in the Felix Kulpa ceramics show with several Coeleen Kiebert’s beautiful profundities (and to see Mattie Leeds all boyishly happy about the most exciting new development (gossip, gossip!) at his Bonnie Doon homestead) all topped off by a fun look at...
January 2011
3 posts
Melting glass, bending metal, carving wood,...
Jon Drier
The first two weeks of January proved to be a tightly-wound springboard for a year of creative work for some 24 students, three artist-teachers and two studio volunteers at Cabrillo College Adult Education winter break Warm Glass/Lighting Workshop. In an otherwise nearly empty campus, the bustling 3-D Studios of the Visual and Performing Arts campus seemed ready to take up the slack...
2 tags
Help the Mural Detective Reclaim Lost Murals for...
Unlike paintings that hang in frames on walls and are treated with care as precious artworks, murals painted on walls outdoors or even inside public spaces often deteriorate because of weather or graffit or are “painted over” or abused because buildings change hands and walls take on new uses. Since I began to look for these lost murals I have discovered how much meaning some of these...
2 tags
Scrooge 2010 Cheers Cabrillo Stage Audiences—a New...
The face of a gigantic clock marks the place as well as the time of the action and plays an important role in a marvelous production of the updated Dickens’ classic, Scrooge, at Cabrillo Stage. From the first rousing greeting by a stage full of caroling Victorian Londoners to the exhilarating full-throated conclusion, there is not a lagging moment. Even the “Bah Humbug! Tired of Christmas”...
December 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Kim Nalley Song/Storybook Delights Kuumbwa...
Kuumbwa audiences do love a great song-storyteller, and Kim Nalley filled the bill beautifully on a Kuumbwa Monday night when this singer known for her compelling performance/history of the songs, the life and times of Billie Holiday, brought a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald to the welcoming crowd. I saw Nalley several years ago, presiding over the San Francisco jazz institution, Jazz at Pearl’s,...
3 tags
Artists Hold up the Sky at Two Museums
The generosity of Monterey Bay artists is one thing nonprofits have depended on for years. Currently Monterey Museum of Art exhibits their annual Miniatures show, which is a museum-full of small works donated by artists in support of the cause.
Each work is displayed with a wee box underneath it; a wee box with a wee slot into which raffle tickets are placed. In early January the tix collected...
November 2009
1 post
2 tags
Diaspora at 418 Project: A Stunning Success
It’s elemental, the way a body moves: the shape of it, the shape it creates in space, the shape its rhythm creates, its exquisite naturalness and unnaturalness. The way two three four more bodies move together: harmony…unison…opposition…a deaux? Is this a story? Or a movement that is simply the story of itself? In Diaspora, Food For Thought, Artist-in-Residence Cat Willis serves up the fruits of...
