Silverlake Blvd.

Songs & dances : Wynston Marsalis, Roxy Music, Florence Price, & Margaret Bonds

 

9/8/22. Winston Marsalis's "All Rise" at the Hollywood Bowl

 

My mousepad melted to my desk. Even at the Bowl it never cooled down. But Wynston Marsalis’s “All Rise” (1999) was the most enjoyable and moving concert I’ve heard in a while. It’s a big (he Phil, five soloists, five choirs, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra) modernist collage that proceeds by contrast rather than narrative. The sections jolt with opposing moods and sonorities.

 

Marsalis himself didn’t make an entrance. We wondered if he was there – until the big screen camera caught him at work in the trumpet section. Part of the team, exactly like the music: MW working with multiple musical traditions of North and South America, plus extended conversations with Stravinsky and Bernstein (“Jubal step”), Copland (“Wild strumming of fiddle”), Ellington (“Expressbrown local”) among others.

 

 

 

9/28/22. Roxy Music at the Kia Forum

 

Still beastly hot. Instead of partying all afternoon – as in the old days – in preparation for the Roxy Music concert, we napped and had a bowl of cold leftover pasta and slices of half of a tomato.

 

The Forum was lit all lavender and dark rose. The crowd seemed to be mostly people who had seen Roxy at the Palladium in 1972. I can only boast to have seen them at the Greek at the turn of the century. I remember that they really rocked out and ignored the ballads (also that there were Las Vegas style showgirls and one of my party slipped on a syringe that rolled down the aisle).

 

I hadn’t been at a big rock concert in a long time (Pearl Jam, Milwaukee, 2006) and marveled at the continuity of traditions (indoor clouds of smoke) and the novelties (roadies breaking down one set and installing another efficiently with a gleaming mini-forklift, digital panels so delicate that the screens were invisible in normal light).

 

The show began with a seductive instrumental (“India”) then blasted off with rousing audio and visual cacophony (“Re-Make/Re-Model”).

 

I’ve always dismissed “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”  as a novelty song, but in person it’s impressive and audacious.

 

“Tara” was perhaps my favorite moment. Andy McKay on sax, with thundering piano by one of the back-up kids (each member of the original team was spotted by sharp younger musicians: two keyboardists, a woman on sax, three glorious back-up singers in spangles, two extra guitarists).

 

The credible performance of “Avalon” was an unexpected treat.

 

 

 

11/5/22. “A Musical Portrait: Price and Bonds” at Disney Hall

 

The most adventurous program of the season and it was thrilling. My take-away was that while Bonds may be a more polished composer – and perhaps had more advantages – Price (1887-1953) is more inventive and idiosyncratic. She’s a valuable neoromantic voice.

 

This presentation also highlighted Price’s wit. The finale to her Symphony No. 1 in E minor (1932) was animated fun. Her wonderful “Four Encore Songs” began with “Tobacco”, with words by Graham Lee Hemminger: “Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it. / It satisfies no normal need. I like it. / It makes you thin, it makes you lean, / It takes the hair right off your bean. / It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. / I like it.”

 

I hear Bonds’s “Troubled Water” fantasia for solo piano on KUSC pretty often and it makes me want to hear more of her music. We should know all about it. She even lived the last part of her life in L.A.

 

At this concert she was represented by a generous selection of songs, and the second, fifth, sixth and seventh parts of her orchestral masterpiece “Montgomery Variations”. Fifteen months earlier the Phil played the first, third, fourth, and seventh parts at the Bowl. So in a sense I’ve heard the whole piece. But may I be outrageously greedy and request the Phil play the whole work – all seven parts – in one go? Is that asking too much? The publishers say it’s only 28 minutes total.

 

Chopping “Montgomery” into pieces was part of the problem of this concert. In the bad tradition of programs that try to make up for the neglect of worthy composers it sabotaged itself by going on too long, featured excepts rather than whole compositions, sequenced things for variety rather than chronology, presented arrangements rather than original versions (why?), and wasted space in the program with PR puffery instead of information.

 

The complicated stage management challenges were not handled efficiently. After the “Montgomery Variations” there was an ovation, the house lights went on, and the orchestra musicians left the stage. Show’s over, right? But then Nathaniel Gumbs started playing Price’s Organ Suite No. 1. People in the audience who had started filing out paused – and if they were smart, they sat down to relish one final treat.

 

[Image: Composition 10, 1939, Kandinsky]

“Regeneration : Black Cinema 1898–1971” at the Academy Museum & “Cy Twombly : making past present” at the Getty

Two recent exhibits offered – beyond the delicious items on display – a demonstration of different approaches to the past.

 

While both created new contexts for the lost/forgotten/ignored to resonate, “Regeneration : Black Cinema 1898–1971” deployed scholarship to document, while “Cy Twombly : making past present” reveled in aestheticism for the fun of it.

 

The former said, “Here is the evidence. You cannot deny these realities,” while the later said, “This is what survives. Make of it what you will.”

 

You could make a list …

• A topic / An individual
• An essay / A retrospective
• Partisanship / Ambivalence
• Marginal / Central
• Moving / Static
• Celebratory / Elegiac
• Recovering personal stories / Editing personal stories

 

 

“Regeneration” was a delight. It emphasized Black agency and self-representation and self-creation. The heart of the exhibit was two rooms devoted to music – Black jazz artists and Black musicians in movie musicals. I thought I knew this stuff but left with a long “To see” list: “Carmen Jones” and the Sammy Davis Jr. “Porgy and Bess” and “I dood it” and much more.

 

One aspect that contributed to the pleasure was the installation. This is the Academy Museum’s second big special exhibit, and they have learned. They have found a better balance of objects, texts, and monitors and/or projectors.

 

Each room had sufficient quantity and variety of things to be intriguing. But never too much; you never felt overwhelmed. In the museum’s first installations you were often bombarded by movie clips. It was counterproductive. Here the effect was less noisy: often one main screen supplemented by discrete, smaller screens. Clips take up a lot of mental space, and here they were given room.

 

And I very much liked having actual works of art (by Greg Ligon, Kara Walker and others). It provided something direct and visceral in rooms full of representations.

Especially helpful was the associated installation of Isaac Julien’s “Baltimore” (2003) – a cheekily deep demonstration of seeing Black representations and deriving power from them. I’m glad we started our visit there.

 

 

 

The Twombly exhibition prompts its own list of contradictions:

• Chi-chi / Ugliness
• Preciousness / Irony
• Chaos / Arcadia
• Mindlessness / Erudition
• Forgetting / Remembering
• Epitaphs / Erasures

 

The subtitle of the Twombly exhibit was misleading. Is it possible to take seriously the notion that these scribbles and post-it memos are evidence of a significant engagement with the classical heritage? What have these to do with the study of the antique engaged in by Masaccio, Raphael, Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Lawrence Alma-Tadema or even Picasso or De Chirico?

 

The exhibit made a fuss about CT’s residence in Italy and his life there. The romance of the American artist in Rome, like Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun”. Not that this doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. I suspect the whole story – if we ever get to learn it - is pure Henry James. An inverted “Portrait of a lady” overlaid with “The Aspern papers”?

 

Even so, the work is thrilling and exhilarating, and the exhibition unforgettable.

 

I’ve loved “Synopsis of a battle” since seeing it in an ad in “Artforum” in the ‘70s. Trying to make sense of the senseless. Diagrams of lines of force, not attempts to suggest that force. Traces, after-effects.

 

CT was not engaged in any sort of revival. He wasn’t even translating ancient motifs into a modern idiom. His classical words and allusions are all epitaphs. What’s left of Virgil? A name, for most people. And for the minority for whom Virgil is more than that, CT’s gesture provides a mournful monument.

 

It was the sculptures that really got me. Certainly the work of the 1990s what matters is the sculpture, not so much the paintings. Giacometti plus Oldenburg.

September: Oedipus at the Getty Villa

 

The most audacious production of a tragedy the Getty has hosted. The comedies have been pretty free and far-out, but for a drama this was something else.

 

It was an explicitly political drama, with Oedipus’s accusations of treachery against Creon – and Jocasta’s attempts to mollify the conflict – being the main thing. Oedipus’s tragedy seemed the tragedy of a vain and hotheaded politician, rather than the fate of Everyman.

The mood was violently haunted rather than dispassionately relentless. The conclusion, after Jocasta’s exit, was a frenzied Expressionist free-for-all, rather than a orderly march into hell.

 

It was not a translation from Greek to English. The primary language of the production was American Sign Language. There were usually English-language voice-overs and supertitles, but not always. The choruses were a quintet signing in unison, without any interpretation. It underscored the event is an occasion of translation, interpretation.

Gestures were repeated so that even un-signed idiots like me began to note the repetitions. E.g. rubbing palms together, then extracting from a palm a stream and tossing something over a slightly bowed head.

But this was not decorative dancing. It was often beautiful but it was often brutal: abrupt, harsh, ugly. Indeed, the actors seemed to strive to make each speech end with a big, abrupt gesture. A gestural exclamation point. Is this Deaf West’s house style, or is it a feature of ASL? Either way, it was expressive of conflict and turmoil.

The signing was not silent. The performers thwacked their chests with resounding thumps, clapped, squeaked, slapped and – most disturbing of all – grunted, groaned and howled.

 

Russell Harvard delineated a clear trajectory from an everything-is-under-control CEO to paranoid inquisitor, to human wreck. He didn’t waste any energy in imitating a Greek statue: no nonsense about being stately and calm.

Ashlea Hayses was an appropriately strange Tiresias. She evolved from being too frightened to speak to the voice of doom.

Jon Wolfe Nelson played Creon as a martinet more concerned about his privileges than his country, or the truth.

Akia Takara’s writhing and shrieking and cowering made the Shepherd a bigger part than I remember.

Tany Orellana’s visuals had a tremendous moment when the frames between the Getty pillars became illuminated white rectangles.

Peter Bayne provided a nicely ominous electronic rumble.

 

A lot to think about.

 

A surprising choice. The Getty up to now has made a point of avoiding the most familiar items in the antique repertoire. Also, the program booklet, contrary to tradition, didn’t announce next year’s play. Could we hope for Deaf West doing “Oedipus at Colonis” next, then “Antigone”?