Archives for 2010

The weather not being all that cooperative in Hawaii last week, I ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to find fun things to do indoors. At the advice of a sweet and avuncular Michigan lawyer names John who was on Kauai vacationing with his wife, I followed a dirt track just outside the center of the town of Hanalei to hear a slack key guitar concert in a local community center given by a couple of Hawaiian old timers, Doug and Sandy McMaster.

Doug is one of the few people remaining on the islands who practices this old school form of guitar playing. Slack guitar is a soloistic style of playing which came into being in the late 1700s. It’s purely instrumental and doesn’t involve any singing, though originally it was used to accompany hula dancing and chant. It involves alternate tunings to the regular guitar tuning system (around 75 known slack guitar tunings are known of today) and extensive use of the thumb as a self-accomaniment device. The mode of playing was born when Mexican workers, who had come to Hawaii to teach the locals farming techniques (the cow had recently been introduced on the islands) left some of their instruments behind when they went home to Mexico. The locals picked up the Mexicans’ guitars but didn’t know how to recreate the original tunings, so developed their own systems based on what sounded good to their ears. The resulting effect is extremely melodious, sweet and mellow.

What a double-act the McMasters turned out to be! Sandy, a portly lady with a broad grin and the kind of speaking voice that could soothe the temper of the most harried politician, clearly (or at least in performance mode) wears the trousers in the relationship. She casually and almost inaudibly strums a ukelele in most of the pieces and does pretty much all of the talking, telling mystical-tinged yarns about the development of slack guitar and her and Doug’s experiences over the years on the islands. She decides the playlist and tells her partner what to do at every stage. Only at one point during the two and a half hour concert did Doug get a chance to pick a tune and even then he seemed shy to do so and looked for Sandy’s approval of his decision.

Doug, a gaunt gentleman with long straggly hair and a low voice, spent the first half of the concert peeping out from behind dark glasses. He has a sheepish aspect about him and a dry, understated sense of humor. He is also a very amazing musician. I was very glad to be sitting in a place where I could see Doug’s fingers work the fretboard clearly. He gave the impression that he was hardly moving his thumb at all, but the musical structure was often so dense that it sounded like there should be three pairs of hands playing at once, not just one.

As the music flowed evenly like waves lapping a shore on a beautiful day, I shut my eyes and almost fell into a slumber. It’s a good thing that Doug and Sandy serve Oreo cookies and water at intermission — I needed the sustenance to kick me out of my lovely listening lethargy.

If you’re on Kauai, I thoroughly recommend a trip to hear the McMasters play. They perform twice a week, on a Friday at 4pm and Sunday at 3pm in the Hanalei Community Center on Kauai’s north shore.

You know how sometimes you look at a once-familiar word, phrase or sentence and it suddenly seems incomprehensible, like it’s written in Swahili or Urdu?

That happened to me a couple of nights ago as I was on the plane back from New York staring dumbly at the screen of a passenger seated a couple of rows ahead of me. My neighbor was watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on the in-flight TV service and Larry David was gesticulating in his usual over-the-top fashion at some other guy in front of a theater box office.

All of a sudden, the words “Will Call” came floating into view. Being a frequenter of box offices on an almost daily basis myself, I never pay much attention to these two small words. But seeing them on screen the other day gave me pause for thought. What on earth does “will call” actually mean? And where does the phrase come from? It makes very little sense to me in the context of a box office. A sentence like “I will call you tomorrow” uses the words in a normal way. If anyone out there can shed light on the etymology behind this phrase, I’d love to hear from you.

PS More travels ahead: Lies Like Truth is going on hiatus for ten days or so. I will be blogging again from March 9.

KALW 91.7 FM, the small, scrappy and innovative public radio station which broadcasts my weekly radio show about the art of singing, VoiceBox, is doing really well in terms of listener numbers. I was gladdened to find out that the station, which is tiny and run on a shoestring, came in fourth on the Public Radio Player‘s list of live radio streams which are accessed most by listeners.

At the top was WBUR (Boston), second was WBEZ (Chicago), KCRW Music (Los Angeles) came in fourth, followed by KALW (San Francisco). KQED, the much bigger and shinier local NPR affiliate here in the Bay Area, came in a distant 17th.

Read more here.

Here’s a very quick roundup of some stuff I experienced on my trip to New York over the past few days:

1. Pinball machine exhibition at San Francisco International Airport: I should pay more attention to the exhibitions in the international concourse at the airport. The show on pinball machines at the moment is not only gorgeous to look at thanks to all that chrome and all of those flashing lights, but is also very informative. I might have to visit a pinball convention one of these days. San Francisco appears to be one of the last remaining bastions of interest in these lovely old machines.

2. Fela: I caught the much-talked-about Broadway musical about the Nigerian Afro-jazz musician and activist Fela Kuti as soon as I got into town on Friday night. Although I didn’t learn a great deal about the artist’s life beyond what I already knew (the musical really only goes into the Wikipedia version of Fela’s history and legacy) I appreciated my $27.00 standing place for two reasons: 1) after five hours on a plane it was great to be on my feet, and 2) you can dance so much better from the back of the orchestra than you can from an actual seat. My fellow standers and myself rocked out for two and half hours to the great on-stage band.

3. Iannis Xenakis exhibition at the Drawing Center: Most people know the Greek composer/architect Xenakis for his music, but people often forget that he was an accomplished architect who worked for Le Corbusier for many years. The exhibition made the connection between draftsmanship and music in Xenakis’ work and I left all the more informed and entranced for it. I appreciated the iPod I was given at the front desk which enabled me to listen to music by the composer as I looked at his visual work which ranged from oblique scratches on graph paper, to carefully executed plans for sound installations to music manuscript.

4. Radiohole’s Whatever Heaven Allows at P.S. 122: I was completely flummoxed by this show by the downtown New York experimental performance bastion. There were just too many in-jokes and the whole thing smacked of self-indulgence. Though there were a few memorable moments, such as when the cast members threw shotglassfuls of what appeared to be Kahlua in their own faces.

5. Mr. and Mrs. Fitch: Douglas Carter Beane’s new play about a couple of yuppie middle aged newspaper gossip columnists starring John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle is utterly insufferable. Both Ben Brantley agrees with me so there’s no point wasting any more time and space explaining why it’s probably among the worst ten plays I’ve ever sat through in my life. The only mystery is why I bothered seeing it through to the end.

8. Regret of the trip: Not staying an extra day for the opening of the Whitney Biennial.

It’s a common assumption that if you’re a truly great singer, you can sing most anything. But this assumption of course is false. There are amazing lyrical tenors who can’t do Wagner. And incredible jazz singers who can’t sing folk music. For many experts, fach is everything and knowing your parameters as a vocalist is the best way to become excellent.

In the world of choral singing, however, some groups have earned a reputation for being able to sing in practically any style. The King’s Singers is one such group.

But at last night’s concert at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, the six-song, all male, a cappella showed that some musical styles may not fit them as well as others. The group breezed beautifully through a bunch of Italian and English madrigals by Schutz, Monteverdi, Weelkes and Bennet, and brought lushness and warmth to a performance of Saint-Saens’ Saltarelle.

But the King’s Singers’ performance of Berkeley composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s Tres Mitros de Mi Tierra (a commissioned world premiere) reminded me of hearing the Trinity College Choir from Cambridge, England, attempting gospel music at a concert at Grace Cathedral last summer. They just sounded stiff and “trained” — they couldn’t get under the skin of the music at all.

The same thing happened to the King’s Singers at last night’s concert: No matter how much accuracy and dexterity the vocalists brought to Frank’s rhythmically complex, mystical three-movement piece about three mythical Peruvian characters, they just couldn’t quite get into the swing of it. I guess these particular Brits (or maybe Anglo-Saxons in general?) are just too buttoned up to really communicate this ethnic kind of music. The piece, which offsets beautiful, delicate moments with a strident Latino pulse felt mostly quite stiff and formal.

I wonder if it would have sounded more supple if sung by a group more comfortable with Latino and/or folk idioms?

PS lies like truth is going on hiatus for a few days owing to travel plans. Look out for a new post next Wednesday.

What’s it like to feel like an outsider in your own country? I think a lot of people living here in the so-called “Republic of California” feel like this when they read about pro-life groups gaining headway in the mid-west or the outlawing of the teaching of the Big Bang Theory in southern schools.

Not that the Bay Area way of life, with its yuppie brunches and hipsters fretting over whether their Thanksgiving turkey went to art school before it was humanely put to sleep, is necessarily preferable, mind you.

It is this duality that underpins solo theater artist and writer Dan Hoyle’s new show, The Real Americans, currently playing at The Marsh Theatre in San Francisco.

Put off by the hipster brunch crowd, the artist leaves the Bay Area bubble and sets off into the hinterlands in his van to find out what middle America is really like in the hopes of finding something that goes beyond the aforementioned cliches. Sadly for Hoyle — and for his audiences — he comes back to the Bay with his stereotypes mostly confirmed.

The show entertains us with its vivid characterizations of various hayseed and christian conservative types. But it ends up confirming typically San Franciscan liberal views about the rest of the country rather than providing any truly new insights into what it means to be a “real American” or if such a thing even exists today.

PS On the subject of national identity and belonging versus feeling like a stranger in your own land, the Akram Kahn dance company is coming to San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend with “Bahok”, the group’s acclaimed 2008 work which explores similar issues to Hoyle’s show. Taking its title from the Bengali word “carrier”, the piece mixes Chinese folk dance and Kathak influences with western contemporary and classical ballet techniques. It might be interesting to compare and contrast Hoyle’s and Kahn’s approaches to the subject of patrimony.

The fabulous British all-male a cappella vocal ensemble The King’s Singers is in town for one concert tomorrow night, Wednesday 17 February, at The Herbst Theatre under the auspices of SF Performances. I caught up with one of the members, countertenor David Hurley, via skype, for a quick chat…

Arts events aren’t a common occurrence at City Hall in San Francisco. But they should be.

Hundreds of people flocked to the venerable old building on Friday at noon to witness a jubilant Love Everywhere, a new dance-theatre production by local choreographer Erica Chong Shuch.

The piece commemorated the sixth anniversary of the weekend when San Francisco city officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Given the current political turmoil surrounding this subject, the event, which was free to the public, couldn’t have been more timely. Though conceived in a celebratory mood with a klezmer dance party at the end, a sense of solemnity still hung over the piece.

I’ve seen Shuch, a prodigiously talented choreographer, do much better work from a purely artistic standpoint — the choreography, which evoked simple old fashioned dance steps such as the waltz and tango, was predictable and crowd-pleasing and the messaging about happy same-sex couples was heavy-handed.

But there was such an infectious energy to the piece, with its 49-strong cast, 13-piece live band and two singers, and Shuch used the marble-lined enclaves of city hall so inventively, with groups of performers spread all around the space, that Love Everywhere ended up being a galvanizing event nontheless. At the end of the day, Shuch’s brilliant was to bring so many people together under the cupola at City Hall rather than create a breathtaking work of art. And there’s definitely artistry in that. I felt mobilized by the time I left.

At what point in an arts organization’s growth does it need to have more than one person at the top? I ask this question in light of the departure of the Magic Theatre‘s Managing Director, Scott Hawkins. According to an article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Hawkins decided to eliminate his own position:

“Reached by phone, Hawkins said that in his efforts to help restructure the company to cope with its financially straitened circumstances, “after analyzing the budget in December I decided we could no longer afford a managing director’s salary. The standard two-headed model at American theaters no longer fit here, and I didn’t see the opportunity to rebuild the budget to the point where we could justify that position.”…Having a “single person in charge of both the business and artistic sides is not an uncommon structure for organizations of a certain size,” Hawkins adds. “The Magic is now that size.””

I wonder how the venerable producer of new plays will cope with only one person to run it? The stress on the Magic’s artistic director, Loretta Greco (pictured), must be enormous, even if the company has scaled back operations dramatically over the last couple of years by taking such measures as shuttering one of its two spaces.

I also wonder whether under one leader and a reduced budget, the Magic can even be considered as a “mid-size company” anymore. What does Hawkins mean by “of a certain size”? He uses the same terminology that people use to hide the age of a person in decline. I really hope that his words don’t spell the end of one of the very few remaining mid-size theaters in the area.

Unlike many people who write about music, I keep all of my audio collection on my laptop computer, a MacBook air. The main advantages of doing this are that I have my entire music collection at my fingertips wherever I go, and I save a lot of shelf space that would otherwise be taken up with CDs gathering dust. I also love buying music online – it’s so quick and easy – and these days, you can find a surprising amount of unusual stuff via digital download. 

But in truth, maintaining a digital music cache isn’t ideal in many ways. Here is a list of some of the main issues I have with my current system:

1. Manual data entry: Many of the CDs that people send me which I  then transfer to my computer’s iTunes application don’t import their track information automatically. This means I spend many painstaking hours manually entering the names of titles, artists, albums and genres.

2. Limited access to liner notes: Some CDs bought on iTunes come with a downloadable album booklet, but this is the exception rather than the rule. So most of my musical collection is devoid of lyrics and useful background information about the artists and the works on the recordings.

3. Browsing difficulties: The “cover flow” setting in iTunes allows you to “flick” through album covers as you might browse through a CD or vinyl collection on a shelf. But it’s not quite the same because so many of the recordings I own aren’t commercial recordings, so they show up on the screen as blank squares with no titles or cover art.

4. Incomplete track importing: Sometimes when I try to transfer a CD to my laptop music library, not all the tracks from the CD transfer successfully to the digital format. I end up with a partial album.

5. Backup challenges: I have so much music that my current backup drive can’t handle all of the files. I need to find another solution quickly.

The convenience and space saving qualities of buying and maintaining my music via iTunes means that I’m willing to put up with these less-than-optimal conditions. I’m hoping that in time I’ll be able to iron out the kinks.

American soprano Kiera Duffy is a rising star of the opera and concert stage. Since being a finalist in the 2007 Met National Council Auditions — and as such was featured in Susan Froemke’s documentary about the major opera competition, The Audition — she has gone on to great things. In 2008, she won a Sullivan Foundation grant and has performed with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as at Tanglewood and Carnegie Hall. Kiera took some time out of her busy schedule to pen her thoughts for lies like truth about The Audition‘s impact on her career…

The 2007 Metropolitan National Council Competition was an enchanting, nerve-wracking and surreal experience, to say the least. Never could I have predicted that a little audition I did on the east side of Manhattan (for which I arrived late and completely flustered–thank you, Madison Avenue traffic) would eventually lead me to sing on the Metropolitan Opera stage with the Met Orchestra on one of the most famous sets in operatic history. I think it’s safe to say that this experience would be one of the more overwhelming and incredible moments in any aspiring opera singer’s life, but to relive that whole experience while watching a 20-foot version of yourself on a jumbo movie screen? Well, that’s just weird.

Working in an industry that is mainly focused on live theater, I’ve been really taken aback by the power of film and its ability to reach such a vast audience. Since the release of the documentary on national PBS stations this past January, I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to The Audition. I seem to get at least a handful of new Facebook friend requests every day, not to mention the emails and wall postings and messages on my website from people around the country who were impacted by it. To hear what viewers have had to say after they’ve watched the movie has been fascinating: “I never realized what it took to be an opera singer!” “I never saw an opera before, but now I want to go to one!” “I’m simply blown away by all of the talent!” I have to admit that I’ve also gotten quite a bit of: “I was sure you were going to win.” Or the slightly more authoritative: “You should have won!” Or, ahem, my father’s personal favorite: “You got robbed.” Of course, I am touched that people enjoyed my performance, and hey, maybe I could have used some of them at the judges’ table, but For. The. Record. I’m actually not sure I should have won, and I definitely don’t think I got robbed. Dad.

If I may say this without sounding self-congratulatory, I personally think that the 2007 National Council semi-finalists and finalists were particularly extraordinary, and well yeah, it was “just an honor to be nominated…” (Sorry, but it’s Hollywood awards season and I just got back from LA.) Moreover, at the risk of sounding trite, I was not so interested in winning the competition. Though it would have been great, I had a bigger battle to fight, aka performance anxiety.

It’s official: Monday is the new Saturday and last night’s escapades in San Francisco are proof of this fact.

The evening kicked off with some delicious Brazilian food and then a concert at the Conservatory of Music dedicated to celebrating the new official “sister school” link between the San Francisco Conservatory and The Shanghai Conservatory.

The concert itself was, to be honest, a bit of a yawnfest. Besides a luminous rendition of Jake Heggie’s schmaltzy but gorgeous song “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” by mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, cellist Emil Miland and Pianist Mack McCray, the event  proceeded in a very monotonous mood. The compositions that made up most of the program – by faculty and students of the Shanghai Conservatory – were all incredibly samey. It seems that the Shanghai Conservatory has a very particular view of how a piece of chamber music should be written. The style can be distilled down to monochrome textures in meandering roughly atonal keys with occasional non-commital flutterings from wind and string instruments and a bit of pitch-bending. Melody was completely absent and there was very little rhythmic drive to any of the pieces on the program.

What a striking (and welcome) contrast it was, then, to head off in the Monday evening drizzle to a nearby venue located under the 101 freeway exit to experience “Live City Revue”, a club night at The Coda Lounge run by local hip-hop mavericks Felonious. The event, which started a few weeks ago and happens every Monday night, featured some of the most uplifting and core-rumbling music I’ve heard live in a while.

Over a couple of hours, I heard Felonious performing several beatbox-infused, intelligent-worded, spiraling numbers, the sounds of a burgeoning beatboxer, Cornbread, a completely enrapturing cover of the John Legend / Andre 3000 R&B hit “Green Light” performed by beatboxer/MC Carlos Aguirre and Joshua Torrez (the star of The Magic Theatre‘s current production of Oedipus el Rey and a wonderful guitarist/vocalist — his falsetto left me swooning) and an amazing set by a Frencophile African band whose members played guitar, cora and marimba and sang. The jam session between the band and Felonious was the highlight of the evening. Hip-hop, jazz, folk and African sounds merged effortlessly as the musicians got more and more into the zone of their playing.

I left the Coda Lounge on a vast high. It was of the best Monday nights in memory. What I live city I live in.