Archives for 2011

One thing England still does very well during the holidays in spite of competition from the end-of-year sales, is a vivid line in eccentric niche cultural traditions.

I spent this Boxing Day afternoon standing under threatening skies outside The Phoenix Pub in the town of Faversham, sipping mulled wine as a bunch of bearded blokes wearing colorful sashes, top hats, white shirts, braces (suspenders) and corduroy trousers (pants) tied just under the knee with rough brown rope, thundered gracefully up and down in a display of “Molly Dancing.”

Molly Dancing is a rogue branch of traditional Morris Dancing (you know, the guys who skip about wearing bells and waving hankies) which was traditionally done by out of work ploughboys in midwinter in the 19th century. There are no bells and hankies in Molly, but it has its own peculiarities: All the male dancers perform in blackface and one of their number, known as “the molly,” capers about cross-dressed as a woman in frilly cap and billowing skirts.

It’s an energetic art form that requires the dancers to perform intricate footwork and high-kneed skips in tight spaces wearing extremely heavy boots with nails in the soles. Wikipedia has a user-friendly overview of molly dancing here.

The members of the Seven Champions Molly Dancing troupe (or “side” as a group of molly dancers is known in local parlance) which was the group that was dancing at the Phoenix today, have wonderful answers to the inevitable questions that audiences ask them about what on earth it is that they think they’re doing.

For instance, when I asked my friend James, a member of Seven Champions, why the dancers perform in blackface, he replied that it’s because they all work down a treacle mine. And when I asked him about the bits of tatty rope wrapped around their trousers, he said, “it’s to stop the rats from getting lost up there.”

This link explains all.

PS According to Wiki-P, the University of Aberdeen ethnomusicologist Elaine Bradtke wrote a PhD thesis on the inherent post-modernism of the Seven Champions. Gosh, it’s nice to be home.

Can Margate’s swanky new Turner Contemporary museum reinvigorate the derelict seaside town?

Few urban environments in the UK offer such radical cultural contrasts as Margate. The seaside town located in the southeast of England which I visited today with my parents who live in nearby Canterbury, is going through a bad case of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder these days.

Up until the mid 20th century, Margate was a thriving resort. My dad remembers taking family vacations there as a child. The place attracted its fair share of celebrities, including T S Eliot, who reputedly wrote part of The Wasteland in a windswept shelter (pictured) close to the sea. In earlier times, King George III’s brother lived in the middle of town, in a grand house on Cecil Square.

Today, that building is occupied by a NatWest Bank.

It was at this bank today that my dad found himself held up at gunpoint by a robber while trying to make a transaction at the counter. The assaulter fled, the police came, no one was hurt. Needless to say, my father didn’t finish his transaction.

It was hard to believe that only half an hour before this incident, he, my mum and I had been wandering around the sparkling Turner Contemporary museum — an amazing new addition to Margate’s waterfront. We had taken in a somewhat unfocused yet eye-catching exhibition dedicated to youth culture in the 20th century featuring works by an eclectic array of artists including Phil Collins, Diane Arbus and the museum’s namesake, JMW Turner. We followed that up with a gourmet lunch at the museum’s cafe — all local-organic this and sustainably-harvested that — and then pottered around the revitalized “Old Town” area with its multitude of trendy vintage boutiques and art galleries.

Our stroll through town made me see Margate in a new light. No more a derelict, seaside town, the sort of place that might inspire Morrissey in his darkest moments, I thought.

And yet…

Though blue plaques detailing Margate’s proud cultural heritage adorn buildings all over town, the city is still mired in muck. Crime in broad daylight. Drab, post-war buildings that look like they might collapse. Beautiful old facades in peeling paint disarray.

And that’s to say nothing of Margate’s effort at holiday decorations. The city is home to the saddest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen in a public place. Threadbare and keeling slightly to one side, the tree had been carelessly strung with a meagre spiral of weak lightbulbs which winked apologetically from the sickly evergreen’s scrawny trunk.

I’m hoping that the museum, which is free to visit and was well-attended in the middle of the day, together with the slew of artisans making the most of Margate’s relatively low-cost real estate, will gradually help to pull the town firmly out of the swamp.

Not that I’m completely comfortable with the squeaky yuppification that’s going on in many small towns across the land. A city ought to have frayed edges. But its citizens and visitors should be able to walk around without feeling afraid.

Gareth Malone is the British chorus world’s answer to Jamie Oliver.

What Jamie has done to revolutionize people’s appetite for home cooking, Gareth has done to bring them together in song.

I have been following Malone’s trajectory with curiosity for the last few years since first hearing about the unlikely idea of a choirmaster as TV personality. But I didn’t fully appreciate the power of Malone’s TV series The Choir until tonight, when my mum turned on the television, saw what was on and said, “you should watch this, it’s Gareth Malone.”

Over the course of a couple of hours, I sat riveted as the thirty-something choirmaster, who cuts a nerdy-chic figure in Buddy Holly glasses, preppy blazers, knitted pullovers and trendy jeans, took a bunch of stoical army wives from a couple of British military bases and turned them into vocal superstars. In so doing, he also helped to give these women, who felt pretty isolated and emotionally drained, a potent sense of community and well-being.

At the start of the show, the ladies were mumbling their way apologetically through a song on home turf. By the end, they were singing with gusto and flair at the Royal Albert Hall before the Queen. All the while, they were soldiering on, fearing for the safety of their husbands, most of whom were serving long tours on the front-lines in Afghanistan. Added pathos came from the story of one tattooed military wife and mother, who at the start of the show, could barely summon up the courage to sing a note to herself, let alone a solo before a crowd. At the climax of the episode, she was belting out the solo part at the Royal Albert Hall in front of 5,000 audience members and millions of people watching at home.

OK, so the show was pretty schmaltzy and the simple musical arrangements of songs like the Whitney Houston hit “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” aren’t exactly fascinating fodder for the ears. But if Malone’s choral interventions don’t make for compelling telly, I don’t know what does.

Following in Jamie Oliver’s footsteps, my mum tells me that Malone is headed to the States to work his magic there. I hope the choirmaster makes it as far as The Bay Area. I can think of several groups of people who would benefit from his touch, from the prisoners of San Quentin, to Silicon Valley engineers, to the kids currently starved of music education at any number of our public schools.

P.S. “Wherever You Are,” the song that the military wives sang at Albert Hall, went on general release  in the UK on the 19th of December and is topping the charts for the holiday season.

On the similarities of two productions happening in close proximity to one another in Berkeley.

After seeing of The Wild Bride at Berkeley Repertory Theatre a couple of nights ago (go see it if you’re in the Bay Area — they’ve just extended by three weeks and tickets are selling fast) a friend wrote to exchange thoughts about the remarkable and coincidental similarities between Kneehigh Theatre’s spiraling and engrossing production and the show that’s currently playing right next door at the Aurora Theatre — an adaptation of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.

In some ways, I suppose it is a remarkable coincidence to see two shows with so much in common happening in adjacent theaters: “Devil … rhyming couplets … on stage musicians … morality play about easy wealth/greed … puppet … dancing … and on and on,” wrote my friend in an email about the links that the two shows share.

What strikes me though is how two shows with so much in common can be so different in terms of quality though. I admired Muriel Maffre’s puppeteering work in The Soldier’s Tale. But it was about all I admired. The production was otherwise over-labored and slow.

The Wild Bride, by contrast, is a wild ride. It grabs you with a vice-like grip that won’t let go — literally, in fact, as hands are a major metaphor and source of visual imagery throughout the work — from the moment the devil appears on stage sitting under a tree playing a laconic blues song and thinking about how much mischief he might cause to an unsuspecting family. What I appreciated most about this dark fairy tale was the multi-dexterity of the performers, who not only act brilliantly but are also excellent multi-instrumentalists, puppeteers, singers and dancers.

Ultimately, though, is it that much of a coincidence to see two plays that make use of many of the same theatrical tropes? It seems like one can hardly go anywhere at the moment without stumbling across actor-instrumentalist-puppeteers telling dark fairytales. British directors like John Doyle and Kneehigh’s Emma Rice have inspired American directors to create work along these lines in recent years and the Brits in turn were most likely turned on to the format by Eastern European auteurs. So I wonder if the shared mise-en-scene attributes are simply part and parcel of an overall “physical theatre” aesthetic that’s become so trendy these days?

How can the managers of arts organizations best control who gets press tickets to see their work?

The manager of a theatre company in the Bay Area sent out an interesting email yesterday asking members of the arts journalism community for help in developing a strategy for controlling press ticket allocations.

“We’ve come to the point where giving a press comp to every blogger or person with a dedicated theatre webpage is no longer feasible,” wrote the manager. “I’m trying to come up with some way to easily distinguish between real journalists and other folks for whom reviewing theater is more of a hobby, and I’d like your help.”

The manager expressed a problem that I’ve been hearing from many arts organizations over the last few years as the blogging and tweeting world has expanded and traditional media has shrunk.

I was impressed by the manager’s reaching out to the media community for advice on this front — it’s testament to the good relationship that exists in the region between journalists and the arts organizations they cover.

The manager’s conclusion about how to tackle the issue, however, raised some interesting questions about the difficulty of taking a hard-line approach: “Basically what I’ve come to is that people who are not directly affiliated with a news source, be it print, online or radio, should not get press comps.”

This approach is nice and simple, but problematic. I, for one, don’t fit into the manager’s desired category for press tickets as a member of the media who is currently on a journalism fellowship at Stanford and taking a break from filing stories and reviews to regular media outlets. This blog and my VoiceBox radio/podcast series are all I’m doing at the moment and both are independent projects.

I was relieved to hear that I am still in the “in crowd”: “I consider you a very valid member of the local press,” the manager wrote to me when I raised the above point. “I know your work.”

So if familiarity with a journalist’s work is the main criteria upon which to base a decision about whether or not to give someone press tickets, then the media through which a journalist operates is perhaps less relevant. Of course, a commentator is much more likely to get exposure and recognition in arts circles if he or she contributes to well-known news sources. These still tend to be traditional media entities. It’s hard to make a name for yourself as an arts blogger alone.

In short, the problem remains a tricky one for arts organizations to navigate. As colleague of mine eloquently put it in a follow-up email:

“That line between journalists and hobbyists continues to blur. I get that your press comps are limited, but to cut out all non-affiliated writers risks losing some interesting voices from the conversation. To have a blanket policy about who gets in and who doesn’t is useful when it comes to explaining why you’re not offering tickets for someone, but I’d recommend that your rule have some leniency based on your own review of a writer’s work and audience reach.”

Chanticleer schmaltzes it up for the holidays with a riper soprano sound — and it’s good.

The Bay Area-based, Grammy Award-winning men’s vocal ensemble Chanticleer has got the holiday formula down. The 12-member group packs churches all over the country at this time of year with its perfectly-honed mix of Medieval chant, traditional carols and gospel medleys spiced up with a few crunchy-harmonied postmodern compositions to keep the serious musses in the house happy.

Last night’s lovely concert at Stanford’s Memorial Church felt different to me in one respect, though: The ensemble’s high voices (the voices that Chanticleer has become most famous for promoting over the years) weren’t sounding like they usually sound. Unless the acoustics in the room were throwing my ears off, the altos and sopranos came across as being much more operatic than is customary. Instead of making a bell-like thread of pure sound which is boy chorister-esque in quality, the singers performed in a much fuller and more fruity fashion — reminding me of David Daniels on one of his riper days.

The lineup at the top has changed recently — Michael McNeil has been replaced by Kory Reid. Perhaps that explains the fuller sound. Or maybe it’s something that the new artistic leaders for the season — interim director Jace Wittig and guest director Dale Warland — have specifically incited.

Either way it’s pretty great. There’s no reason for men to sound like boys.

Could singing be a way to get horses to cooperate with humans?

I hadn’t heard of “Equine Guided Education” until I met Wendy Millet.

Wendy spends half her life heading up the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford and the other half running Gallop Ventures, a business dedicated to helping people figure out interpersonal dynamics and leadership skills through interacting with horses.

Wendy and her partners run workshops for executive groups and other teams and every now and again, they do a free demo class. I’d been clamoring to to see what this Equine Guided Education thing was all about, so I joined a group on Saturday.

It turns out that horses are extremely sensitive creatures. The subtlest changes in their body movements indicate whether they’re feeling in sync with their environment. When they’re feeling comfortable, they behave like they’re “one of the team,” actively coming up to and sticking around the humans that are near them. When they’re feeling disgruntled by the interactions going on around them, they put their ears back, rear their heads haughtily and even walk off in the other direction in apparent disgust.

Our small group of participants at the demo took part in a number of exercises to test our ability to lead a situation and work as a team. The picture to the right, above, shows me and a couple of fellow workshop attendees attempting to get a bridle on Master, the steed who had been selected to work with us, with our arms interlocked and restrictions placed on our ability to communicate with words. We made a hash of the task. Master’s ears were pinned back. Otherwise he treated us with indifference. By the time we had got the bridle on him, we realized we had put it on upside down.

The most challenging task of the morning, however, was trying to get Master to walk around the paddock with us, without using the bridle to pull him. Try as we might, he wouldn’t budge. At some point, for no particular reason, I suggested that we try singing a song. We stood in a semi-circle and tried a couple of verses of “Home on the Range.” Master walked towards us. He didn’t make it all the way over and we never got him to follow us around, but he seemed at least to relax and want to be part of our circle when we were singing.

Wendy thought we were on the right track with this activity. “He wasn’t responding to the song itself,” she said, “But rather to the collective energy you all had together when you were singing. He was responding to the fact that you were all in sync.”

I want to do more singing experiments with horses.

Choral composers should look to Bach for inspiration.

Earlier this week, I posted about why I feel that the choral arts, on the whole, are on a moribund track. I stand corrected for looking at choral music from a strictly western “art” perspective. Gospel music and glee club-type events are obvious, jubilant exceptions to the bloodless stuff we’re seeing and hearing all too much of these days on the non-denominational, Anglo-centric choral front.

What I was thankfully reminded of during a spirited performance on Tuesday night by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in Palo Alto of Bach’s B minor Mass, is the fact that choral music hasn’t always lacked a fire in its belly. Bach’s lickety-split, joyous, rhythmic writing keeps audiences on the edges of their pews. Thus, the slower sections stand out in thoughtful, soulful contrast. The fast and the slow go hand in hand and the music never cloys.

Composers today often seem to forget that many choruses are capable of singing rhythmically and at speed. So they shouldn’t be afraid of writing less dirgey, faster material for voices.

As the holiday season kicks into full swing and choral music concerts abound, I am invariably reminded of why it is that the genre has so little street cred.

Here are the problems as I perceive them.

1. Composers like to write tediously slow, earnest music. Most of the contemporary repertoire sounds like a dirge, with the same superficially complex harmonies borrowed from the Lauridsen and Whitacre cannons. There’s little rhythmicality and joy to any of it. In short, the sincerity bores the pants off me.

2. Choral directors take themselves way too seriously and program too much samey stuff. I guess they can’t help it — that’s all that’s being written at the moment, apparently — as per my above point. The concerts generally lack variety and are often way too long, sending the audience into a comatose state.

3. Singers usually seem completely disengaged. With expressionless faces, they look akin to many performers of contemporary dance. At most, you get one or two simperingly beatific expressions, which are as off-putting as the blank, robotic looks. Where’s the fun?

4. The churches in which most choral concerts take place couldn’t be less inviting. The pews are hard. The air is cold. The toilets are in the basement. The lighting is bad and there’s nowhere to get a drink.

5. Choral people often dress very poorly. I can’t stand choruses’ attempts at homogeneity e.g. matching uniforms. And the “all black” thing is boring plus leaves too much room for people to get away with ugly variations on a theme like ill-fitting shirts, trousers that are too short and, worst of all, clogs. (I know clogs are comfortable and singers have to stand for a long time. But there are limits.)

I believe that the above issues are easy to fix. Choruses should commission composers to write more fast-paced, joyous and/or rhythmic pieces. Directors should program shorter concerts (max 90 minutes) and include a wide variety of moods and styles into a single program. Singers should understand the words they’re singing and wake up. Choruses should stop performing in churches so much. There are plenty of other kinds of venues with decent acoustics. Oh, and the singers and their directors should take a style lesson. Looking good on stage doesn’t have to cost much money.

Almost every journalist these days feels like their beat is the most likely to become extinct first. Is one species of journalism more endangered than another?

At a panel discussion last night on the Stanford campus featuring members of the investigative reporter team from the Los Angeles Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of corruption among civic officials in the city of Bell, California, the moderator said that investigative journalism was the most endangered of all journalistic forms. His reasoning was that investigative journalism is expensive (The LA Times had 20 reporters working on the Bell story) and takes a long time (the Bell story developed over months and months.)

It strikes me that while investigative journalism is a strong contender for the “most likely to become extinct first” prize, arts journalists could give the investigative crowd a run for their pink slips. Stories about arts and culture media layoffs are rife on ArtsJournal.com, for one thing. And I guess nearly everyone in this industry, from Op-Ed columnists to weather reporters, feels like their heads might roll first. Perhaps it’s only the sports journalists who are sitting pretty.

So I wonder if it’s useful to think about journalism in these terms? We’re all feeling like the future is foggy. No one type of journalism is more at risk than the others. We need to devote our energies to coming up with viable business models and content paradigms to strengthen the role of the media in the future and spend less time brooding about the spilled blood.

Bay Area-based chanteuse/guest blogger Pamela Rose is relieved to hear that Reese Witherspoon, star of the forthcoming Peggy Lee biopic, considers the jazz icon to be first and foremost a songwriting genius.

I don’t like Hollywood biopics about music icons. I can almost predict the story arc, the struggle of the early years, the montage of increasingly better nightclubs, cars and homes, a painful descent into booze and drugs, the scene where the bottle shatters against the wall, the humbling climb back from the abyss into the sunlight of an adoring public.

So you might imagine my concern upon learning of a movie in the works about Peggy Lee, one of my musical heroines. Even with a gifted writer like Nora Ephron on the project, and the talented Reese Witherspoon apparently hand-picked by Ms. Lee’s family to play the leading part, will Hollywood see beyond the sultry icon?

The memory of her warm, purring stage persona makes it easy to underestimate what a hardworking, canny businesswoman and musician she actually was. And of course, the chilling truth about Peggy’s childhood – she was raised by a physically abusive stepmother — and her unlucky marriages, will make such a strong onscreen story, one might never be allowed to celebrate Peggy’s delicious creativity and enduring passion for arranging and writing.

So it came as a great relief, while watching a TV interview with Ms. Witherspoon, to hear the actress characterize Peggy Lee first and foremost as a songwriter.

Many people aren’t aware of how prolific and dedicated a writer Peggy was. It was fairly unusual for a pop singer in the 40’s and 50’s to record and publish so many original songs. Writing at first with her guitarist husband Dave Barbour, she later worked with collaborators as diverse as Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Marian McPartland and Michel Legrand. Peggy produced hit after hit for vinyl, television, Broadway, Hollywood and even animated features.

And let’s not forget that when she added her two hip verses to Little Willie John’s “Fever” (“Romeo loved Juliet…Captain Smith and Pocahantas”), she helped transform the song into a classic.

Peggy liked to write with the rhythm of a lyric in mind and a cadence suggested by a phrase. As a vocalist, she knew just how to marry a lyric to melody that felt natural and easy, relaxed and true. Listen to her song “I Don’t Know Enough About You” for a terrific example of that silky, simple melodic line. And her dark, torchy “Don’t Smoke in Bed” doesn’t waste a single syllable or note in delivering its dramatic message. (I also love K.D. Lang’s version of this song, if you’re curious to hear another singer do it).

I think my favorite Peggy Lee story — and I’ll be interested to see if this comes out in the movie — was when she sued Walt Disney Studios.

Peggy was paid $1000 by Walt Disney to compose 6 songs (with collaborator Sonny Burke) for the animated feature Lady and the Tramp. At the bargain rate of $3500, she was the voice of four of the characters and sang in the film as well. Peggy played the roles of Darling, Peg (who sang “He’s a Tramp”) and the singing Siamese cats. Disney had brokered hundreds of these unfair deals with artists and successfully fought off many later royalty claims. The company’s unofficial tagline in the industry was “Donʼt Mess with the Mouse.”

But when the film was released on video in the 1970ʼs, the estimated additional $90 million in sales to Disney was too much for the determined Ms. Lee to leave alone, and after a fifteen year court battle, she successfully sued them for a landmark $3.8 million in back royalties. That famous settlement liberated musicians and artists from Disney’s draconian policies.

She was seventy years old when the case finally settled, and certainly didn’t need the money. What made her persist with the suit all those years?

Perhaps it was her passionate belief in the power of the working musician. Even after becoming a big star, Peggy always related to “the band” – the musicians, composers and arrangers whom she considered her fellows.

Incidentally, you won’t see Peggy’s name on the song credits for “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” She took her name off to benefit her co-writer, Willard Robison, who was struggling with ill-health and financial hardship.

I’m hoping the movie version of Peggy Lee captures the generous, driven, perfectionist, vibrant and creative woman that she truly was. Recognizing her as a songwriter seems like the right place to start.

Pamela Rose is a San Francisco singer and educator. Her new book “Wild Women of Song: Great Gal Composers of the Jazz Era” celebrates women songwriters. Pamela’s book is available through Amazon and CDBaby.com. More about the Wild Women project can be found at www.wildwomenofsong.com

My friend Phil Weglarz, a Bay Area-based arts therapist and allover creative genius, created a fascinating centerpiece for his Thanksgiving dinner table this year. I wasn’t present at the event, but was able to see the art object (pictured) over the weekend when I stopped in to visit Phil and his wife Kate on the way back from my own holiday weekend travels further afield.

Fashioned from merchant discount ads and cellophane, the turkey makes as strong an anti-consumer statement for this holiday season as I’ve ever seen. Quite apart from looking festive, the lurid object draws attention to “Black Friday” propaganda and the waste that it produces, while at the same time inviting us to eat it.

I think Phil should go into business with this concept. People could order the cellophane-discount ad turkeys online in advance of Thanksgiving as they might a regular turkey. Phil could become a millionaire while simultaneously making subversive statements about American consumerism.