Words and Music

The Second Hundred Years

2026-08-07T12:13:00.000-04:00

From the Jazz Vault Dept.: Mosaic Records has announced a CD set chronicling the recordings Louis Armstrong made in New York in 1924 and 1925 – just before he participated in the groundbreaking Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions. Which means we’ll be hearing Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra as well as recordings with Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter, the unmissable sound and creativity of Satchmo behind them. But even before this Armstrong recorded as part of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Let’s revisit my review of a lavish CD set devoted to those sides.

JAZZ, THE UNIQUE AND DEFINING MUSIC of the United States, evolved throughout the 19th century, with New Orleans its epicenter, but couldn’t gain general-public attention until its earliest recordings were released, in 1917. Not surprisingly, these featured white musicians, but the recordings proved popular enough to open studio doors to the Black pioneers. Among them was Louis Armstrong.

In 1922 he was a young man, fresh out of New Orleans, newly installed in Joe “King” Oliver’s ensemble in Chicago. Oliver, also from New Orleans, was his mentor and hero. He had summoned his protegé to join the band, and Louis couldn’t have been more grateful. The two cornets, playing side-by-side in this seven-piece group, gained attention for their exciting duet work – and that’s generally all the space that Armstrong got. Oliver kept him leashed.

But listen to “Chimes Blues,” recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on April 5, 1923. Louis has his first solo on record, what would turn out to be his only solo on these King Oliver sessions, and you can hear why Oliver felt threatened. That assertive Satchmo tone is all there, fully inhabiting the acoustic horn through which it was recorded. And this was part of the first of the six sessions that year that gave us the 37 sides enshrined as among the most important and influential records of that decade. Sure, Louis’s Hot Fives and Sevens were soon to come, but this is where they were born.

The Oliver ensemble initially included clarinetist Johnny Dodds, his brother Warren “Baby” Dodds on drums (but using only with woodblock, tom-tom, and cymbal, so as not to overwhelm the recording), trombonist Honoré Dutrey, Bill Johnson on banjo, and Lil Hardin at the piano (soon to become Louis’s second wife). Later sessions subbed out Johnny St. Cyr on banjo and added Stump Evans and Charlie Jackson on saxophones.

Those 37 sides, all recorded in 1923, form the core of a recent release from Archeophone Records, a label that specializes in the careful restoration of music from the acoustic-recording era, an era that ended in 1925 with the invention of the electrical microphone. It’s a four-CD, two-LP set designed to look as attractive as the recordings sound. And that’s saying something: These sessions have been reissued many times, most recently on a two-CD set in 2006 by a label called “Off the Record,” which offered restoration work far better than any that had come before.

So: If you have that set, do you need this (rather more expensive) one? I’m saying Yes, and for three reasons. The restoration work on this set is better – sometimes subtly, sometimes demonstrably. It’s the best these seminal recordings have ever sounded. Listen attentively and you will hear the individual instruments, especially Hardin’s piano, which was much obscured in earlier releases. Second, the accompanying LP-sized book contains excellent, detailed noted by Armstrong scholar Ricky Riccardi. If you’re already a fan of Louis, you know that name. And third, the collection boasts two extra CDs that provide a fascinating context to the King Oliver recordings.

The restorations in the new release were done by Archeophone co-founder Richard Martin, which may seem confusing at first, because it was Archeophone who distributed that earlier Off the Record release. But, explains Martin, “The Off the Record people are buddies of ours, and we’d worked on stuff together. They came to us one day and said they wanted to start their own label. We said, let us help you. This was 20 years ago, when distribution was still a thing, and you couldn’t get into distribution with just one title.

“So now people are asking us, why should we buy your release again? Well, the earlier one really wasn’t ours. That was David (Sager) and Doug (Benson). And for our release we got a number of the transfers that Doug did. He’s an excellent transfer engineer.” The two major ingredients of reissues of vintage recordings are transfers and audio restoration. Transfers are the bulwark, requiring the best possible original sides. Restoration requires good software and ears that know how to employ it.

What’s evident about the new Archeophone release is that there’s a more compelling presence to each of the Oliver sides, which I determined by comparing them to the Off the Record versions via a superior set of headphones. “That’s what I’m going for these days,” says Martin. “I’ve been working on this sound that I’ve arrived at for a number of years, and my ears have evolved.”

He began with Benson’s transfers, but sought better copies for some of the songs. “For instance, I was dissatisfied with ‘Tears.’ I found (writer and record dealer) Mark Berresford’s copy to be more workable. Mark’s copy of “Mandy Lee Blues” similarly was better than two others to which I had access.”

And sometimes the puzzle is pieced together from more than one record. “Except for the first three or so revolutions, Mark’s “Krooked Blues” must be the absolutely best copy out there. That was a big breakthrough. And for the bad start, I used the grooves from one of his lesser copies that had a good start! The flip, ‘Alligator Hop,’ was also an improvement over previous issues.

“For the Off-the-Record release, they went back to originals. They got rare copies. They were able to work with Marty Alexander, who was the person who had ‘Zulu’ and they did these revelatory transfers. But this is where we differ, because they decided not to turn the knobs, but present them (with) flat (equalization), as if that’s the way you would have listened to them at home. I felt that was the wrong decision.”

As a sidenote, “Zulu’s Ball,” is the rarest of the King Oliver sides, and therefore one of the rarest records of all time. As Riccardi writes in the program notes, “Only one copy ... has ever miraculously surfaced, twenty-one years after it was recorded, and in Oregon of all places.” It happened in a department store in Portland, where guitarist, banjoist, and vocalist Monte Ballou regularly pored through records sent there from New Orleans, “and that’s how he found Gennett 5275 in a ‘pile of scrap discs’ in 1944.”

Martin notes that he gave each of these sides hours of detailed restoration work. “The mastering stage is where I take the initial restorations, which by and large sound great, and then try to make everything ‘fit together’ sonically. This is easiest when I have done all the transfers myself, because there’s an aural consistency, even despite the different distinct characteristics of the record labels: Gennett, Columbia, OKeh, Paramount. So, it’s a heavier lift when several different people have done the transfers, but I get it. These are rare, valuable records, and I am more than satisfied by the results achieved by my friends and colleagues.”

I can’t speak to the sound quality of the LPs; I ditched my vinyl collection years ago and never lamented the passing of that format. But I know it’s a complicated subject these days. Scratch the surface and you . . . well, you know.

As to the program notes, Riccardi is an excellent writer well steeped in Satchmo lore. He’s the Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, the house where Armstrong lived from 1943 until his death in 1971. His widow, Lucille, willed the house to the city of New York, so a museum there was inaugurated after she died in 1983. Along with many Armstrong-related liner-notes projects, Riccardi has written a three-volume Armstrong biography, albeit in reverse order. “What a Wonderful World” (2011) covers his later years, while “Heart Full of Rhythm” (2020) looks 1929 to 1947. “Stomp Off, Let’s Go,” due in February, gives us Armstrong’s beginnings, dovetailing nicely with the Archeophone set.

Alongside a lengthy essay on the backgrounds of Oliver and Armstrong are detailed descriptions of each individual track on this set, looking at the origins of the songs, the featured players, and other insights of interest. And thorough discographies identify all of the known players and times and places.

Archeophone Records was founded in 1998 by Martin and his wife, Meagan Hennessey, to specialize in the restoration of material from the earliest days of recordings, sourcing from both cylinders and platters and issuing jazz, popular music, and spoken word (including a CD titled “Actionable Offenses” that comprises extremely rude recordings from the 1890s – a revelatory set). The company won a GRAMMY Best Historical Album Award in 2006 for “Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891–1922,” and has been nominated for many more.

“Meagan and I actually landed in this area through parallel paths,” Martin explains. “We were kids who were interested in Billboard charts and stuff like that, and the history behind those songs. We didn’t get to know each other until we were around 30. I’ve always felt there was this artificial door put up between 1955 and anything before that, so we just knocked on the door, asking what’s behind here, what’s behind there – and then we found the acoustic era and thought, Oh my god, nobody’s ever heard of this stuff. It’s this entirely different world.” And they decided to make a business of exploring it.

While Richard takes care of the restoration part, he and Meagan both work on packaging. “Centennial” includes two LPs in addition to the four CDs, with the entirety of the Oliver sides on the vinyl. The size of the box offered a larger canvas for design, and they created what I see as its own work of art. Not everyone agrees.

“The day we announced the set,” recalls Martin, “we had one cranky guy bitching about the cover on an online forum, asking how could we take a rare, important photo and treat it with such disrespect!”

The cover art reproduces a classic portrait of the Creole Jazz Band, but divides it into eleven vertical strips. “But, you know, there’s a 22 by 33-inch poster of it, intact, inside. For a hundred years, people have complained about how imperfect these recordings are, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could have had them live or electric, or this copy is not good enough, and so on. So it’s a broken narrative, these bits and pieces. That’s what’s visualized on the front, and then it’s restored on the CDs and on the poster, where it all gets put together.”

There was a last-minute change to the playing order. Where earlier sets put the tracks in the order in which they were recorded, he and Meagan decided to present them in release order, which differs, and which offers the experience a fan would have had when eagerly acquiring these 78s.
“It gives a fresh way of hearing them. And the liner notes talk about that. But then I asked Ricky what else we could do to make this a little different, a little special? He pointed out that with two CDs, there’s still some playing time left, so why don’t we add some of the Oliver tracks that other people were playing? I thought about it, but decided instead to add the flip sides, because those are part of the story of the records.”

Although common releasing practice was to place the same recording artists on both sides of a 78, there were exceptions. Three of the original Oliver sides were backed with other material: specifically, “Choo Choo Blues” by Art Landry’s Syncopatin’ Six, “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (featuring the near-debut of Sidney Bechet), and “Dearborn Street Blues” by Young’s Creole Jazz Band, all of which have been restored and placed at the end of CD 2.

“So now we’re going to have 40 tracks, two CDs, a lovely package and great notes. And Meagan and I looked at each other said, this isn’t enough. We wanted to go bigger. Now, Ricky’s got a book coming out in February about Louis’s early days, and an important part of that was his phonograph obsession.”

Thus was born the idea for discs 3 and 4, superb historical markers that allow us to contextualize King Oliver’s music. Jazz didn’t emerge in a vacuum, and even though its recorded legacy is over a hundred years old, we’re missing its earlier development. So it’s helpful – and, to my ears, exciting – to enter the world of recordings that documents what the musicians then were listening to.

Especially Louis, who moved from Victrola to LPs to tape over the years (and who made his own fabulous mixtapes). The recordings featured on CD 3, “Louis’s Record Collection,” weren’t all in his collection, but those that weren’t at least had a proven influence.

We start with “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” by Louis Vasnier, an 1891 cylinder recording included to give a feeling of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. And what a mix that follows! There’s a march from Sousa’s Band, a hymn by Henry Burr, and a Yiddish lullaby that he may have heard from the Karnofsky family, for whom he worked when he was ten, and that he certainly heard from one of his doctors when he was nearly 70.

The New Orleans funeral ritual is embodied in “Flee as a Bird” and “O Didn’t He Ramble,” while Louis’s boyhood singing as part of a street quartet is reflected in the Haydn Quartet’s 1908 recording of “Darling Nellie Gray” – which Armstrong himself would record in 1936 with the Mills Brothers. .

Trumpeter Herbert L. Clarke, immensely famous in that century’s early years, shows his chops on “Carnival of Venice,” and Louis owned this record and idolized the performer. He loved opera, too, so the inclusion of recordings by Luisa Tetrazzini, Enrico Caruso, and John McCormack sit alongside songs sung by Al Jolson and Bert Williams. Chronologically, the playlist ends in 1921 with a Shelton Brooks and others in a sketch titled “Darktown Court Room,” and you would do well to make peace with its outdated, racially insensitive material. Louis owned three copies of this disc.

Disc 4 is a little different. Recorded between 1920 and 1923, the 26 sides on this disc are presented chronologically, offering a before-and-after trip through that brief era of jazz. The “before” sides were chosen as likely influences on Oliver and Armstrong, and the “afters” pay their debts to their band. The selections also prove that even in its nascent stages, jazz came at us in a variety of configurations.

Both Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra and the Isham Jones Orchestra were offering fairly straightforward stuff (not forgetting that there were those in 1920 who considered all jazz to be the work of the devil), while the feeling was looser with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds and Jelly Roll Morton’s Jazz Band, each of which is featured on this disc. But the Whiteman number, “Wang Wang Blues,” features Henry Busse on cornet and Isham Jones’s “Wabash Blues” sports Louis Panico on “laughing cornet,” and both of those players were tremendously influential.

Then there’s “Avalon,” in a 1920 recording by Art Hickman’s Orchestra. This is among the platters that found their way onto the Mississippi River steamboat where Fate Marable’s Jaz-e-Sax orchestra was playing, young Louis among them. “Avalon” was among the new records obtained by Joseph Streckfus, the ship’s captain, who was so impressed by the different kind of sound that he insisted that his band learn it. As he recalled in 1958, “it wasn’t long before we were in a rehearsal of these pieces by ear. ... That evening we had approximately 1200 dancers, and when the band played ‘Avalon,’ they stopped the show. Folks crowded around the orchestra stand and applauded and applauded. They never had heard music like that.”

Other famous names appear as well. Fletcher Henderson is the pianist in “Frisco Jazz Band Blues” by Ethel Waters Jazz Masters (a 1921 instrumental recording), and he returns later on the disc in “Old Black Joe’s Blues,” leading Henderson’s “Club Alabam’” Orchestra in 1923 – before Louis’s brief stint with the band, but featuring a teenaged Coleman Hawkins.

“Buddy’s Habits,” by Charley Straight and His Orchestra, got its first recording in June 1923; Oliver recorded it four months later, somewhat slower but using the same instrumental breaks, which means he either knew the record or the published stock arrangement (or both). But “Sobbin’ Blues,” recorded in October 1923 by Art Kahn’s Orchestra, shows the Oliver influence on that outfit’s unnamed cornet player – perhaps inspired by Oliver’s own recording of the song that was made four months before.

And so it goes throughout this fascinating playlist. As Riccardi writes, “From Verdi and Caruso to Jones and Panico to Oliver and Armstrong, all of this music seemed to be in a state of constant conversation with each other and with anyone who was listening.”

Centennial
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (and Various Artists)
Archeophone ARCH 6014
www.archeophone.com

– The Syncopated Times, October 2024

Keeping It in the Family

2026-07-31T23:12:00.000-04:00

From the Food Vault Dept.: There’s some back-and-forth to the Lanzi family’s restaurant history. A Lanzi’s Restaurant opened in Amsterdam, NY’s, south side in 1920, where there was good food as well as occasional organized outdoor boxing matches. Luigi and Amalia Lanzi, who founded the place, came from Agani, Italy; after working for his parents, their son Lorenzo opened his own place, named after himself, in 1956 on Amsterdam’s Union Street. Lanzi’s closed in 1985; Lorenzo’s in 1998. But Lorenzo’s five sons all went into the business, and soon enough began opening their own places. Thus we now have Northville’s Sport Island Pub, Lakeside Tavern in Gloversville, and Lanzi’s on the Lake in Mayfield, all three on the shores of Great Sacandaga Lake; as well as Partner’s Pub in Johnstown. (Find them online at lanzifamilyrestaurants.com/restaurants)

A century later, the Lanzi family opened another restaurant where their grandfather started: Lorenzo’s Southside, where Neapolitan pizza, cooked in an authentic wood-fired oven, is a specialty. My wife and I recently dined there and had a thoroughly wonderful meal, and we’re returning soon to try to pizza we missed our first time around. Meanwhile, I rummaged through the archives and discovered my reviews of Lorenzo’s from 1990 and Lanzi’s on the Lake from 1993, which you’ll find below.

THERE’S NO SIGN ON THE BUILDING. Joe Lanzi shrugs and smiles as he explains: “We never needed one.” Lorenzo’s looks like the other houses on the block save for the neon Bass Ale sign in the window. It’s on one of those Amsterdam hills, looking over the Mohawk River, a location chosen by Joe’s father in 1957 and which brought most of the nine kids into the business.

My sense is that people don’t wander into the place on their own: they’re brought by friends who want to share this Amsterdam treasure. That’s how I was introduced a few visits ago, and it was a ritual I performed the night before the Travers cup race to avoid all traces of track crowds.

Ironically, we sat next to cartoonist John Caldwell and his wife – people who know their restaurants – who were showing off the place to fellow cartoonist Jack Ziegler and his wife, up from Connecticut for the Travers and no mean restaurant fans themselves. Making this the first restaurant in a few years of reviewing for which I can offer social notes as well.

All right: no sign. Visits from celebrity cartoonists. What’s the appeal?

I’m inclined to pin it on the Fettucine Carbonara, but there’s so much else on the menu worth trying, and so much else that’s just as good, that I know I’ll be shouted down by other Lorenzo’s enthusiasts. Still, assuming you’re in the mood for completely violating any kind of weight-loss program, you won’t go wrong with that item.

It starts with fresh pasta. “My father makes the pasta every morning,” says Joe, who’s now head chef. “He’s 73 years old but you can’t keep him away.” (If the angel hair pasta shows up as a special, get it. This is the pasta-maker’s art made beautiful upon the mountains.)

Two friends were up from the ‘burbs of Manhattan for a weekend visit, quietly skeptical that culinary proficiency could make it this far up the Hudson. City people get that way. We have to be patient with them.

I forced the Carbonara upon Harry, while his wife, Debra, ordered the rolled stuffed eggplant. Although she doesn’t eat meat, we all started with a shared antipasto platter (a medium was more than large enough for three) and she simply removed the salami slices. “I can deal with meat neighbors,” she explained.

It’s a nicely-presented plate topped with just enough of the house Italian dressing. Although the heart of it is that all-crunch-and-no-flavor iceberg lettuce, you’ll find some spinach mixed in and a generous accompaniment of artichoke hearts, red pepper slices, provolone, pepperoncini, onions, tomato slices, black olives and, of course, anchovies. (Deb: “Yuk. On the side, please.” Foolish woman.) A basket of garlic bread was served with it and replenished throughout the meal, although Deb is in the embarrassing habit of eating only the buttery part and leaving a pile of crusts on the table. We had to speak to her about that.

That Bass Ale sign makes a tasty promise, and you can get it, right from the tap, in a 20-ounce mug. That took care of my beverage requirements. There’s a wide selection of other beers, too, and a modest, modestly-priced wine list.

The entrees are simple, as you’d expect from what’s really just a neighborhood joint. (There have been Lanzis in the restaurant business in Amsterdam for three generations, so you’re talking a long time for word-of-mouth advertising to spread.)

Fettucine carbonara
(Stock photo)

Served with a choice of pasta or vegetables, it’s impossible to resist the former. I had a special of grilled chicken breast, a meat that’s first marinated in the house Italian dressing before hitting the fire. By itself, it would be a fairly dull entree; in conjunction with the spaghetti side-dish, it was terrific. Flavors and textures contrasted and combined for a mouth-filling treat.

“This is really cooked al dente,” Harry said admiringly. “It’s exactly how I like it.” And it looks so modest on the plate. The wide fettucine noodles peeking through a coating of thick, cheese-rich cream, tiny morsels of bacon spicing the mixture.

Deb’s eggplant was stuffed with an herb-rich ricotta, finished with a light tomato sauce. She ordered the side of ziti, which featured large noodles (obviously most capable bridegrooms) and a marinara aburst with freshness.

The simplest and yet hardest rule for a restaurant to learn is the one that Lorenzo’s has mastered: keep it fresh. Joe and family obviously love the work and are eager to share it with you--he frequently makes the rounds, table by table, to find out how you like his food or to share some new idea.

Service is nothing fancy but there’s a large enough staff that you shouldn’t ever feel you’ve gone into limbo. We finished a fine meal with some coffees and then left quietly so as not to call attention to the party beside us where the men were scribbling excitedly on the tabletop.

VEGETARIAN ALERT: I know, I know, all your meat-eating friends figure pasta is the easiest vehicle with which to shut you up, but this is a pasta paradise. Look for lots of eggplant recipes as well as a very nice marinara. And don’t be bashful about asking for special dishes.

Dinner for three with tax, tip and a big beer was $50.

Lorenzo’s Restaurant, 25 Union Street, Amsterdam, 842-xxxx. Serving lunch Wednesday-Saturday 11:30 AM-2:30 PM, dinners Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday 4:30-9:30 PM, Friday-Saturday 4:30-10 PM. No credit cards; personal checks accepted.

– Metroland Magazine, 23 August 1990

THE LANZIS ARE RESTAURANT BRATS who had been looking for some time at expanding beyond Lorenzo’s, their successful Amsterdam operation. Successful? It’s achieved cult status in the Capital Region.

There was talk of a banquet hall a little further north, but they came upon an even better deal in the former Rokadaga, a handsome restaurant that overlooks the Great Sacandaga Lake just north of Mayfield in Fulton County.

As Lanzi’s on the Lake, it reopened just before the Memorial Day weekend. As the Lanzis report, it’s been doing better than they could have expected. The five brothers are now split between the two restaurants, with their Lorenzo, their father, still making fresh pasta daily for both places (along with some special order accounts).

“We came up with a different menu,” says Chris, the chef at Lanzi’s, “that wouldn’t take away from what we’re doing at Lorenzo’s. This one has a different variety, and it’s a little more upscale.”

Lanzi's on the Lake:
Seen from the lake

In other words, it’s more suited to the tourist business the Sacandaga attracts. Dinner entrees are priced from $10 to $18, in a progression from pasta to steak that includes chicken, seafood and veal selections. If you visit for lunch, which is when you’re more likely to enjoy a lakeside seat and the spectacular view that comes with it, you’ll find items in the $5-$8 range, including an impressive array of gourmet salads.

Susan and I visited on a Tuesday evening, usually an easygoing night for restaurants. While by no means packed, Lanzi’s was still hopping. And it’s a good-sized place.

For larger parties, the main floor has long tables and lots of leg room; for a deuce like us, the ringside booths are attractive. Although the omnipresent television set hangs by the bar, the bar area is separated from the dining room by enough glass and wood to keep the noise from penetrating, one of the best ideas I’ve seen in a long time. The wide open airiness of the place is undisturbed, too.

We saw a lot of young people working the floor – young women, in fact, which can be a tipoff that the house is going to stint on service by stinting on servers themselves. But this was far from the case. Our server was very attentive and never far out of reach.

She got us started with a bottle of wine from the short, comfortably-priced list and helped us through the menu. Some of the items that interested us weren’t available, a phenomenon about which chef Chris is entirely unapologetic. “We make it a point to use what’s fresh,” he says, “so we’re likely to run out sometimes. But that’s better than having something that’s been hanging around for the past four days.”

Black bean soup was unexpectedly good – a little heat, a nice presence of cumin – but surprisingly thick. It had a pastelike consistency that would be more suited to use on nachos.

Salads are served family style, which means it’s tossed in a large bowl before it reaches your table. The house dressing, a modified creamy Italian with better, tastier vinegar than usual, was delicious. Don’t overdo it on the fresh, garlic-redolent rolls you’re served.

Filet of sole (Susan’s entree) is so good all by itself that we get suspicious when it’s enhanced. Did the Lanzi’s preparation, which adds a mountainous topping of sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts, conceal something? Nope – just the freshest slice of sole I’ve tasted all summer.

Scallops Christopher is also terrific, in spite of the general decline in quality of scallops. They picked some good ones, which must cost dearly, and sauteed them with fresh tomato and artichoke hearts, serving the nicely-seasoned result over fresh pasta (I chose fettucine, which complemented the large scallops well).

Desserts come from J & S Watkins and some more local sources; we split a wholly unnecessary slice of raspberry cheesecake before we split.

Look for a different menu and fewer hours once we wind down into winter. Chris expects to stay open Thursday through Sunday when it’s cold, although he’s hoping the snowmobilers will glide to his door over the lake. In the meantime, that’s something that boaters are invited to do.

Dinner for two, with a $10 bottle of wine, tax, tip and a dessert, was $60.

Lanzi's on the Lake, 1751 Route 30, Mayfield, 518-661-7711, lanzisonthelake.com.
Serving Mon-Tue 4-8, Fri-Sat 4-9, Sun 11:30-7. All major cards. (Current info as of this posting.)

– Metroland Magazine, 26 August 1993

Are You Now or Have You Ever?

2026-07-23T14:25:34.825-04:00

MY FATHER, who was born in 1928, extolled the 1950s as the last decade during which “the United States made sense.” As a conservative white male military vet, his opinion wasn’t surprising: he believed he’d earned part ownership of this country. Marx would have defined that ownership as exclusionary but, to my father, Marx represented communism and communism was evil.

Joseph Lattanzi and Laura Santamaria-Mendez
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

And communists were being systematically revealed and removed from their jobs, both in Hollywood and in Congress. Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel “Fellow Travelers” is set during that era, but takes the persecution further by placing at its center two men who become lovers while working in Washington, D.C. as the spectre of being outed – and thus career-ruined – draws closer and grows more ominous.

Although the story is better known as a TV mini-series (taking the story well beyond the bounds of the book), the opera packs a greater emotional punch, because that’s what good opera does. The shrewd melding of music and words bypasses that part of the brain we use to decode novels and goes straight to our emotional nerve centers. TV writing, no matter how critically lauded, is too formulaic to allow for emotional depths. Even if ads aren’t part of your streaming service, TV writing is structured to accommodate ads.

Director Kevin Newbury read the novel “and I fell in love with the characters,” he says, so he shepherded the opera into being by giving the book to both librettist Greg Pierce and composer Gregory Spears. “I wanted to write a love story,” says Spears, “and opera does love better than any other genre.”

As an opera,“Fellow Travelers” is now a decade old and that anniversary is being celebrated with a national tour taking it to ten different companies. It played in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego before settling in through August 16 at the Glimmerglass Festival. It’s a top-notch production that underscores the power of words and music when they’re deftly combined.

From the perspective of a straight white male, it’s easy to reckon that the end of McCarthy-era blacklisting meant the end of persecution over philosophical and religious beliefs. After all, that safety is now enshrined in law. But such protection never extended, until very recently, to those of a non-straight sexuality – and lately all such protection is being swept away by the fascists currently in government.

Timothy Laughlin is a boyish man in D.C. seeking to use his writing skills to pursue some manner of government job. As portrayed by tenor Colin Aikins, he is smart and articulate and vulnerable. He meets Hawkins Fuller – “Friends call me ‘Hawk.’ And now you’re a friend.” – on a park bench in Dupont Circle. It’s 1953. Baritone Joseph Lattanzi brings a blustery handsomeness to a character made all the more real by his contradictions. He’s a hail-fellow-well-met type who livens a party but is covering his own vulnerability. And both of these men are doubly vulnerable as they hide their homosexuality.

Characters are more effective when they reveal aspects of themselves that seem to play against our expectations; the same holds true for music. Spears’s writing is many-layered, using the instrumental forces with a chamber-orchestra approach. Piano is prominent, often placing its percussive accents atop minimalist-style string sequences, all of it performed with exceptional skill by the Glimmerglass orchestra under the baton of Kelly Kuo. We get some big brass statements at the top of the show as a kind of fanfare to welcome us to the lonely park bench on which the action commences.

Jose Olivares, Joseph Lattanzi, and Luke Harnish
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

True to his word, Hawk places a recommendation that secures Tim a government job, as speechwriter to Michigan senator Charles E. Potter (Yichen Xue), who (true to his actual history) walks in with the help of two canes owing to the loss of his legs in France during World War II. Potter is an ardent anti-communist, and became a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Tim’s brief interview with Potter, a dance of discovering each other’s politics, is conducted over insistent music of a chaconne-like character.

And Tim is pleased to be in this company, because he, too, is a conservative anti-communist, more in line with McCarthy’s antics than he perhaps cares to admit, and a devoted Catholic as well. All of which is tested after Hawk, on a surprise visit to Tim’s rooms, determinedly kisses him and persuades him to bed.

Up until this point, the lyrics by Greg Pierce have been resonant and efficient, taking us through seemingly mundane workplace conversations with effective subtexts woven through. Now the piece grows more lush and poetic as Hawk and Tim liken their ecstasy to the paradise of a place like Bermuda. It’s a soaring duet that begins with the couple singing overlapping individual thoughts, but culminating in a confluence where “Under the sheets in a tropical storm, you. / The rain, finding its way through the gaps / in the straw of our roof / onto your chest. / Two little drops. / Paradise.”

This duet is in 6/8 time, and much of the score is written in some increment of three, a tempo marking that it both elegant (see “A Little Night Music” and the J. Strauss legacy) and, according to some, unnatural, as it goes against the count of our natural walking pace.

Tim seeks refuge in church the following day, and there, in front of a giant judgmental crucifix he ponders his encounter. “How many hours?” he asks, then, “How warm, how strong .../ His hands,” noting unironically, “I died last night.”

Mary Johnson, a secretary in Hawk’s office, is quick to figure out the relationship between the men. She likes Tim and thus worries on Tim’s behalf. Soprano Keely Futterer, fresh from her role as Despina in the Glimmerglass “Così,” is 1950s-garbed (excellent work all around by costume designer Devario D. Simmons) and inhabits that oppressive ‘50s head-space quite credibly, as when she reveals that she’s one-night-stand pregnant and must find an illicit way to terminate the pregnancy. (And here we are, in 2026, careening back to that aspect of the era, among many other horrific aspects that there never seems to be enough enlightenment to leave permanently behind.)

Although Mary is devoted to Hawk, he’s ratted out by another woman in his office, the ironically named Miss Lightfoot (Kaileigh Riess) and thus is called to Room M304, where Scott McLeod’s goons interrogate him. McLeod (unseen in this piece) headed the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs, another example of a figure from history woven into this tale.

Set Designer Vita Tzykun has created a series of fat filing cabinets that, lined up by themselves and shadowed by Thomas C. Hase’s lighting pendant, create a suitably oppressive look. Hawk’s interrogation is a childishly ludicrous affair, conducted with perfect gravity by baritone Luke Harnish (who will return in Act Two as McCarthy himself). Hawk must walk to the wall and back. The Interrogator, listening for a sibilant S, says, “Repeat the word ‘Disstrict.’” Hawk does so, and is asked to do it again. Then he’s given a lie-detector test. He breezes through the procedures, seemingly unconcerned, but the music tells us that has buried his worry.

Of course, Senator McCarthy knows the score, and our glimpse of him at the top of Act Two is chilling. He’s reading newspaper-published comments from Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders, who is seeking to censure McCarthy, but the Senator from Wisconsin laughs it off by declaring, “They’re all pansies up there in Vermont.”

Colin Aikins, Joseph Lattanzi, and
ensemble members | Photo Credit:
Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Some of those filing cabinets spin to create other settings; thus we see a white enamel sink in sideboard unit for Mary’s kitchen, with tiles of ‘50s green even as the flanking file cabinets continue to look. Mary is worried; “I’ve known Hawkins a very long time,” she says. “Everyone loves him. Including me.” Leading to an aria of depth and complexity as she sorts through her own conflicts even while trying to protect Tim. “There are times I wish I didn’t know him so well, if you know what I mean,” adding, “He’s ‘wonderful,’” which is a Tim has been overusing lately. And I believe I caught some musical clues behind that word, resonating with its prominent use in Handel’s “Messiah.”

Tim is in love; to Hawk he’s a diversion. Stories that tell of an aggressive suitor taking advantage of an innocent’s willingness resonate throughout time and literature, from “Don Juan” and “Clarissa” on up to “Fifty Shades of Grey” and beyond. That this is a same-sex story only means that there are no gender restrictions on such a tale.

Trying to forget Hawk, Tim enlists in the Army and is sent to France. But his years away fail to dim his passion. Hawk, now in a lavender marriage to a woman named Lucy (Laura Santamaria-Mendez), is living the suburban life, but sets up a love nest he can share with Tim. But it’s doomed, and they know it. Hawk sings a heartbreaking aria that explores the limits of a single chord: “Our very own home ... / Bricks ... a fireplace / Matching plates ... a bed ... a bookshelf / Towels ... gray for you, purple for me.”

Even as so many were fired back then because their sexuality didn’t align with McCarthy’s and Eisenhower’s beliefs, so too were prominent people in the arts denied access to their livelihoods. But it always is a fascist priority to muzzle the arts, and now we’re watching them use the cudgel of financial strangulation as funding vanishes and the virus of ignorance impels onlookers to shrug and say, “Who cares?”

We all care, of course, but won’t know it until the noose is drawn tight enough to be noticed. And we care on behalf of those who have been or continue to be more immediately affected by vituperative discrimination or censorship. This superb opera captures a moment in time seen by few but resulting in the suffering of many. At the end of it, as Tim, now unwelcome in Washington, is back at Dupont Circle considering his fate, a photo-laden back wall is revealed. These are photographs collected by the Lavender Names Project, a national grassroots effort to “collect photos and stories of members of the LGBTQ+ community who were systematically discriminated against and fired by federal and local governments in the United States.” Which means that the opera may be over, but awareness and activism must continue.

Fellow Travelers
Music by Gregory Spears
Libretto by Greg Pierce
Based on the book by Thomas Mallon
National Tour Produced by Up Until Now Collective
Produced in collaboration with The Glimmerglass Festival
Conducted by Kelly Kuo
Directed by Kevin Newbury
Glimmerglass Festival, through August 16, 2026

And That’s the Way It Is

2026-07-20T23:56:00.000-04:00

SOME YEARS AGO, The Onion, a satirical periodical, sported a headline proclaiming
“Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” The ensuing story suggested that a community-theater director would actually set “The Merchant of Venice” in 16th-century Venice.

Gregory Feldmann, Kevin Burdette,
and Travon D. Walker | Photo Credit:
Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

It was a welcome jab at those who shoehorn classic theater pieces into supposedly innovative environs, and nowhere is this more apparent, in my experience, than in the world of opera. The practice seems to me to be more a creative-team indulgence than some manner of bold choice, so I was dismayed to learn that the Glimmerglass Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” would be set on a 20th-century college campus rather than 18th-century Naples.

I’m here to eat crow. Two helpings, in fact. In the past, I have roundly criticized in-house dramaturg Kelly Rourke’s translations. I’m a stickler for correct rhyming when the original is written rhyming verse, and line endings that don’t match as intended hurt my ears. But it turns out that Rourke’s new libretto for old “Così” (title has been truncated) is a festival of witty jokes and glorious rhymes.

Second helping: The shift of time and locale, to an American college campus in 1992, turns out to brilliantly suit the improbable demands of the story. Rourke and director Eric Einhorn began shaping this concept in 2019 for a pocket production that was Covid-stilled; encouraged to pick up the task for the current season, they have proved that the questionable morals explored in Mozart’s time are, if anything, more credible in this academic setting. To put it another way, contempt for women endures undimmed.

The premise is audacious and simple: Two young men, in this case football heroes on the Spartans team, are extolling the virtues of their fiancées. “Why play the field / when you’ve landed the one?” Ferrando muses, and Guglielmo seconds that with “I never imagined / I’d fall quite so hard.” The roles are sung by tenor Travon Walker and baritone Gregory Feldmann, respectively, who credibly inhabit the emotionally spiky world of young men on the cusp of 20.

Amanda Batista, Travon D. Walker,
Gregory Feldmann, and Michelle Mariposa
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

But they’re overheard by an interloper, in this case Alfonso, a nosy maintenance man. He bets them that he can put that virtue to the test. The plum role is sung by bass Kevin Burdette, a Glimmerglass Resident Artist this season, garbed in work clothes and headphoned into the Walkman he wears on his belt. The bet is taken and the scene culminates in a trio during which they promise to “raise a glass to friendship and put argument to rest.”

Orchestra and singers are transparently in sync, but we knew this would be the case from the overture. Conductor Joseph Colaneri set a lively tempo that unleashed the virtuosity of the wind players, and he led the ensemble throughout in a perfect match of tone and dynamic.

The women stirring the hearts of the boys are Fiordiligi, sung by soprano Amanda Batista, and Dorabella, sung by mezzo Michelle Mariposa. I don’t especially care for this “sung by” convention in reviewing an opera because these roles – all of them in the piece, in fact – were fully inhabited by the singers, who I’m sure could excel in stage roles without singing a note. The goofy premise of “Così” notwithstanding, there is depth to these characters that helps make the music so timeless.

Structurally, “Così” is about twos and threes. The two footballers ally with Alfonso; the women they adore will seek advice from Despina, the dorm’s resident adviser. Soprano Keely Futterer is all brass and bluster in the role, her performance all the more impressive when contrasted with the more introspective character she portrays in this season’s “Fellow Travelers.” Despina colludes with Alfonso to help him win his bet, a collusion he achieves by tempting her with unlimited snacks from an upstage vending machine. (“You'll have Ding Dongs for days.”)

That practical machine is but one of the many incredible aspects of James Rotondo’s unbelievably detailed two-level set. Downstairs there’s also a foosball table along with some worn-looking lounge furniture and an upstage elevator, used frequently. Outside the upstage window and door are distant buildings and a darkening sky, and that sky will darken to night as the distant windows light up during the course of the piece.

Hallowe’en decorations abound, but even beyond that there’s an array of flyers and posters that look to have been generated specifically for this show, only to fade into a crowd of anonymity. Upstairs is a dorm room with bunk beds, with a prominent “Pulp Fiction” poster among the many wall decorations; across the hall is a bathroom with toilet and sink. Will they resist making bathroom jokes? They will not.

There’s a Big Game ahead, but it seems that Ferrando and Guglielmo were injured during a pre-game scrimmage; thus they (improbably, but what the heck) appear on crutches with braces and collars and bandages galore to head off to the hospital – but not before a high-energy cheerleading sequence with jaw-dropping acrobatics. Then it’s time to bid the footballers goodbye with the terzettino “Soave sia il vento,” sung by Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Alfonso, here Englished as “May heaven protect you / May kindness attend you.” I don’t suppose Mozart had a show-off mode, seeing how just about everything he wrote was impressive – but the trios in this opera are among the best in the business, and the singers and orchestra in this production serve them spectacularly well.

Alfonso’s subsequent scene takes place in the bathroom, with lyrics styled to match. “And now it's time to plunge ahead!” he declares, plunger in hand, unclogging the toilet as he sings. I have a feeling the scatalogically inclined Mozart would have loved this.

Travon Walker, Keely Futterer, and
Gregory Feldmann | Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The boys return in costume, impersonating a pair of Class of ‘87 alumni. Can they seduce the ladies in question? Fiordiligi sings the aria “Come scoglio immoto resta” to assert her faithfulness. “I am Spartan to my core,” she declares. “And my faith cannot be shaken / I am woman, hear me roar.” Batista owned the stage during that number.

The stakes are raised. In the original, the suitors ostensibly poisoned themselves with arsenic; here they’re going pound down vodka. Despina, disguised as a doctor, does some hocus-pocus with magnets in the original; here it’s a more plausible pair of defibrillator paddles in a scene that didn’t worry at all about going too far over the top with silly sight-gags. We finish the act with a sublime sextet: “Kiss me, kiss me, oh my goddess” (“Dammi un bacio, o mio tesoro”), masterfully staged and sung.

Despina gets an impressive solo moment near the top of the second act with the aria “Una donna a quindici anni,” but instead of musing about fifteen-year-old girls, Rourke’s version advises, “When a girl becomes a woman / She no longer needs permission / Trust your heart and intuition / They will never lead you astray.” Despina offers good advice but, as we’ll learn, her character is fond of cliché. “Say what you mean and mean what you say,” she’ll insist, and “Once more with feeling! Go seize the day!”

The men are persuasive. The ladies weaken. But each is an individual event, with Fiordiligi a hold-out until the end. Her paramour, Guglielmo, takes a novel tack in his aria “Donne mie, la fate a tanti,” stating, “I've defended loads of women / I'm a feminist full-blown / But then someone disappoints me / and it cuts me to the bone. / Maybe love is too much trouble /and we're better off alone.” Thus are the plot complications more compelling than in most mistaken-identity classics.

Where this production is most lacking is in Madison Manning’s choreography. With a Hallowe’en party in full swing, there’s much call for dance, but it’s an unhappy pairing of 1990s free-for-all against Mozart. I suspect that combinations could be developed from 18th-century precedent and plausibly land in the ‘90s.

There’s the usual rush to a happy ending – I give nothing away to note that it finishes as such – when Alfonso sings “Tutti accusan le donne” – “Don’t blame women – it’s just how they are.” To which I add: Don’t blame the story – it’s just how it is, and it’s only one overlookable aspect of an otherwise splendid, fun-filled production.

Così
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Original libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte
English adaptation by Kelley Rourke
Conducted by Joseph Colaneri
Directed by Eric Einhorn
Glimmerglass Festival, through August 14, 2026

One Fine Evening

2026-07-15T22:42:25.183-04:00

WHY DO WE ENJOY “Madame Butterfly”? It has great tunes that invite amazing performances. It tells a story that, despite its exotic trappings, comes from the abandoned-wife mode of melodrama that was so popular at the time, and is at heart a story of social class. We believe all over again the promises of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton as he insincerely woos his Japanese child-bride, yet we know it’ll be a three-handkerchief finish.

Eric Taylor(left) and Randy Ho (right)
Photo: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival has brought back a “Butterfly” most recently staged there in 2014, and my main question is, Where has it been? This is the essence of opera. If political-correctness concern have delayed it – well, read on. But first let’s have some quick shouts of praise for a top-notch cast and creative team, whom we’ll return to in a moment.

Before mass-media – before much of any media, really – we learned about exotic foreign cultures through spoken and written accounts, and sketches and paintings. And it certainly could seem exotic viewed from within one’s cultural cocoon. But it also invited cultural imperialism as a country’s self-perceived exceptionalism justified all manner of exploitation.

By 1904, when Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” debuted, Japan was only a half-century beyond its 250 years of isolationism, broken when US Commodore Matthew Perry forced the island nation to trade with the West. A fascination with “all things Japanese” followed, per Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Patience” and especially with “The Mikado” – although the latter borrowed and caricatured Japanese characteristics to drive home a satire about the British.

Puccini also sought to use the exoticism of Japanese custom and music to draw an audience into the story – in this case, a story of tragic love. Cio-Cio San’s arias tend to be based on a pentatonic scale, for instance, and there’s an important presence of natural elements in the tale’s Nagasaki setting. Traditional Japanese songs are quoted – and so are American ones, which is an easily overlookable point. This opera is as much an indictment of American attitudes as it is anything else. Pinkerton is a selfish boor. His friend Sharpless comes to realize it, but Pinkerton’s own delayed insight comes too late. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” sounds behind his arias, its jauntiness grows sadly ironic.

Francesca Zambello directed the 2014 production, which was revived this year by Joshua Horowitz, again using set designer Michael Yeargan’s clean, open-air playing space. The house that’s toured at the top of Act One becomes a scale model, easy to ponder, and adding to the visual excitement as it travels from hand to hand.

At first it’s big, bluff Pinkerton dominating the scene as he discusses the details of his new house with Goro, the local pimp-cum-matchmaker. Eric Taylor’s white-garbed lieutenant knows what he wants and is amused by it all. Taylor’s tenor is a fabulous instrument, sometimes sounding as if not even he can contain it. And he knows this role – he has recently sung Pinkerton with North Carolina Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, among other companies. As for the character he’s playing, “He’s not satisfied with life unless he makes the flowers of every shore his own,” he sings. “America for ever!” This sentiment never will not be ironic.

Eri Nakamura and Eric Taylor.
Photo: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival.

Placing Asian singers in Asian roles evaded casting controversy, and I think we’re enough accustomed now to see racial characteristics authentically mirrored that it took me a while to realize that this was the case. Randy Ho, a member of the company’s Resident Artists Program, is a first-generation Vietnamese American, and played the fussy, intrusive Goro with bursts of manic energy and a powerful voice to match. But to his credit, he kept the character under control, allowing it ease into the background when necessary and even standing still for astonishingly long periods.

We met baritone Troy Cook in “Oklahoma!” earlier this season; here he has the more demanding role of Sharpless, the U.S. Consul, which placed him in duet situations with Pinkerton in the first act (“Dovunque al mondo”) and brief but effective moments with Butterfly in the second (“Ora a noi” and “Io scendo al piano”), where Cook demonstrated the elusive skill of supporting a fellow-singer.

In the case of the powerful Taylor, Cook had some work to do; with Cio-Cio San, he met a more subdued challenge. Soprano Eri Nakamura sang that title role, bringing formidable credentials to her appearance here both in a range of roles (she replaced Anna Netrebko at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) and as Cio-Cio San, which has become something of a specialty. The test in this opera, of course, is “Un bel dì, vedremo,” at the top of Act Two, which was as good as this aria gets – but she also provoked a massive ovation with her Act One-finishing duet “Bimba, Bimba, non piangere,” holding her own against Taylor as they cruised up to a high-C together with the marital futon beckoning in one of the most gorgeous love duets in all of opera.

Praise, also, for mezzo Michelle Mariposa, as Cio-Cio San’s maidservant Suzuki, a role that calls for much in the way of support and not much in the way of flash. She’ll also be seen this season here as Dorabella in “Così.” Erin Alford, whom we saw as Gertie in “Oklahoma!,” has the more subdued role here as Kate Pinkerton, which she essays with impressive dignity.

Eri Nakamura and Prior Parker.
Photo: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Butterfly has a son whom she has named Sorrow; it’s a non-speaking role for a versatile child, and Prior Parker performed it wonderfully, never giving the audience enough “Oh, isn’t the child-actor wonderful!” ammo to inspire unearned applause.

Glimmerglass music director Joseph Colaneri conducted the exceptional orchestra, which colored every scene with just the right amount of texture, and never more so than in the celebrated “humming chorus” that ends Act Two and will leave you in tears. The finish of it all is tragic, of course, but here gets an extra dimension of Noh-meets-Grand Guignol as Butterfly’s seppuku finish plays out with a startling curtain of scarlet.

Seven years ago, a NY Times opinion piece by Katherine Hu suggested that “opera has to confront the depth of its racism and sexism point-blank, treating classic operas as historical artifacts instead of dynamic cultural productions. Opera directors should approach the production of these classics as museum curators and professors – educating audiences about historical context and making stereotypes visible.” This production goes a long way to satisfying that idea.

Madame Butterfly
Music by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto by Luigi Illica & Giuseppe Giacosa
Conducted by Joseph Colaneri
Original Production Directed By Francesca Zambello
Revival Director - Joshua Horowitz
The Glimmerglass Festival, through August 17

You’re Doing Fine

2026-07-13T22:43:14.099-04:00

THE OVERTURE BEGINS, in time-honored fashion, with a trill – the sound of two next-door notes alternating rapidly, giving a sense of uncertainty. It’s a great device that makes the sonority of the ensuing music all the more comforting. In other words, it’s a foretaste of the tension and release that informs all aspects of the drama to come. Even with a so-familiar musical like “Oklahoma!,” we’re encouraged by such devices to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in what’s ultimately an entertaining, inspiring show.

Jaelynn Ricks, Jude Emperado, Peter Murphy,
Jordan Spena, and E. A. Hobbs.
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

With the U.S. celebrating 250 years since its declaration of independence, during a year in which the country’s much-vaunted freedom is so much under attack, the Glimmerglass Festival season opener of “Oklahoma!” whisked us away from those concerns to a time – 1906 – when a number of the rural inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory were faced with their own issues of anger and reconciliation. It’s a brilliant production, marshalling all the talent and resources Glimmerglass uniquely has to offer: Great cast, great singing, great staging, great set. A great orchestra, led by a masterful conductor. And one of the finest directors in the business.

The musical premiered in 1943, during wartime, and ran for five years, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. It was based on a 1931 play by Oklahoman Lynn Riggs, which book-and-lyrics writer Oscar Hammerstein crafted in a sweeping but efficient two acts that, along with Richard Rodgers’s unforgettable music, gave the public a thoughtful story with plenty of fun, even while further changing the conventions of musical theater.

I write “further” because Hammerstein caused a seismic shift sixteen years earlier with “Showboat,” written with composer Jerome Kern, a piece that also turned from an urban setting with chorus girls to explore a fraught American landscape. “Oklahoma!” is celebrated for its integration of songs and story, but Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern had been attempting that with their Princess Theatre shows three decades earlier. There’s the matter of putting ballet on the Broadway stage with Agnes de Mille’s choreography, but Rodgers had worked with George Balanchine on four shows during the 1930s. And there’s that quiet “Oklahoma!” opening, as Curley’s voice is heard, unaccompanied, after the overture’s end. Yet something similar opened “The Yeoman of the Guard” in 1888.

None of this takes anything away from the innovations of “Oklahoma!” – it actually underscores how deftly Rodgers and Hammerstein and director Rouben Mamoulian built upon such precedent to present something that seemed absolutely new.

And what helps make the current Glimmerglass production so appealing is that director Francesca Zambello and her creative team are bringing out what lives inside the show, rather than imposing some needless agenda upon the piece. Her approach is to offer it in a way that honors the material’s origins, and she has done this in previous seasons with such musicals as “Candide,” “Porgy and Bess,” “Showboat,” and “West Side Story,” not to mention the operas “La traviata,” “The Crucible,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” and “Madame Butterfly,” the last-named returning this summer. She informs every actor on the stage with a character and a purpose, thus bringing the entirety of the stage picture to life.

Michael Adams and Shereen Pimentel.
Photo by Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Set designer Peter J. Davison welcomes us to this landscape with a Grant Wood-style curtain illustration of barns and a train, suggesting cultivation and restlessness. The curtain rises on an open stage flanked by farmhouse and barn, with a expanse of field between upon which oil derricks rise portentously in the distance. And a fence, symbolizing the tension between the territory’s ranchers and farmers.

Laurey Williams is a farmgirl, Curly McLain a rancher. That’s not enough to stop their flirting, but Laurey can be acid-tongued, giving a hard edge to her coquettishness. There’s a box social coming up, and Curly sure would like to take Laurey. Michael Adams, as Curly, is movie-star handsome with a winning smile and, of course, a voice to match, as we heard when he opined what a beautiful morning it was a little earlier.

Costume designer Constance Hoffman starts Laurey (Shereen Pimentel) out in hickory stripe bib overalls and a print blouse, playing a demure appearance against a firecracker personality. It’s very effective. Refereeing the couple is the dependable Aunt Eller. She’s the voice of wisdom, and as such can turn into caricature, but Holly Twyford plays her with command and credibility. We need these characters to bond somewhere beyond the brittle dialogue, and that’s where the song “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” comes in, allowing Curly to paint a dream-picture that Laurey very much wants to realize despite her stand-offishness.

Choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, who also served as associate director, is another brilliant, reliable team member, keeping the movement effective throughout the song as the relationship dynamics are explored through character placement even as Adams sings Hammerstein’s clever triple rhymes as if they’d just popped into a cowboy’s head.

In classic musical-theater style, the second leads provide welcome comic relief. Peter Murphy, who plays Will Parker, is an extraordinary dancer with an excellent voice, and stops the show with “Kansas City,” his terpsichorean tribute to the big city, letting him and the dance ensemble run through a number of virtuoso steps that climaxes in a breathtaking tap sequence.

But this is not to neglect Ado Annie, the girl who “Cain’t Say No,” as she musically confesses, perching atop a hay bale to remind us of the other traditional farm use for that vegetation. Kate Morton looks a little too prettily innocent to “knowed what’s right an’ wrong since I been ten,” but that’s part of what makes the character – and Morton’s characterization – so effective. Along with a superb voice and great comic timing.

Members of the Oklahoma! ensemble.
Photo by Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Each of the two women is courted by another man, representing dramatic dangers. Fixated upon Laurey is Jud Fry, played with snarling menace by Erik Nordstrom, a farmhand who has no friends. When Curly learns of this rivalry, he improbably visits Jud in the smokehouse where he lives, and we overlook that improbability to enjoy the breathtakingly dark duet “Poor Jud is Daid,” staged with a shifting power dynamic as the characters circle upstage and down.

Then there’s the Persian peddler, Ali Hakim, a morals-free foreigner (aren’t they all?) who sweet-talked Ado Annie into thinking he’ll marry her even though she’s engaged to Will Parker. Gregory Sliskovich wears a loud plaid suit (looking as if he just stepped off the Spike Jones bandstand) and oversized fedora, and seems constantly in motion as he woos his cutie and sells his wares. “It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!” he leads the men in singing as a shotgun wedding seems imminent, concluding “A rooster in a chicken coop is better off ’n men / He ain’t the special property of just one hen!”

How do you give your star-crossed couple a love song when she’s busy refusing him? Hammerstein (who was a lyrics-first songwriter) devised the justly famous “People Will Say We’re in Love,” which gives the kids a little more bonding time even as it allows their antipathy to continue into Act Two. And then it’s the “Out of My Dreams” and Dream Ballet sequence as Laurey imagines a dark romantic destiny. Dance has an ineffable ability to convey desire, and Madison Manning as Dream Laurey and Jordan Spena as Dream Curly were perfect mirrors of the couple, surrounded by an ensemble that deftly mixed dance styles to go with the mixture of pointe shoes and boots we saw on the stage.

Let me single out two more cast members: Troy Cook as Andrew Carnes and Erin Alford as the cackling Gertie. They’re top-notch here and they’re also featured in the Glimmerglass “Madame Butterfly,” my review of which will run in a couple of days.

Alongside all its other merits, this is a festival of American music, far more appropriate to our anniversary than most of the other schlock on tap. Rodgers skillfully synthesized operetta and jazz, advancing the sound of musical theater, and the chromaticism and melodic patterning of this score should call to mind another uniquely American composer: Leonard Bernstein, whose “On the Town” would open on Broadway a year later.

Trust me when I insist that this production makes the show looks better than ever – better even than the 2017 Glimmerglass production. And the more I see this show, the more I admire the craftsmanship of Rodgers & Hammerstein. James Lowe conducted it here nine seasons ago, and he’s back in front of the virtuoso orchestra for a performance you could as easily enjoy with your eyes closed. But don’t. There’s too much good stuff here to see.

Oklahoma!
Music by Richard Rodgers
Book & Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Based on the play “Green Grow the Lilacs” by Lynn Riggs
Conducted by James Lowe
Directed by Francesca Zambello
The Glimmerglass Festival, through August 15, 2026

Fresh Rhodora in the Woods

2026-07-10T14:26:18.331-04:00

THE PROGRAM LOOKED more audience-challenging than I’d expect in a place like North Creek, NY, with string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Bela Bartók, and George Walker on the program. I’d felt like an outsider all day while relaxing in this charmingly rural community, because I wasn’t clad in the standard uniform of the male habitués: ball cap, tee shirt, shorts, and sneakers (or sandals or flip-flops). But at the Tannery Pond Community Center that evening, July 2, I felt more sartorially at home in my conservative shirt and slacks.

Rhodora Quartet

The handsome, energy-efficient building, erected in 2002, features an art gallery and large multi-use room that serves as an auditorium when so arranged. Tannery Pond Concerts, however, go back to 1991 when photographer Christian Steiner inaugurated the series, and the same high quality of artists and concerts he oversaw is clearly maintained.

The ear-filling sound of an SATB chorus fits nicely into the voicing of a string quartet. There are enough voices available to reinforce harmonic identity, and enough to further play with that identity, dipping into dissonance, affirming and thwarting rhythmic expectations.

As is well known, Haydn molded the form through his 68 (official) string quartets into four-movement classicism, a model acknowledged by Mozart and Beethoven – and then pursued by Beethoven into previously unimaginable places where all precedent of form and harmony was shattered.

The Rhodora Quartet skipped Beethoven, a brave move, and went straight from Haydn to Bartók. After Beethoven, Bartók wreaked the greatest changes on the form. Our ears have absorbed Beethoven’s changes; we’re still adjusting to Bartók’s. This is a youthful performing group with the brashness of youth, so they concluded the program with a work even crunchier, in its way, than Bartók’s quartet, which was an early piece by American composer George Walker.

“The Rhodora” is poem by Emerson, and in choosing this moniker, the performers are paying tribute to their mentors, the Emerson Quartet. I also like the suggestion of New England-style iconoclasm. The quartet was founded two years ago. They satisfy the twin requirements of such an ensemble by featuring players with the sound and ability of soloists who are then able to subsume that into an entity that functions as if with one brain. In entomological terms, they’re a superorganism.

The members are violinists Chaewon Kim and Hanbo Wang, violist Rachel Haber, and cellist Jonathan Kim. Haber introduced the first work, setting up just enough background and expectation for Haydn’s Quartet No. 75 (or 40 or 60 depending on your favored numbering convention) in G Major, Op. 76 No. 1 to give a comfortable entry for newcomers to this piece. I very much approve of spoken intros like this when they’re brief and fact-filled, as was this one (and those that followed).

There’s a pleasant, unobtrusive sound to the work. Was Haydn’s initial audience as inclined to background-listen as we are today? A clue to that waits in the lively Menuet movement, which erupts into a brisk fortissimo moment that the performers played for all it was worth. No dynamic bashfulness here, and when the bouncy, triplet-laden finale arrived, they found all the fun that movement contained.

An excellent artistic decision, and an important programming one as well, because the transition to Bartók can seem abrupt. No background-listening invited here. The composer finished his Quartet No. 2 (of six) in 1917 amidst the horrors of a no-end-in-sight war. While Bartók incorporated elements of the Hungarian folksongs he assiduously collected, he painted his melodic material onto what could be interpreted as a bloodstained canvas. The work is in three movements – Moderato, Allegro molto capriccioso, Lento – the first two in classical forms, the last more free-form. And I’m inclined to consider this a four-movement work with the last movement omitted to reinforce the dramatic effect of the Lento.

As with all of Bartók’s quartets, this one needs virtuoso players, and the Rhodora ensemble was absolutely in control of the material. Furthermore, these aren’t performers (as are far too many these days) who seek to assert some manner of interpretive genius by imposing pauses that go beyond the limits of rubato. These players clearly understand that what the music needs to be said is said by the music, and the cumulative effect of the Bartók quartet was devastating.

George Walker was an American pianist and composer who lived from 1922 to 2018, and who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Lilacs,” a setting of Whiteman. His String Quartet No. 1 was written in 1946, just after his graduation from the Curtis Institute and around the time of his debut as a piano soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

This, too, is a three-movement work, this one placing its most emotionally devastating movement in the middle. That Adagio was later reworked by the composer in 1990 as an orchestral piece titled “Lyric for Strings.” Was the movement inspired by Barber’s “Adagio,” which premiered as an orchestral work in 1938? There is a similarity of spirit, but I submit that Walker’s piece packs for more of a sensory punch.

In any event, the movement laid its sweet, somber, soulfulness upon a very receptive audience, who then enjoyed some relief with the work’s lively Allegro con fuoco finish. Some tentative rhythms and intonation crept in towards the concert finish, which I put down to the taxing challenge of the three works, but the players came roaring back in the generous encore, a movement from Wynton Marsalis’s String Quartet No. 1. The seven-movement quartet is titled “At the Octoroon’s Ball,” paying tribute to the composer’s New Orleans roots; the movement chosen by the Rhodora Quartet, “Hellbound Highball” gives us the roaring energy of a train (the best such since Ellington’s “Daybreak Express”), and the players were in peak form throughout.

Tell It to the Marines

2026-07-03T22:13:00.000-04:00

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Some of my old stories pop up and inspire no recollection at all of writing it. I interviewed people, I put together quotes, I cranked out 1300 words. And I don’t remember a damn thing about it. Reading it today, I’m impressed – as I am with so many of my elderly tech pieces – at how obsolete everything in the story has become. The magazine itself, VARBusiness, I do remember mostly because I so enjoyed working with editor Beth Adelman. But we lost touch not long after this as other magazines lured me with more money. Until the whole computer-magazine empire collapsed. VARBusiness retooled its website in 2005, but has now been absorbed into CRN, “a media brand of The Channel Company.” Anyway, here’s how the Marines stored data 34 years ago.

YOU KNOW THE FRUSTRATION of accumulating page after page of information that needs to be filed? Documents that you may not need right now, but you know they’re going to come in handy. And they sit in rows of cabinets, hogging valuable office space.

Tell it to the Marines.

Millions of documents are stored in the Installation & Logistics operation at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Material ranges from accounting data to troop lists, and keeping the paperwork up to date forced a heavy workload on the staff of 700. And even at its most efficient, the system only allowed one person access to a document at a time.

Thanks to what’s billed as the world’s largest document image processing (DIP) system, filing cabinets and attendant frustration were replaced last June by a PC-based scanning system.

Because of the sensitive nature of the material being processed, spokespeople for both the Marines and the VARs involved can’t divulge all of the story. But at the heart of it is the kind of challenge that all vendors face.

“With 360 users on a large network running a variety of applications, you have to provide a flexible image processing interface,” says John Karagosian, sales manager for Image Tech of Southfield, Michigan. With a strong presence in the Washington, D.C., area, Image Tech has developed sales relationships with a number of resellers. Principals in the Marine Corps installation were two Virginia-based firms: Versyss Benchmark Systems in Arlington and Potomac Systems Engineering in Annandale.

“Once the Marine Corps chose the hardware vendor, we came in to set up the software,” Karagosian says. That software is called Marvin, which Image Tech wrote and introduced in the early days of Windows. “Our first release was designed under Windows 1.0, and we had the first document processor to run under 3.0.” With the release of Windows 3.1 will come an all-new, even faster Marvin.

And Marvin isn’t only in D.C. The Marine Corps have DIP installations in several west coast bases thanks to Integrated Network Systems, a San Diego, California, VAR that won a contract thanks to the promise of a speedy installation. “Before we got involved,” says INS general manager Larry Leathers, “the Marine Corps had been working for about 18 months to implement a DIP system. When we got the contract, we had them on-line in 45 days.”

Back east, a versatile software product and an impressive track record worked in Image Tech’s favor. “We’ve done a ton of installations in the D.C. area,” explains Karagosian. “We showed them a versatile product, we let them talk to other user sites. About 30 percent of our business is with government agencies, which are very paper-intensive.”

The bottom line was also attractive. “If you’ve ever dealt with the government, you know that we’re generally looking for the best quality at the lowest price.” Pat Shaw is the Marines’ in-house project manager, who worked closely with Image Tech to see that the installation adhered to specifications. “We looked at a lot of vendors and chose the Marvin software also because it did what we needed it to do.”

Getting Marvin to work with the existing PC-based Banyan Vines network was one of the first challenges. “We’re accustomed to using other networks,” says Karagosian, “but the Marines were able to solve those problems for us.”

Support was important, at least at the start. “You’ve got a vast amount of people in different departments with different amounts of computer literacy. Our training had to be designed to show them how to fit DIP into the suite of applications – desktop publishing, word processing, and so on – that they already are used to using.

Addressing another area of concern, Image Tech made sure that Marvin satisfied the Marines’ security requirements. “We offer up to 255 levels of password security on each document,” says Karagosian. The program can be reconfigured easily, and improvements continue to follow.

The hardware base at the seven-story building is impressive: 360 PCs are linked in seven suites across Banyan Vines networks connected with Token Ring topology. Workstations are a mixture of 286- to 486-based PC machines, and optical storage is based in a Reflection Devices optical jukebox. Cornerstone high-resolution monitors are installed among VGA color devices, and Fujitsu M3096 and M3093 scanners handle the papers themselves.

Susan Kehoe is manager of image scanners with Fujitsu Computer Products of America in San Jose, California, and she’s watched the scanners change and improve quickly. “Scanner technology is still relatively new,” she says. “The machines are moving up in speed and paper handling. It’s similar to the way that laser printers evolved after they first were introduced.”

According to BIS Strategic Decisions, an independent research company in Boston, Massachusetts, the market will grow as fast as current economics will allow. “We saw a $1.3 billion market in 1991,” says Bruce Silver, director of image management systems, “and we predict that it will go up to $1.8 billion in 1992. There wasn’t a lot of growth from ‘90 to ‘91 -- that is, it was a lot lower than we’ve seen in previous years -- and we believe that this year will also start slow. But that’s because of economic problems in general.”

Is document image processing a good VAR opportunity? “Absolutely, because it’s not strictly a fulfillment kind of sale. There’s a lot of service and support required. Over a quarter of the 1991 revenue was in maintenance, as opposed to the basic hardware and software product. And this is true across the entire spectrum of the image processing market, from high end to low end systems. I think this is the kind of opportunity a lot of VARs are looking for now because straight fulfillment stuff is going by the boards for them.”

Although the prospect of ongoing support provides lucrative incentive for VARs wishing to go the DIP route, the Marines wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible.

“Money was a big issue,” says Shaw. “We needed something we could maintain ourselves -- we don’t want to have to bring in a contractor every time we have to make a change. We can modify Marvin as our needs change, but John can still come out and look over the product as those changes occur.”

The way Karagosian explains it, there’s a hint of military strategy in his approach. “Our people went in there and showed them what we could do for them. That we have a good product, good references, a very good price. And we’ll be there for support.”

Image processing systems were first developed over a decade ago, but didn’t take off until the introduction of economical optical storage disks during the past five years. As with all computer hardware, a steady advance in technology combined with falling prices has made scanners and optical storage devices options that even low-end VARs can reasonably consider.

“At Comdex last fall I saw for the first time a lot of interest in DIP from the VAR community,” says Silver. “Thanks to the greater availability of low-end systems, the market is being transformed. People are waiting now to see the shakeout of some market factors, such as Novell’s association with Kodak and the impact of products like Lotus Notes and Windows/NT on the PC LAN environment. But all in all, it’s getting easier for the low-enders to move ahead.”

Leathers seconds the notion that the VAR opportunity lies as much in support as with the initial installation. “Once we’re in with an imaging system, anything that happens on that network is liable to become our problem.”

A broad base of management experience was also a key to making the sale. “One of the advantages we have in securing this kind of contract is that we’re management consultants at the highest level at the front end. We’re able to look at a client’s requirements and quickly match those needs.”

– VARBusiness, April 1992

The Gieseking Story on Disc and Page

2026-06-26T19:32:00.000-04:00

THE MOZART RECORDINGS grabbed my ear with their delicacy of touch and overall ethereal sound. This was late-night radio listening for me, a teenager in thrall to the many discoveries I was making in world of classical music. An eccentric radio host named Bill Watson purveyed the Mozart, calling particular attention to the fact that these sonatas and other keyboard works had been recorded by Walter Gieseking.

I’d been amassing piano records by Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, but I sprang for the low-priced Seraphim-label reissue of Gieseking’s Mozart, and I have not been without it, in some form or another, in the half-century since.

Gieseking was a unique phenomenon in the crowded world of piano virtuosos. From all accounts, his technique was impeccable, his six-feet-four body hunched close to the keyboard, the fingers seeming to move hardly at all. In his early years, his repertory was quite large, but it contracted as concert promoters grew increasingly wary of new works – a category Gieseking championed. He could sight-read anything with no mistakes, and he learned scores by studying them as an actor would study a script.

A 48-CD set issued by Warners in 2022 covered the bulk of the pianist’s studio recordings, including those works by Mozart (almost everything for solo piano), almost all of the Beethoven sonatas. He never commercially recorded No. 22 and died in 1956 before completing No. 15, although that didn’t stop EMI from tacking on someone else’s performance of the last movement. But there’s a 1951 recording of the complete sonata earlier in the set. The Warner collection, issued as Gieseking’s Complete Columbia Graphophone recordings, covers his studio output from 1923 to 1956, and is a thorough survey of his repertory, in variable but often decent sound.

Meloclassic, a label established in Germany thirteen years ago, specializes in restoration of rare recordings by significant artists. Two recent releases feature Gieseking. One of them pairs the pianist with conductor Herbert von Karajan, one of Gieseking’s favorite collaborators (although there was frequent friction between them), and is the only known live recording of the two working together. It’s a 1954 Lucerne Festival appearance by the Philharmonia Orchestra, and finds Gieseking in top form in Mozart’s Concerto No. 23. For me, that alone would be worth the price of the two-CD set, but we also get Strauss’s “Don Juan,” the program opener, and a bang-up finish with Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique,” one of Karajan’s signature pieces.

And note that there’s a 2019 Meloclassic two-disc set presenting three of Gieseking’s final appearances at the Hollywood Bowl, in 1955 and 1956. Concertos by Schumann, Grieg, and Rachmaninoff (No. 2) were performed alongside a generous sampling of shorter solo works.

All but one of the label’s 122 releases are single- or double-disc sets; the exception is the latest release, a magnificent collection of rare Gieseking recordings in a 26-CD (and one brief DVD) set. Many of the recordings were made for the German Reich Broadcasting Corporation (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft) between 1933 and 1945, and even those which were previously released have been given better sound and pitch stability. They don’t, and never will, sound like recent stereo recordings, but there’s enough sonic improvement to showcase Gieseking’s interpretations well. Alongside these is a series of Australian radio broadcasts he made in 1952 and a number of private recordings at informal gatherings, proving that the pianist’s never compromised his artistry.

The Gieseking discography seems fairly extensive, although (as the biography makes clear) his concert repertory narrowed quite a bit over the years, so that his recital programs became fairly formulaic. Which means that his late-career live recordings contain plenty of duplicates. What’s nice about the Meloclassics box, at least as far as completists are concerned, is that while the repertory is often familiar to collectors, most of these sessions are unique.

Gieseking was born in 1895 in Lyon, France, to German parents, and his family moved frequently while he was young to satisfy his father’s passion for collecting butterflies. The boy developed both a facility for languages and his own interest in lepidoptera, and began teaching himself piano at the age of four. His first formal lessons took place at the Hanover Conservatory, which he entered in 1911. On the brink of launching a solo career in 1915, he was conscripted into the army in 1915 and assigned to be a regimental bandsman. His 1923 London recital debut essentially began his career, and began it spectacularly. Audiences and critics were dumbfounded by his technique, achieved without any seeming effort. His interpretation of Debussy’s music won him particular acclaim, prompting Debussy’s widow to declare that nobody besides her late husband sounded so effective.

Walter Gieseking

Although Gieseking’s complete Debussy is available in the Warner box and elsewhere, the Meloclassic collection gives us a complete traversal of the Preludes alongside many other works. That collection is available in two editions; there’s a handsome box with the discs alone and, for a little more money, a deluxe edition that includes a 640-page biography of the pianist, the first comprehensive overview of his life and work. The book is by Michael Waiblinger, in English, and is aimed at a non-specialist readership. But it’s very dry going. Waiblinger had access to the family archives, which includes hundreds of letters, many of which are included as excellent vehicles to reflect the pianist’s state of mind at a particular time.

But, after his family and butterflies – for he picked up his father’s enthusiasm – Gieseking was totally dedicated to his music. This is what comes through in the letters: accounts of his travels, his programs, the pianos he faced, and the critical reactions. Once he achieved international fame, which happened early in his career, it was nonstop travel in country after country, with ships and trains giving way to planes and cars over the years, but still an incredible grind. This book should be required reading for anyone desiring a concert career, because it underscores the amount of sheer work that’s involved.

Gieseking fandom borders on fanaticism, as it should, but the pianist’s reputation was tarred when he was accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Third Reich era. He never was a member of the party and objected to its philosophy and politics, but he and his family remained in Germany throughout the era and he continued to give concerts where the Reich permitted, acceding to the Goebbels mandate that works by Jewish composers be removed from all programming. This presented a hardship – Gieseking not only regularly programmed such works but remained friends with composers like Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, whose music was forbidden.

As the biography takes pains to explain, Gieseking was not a rebel, preferring to keep his head down and continue performing. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to Gieseking’s “denazification” process, a post-war ritual to which hundreds of accused collaborators were subjected, typically waving through scientists like Wernher von Braun (whose V2 rocket killed thousands of allies during the war, but who was judged to be useful to the U.S.), while delaying the cause of others. Thanks to Gieseking’s imperfect command of English and an interviewer with a very clear agenda, the pianist was forbidden to perform outside of the particular sector of Germany in which he resided, a restriction that persisted until the ban was lifted in 1947. But even after that, some of his performance venues (including Carnegie Hall) were dogged by protestors wrongly insisting that the pianist had been a Nazi.

It didn’t help that calumnies were spread by fellow-artists Arthur Schnabel (“He is ... a passionate beautiful Hitlerian. Goes easily with stupidity”) and Arthur Rubinstein (“... he answered arrogantly, ‘I am a convinced Nazi. Hitler is saving our country.’ ... ‘Look here, Gieseking,’ I said sternly, ‘you had better keep out of my way,’ and I never addressed him or looked at him again”). Rubinstein’s quote is from his impressively fictitious autobiography My Many Years, which was written after Rubinstein acknowledged that he had confused Gieseking with another pianist who truly was a Nazi – but I’m guessing the other pianist lacked the name value for a juicy piece of gossip.

Gieseking’s denazification interview was conducted by Severin Kaven on September 20, 1945 at Gieseking’s home in Wiesbaden. Kaven’s report was dated the following day. “I am a pure artist,” Gieseking declared defensively, after being hammered with questions about the concerts he gave in Germany and occupied territories during the reign of the Reich.

“You never thought of leaving Germany?” he is asked. “Not after 1933. I would have lost my entire fortune, and I had my family and father to think about.”

Kaven was a Polish national who came to the U.S. in 1935. He was fluent in five languages, and was drafted in 1942. His war record, available online, shows that he was passionate about defeating every trace of Hitler’s legacy – which is admirable, but the interview transcript and report, both of which are reproduced fully in this book, show a man on a very determined mission. And Gieseking had no legal representation during the interview, nor was he allowed to review the transcript and final report.

Rudolf Goette, a concert manager who had worked with Gieseking since 1926, wrote a lengthy response to Kaven’s report, a well-considered essay that gave an overview of the pianist’s activities both before and during the war. Goette notes that Gieseking repeatedly turned down invitations to play for Hitler, and avoided invitations from the Propaganda Ministry for other performances before Reich notables. His effort helped to sway American military officials to reverse the Gieseking ban, but misinformation endured, as shown in a New York Times piece from February 2, 1947, by Delbert Clark. Here’s an excerpt:

“The cases of artists, actors and musicians cleared by German denazification tribunals are no longer subject to review by United States authorities, according to an order recently issued by Lieut. Gen. Lucius D. Clay, deputy military governor ... The order opens the way for such men as ... Walter Gieseking, the pianist, and many others who openly supported the Nazis to resume public activity so far as United States zone is concerned.” This biography should go a long way to clearing the pianist’s name of such false charges once and for all.

As for his music, his discography presents a confusing cascade of recording company names, especially because labels changed names, sold rights, and changed ownership over the years. And there are many smaller labels keeping his performances available, so the choices can be dizzying. But between that Warners box set and these Meloclassic releases, you can feel that your Gieseking needs are comfortably covered. And needs, indeed, they are.

A Tangled Web

2026-06-19T23:34:00.000-04:00

From the Unihanded Reading Dept.: My debut as a writer of smut occurred in D-CUP, a magazine devoted to – but need I explain? This takes us back to 1995, and the piece below is interesting more as a nostalgia trip for computer nerds than as anything salacious. I signed my pieces for that magazine “Dr. Barry Tetons,” but took on other names as I branched out to such other publications as “Shaved,” “Sex Acts,” and “Plump and Pink.” My daughter went to college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and told me that when a group of students got to discussing their parents’ occupations, she offered “porn writer” as mine and immediately won all the prestige points.

YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT the Internet. You may even know that its most passionate users are also passionate about a free exchange of ideas. What you may not know is that beautiful naked women are among those ideas, and just in case you don't get the idea, you settle for getting the picture – a full color, let’s-leave-nothing-to-the-imagination picture, that is.

Cat Tailer would have been
at home in D-CUP

Let me be your guide. I’ve been working with computers for a decade, and if there’s smut to be seen on the screen, I’ve seen it. I’ve taught computer beginners in classrooms but that’s too damn polite and forces me to leave out the good parts. And that’s what I’m going to help you find every month as we explore together.

All you need is a good computer, the right software, and a little know-how. Let’s talk first about your hardware. I’ll show you mine: it’s an IBM clone, based on a 486 processing chip. It’s got 8 megabytes of memory, and a good color monitor. That’s the basic stuff to run Microsoft Windows, and the easiest way for us peeping Toms to find our thrills is to look through Windows. You can find a system like this for well under a thousand bucks.

I’m also going to show you in a moment how easy it is to help yourself to pictures of those sultry Internet women. It takes a little patience and perseverance, so don’t be like the cheesehead who recently complained that he was tired of the searching, and would someone just send dirty pictures to his e-mail address. “Go out and buy a magazine,” snarled one of the angry responses.

First, a brief history. Sex has always been an important driving force behind technology, and from the day that the first computer-based screen flickered to life there have been tits and ass alongside the spreadsheets. It was crude stuff, in the worst sense of the word; the really good crude stuff needed color monitors and high-resolution graphics for anything approaching photo-realism.

And each technical improvement brought a fresh round of sexy images. They even started to move. At first you didn’t see much more than stick figures fucking, but good intentions soon gave way to good detail, to the point where now you can find complete porno films on CD-ROM, a subject we’ll cover in an upcoming column.

The smut pioneers distributed their material through computer bulletin board systems (BBSes), which are just computers that are left on all the time, hooked to a phone that anyone can call. You need a modem attached to your computer, with a phone line plugged into the modem, to translate signals from phone to computer, and communications software to tell the computer how to handle the modem. BBSes became so popular that a few nationwide services evolved, the biggest being Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online.

And then there’s the Internet. That’s been around for a long time, actually, started by the Defense Department and taken up by colleges and universities. It’s now a worldwide collection of computers, many of them physically wired together, some of them connected by phone lines. Anyone whose computer is connected to the Internet can share his goodies, so there have always been dirty pictures available. So explosive has recent interest been, however, that every time a source for good smut is announced there’s a stampede of horny collectors to that address – and when a few thousand users suddenly gang up on a machine, it freezes up.

That’s one reason why things change daily on the Internet. But there are newsgroups – called Usenet groups – that monitor such things. So the first thing you want to do is hook up with the right Usenet groups.

The Internet itself is free, but unless you’re at a college, you’ll have to pay to get access to it. We’ll consider a few different angles in the next few months, but let’s start with what may be the easiest way in, through America Online (AOL). You’ve seen their startup diskette included with computer magazines; you may have gotten one through the mail. Otherwise, ask a computer nerd friend, or call 1-800-XXX-XXXX [to get the free software. Follow the enclosed instructions to install the program and create an account. AOL costs $9.95 per month, which gives you five free hours of online time; exceed five hours and you pay $2.95 for each additional hour. If you’re near a city, your access number will probably be a local call. [Editor’s note: The world of AOL has completely changed. None of the foregoing applies to it any more.]

You saw much more of
Danni Ashe in D-CUP

When you’re finally logged on, go to the Main Menu. Choose “Internet Connection.” You’ll see a half-dozen buttons (also called icons) on the left; choose “Newsgroups.” AOL plays a peekaboo game with the lusty stuff, so you won’t find the juicier newsgroups listed in the “Add Newsgroups” area, even when you search under “Alt” (for “alternative,” which is the prefix to most of the sex-related groups). In short, you can’t use the “Add Newsgroups” button, so on that next screen, choose the button marked “Expert Add.”

You get a small screen with an empty box marked “Internet Name.” Type in (without the quotation marks) “alt.sex.breast.” Click “Add.” If you did it right, you get a message telling you you’re subscribed. And you’re back at the input box, so delete what you just wrote and type “alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.breasts.” Click “Add.” Close the input box by double clicking the upper left corner.

You’re back at the “Newsgroups” window; click “Read My Newsgroups” and you’ll see your new additions listed. Double click “alt.sex.breast” and you can follow ongoing discussions about breast-related matters; you can even talk to this magazine in that group (D-CUPMAG @AOL.COM). But it’s only discussion going on there. For photos, check out the listings in “alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.breasts.”

Some of these pictures are pretty large, so they’re broken into components – and you’ll see such listings as “big wet tits 1/7,” which means that there are seven messages in all, and you’ll find (or you’d better find) “big wet tits 2/7" through “7/7" if the person who created the files did the job properly.

Finally, you’ll want to view the thing. A shareware utility called VuePrint will do the job of decoding and displaying the image, and you’ll find it back in AOL’s regular area. Go back to the Main Menu and click on the bar labeled “Computing.” The next menu includes a button marked “Software Center.” Click it and look for (and click on) a button marked “Search the Libraries” on the next menu. On the Search menu, click “Windows” and type “vueprint.” Now click “List Matching Files.” The result screen will list “VUEPRI.EXE.” Click “Download Now” and wait out the time it takes to transfer the file. Once it’s done, sign off of AOL and go back to the Windows Program Manager.

Pull down the File menu and choose “Run,” and type “\AOL20\DOWNLOAD\VUEPRI” in the box. VuePrint automatically sets itself up and adds an icon to your Windows screen. Start the program, acknowledge the introductory screen (the author would like you to pay $40 after a two-week trial period), and pull down the File menu. Choose “D” for UUdecode. The program should take you right to the \AOL20\DOWNLOAD directory, and lists whatever you found in your alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.breasts browsing. Highlight all of the component files in a set – or just highlight everything--and click “OK.” Pull down the File menu again, choose “Open,” and double click on a file name. Congratulations! Happy viewing, and I trust you’re keeping one hand on that mouse.

– D-CUP Magazine, November 1995

2026-06-12T14:22:00.000-04:00

From the Culture Vault Dept.: Forty years ago, our already loose delineation of the Capital Region (often erroneously monikered as the Capital District Region or the Capital Region Area, among other such variants) expanded in the summer to take in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and areas of the immediately southern counties of New York. That’s because the region exploded with happenings when the weather got warm. Here’s a listing I compiled for Metroland Magazine in 1986 of my disciplines of interest. I don’t expect you to read it, but I invite you to remember the impressive performers who stopped and marvel at the amount of dance.

Summer Arts Preview: Theater

SUCH IS THE BUSY state of the stage that we devoted a cover story all its own to summer theater (May 15, not posted here ), but there have been a few changes and announcements since that time, so let’s check in with the various groups and see what’s happening.

Lou Harrison

The Lakehouse, in Albany’s Washington Park. has announced a title for its city tricentennial revue: Nice TRI, Albany, to be directed by Michael J. Hume and Lloyd Waiwaiole (July 18-20, 23-26 at 8:30 PM). Also look for visits from the Lake George Opera Festival (August 5, 7 PM) and Kuperberg & Morris Movement Theatre (August 12,7 PM).

At New Lebanon’s Theater Barn, the season Is well underway with second production “On Golden Pond” running through, Sunday; next Thursday, the musical revue “Cole!” begins a 10-day run.

The Lake George Dinner Theater announced the title of its summer production: running from June 20 through October 12 at the Holiday Inn in Lake George will be Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

The Lake George Opera’s American Lyric Theatre apprentice program has announced three titles that will be produced under the aegis of newly appointed director Rosalind Elias: “Gallantry” by Douglas Moore, Donizetti’s “Rita,” and “The Old Maid and the Thief” comprise a triple bill to be performed August 17 and 19.

The Mac-Haydn Theater, down in Chatham, already is up to its third production: “Babes in Arms,” which opened yesterday (Wednesday).

Also, Cohoes Music Hall is going into a summer season with two very contrasting titles: “The Drunkard or The Fallen Saved” is an old temperance-era show that was revamped in the 1960s with a score by Barry Manilow; it will run from June 20-July 12. Then the immensely popular and, despite a scare, still longest-running show in New York, “The Fantasticks,” will be performed from July 18-August 10. Remember: The air conditioning works in this house!

The schedule for the Woodstock Playhouse is as follows: “South Pacific” is currently under way, through Sunday; then “Brigadoon” comes in June 17-22. “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” runs June 24-29, and again July 22-27; “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” goes up July 1-6; “Carousel” will play July 8-13; “Funny Girl” July 15-20. Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is scheduled for three slots: July 29-August 3, August 26-31, and October 1-5. “Camelot” runs August 12-17, September 3-7, and September 24-28. “My One and Only” is set for September 10-14.

In Massachusetts, the schedule for Berkshire Public Theatre is as follows: Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” runs July 19-21, then enters the summer repertory, playing every Friday evening from July 4-August 29. “Twentieth Century” by Hecht and MacArthur opens July 27 and plays every Saturday and Sunday from June 28-August 30. Beginning July 7 it’s “The Threepenny Opera,” which then will play Monday evenings through September 1.

And the Williamstown Theatre Festival has leaked a couple of titles: “Barbarians” by Maxim Gorky runs June 26-July 5, followed by Pinter’s “The Homecoming” July 8-19. Opening July 22 is Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke”; more remains to be announced.

Note: Schenectady Resets Fest for Saturday:

THE ONLY PART OF THE FESTIVAL that didn’t cooperate last Saturday was the weather, so Schenectady’s Food Festival people are going to try again this Saturday with a variety of items for your delectation.

The art show went off as planned, and filled the skating rink at Center City.

But to do justice to the kind of presentation that restaurateurs require, the whole of downtown State Street is needed. They tried cramming too many into the rink a couple of years ago, but it just isn’t the same.

So don’t be dismayed when you find the street blocked off this Saturday from noon to 5: some delicious food will be on the other side of those barriers.

Summer Arts Preview: Classical Music

WHEN LOU HARRISON comes to SPAC this summer, he’s bringing his garnelan. But that’s not the kind of thing you can slide onto the hand-baggage shell of an airplane. A gamelan is an orchestra, characteristic of Southeast Asia (in this case. Java, although the word itself is Javanese for “percussion instrument.” And percussion is featured. along with some winds and strings).

Sherrill Milnes

Gamelan Si Betty will perform in the Spa Little Theatre at 3 PM Monday, August 11, and the Philadelphia Orchestra is including music by Harrison as part of its regular August season.

Also in August, look for distinguished composers Virgil Thomson, George Crumb, and Otto Luening to visit Rensselaerville as part of the Catskill Conservatory summer festival that also includes performances in the Oneonta area

Music alfresco is catching on in the area: We now have full seasons at the Lakehouse in Albany’s Washington Park and at the Guilderland Performing Arts Center. Following are the listings.

Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davis, conductor, unless noted otherwise. (All concerts at 8:15 PM.)

August 6: Tribute to Eugene Ormandy, includes Harrison’s Symphony No. 3.
August 7: Music of Puccini, Ravel, and Colin McPhee, soprano Martina Arroyo, tenor Jon Fredric West, and pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin soloists.
August 8: Franz Allers, conductor; Sherrill Milnes, baritone: opera favorites.
August 9: Davies as pianist and concertmaster Norman Carol play Harrison’s Suite; also music of Puccini and Haydn.
August 13: William Smith, conductor; David Bar-Illan, pianist; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, Harrison’s “Marriage at the Eiffel Tower.”
August 14: Keith Jarrett plays Harrison’s Concerto with Selected Orchestra; also music of Satoh, Bartok, and Jarrett.
August 15: Erich Leinsdorf, conductor; music by Mussorgsky, Liszt, and Shostakovich.
August 16: Leinsdorf conducts Smetana, Stravinsky, and, with pianist Yefim Bronfman, Liszt’s Concerts No. 2.
August 20: Leinsdorf, conductor, in a concert featuring Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.
August 21: In honor of Virgil Thomson’s 90th birthday; guest artists: saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and bassist John Cheek.
August 22: Rudolf Nureyev with members of the Parts Opera Ballet.
August 23: A big good-bye with Beethoven’s "Ninth."
August 31: The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Zubin Mehta, conductor, in one performance.

Weekend concerts by the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra will be preceded by a free chamber music concert on the upper lawn.

Live at the Lakehouse, Washington Park, Albany (All concerts at 7PM.)

June 17: Northeast Symphonic Band.
June 24: Albany Big Band Jazz.
July 8: Bud Bryer Orchestra.
July 15: Lake George Opera Festival (Douglas Moore ‘s “Gallantry.”)
July 22: Jack Dugan & Company.
August 5: Lake George Opera Festival.
August 19: Skip Parsons’ Riverboat Jazz Band.

Guilderland Performing Arts Center, Tawasentha Park, Guilderland (All concerts at 7:30 PM.)

June 19: Mendelssohn’s Elijah, with the Octavo Singers, George G. Morass, directing.
July 3: Guilderland Town Band with a concert of golden oldies, featuring pianist Patty Keyes,
July 10: Lake George Opera Festival with Moore’s “Gallantry.”
July 24: Guilderland Town Band: Music of Faraway Places.
July 31: Don Nikolski: The Area Polka King.
August 7: Guilderland Town Band presents “A Night at the Theater.”
August 14: Catskill Chamber Players with an evening of chamber music.

Rensselaerville Institute, Rensselaerville
July 13: Jazz on the Lawn, featuring the Greg Speck Trio and the Hal Miller Quintet (2 PM).
July 20: Folk on the Porch, with Fancy’s Train and Whippersnapper (2 PM).
August I7: Matthew Herskowitz, piano recital (4 PM).
August 24: Catskill Conservatory, with guest composer Otto Luening (4 PM).
August 31: Catskill Conservatory, with guest composer George Crumb (4 PM).
September 7: Catskill Conservatory, with guest composer Virgil Thomson (4 PM).

Spencertown Academy, Route 203, Spencertown (All concerts are at 8 PM)

June 14: Soprano Marvis Martin in recital.
June 28: Pianist Thomas Lorango plays music by Beethoven, Ravel and others.
July 26: The Canterbury Trio.
August 10: Boston Symphony cellist Jonathan Miller in recital.

Summer Arts Preview: Dance

ALTHOUGH THE WOODSTOCK PLAYHOUSE has gone co-op in its theater productions, the tradition of fine dance is not being neglected. To celebrate its 13th season of dance, 13 concerts will be presented on consecutive Monday nights.

Peter Martins

A similarly laudable series is on tap at Jacob’s Pillow again this summer, with a diversity that stretches from classical ballet to avant-garde mixed-media.

And, of course, the New York City Ballet celebrates Saratoga in July with the choreographic wizardry of Balanchine as a mainstay, alongside works by Peter Martins, Jerome Robbins, and others. Here’s how their schedule shapes up:

New York City Ballet at SPAC, Saratoga Springs. (Evening performances at 8:15; matinees at 2PM. Unless indicated, shows are evening performances.)

July 2: Serenade, Symphony in C, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
July 3: Includes the Saratoga premiere of a new ballet. July 4: All Americana Balanchine, including Stars and Stripes.
July 5: Donizetti Variations, Who Cares? (Matinee)
July 5: Serenade, Prodigal Son, Stars and Stripes.
July 6: All-Balanchine, includes Who Cares?
July 8: Saratoga premiere of Robbins’s in Memory of...
July 9: Saratoga premiere of Jean-Pierre Bonneloux’s Shadows.
July 10: Features Peter Martins’s Eight More.
July 11: The Gala, features Circus Polka.
July 12: Shadows, Eight Mere, Union Jack (Matinee).
July 12: La Source, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.
July 15: All-Balanchine, includes Allegro Brilliante.
July 16: All-Robbins, includes Glass Pieces.
July 17: Dances at a Gathering. Glass Pieces. Divertimento No. 15.
July 18: Includes Episodes, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.
July 19: Includes Interplay and Dances at a Gathering (matinee).
July 19: The season finishes. Includes Union Jack.

The Little Theatre at SPAC

July 7-12: Twyla Tharp Dance, six evenings and a Friday matinee.
July 14-19: Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians (Saratoga premiere).
July 21-26: Alwyn Nikolai Dance Theatre, six evenings and a Friday matinee.
July 28-August 2: Hubbard Street Dance Company, similar schedule.

Jacob’s Pillow Festival ‘86, Lee, Massachusetts (Performances in the Ted Shawn Theatre at 8 PM Tuesday-Thursday; 8:30 PM Friday-Saturday, 2 PM Saturday.)

June 24-21: Paul Taylor Dance Company.
July 1-5: Stars of the Royal Danish Ballet
July 6-12: Moving Images – Pooh Kaye, Kathy Rose, and Victoria Marks.
July 15-19: Ballet and Ballroom, featuring American Ballroom Theatre.
July 22-25: The Mark Morris Dance Group.
July 29-August 2: Pilar Rioja and the Mandala Folk Dance Ensemble.
August 5-8: The Trisha Brown Company.
August 12-16: The New York City Ballet Choreography Project,
August 19-23: Jacob’s Pillow Jazz Parade.
August 26-30: Avner the Eccentric

Woodstock Playhouse, Woodstock (Monday nights at 8)

June 16: Rebecca Kelley Dance Company.
June 23: May O’Donnell Dance Company.
June 30: Berkshire Ballet.
July 7: Empire State Ballet.
July 14: Balletfore (featuring the principal stars of three major companies).
July 21: Hartford Ballet.
July 28: “Gotta Dance.”
August 4: Daniel Duell and stars of the NYCB.
August 11: Spanish Dance Arts.
August 18: Vanaver Caravan.
August 25: Jazz Dance Company, with principal Danny Buraceski.
September 1: Ballet Today.
October 11: A special program with Martine van Hamel and stars of American Ballet Theater.

Guilderland Performing Arts Center, Tawasentha Park (All concerts at 7:30 PM)

June 26: An Evening of Dance and Music, with the Myers Dance Company and the Guilderland Ballet Workshop.
July 17: The Berkshire Ballet in concert.

– Metroland Magazine, 12 June 1986

Footloose in Philly

2026-06-05T23:03:00.000-04:00

From the Food Vault Dept.: Recently, I was reminiscing about the variety of restaurants I found in Philadelphia in 2008, and the crazy trip I took one evening to get from one to the next in order to sample a single entreé at each. You might want to learn about it, too, I reasoned, so here is the piece I wrote about it. Please note that this was eight years ago, so there’s no telling who’s still in business.

DURING THE LONG DRIVE home from Philadelphia last weekend, my family and I visited Valley Forge and sought lunch in a nearby town. We found a street flanked on several blocks by chain stores and restaurants, but we also spotted an obviously local place promising pub food. It was so disgusting inside – filthy walls, sticky tables, apathetic servers – that we hightailed it to one of the chains and contented ourselves with an acceptable, if boilerplate, meal.

Noodle soup at Viet Huong

It was a depressing end (on the culinary side) to an otherwise delightful weekend, during which my wife escorted my daughter to a concert by her favorite rock band at a downtown arena while I drove around South Philly that evening to check out recommended restaurants. Finding those restaurant has never been easier when you take advantage of current technology.

Having been consulted by a visiting alt-newsweekly writer in the past, I sent my own request to Drew Lazor at Philadelphia’s City Paper, and he and his colleague Felicia D’Ambrosio generously put together a list of eateries reflecting the area’s ethnic variety. The magazine’s website (citypaper.net) also has restaurant listings and a lively food-related blog. [Note: The paper folded in 2015.]

Blogging being the obsession it is, every city has its share of passionate critics, and those blogs are easy to search. Albany has a helpful variety that I consult, and I noted that Philadelphia’s City Paper did a roundup a while back of its favorite blogs.

Armed with those restaurant names and addresses, look for websites. Those aren’t always as easy to discover, if they exist, and sometimes are insufficient or outdated. The quickest and best tool is a phone call. And be sure to do what I forgot to do when I remembered to call at all: ask about parking.

The clientele at Penang

I even go so far as to look the places up on Google Maps and use the Street View feature to get a look at the place. But your most important gadget is a GPS. For my first stop, I sought Wing Phat Plaza (1150 Washington Ave.), a bright yellow strip mall of Asian stores and restaurants, with more Vietnamese restaurants in one block than exist in the Capital Region. Spaces in the small parking lot are snapped up aggressively quickly, but I bested a Jersey driver for a slot and had an early meal at Viet Huong Restaurant – rice noodle soup that sporting thick chunks of stewed beef, fatty meat in a liquid so meaty that I confined myself to a few slurps and packaged the rest, saving room for more stops.

Grilled octopus at a popular Greek restaurant named Dmitri’s (795 S. Third St.) sounded appealing, and I made it there in spite of a fit of wackiness from the GPS. Instead of sending me on a highway along the Delaware River, I was led through a maze of one-way residential streets, each block ending in a stop sign, traffic light, or, as far as I could tell, free-for-all. And the tiny dining room of my destination was packed, the sidewalk thick with waiting customers. I couldn’t imagine the crowd thinning too soon, and moved on to Chinatown.

The route was more direct, but parking on the narrow streets eluded me. I dropped the car at a for-pay lot where it was crammed into an array that couldn’t possibly be untangled when I chose to depart.

Malaysian cuisine has yet to arrive in Albany, so I elbowed my way past the sidewalk crowd in front of Penang (117 N. 10th St.) and got a single seat. I liked the warehouse-y feel of the interior, with its creative use of corrugated steel on the walls. Again, just a few spoonfuls from a very hot clay pot of green curried chicken, set off with lemongrass and chilis. And a few spoonfuls were enough to liquify my face, which I consider a spicy recipe’s mark of success.

Potluck Café is a short distance down the street, at 220 N. 10th. We see endless similar-looking Chinese takeout storefronts, but none offering “Frog with Three Kinds Mushroom in the Hotpot.” I like to boast of epicurean adventurousness, but that was daunting. I settled on pork kidneys with homemade hotbean paste, a more rugged meat than the veal or lamb kidneys I’m used to, but excellently sauced.

Gelato at Capogiro

I marveled at the parking attendant’s skill at vehicular Tetris as he brought my car to the head of an exit lane. I wanted to get to a restaurant named Indonesia (1725 Snyder Ave.) I was eager to sample fare from Ethiopia or Eritrea. And I was running out of hunger. I drove a short physical distance for a huge change of neighborhood, and entered Wazobia (616 N. 11th St.) for a Nigerian meal.

It’s humbling, as a middle-aged white guy, to be the minority. I gamely introduced myself and explained my purpose and was served a tray of steaming goat stew with sides of amala, a sticky yam derivative, and okro, a stringy, viscous okra soup.

And then pathetically addressed each item individually, forking into my face a bit of this, a bit of that. “This is Nigerian food,” explained a man named Peter, taking pity on me. “You mix it all together, that’s how it’s supposed to be eaten.” Then he launched into a fascinating comparative survey of African cuisines, describing so many unfamiliar aspects that I failed to follow much of it.

What better way to finish than with something sweet? Capogiro is famous throughout the area for its hand-crafted gelato, served in a welcoming storefront on Sansom Street..

Had I done more careful research, I would have discovered that the recently reopened, very acclaimed Indian restaurant Minar Palace (1304 Walnut St.) closes Saturdays at 7. It was well past 9 when I read the sign on the door. Good as the GPS was at delivering directions, that didn’t stop me from misinterpreting some of them and ending up suddenly crossing the Delaware into New Jersey and laboriously finding my way back.

Cafeteria-style offerings at Wazobia

My luck continued lousy: Vic Sushi (2035 Sansom St.) had just closed when I neared the place, taking my hope of sashimi with it, and the walk to Almaz Café (140 S. 20th St.) also proved fruitless – I missed the place by minutes.

But got there in time for lunch on Sunday, this time with the family as we sightsaw the city. We sat in the tiny balcony of this coffeeshop that also sports a creative Ethiopian menu, so I was able to enjoy cappuccino with my zilzil tibs – tender beef strips sautéed in butter with an aromatic sprig of rosemary, leaching its juices into the enjera, the soft bread on which it was served.

I couldn’t persuade my tablemates to go gursha and abandon their forks in favor of scooping the food in swabs of enjera, but I did it and enjoyed it and hope I earned some spiritual redemption for having been so lame at Wazobia.

We finished our Philadelphia visit with dinner at Distrito (3945 Chestnut St.), one of three city venues run by chef Jose Garces. The combination of outrageously pink decor, deliciously described menu items, and a potent margarita turned my wife into an instant enthusiast.

Beginning with the tiniest imaginable portion of yellowtail ceviche – but the cherry-sized scoop of sangria sorbet redeemed it. I’d argue that the fried whole-wheat wrappers on the squash and poblano purée are more like empanadas than quesadillas, but I can’t quarrel with the inspiring intricacies of its flavor. And the rabbit molé was as beautiful to see as to consume, served in a small metal pot with the meat and the sauce, that wonderful purée of nuts and peppers, separated into adjoining areas. By the time we finished, five dinner selections and three dessert had laid waste to our appetites.

I feel very prepared now to return to Philadelphia and try out the places I missed, but with technology like this, the whole country, to put it in culinary terms, is my oyster.

– Metroland Magazine, 6 November 2008

The Last of the Heath Hens

2026-05-29T12:06:00.000-04:00

Guest Blogger Dept.: It’s refreshing to learn that, along with all of his other passions, Robert Benchley nurtured an environmental awareness, as his report on the Heath Hen reminds us.

WELL, THE HEATH HEN has gone! We might as well face it. The sole surviving specimen of Tympanudius cupido, which has been hopping and flitting about the island of Martha’s Vineyard for the past few years under the fascinated gaze of the ornithologists, has disappeared, and, it is feared, has died without issue. It was not enough that the world should be tottering, its reason going, its standards gone. The Heath Hen must be taken from us.

Robert Benchley
Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We knew that it would have to happen some time, but it is hard to believe that there will never be another Heath Hen. We didn’t mind so much when we were told that the Great Auk was extinct, or the Labrador Duck, or the Passenger Pigeon. Even the news about the Eskimo Curlews (although there is hope that there are still a few Eskimo Curlews left who are just playing possum or sulking) didn’t give us that sinking feeling that we experienced when we heard about the Heath Hen. No more Heath Hens – ever! Thank God, John James Audubon did not live to hear that gloomy pronouncement. (He missed it by just three-quarters of a century.)

It seems only yesterday that I saw the Heath Hen at Martha’s Vineyard. She looked as well then as she ever did, but she never was what you would call a robust bird. They did not keep her captive. She was too proud a spirit for that.

But on one occasion, when she had lighted for a chat with Mr. McKinstry, her observer (Mr. McKinstry was paid by the state or somebody just to hang around Martha’s Vineyard and keep tabs on the Heath Hen), they did attach two metal bands to her ankles, so that if she ever got lost or drunk, people would know that she was no ordinary grouse. She didn’t like the bands, and felt that when one is the only surviving member of a proud race of birds, any sensitive person should recognize one without leg bands. “I don’t like the idea of it, Joe,” she said to Mr. McKinstry on one occasion. “Either I am a true princess or I am not.”

One of the greatest sorrows in Mr. McKinstry’s professional career as Heath Hen-watcher was that he could never find a mate for Miss Helen. (He called her Miss Helen because it seemed to suit her best.) The More Game Birds Foundation was very anxious that Miss Helen marry, not only because it would have made the bleak winters on Martha’s Vineyard happier for her but because then, if things worked out right, she might not be the last of her breed in the world. And it was more or less up to Mr. McKinstry.

But either because there were no suitable mates for Miss Helen or because she rather fancied herself in her tragic role as the Last of the Heath Hens and deliberately snubbed any eligible suitors, the fact remains that she made no alliances and was always seen alone when she alighted on the farm of James Green every spring. It made it hard for Mr. McKinstry to make out his report, but there wasn’t really very much that he could do about it.

“I see the position it puts you in, Joe,” she said to him once, “but somehow I feel that I am in the right. I can’t take anybody that comes along, and you wouldn’t want me to. And if the Heath Hens are to go on, they must be the very best Heath Hens, worthy to carry on a fine tradition. And you don’t know this Martha’s Vineyard riffraff as I do.”

And with that (according to Mr. McKinstry) she waddled into a thicket and wasn’t seen again for weeks. Mr. McKinstry thinks that she spent a lot of her time in daydreaming and was really close at hand when she was supposed to be off on a tour of the island. It was also his idea that she had an independent income and kept to herself out of choice. When you are the Sole Surviving Specimen, you have a certain dignity to maintain.

And now she is gone. Spring has broken through again and no Heath Hen has come to James Green’s farm. Somewhere on the hard-bitten ground of Martha’s Vineyard Miss Helen lies in state, with two metal bands about her patrician ankles, and her proud spirit wings its way to the home of all those other Heath Hens who went before. We need sound no mournful tone for Miss Helen, for she kept her name unsullied to the end and her fame is secure on the records of ornithological royalty. But what, what is to become of Mr. McKinstry?

– Robert Benchley, The New Yorker, 6 May 1933; collected in Chips Off the Old Benchley, Harper Bros., NY, 1949

The Old Song and Dance

2026-05-22T23:36:00.000-04:00

From the Vault of the Distant Muses Dept.: Alongside the restaurant review I posted last week was a handful of other pieces of mine that appeared in Metroland in 1987. I chose three of them to illustrate the variety of goings-on in the Albany, NY, area back then. The Boys Choir of Harlem ceased operations in 2007, as Wikipedia is happy to inform you. Pianist Pola Baytelman continues to perform and record, and although Alvin Ailey died two years after my piece appeared (my writing had nothing to do with it), the dance company he founded continues to thrive.

YOU GO BACK TO 1968 to find the beginnings of the Boys Choir of Harlem, when Dr. Walter J. Turnbull and Ruth Nixon started a small choir in the basement of Ephesus Church in the well-known Manhattan district. Then the church burned down the following year.

The Boys Choir of Harlem

They moved to a local community center and had to endure a lack of heat in the winter. And their travels continued: in 1975 they were at the Church of the Intercession; in 1984 they got their first real home, an entire floor in what was P.S. 68, giving them classrooms, office space -- and proper performance areas.

An independent day school for girls was founded there in 1979; next year a similar co-ed program will be started.

But that’s hardly all that’s been happening with this active group. A year ago this month they performed on a TV special with Harry Belafonte. In June, Dr. Turnbull was given the Presidential Volunteer Action Award at the White House.

The boys sang at the Recommemoration Ceremonies last July for the Statue of Liberty, and they were heard with soprano Kathleen Battle in her latest album, a program of Christmas music. Plus they have their own album in the works, to be released shortly.

To remain in the choir places an even greater demand on the youngsters than a sports career: they must maintain a B average in school, but it’s a matter of record that every chorister over the past five years graduated from high school.

The Boys Choir of Harlem will give one performance at the Egg, Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts, Empire State Plaza, Albany, Sunday afternoon at 2 with a program as varied as the choir is versatile. Handel’s “Ode for St. Cecelia’s Day,” a Stabat Mater by Pergolesi and Mozart’s “Regina Coeli” start things off; there also will be songs by Irving Berlin and William Dawson, a South African freedom song by Miriam Makeba titled “Nonggonggo” and “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang.

Tickets for the 2 PM concert are $12 and $10, with $7 student rush tickets available a half-hour before showtime.

LAST SPRING, pianist Pola Baytelman played a concert with soprano Anne Turner that included “The Party Songs” by Joseph Fennimore. This piqued her interest in the composer’s work. When she presents a recital at the Memorial Chapel, Union College, Union Street, Schenectady, Monday evening at 8, a Fennimore solo will be on the bill: “An Old Soft Shoe,” from a piano suite titled “Foxtrot.”

“I was going to put some Chilean dances on the program,” the Chilean-born Baytelman explains, “but this piece worked out just right.”

Pola Baytelman

She is meticulous about her programming. For this recital, she has been working on Schumann’s “Carnival” since the beginning of last year. “I like to have one piece as the core of a program,” she explains. “Last year it was the Schubert B-flat major sonata. When I started to put this program together, I read through "Carnival’ in January, then stopped for a couple of months. Then I read everything I could find about the piece – I like to do that with all the pieces I play – and I memorized it over the summer.

“It’s a difficult work because it’s in so many episodes. Like the name says, it is a carnival, and each little piece within has its own special characteristics. It’s a parade of special characters.”

Also on the program are a sonata by Haydn and two short works by Schoenberg.

Baytelman made her debut with the Chilean Symphony Orchestra when she was 17. She was a Fulbright student at the new England Conservatory of Music, from which she graduated with highest honors.

She has appeared as soloist locally with the Albany Symphony and the Boston Pops. The concert on Monday is free.

– Metroland Magazine, 8 January 1987

* * *

DR. WALTER J. TURNBULL founded the Boys Choir of Harlem in 1968 to give kids in the neighborhood something to do. “They look like angels, don’t they?” he asked the audience at the Egg last Sunday between songs. “Well, they’re devils underneath.”

Maybe so, but these devils can sing. And dance. And they took us from Pergolesi to Kool and the Gang in the course of one amazing concert.

The 41 boys of all sizes took to the stage for a three-part concert that began with a choral section of Handel’s “Ode for St. Cecelia’s Day” and continued with a Magnificat and Stabat Mater by Pergolesi and Mozart’s Regina Coeli. All were done with complete musical conviction with energetic accompaniment by a very accomplished pianist, Alva Nelson.

The choir performed everything from memory, which is hardly necessary but an impressive feat – and good for concentration.

Their costumes ranged from austere robes and sashes to scarlet blazers to colorful t-shirts – each befitting the mood of the particular material. From Baroque and Classical we journeyed to a set of American songs that began with “Shenendoah” and took us through spirituals and Irving Berlin’s setting of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” a Statue of Liberty-related song that celebrated the choir’s performance at the Lady’s recent rededication in New York Harbor.

The stage for Act Two was set with keyboards and drums; Nelson was joined by Dan Glover (piano), Clyde Bullard (bass) and Tony Lewis (drums).

Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” featured well-executed choreography, part of a set that became a continuous sequence of rousing song and dance. The material ranged from the uplifting (Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” with a solo by Akin Cook) to the sentimental (“Grandma’s Hands,” another Withers number).

“Nonggonggo” is a freedom song by South African writer and singer Miriam Makeba, in a Howard Roberts setting that emphasized traditional rhythms and harmonies. It needed more attention, though: it was just sung through once, whereas it could have been explained a little, translated, sung again – and even sung by the audience.

The foot-stomping “Goin’ Up Yonder” was the finale that brought the house to its feet. This is more than just a choir: there are wonderful solo voices (George Ewell deserved and got a big hand for his numbers), great ensemble work and a theatrical sense that could sell the most hard-hearted house. But who could fail to succumb to this kind of talent and charm?

By the time they danced away to their encore, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” the Boys Choir of Harlem had the audience in its pocket.

– Metroland Magazine, 15 January 1987

* * *

WHEN SYLVIA WATERS began her dance studies, a company like the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble “absolutely didn’t exist. So the question was how do you get into a company? Not all of them hold auditions, so you just had to hang in there and make yourself accessible.”

Now, as Artistic Director of Ailey Rep, she oversees a program that gives young dancers the opportunity to study, to perform, to work with professionals. Waters, a former Ailey dancer, has held this position since the group’s founding in 1974.

Sylvia Waters and Dudley Williams
in Steve Sarnasado's Metallics.
Photo by Fred Fehl

We can get an up-close look at Ailey Rep when the company comes to the Egg, Empire State Plaza, Albany, Friday at 8 PM. The program comprises three works: “Streams,” “Knudsen Variations” and “Icefire.”

Ailey himself choreographed the first-named, first performed in 1970 when Waters was still a company member. “I was part of the original cast,” she says. “For the repertory ensemble, this is an interesting challenge even while it gives them an opportunity to do all the things they love.”

Czech composer Miroslav Kabelec wrote the “Eight Inventions” the work is danced to. “He’s not too well known in the West, but he saw us perform during a tour of Europe.

“It’s scored for a percussion ensemble. There isn’t really a story line. It’s austere: the 12 dancers wear unitards and tights.”

Another former Ailey-an, Warren Spears, choreographed the “Knudsen Variations” in 1982. “Warren is very much in demand now in Europe,” Waters explains. “He choreographed a commissioned score from Kenneth Knudsen. It’s an electronic, minimalist work, very high-energy, very “dancey.’ And he based the choreography on a fashion show: the dancers start with many layers of clothing that come off throughout the piece.”

The program finishes with a favorite program-closer, “Icefire,” described by Waters as “a jazz samba. The music is by Pat Metheney and Lile Mays. Fred Benjamin choreographed it and there are elements of ballet, jazz and modern. It builds to a an exciting, climactic finish.”

Waters describes the young dancers of Ailey Rep as “very serious about what they do. They’re very disciplined and dedicated. And they’re all hoping to be in the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, or some major company. They’re all here to make a career of dance.”

Tickets for the performance are $13 and are on sale at the box office and CBO outlets. Student rush tickets at $7 will be sold a half-hour before curtain time.

“Ballet de France” comes to Proctor’s tonight for a single performance, dancing a popular story – ”Romeo and Juliet” – to a not-so-popular score, that of Hector Berlioz.

Not that nobody likes the Berlioz work – far from it. But it’s usually just played as a symphonic piece.

The 40-member ensemble was founded in 1985, established through the patronage of the City of Paris. Choreographer Gray Veredon worked with the music of Berlioz four years ago when the Metropolitan Opera asked him to set a dance in their production of the massive opera “Les Troyens.”

His work also has been danced by companies in Berlin, New York, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Tickets for the 8 PM performance are $16, $14 and $10 with discounts for balletomanes under 18; they’re on sale at the box office and CBO outlets.

– Metroland Magazine, 15 January 1987

Newbie at the Hot Pot

2026-05-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

From the Food Vault Dept.: Below is a review I wrote in early 1987, when I was about six years old. At least, that’s how it looks to me as I read it today. I’d been reviewing restaurants for only a few months, which was only about a year into my tenure of writing professionally about anything. I was (and am) a self-taught writer, and figured that my few years cooking professionally qualified me for the food-review gig. But Japanese food was new to me. Sushi was new to me (as you’ll see). And the phenomenon of shabu-shabu, also known as steamboat and hot pot, was completely new. I’ve had wonderful meals of it since, and even bought my own pot to offer it as at-home dinner treats. Sugi is long gone, and the space it occupied has gone through many incarnations over the years, including Charlie’s Corner, State Street Station, and Gar-Bo’s.

“Is this your first time to order shabu shabu?” the waitress asked. Yes, I told her. “Oh, okay. Many people who are not used to shabu shabu don’t like beef in seafood broth.”

Shabu shabu

You can’t intimidate me that way. Not even in a Japanese restaurant. Octopus, for example, looks disgusting on a plate. But sit me down beside someone who says “yuck” and you can bet I’ll be smacking my lips over the cephalopod.

The place: Sugi, a busy little restaurant the Schenectady side of the intersection of Route 7 and State Street. The time: A recent Saturday, early evening.

Dining rooms don't get much less assuming. This is your basic paneling-with-drop-ceiling joint, but dressed with charming Japanese screens and fans to mask the plainness.

And there's a sushi bar at the far end of the room to capture the eye, with a handful of chairs for the dedicated eaters of the raw fish delicacies.

The menu offers categories. Tempura, one of the better-known Japanese preparations, has its own column for different varieties of the deep-fried delicacies. There are broiled items, most of them with a teriyaki seasoning. Other entrees feature noodles. And, of course, sushi and sashimi, both preparations of raw fish, the former wrapped around vinegared rice.

Susan and I started by splitting an order of sushi, four pieces that included two varieties of snapper (tai), a wrapped-in-skin portion of crab (kari) and a slice of prawn (ama ebi), with the traditional wasabi (hot mustard) and soy sauce served on the side.

My secret for the first-time sushi eater: eat it fast and enjoy the rice. I mean, the fish is wonderful – once you get used to it. But you do have to get used to it.

Soup was next. For her it was miso shiru, a soybean broth with tofu and scallions. Served in a sturdy, black two-piece bowl, it has a flavor that sneaks up on you and shakes your hand. We're accustomed to bean soups thick and gooey, a symphony of soup; this is a soup sonata.

My suimono was a seafood broth, a bouillon, really, with a garnish of egg drop and a whole clam in an open shell. Again, coming from a cuisine where beef and chicken are the stock stock flavors, fish soup is a surprise. But a pleasant one.

While Susan worked on a small, highly vinegared salad, I was served a three-piece tempura appetizer. The art to these deep-fried veggies and seafood (I had a sweet potato slice, a carrot slice and a shrimp) is to make a batter that fries up light and dry. And it's easy to forget that there's even any oil involved when it comes out as light as Sugi's.

Our entrees were both seafood-broth based. The aforementioned shabu shabu arrived in a large bowl with a generous pile of beef shavings on top. Also in the compote were cabbage and carrots and celery – lots of vegetables, and a soy-sauce sort of side dish through which to dredge the items.

It's a stew and it's a soup – and it's a meal in itself. Susan's yosanabe featured fish, where mine had meat: large hunks of lobster and crab and scallops and such, which she was quite unable to finish.

Both entrees were served with sides of starchy white rice.

We braved the whole meal with chopsticks, except where spoons were provided for the liquids. I believe a cuisine should be learned with its native accouterments; after all, there is a rhythm to eating with chopsticks that a fork and knife destroys.

The little restaurant filled to capacity as we finished our meal. They are careful about taking reservations and were forced to turn some walk-ins away, which is a good sign: a well-run restaurant doesn't tax itself by getting greedy.

Service is swift, as brusque as it is efficient when the place is busy, but we were never left feeling neglected.

When you dine at Sugi's, keep in mind that we're not talking American bombast: this is delicate food served in a delicate place, for the patron who appreciates detail.

Dinner for two, with tax, tip and tea, was $44 (but we ate a lot). METROLAND restaurant reviews are based on one unannounced visit; your experiences may differ.

Sugi, 1579 State Street, Schenectady, 374-xxxx. Beer (including Japanese) and wine available. Lunch 12-2 PM Monday-Friday, dinner 5-10 PM Sunday-Thursday, 5-11 PM Friday-Saturday. All major credit cards. Reservations suggested.

–Metroland Magazine, 29 January 1987

Taking It on the Chen

2026-05-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Fifteen years ago, violinist Ray Chen performed in Schenectay, yet another example of a rising star being snagged for a local performance early enough in that career ascendancy to make such a booking possible. I thought we could have made him feel more welcome.

Ray Chen

WHERE’S YOUR BACKBONE, PEOPLE? I’m talking to you, the audience at Ray Chen’s dazzling recital last week. The violinist finished with a Wieniawski finger-buster that spewed wicked spiccato, left-hand pizzicato, harmonics true and false and other virtuoso hallmarks, a spectacular finish to an astounding program. You leapt to your feet, applauding madly, and Chen and pianist Andrew Tyson returned and bowed and returned and bowed again.

Then Chen pulled a fast one: He played a slow one, “Melodie” by Gluck, a Fritz Kreisler arrangement of a flute tune from “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It’s a beautiful display of violin tone and interpretive gentleness, but, as an encore, it does more than that. It calms the audience, robbing them of the furor that the finger-buster provoked.

And you applauded, albeit in a more restrained manner, and even before they were offstage after their second set of bows that time, you packed up your hands and toddled home.

Look, folks. You’re in charge here, not a 22-year-old violinist. He’s a kid, for crying out loud! He could have played all night – if you’d insisted. I’m sure they had more encores up their sleeves. You thought that Wieniawski piece, his “Variations on an Original Theme,” was amazing? If you’d tried hard enough you might have been able to get Bazzini’s “Round of the Goblins” out of them. You never know – unless you try!

Do you think you’re going to see Ray Chen again at this price and in this intimate a space? Union College’s Memorial Chapel is the perfect hall for a violin recital, and the program was shrewdly chosen as the finish to the 39th concert series there. But Chen is a hot item. Obviously. He’s headed for solo appearances with the major orchestras and recitals on much costlier stages. We want him to feel sentimental about Schenectady and come back again for a reasonable fee. We want him to think, “That’s the place that loves me so much they didn’t want to let me go.”

He couldn’t have been more charming. Thanks to a scheduling glitch, the program announced a Brahms sonata where Chen had prepared a different one. “We’ll be playing the Franck Sonata,” he said, which drew applause. “Are you clapping because you think I said Frank Sinatra? No, it’s the Franck Sonata.”fingers

And it was, and it was brilliantly performed. It’s a warhorse and thus runs the risk of being overplayed, but it rewarded the dynamic partnership of Chen and pianist Andrew Tyson, whose consonance in the opening movement set the stage for the quarrels of the second. The wispy third movement comes across as a series of questions with languorous answers, giving way to an autumnal finale that builds in intensity and finished with a virtuoso flourish.

That was also on display in the opening work, Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, the two fast sections of which send the fiddler’s fingers into the controlled spasms that give the piece its sobriquet. As if to justify playing the piece without the ornamentation that has crept in via historically informed performance scholarship, Chen chose arch-Romantic Fritz Kreisler’s version, which adds a challenging cadenza.

The program nearly duplicates what’s on Chen’s debut recording, a centerpiece of which is Bach’s Chaconne, a set of variations with astonishing contrasts of tone and style. Although I could quarrel with some of Chen’s interpretive choices for this unaccompanied work – I don’t like the tempo deviations he put in for dramatic purposes – the performance had the authority you expect from performers who’ve been in the trenches far longer.

Then came the Wieniawski pieces that finished the concert: a Saltarelle (not on the CD) that Chen took at a lively clip, never missing a challenge, and then the “Variations on an Original Theme,” which uses the almost comical device of separating its virtuoso episodes a brief piano flourish. Not only was it a rip-roaring end to an incredible concert, but also an early glimpse of a talent who is destined to conquer this field.

Ray Chen, violinist; Andrew Tyson, pianist
Union College Memorial Chapel, April 27

– Metroland Magazine, 5 May 2011

Enriching the Hall

2026-05-01T22:01:00.001-04:00

From the Comedy Vault Dept.: Back in my reviewing heyday, I presented myself as someone able to write knowledgably about many different disciplines, usually the snooty ones, but I enjoyed forays into realms like comedy, popular song, and even offbeat subjects like ice skating. Here’s a look at Rich Hall’s stop in Schenectady in 1990. Hall dipped into the SNL universe for a season and since has been busy writing plays (at his ranch in Montana) and living and working in London.

RICH HALL'S APPEARANCE at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday night was presented in the guise of comedy, and it’s true that he worked a lot of delightfully-entertaining bits into his set. But he’s really, down deep, a humorist, following a tradition too few comics know about these days.

I haven’t seen him on television and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to share in the instant recognition factor – and that there’d be inside jokes I wouldn’t get.

It wasn’t like that at all. Hall works the audience with easily-recognizable situations – like so many others, he has his own dog and cat routine – but he’s also got a fascination with language that leads him into a territory of free-association once the province only of people like George Carlin.

Like Carlin, Hall explores the sound and sense of words. They differ markedly in matter, however. Carlin shocks by going for the jugular of taboos and chills the audience into laughing at itself. Hall’s is a warmer approach, making friends with the crowd and inviting them into the banter.

And a college-age bunch always has a few willing to cooperate. Vociferously. Hall listened, and worked it all into his routine. He localized the event, seamlessly working what sounded like tried material into a Schenectady-oriented framework.

“Schenectady,” he muttered, prowling back and forth on the apron of the stage, head bent, a shock of hair bouncing as he walked. “Schenectady. Sounds anatomical. Femur, Schenectady, Patella.”

As a humorist, he invents a universe that sounds suspiciously like the one we see. Only his is explainable in terms we never thought of. Terms that make sense. Sort of. (He has written books of “sniglets,” terms he invented to cover ideas the dictionary ignores.)

A late-night trip to Denny’s (“Always open!” he snarled. “Sounds more like a threat”) led to the violence of vegetables (“Beets. Squash. ArtiCHOKES”).

A large portion of the audience was gathered as part of a conference – “Conference? Don’t let me disturb you!” – of the National Conference of Undergraduate Research. As some material based on the enormity of a local Price Chopper failed to spark recognition in an obviously out-of-town bunch, Hall turned to home states for ad-libs, polling people on their origins. It was deftly done.

Free association is a key to this kind of comedy, which puts you at your most vulnerable on stage. Some ideas stay grounded, some take off with marvelous spontaneity. The skilled performer keeps a few surefire saves close at hand, too.

Hall had an impressive number of such unprepared forays fly, and kept the audience with him through nearly an hour and a half of it. He encored with a freewheeling rap with the more vocal contingent and shared some as-yet unpublished sniglets as well.

Glen Schweitzer and the Jalapeno Brothers opened the program with a pleasant set of folk-country material. A mixture of standards and originals, vocals and instrumentals, handled with taste and good cheer in Schweitzer’s Steve Goodman-ish style.

The group is a trio of guitar, bass and mandolin, which makes for an enjoyable sound. But the material leaned toward the languorous, presented with a little too much laid-back diffidence. A “Talking Cigarette” number showed how excitingly the group can hop. I’d like to see a few more such numbers worked in.

– Schenectady Gazette, 19 April 1990

Courting the Farmgirl

2026-04-24T19:39:00.004-04:00

From the Concert Vault Dept.: Baritone Sanford Sylvan displayed such virtuosity as he moved through his 30s that his resume included appearances with major opera companies and orchestras throughout the world, and the creation of roles in two acclaimed John Adams operas: “Nixon in China,” in which Syvan sang the role of Chou En-lai, and then the title role in “The Death of Klinghoffer.” We were fortunate enough to see him several times in the Albany area, including performaces as part of what was then known as the Schenectady Museum-Union College concert series. He was based in Manhattan but long associated with Boston, and he spent sabbatical time in Scotland. When he died in 2019, at the age of 65, his New York Times obituary failed to mention, among his survivors, the man he married in 1996. I reviewed his 1984 Union College recital here; below is a recently unearthed review of his 1994 visit, with Schubert’s “Schoene Muellerin.”

SUPPOSE YOU FINALLY GET this attractive farmgirl to pay attention to you, then she suddenly throws you over for some hidebound hunter. Do you punch him out? Sue him?

Sanford Sylvan

If you're a self-pitying German poet, you rush home and write verse about it, ending up with the lullaby sung to you by the brook you flung yourself into.

I haven't checked to see whether Wilhelm Mueller was actually being autobiographical in his cycle of 23 poems, published in 1820, but the sorrow and sentiment in “Die Schoene Muellerin” shines through a reading of bare texts and erupts into a magical marriage of music and verse in Schubert's famous setting of all but three of the poems.

The Schenectady Museum-Union College Concert Series had a later-than-usual finish as baritone Sanford Sylvan and pianist David Breitman were at last able to present this cycle. Measles – that dreaded Capital District word just now – postponed the concert until last night.

Which meant no other hardship than that we got to see a gorgeous sunset through the high windows of the Union College Memorial Chapel as Breitman opened the program with the Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946, by Schubert.

I'm a bigger fan of Breitman than I am of the fortepiano he worked with. Not that it sounded untrue – it just seemed wimpy for the job. Years of familiarity with these pieces on a concert grand has my ear trained to expect a full-bodied basso DAAAH when a low key is struck, not the fortepiano's fulsome DOYING.

But Breitman's technique makes the most of the instrument's limitations. A slight roll gives a chord extra body; dynamic range is tooled down to thrive within those limitations..

In programming terms, it was a good move, showcasing the artist who then seems to sit in the background for an hour. Thereafter, Breitman had the tough job of drawing forth the marvelous subtlety in the “Muellerin” piano score, sculpting it to fit Sylvan's style, which was excellently done.

Sylvan is an old friend of the concert series with a deserved reputation for terrific lyrical artistry. He burst forth with a thousand-kilowatt smile as he launched into “Das Wandern,” first of the songs, rendered with an almost tenor-like tone.

But there's a deep, dark-hued resonance that is in itself a foreboding of the colors to come. “Die Schoene Muellerin” is a journey of passion and despair that requires the utmost simplicity for its success. You can't ply the songs with artifice. A setting like “Der Neugierige,” in which the poet asks his favored brook for an indication of his beloved's heart, sounds like a nursery song and needs a sincere, childlike reading.

“Morgengruss,” on the other hand, has complicated layers of contrivance that we need to see through quickly as the oh-so-dignified young man heaps praise upon his sweetheart.

Sylvan sang it with complete understanding and perfect control, conveying a sense that even he was discovering new emotional depths of the music. Even the fortepiano sound blended superbly for a sad, superbly sung evening.

Next season's concerts will feature the complete Beethoven quartets performed by the Takacs String Quartet in six concerts (Oct. 9, 10, Dec. 4, 5, March 12 and 13) as well as appearances by the New England Bach Festival, Boston Camerata, the Emerson String Quartet and the Wu Han, Pamela Frank, Yeesun Kim trio.

– Schenectady Gazette, 16 June 1990

Jazzing the Classics

2026-04-17T23:49:00.002-04:00

FOR A FEW DECADES during the last century, when classical music was a familiar part of the musical landscape, many jazz bands borrowed tunes with pleasing results. John Kirby’s sextet recorded several such examples (his Schubert Serenade is a knockout), and Freddy Martin set lyrics to those strains. Harry James played the Bumblebee; Woody Herman did the Sabre Dance. The practice has fallen off a great deal since then, but two recent recordings remind us that, as bassist Mark Wade puts it, “A good tune is a good tune.”

Wade’s trio performs on “New Stages” (Dot Time), a fifteen-track collection that takes some unusual turns through the classical repertory, while pianist Ted Rosenthal’s trio (and guests) explore eleven songs on “Impromp2" (TMR), so-named because it’s a follow-up to his 2010 collection of classical-informed pieces.

Both collections share rhythmically compelling, harmonically inventive approaches to the music under consideration and, remarkably, given the breadth of source material out there, they also share a single piece: Chopin’s Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 69 No. 1, known to many as the “Farewell.”

Rosenthal’s version was fashioned as a vehicle for Ken Peplowski, in one of the clarinetist’s final sessions (see Chip Defaa’s tribute to Peplowski in the March issue). It opens with a straightforward reading of the tune by Peplowski in duet with Rosenthal, who gives a light swing to his first solo passage; without deviating very much from the structure of the piece, Peplowski and Rosenthal alternate 16-bar passages, diving behind its innocent sweetness to embellish the melody with increasing urgency before Peplowski calms it again and brings it home.

On Wade’s recording, pianist Tim Harrison starts off in the salon, his approach for the first minute of the piece coming right from the original page, but with embellishments. Then bass (Wade) and drummer Scott Neumann kick in, the tempo picks up, and we burrow into the harmonic structure of the piece, isolating fragments of the melody and further exploring what they can build from those fragments. We’re treated to bass solos and drum breaks before piano takes a broader sweep through the flavor of the original, again heightening the energy by exploring the short phrases they discovered.

Both leaders toil in the trenches of both classical and jazz, which is how a freelancer survives in the city, alongside writing and teaching, and straddling those genres (probably with some Broadway thrown in) enriches one’s work in each.

A coin-toss determined the order in which I’m considering these albums; thus, we begin with Rosenthal. “Classical music has been a part of my musical life for quite some time,” says he. “I was a classical piano major at the Manhattan School of Music back in the day when you couldn’t be a jazz major because they didn't have a jazz program. In fact, the jazz program started the year I graduated, and now, of course, I'm on the faculty at MSM.” But even before he began studying classical piano, he explains, “I grew to really love and enjoy and pursue classical music, both in its own right and also as a means to find new ways of approaching jazz.”

Which includes the borrowing of melodic material, which, he notes, is like approaching a standard. “After my earlier album came out, there was a reviewer in Boston who said something like, ‘I stepped away from the CD player and thought, “That sounds like a Cole Porter tune, but I don't really know what it is.”’ And it turned out to be a Chopin Nocturne.

Another Chopin waltz opens the record, this one in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 64 No. 2. You well may know the tune, but you probably haven’t heard it cast as a samba, as happens here. Yet it sounds right at home in this setting. “That seems to be a real crowd-pleaser,” says Rosenthal. “I've been playing it for a few years, and I've also made an arrangement of it for chamber orchestra or strings. Last summer I enjoyed seeing the violinists playing the swing melody, all doing it with smiles on their faces.”

Yet one more Chopin piece is here, this one the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17 No. 4. It’s marked Lento, and the players luxuriate in that Lento, with the jazz impulses propelling it in much the same way as a traditional mazurka’s dotted-note rhythms. And watch out for the false ending! Chopin’s original almost sounds like a jazz tune on its own after listening to Rosenthal’s version, a tribute to the persistence of jazz once it gets into your ears.

Burrowing solidly into the repertory, Rosenthal found Brahms’s Third Symphony, specifically the third movement, marked Poco allegretto but always performed at an easy pace. There’s a rocking feel to the melody, which becomes grist for over seven minutes of introspection and improvisation. “That one has been sitting in my stack of music for close to 20 years,” he explains, “and I was never quite comfortable with the form. When you're playing the theme in jazz, you're improvising, and if you're not comfortable with how the form is spinning out, then it's just not going to work. I finally had to make some decisions about it because the phrase lengths that Brahms uses are not all regular. It took a period of living with it as a jazz tune.”

Two movements from Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata are featured. The slow movement is a piano solo every bit as affecting in its way as is the original, culminating in a back-and-forth between two contrasting themes, in keeping with the character of the original. The brisk third movement brings in the trio to cavort in an Ellingtonian manner.

Peplowski gets another soulful showcase, this one “The Old Castle” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Originally written for piano, orchestrated by Ravel (also by many others), played out of those contexts by artists as different as Andrés Segovia and Tomita, it lends itself nicely to clarinet, especially in such able hands.

Peplowski died in February at the age of 66, “and that was pretty shocking,” says Rosenthal. “Ken and I have done many things over the years, and one of the ways we've connected musically is this connection with the classical world, because he's such a beautiful clarinetist and has such a beautiful tone that people always think of Benny Goodman.”

Also guesting on three numbers is violinist Sarah Caswell, playing Elgar’s “Salut d’amour,” written as a violin feature and given feather-light touches of jazz, as is “Je te veux,” a neglected song by Erik Satie. But it’s on Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” that Caswell really shines, summoning the mournful Russian-ness of the piece. “There’s such richness in there,” notes Rosenthal, “especially harmonically, and a beautiful melody, that we just can make a few alterations and kind of loosen it up in a way that seems to fit really nicely. Sarah was a student of mine at Manhattan School Music in a jazz combo, so I've known her a long time, and
I'm very happy to see how successful she’s been since.”

Appearing on the recording as well are Noriko Ueda on bass and Quincy Davis or Tim Horner on drums, musicians who also have worked with Rosenthal for many years. Although the album might seem an unlikely fusion of genres, “I love them both,” says Rosenthal, “and I love finding the commonalities and appreciating the differences.”

Mark Wade’s “New Stages” is the work of a bass player who started out on only one side of the aisle. “I went to school for jazz,” he says, “and classical music was something I came to late in life. I didn't start listening to it till I was in college. It was almost like a hobby at first, but it eventually became part of my career. So I do both.”

A five-time finalist for Bassist of the Year in the DownBeat Magazine Readers’ Poll, he appears venues such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Blue Note, The Iridium, and Birdland, and he’s a longtime member of the Pete McGuinness Jazz Orchestra. On the classical stage, he has worked with the Key West Symphony as well as the Orchestra of the S.E.M./Janáček Philharmonic (Czech Republic) at both Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. But, he points out, “My band is a jazz ensemble, so from all those years of playing and listening to classical music this seemed like a project that would fit.”

He drew from an eclectic list of sources. Four movements from Debussy’s “Children’s Corner Suite” start off the album, including the most famous number from that set, “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” Debussy used the middle of the piece to poke fun at Wagner’s “Tristan Chord”; in keeping with the boppish nature of his trio, Wade veers into Thelonious Monk’s “Bye-Ya.” It’s seamless, and works beautifully.

But you hear this right from the start of the CD, when the fast, rolling scalar passages that open “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” become buoyant bop phrases with insistent drum accents in “The Good Doctor Gradus.” Pianist Tim Harrison and bassist Scott Neumann round out the ensemble with consummate skill.

Following the Debussy suite, Wade turns to Sibelius, exploring sweeping themes from the first movement of his Violin Concerto – and the trio here is in top-notch form, deftly supporting one another as those themes are spun out, re-harmonized, and questioned in a compelling bass solo before being propelled into a surprisingly pointillistic finish.

I confessed that it took me a while to recognize Sibelius’s melodies (and I know the piece well), but Wade says, “For me, that's mission accomplished. This was not about taking the Sibelius Concerto and adding a swing beat to it. It's not meant as a cover album. It's taking this music, which I really loved, and trying to distill it down to its musical essence. I’m asking, ‘What makes the Sibelius violin concerto the Sibelius violin concerto? What are the elements about it that are most important to me? And then, how do I take those and translate it through my lens as a jazz composer and a bass player and the leader of a piano trio?’”

You may think you’re about to get Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, but those opening chords give way to the last of Chopin’s Preludes, proving the piece to be just as nervous as Rachmaninoff’s. After which Wade’s take on Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” offers seven minutes of a wistful journey from Wagner to blue-note-trimmed gospel, which probably would have driven Wagner nuts, but serves the old bigot right.

A two-selection section titled “Iberia” borrows back from Miles the lovely second movement of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” which becomes a terrific showcase for Wade, then moving into a theme from Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Capriccio espanole” – and if a Russian speaking Spanish isn’t unusual enough already, Wade eases it into Chick Corea’s “La Fiesta.”

“I tried not to have it be like a classical greatest hits album,” says Wade, “but I also didn't want it to seem like I went out of my way to come up with something obscure that people wouldn't know. Everything I picked was music that I love, so whether people will know it or not wasn't a consideration.” He credits his time playing with symphony orchestras for offering exposure to a variety of appealing works. “We’d play this thing, and I’d be so knocked out about it that I thought, ‘One day I've got to do something with that.’ Or I heard it on the radio, or heard a performance of it, and just thought, ‘I don't know how or what I'm going to do with this, but I have to find out.’”

Thus his choice of three selections drawn from the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé. “This is not something everyone would know,” Wade explains, “but it's a piece I've played maybe two or three times. It's a piece that a freelance classical musician would be hired to play with a church choir, perhaps for their big piece at Easter.” The third section, titled “At Rest,” comes from the Requiem’s “Pie Jesu,” normally an alto solo. “It was one of those things where I felt like, you know, I need to do it. But how? Obviously, it's not jazz on the original, so I took a lot of creative liberties.”

Writing the charts becomes its own challenge in a project like this, and Wade explains that it’s a long process. “For a lot of these, I start by hearing something that I think would work for my trio, and then I get the score out and start diving into it. And I might say, ‘This isn't going to really work. I don't want this to sound like, if you remember from the ‘70s, “A Fifth of Beethoven,” because I think it'd be pretty easy to tip over into something that sounds cheesy or contrived. So the first process is just weeding out what I think could work and what doesn't. And then I'm going to the piano, working out ideas, writing other material around it, then coming up with charts that I can hand to my band.”

“Lament,” drawn from Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, distilling what may be the most dolorous piece ever written into six minutes of powerful parallel. The symphony became extremely popular in the 1990s but has fallen away since then, so this is a worthy reminder.

“I feel like the final piece on the disc, Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ is the outlier,” says Wade, “because even if you don't know anything about classical music, that’s the one you’ll recognize. It's the dessert at the end of 70 minutes of listening through all this stuff.”

Also hearking back to the ‘90s, Wade has an old-fashioned philosophy about making recordings. “These days, you know, people listen to music so differently. You don't buy a record and listen all the way through the way an artist may have intended. You can buy a track. You can listen to it however you want. People choose how to consume it. And it’s up to them, right? But I still create an album as if you were going to sit down and listen to it from beginning to end.”

Which I’d recommend as an approach to both albums reviewed here, because each has a satisfying arc to its programming and satisfactory finality to its finish.

Impromp2
Ted Rosenthal Trio
TMR Music

New Stages
Mark Wade Trio
Dot Time Records

– The Syncopated Times, April 2026

Galway Dazzles, Flute Sparkles

2026-04-10T20:38:00.003-04:00

Critical Drubbing Dept.: A few weeks ago (in this piece), I recounted my journey from a snotty, full-of-himself critic to a somewhat less-snotty, still rather full–of-himself critic, and I cited a concert by James Galway as one of the turning points in my attitude. I tried searching for the actual review with no success; naturally, it sprang to light when I wasn’t looking for it at all. Like so much of what I had published in 1986 and earlier, the original computer files are long gone, so I’m relying here on a tearsheet that lingered in my files. I wish I’d gotten over berating the audience for applauding between movements by then; now I’m just happy to learn that we’re all awake. Here’s that review.

HIS GOLDEN FLUTE sparkling in the spotlight, James Galway dazzled a near-capacity crowd at Proctor's Theatre, where be performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada Monday evening.

Galway served as soloist and conductor, and his music alone radiated the charm that the television audience knows from his talk-show appearances. Thanks to that exposure, he is a known quantity on the classical stage and thus draws people who might otherwise think twice about spending ticket money. His program similarly comprised known or accessible pieces, a splendid starting place for the novice coecertgoer.

The first suite from Handel's Water Music was the opener. Galway has a lean but enthusiastic conducting style — not for him those flailing Bernstein arms — and he shaped his ideas along conventional and acceptible lines. The orchestra responded with appropriate energy, although there were the spotty problems that suggest a not-well-warmed-up group. There were no surprises in this very familiar work until the hornpipe movement busted loose with a wonderfully quirky but ompletely sensible rhythm; Galway probably has an Irish insight other conductors would be wise to learn.

The audience responded with dutiful applause at almost every break (this was true throughout the concert), and Galway acknowledged it each time with a wave. So much acclaim, while reassuring to the performers, is not an obligation; most conductors have things they do with their shoulders to signify when applause is expected.

The orchestra was thinned out a little to accompany a concerto in G Major by Karl Stamitz. Galway has the luxury of a master technician in being able to bend the rapid solo lines without sacrificing the pulse; in other worth, he can play as fast he wishes yet vary the speed here and there for virtuoso effect. And he likes to take the quick movements at quite a clip.

The Stamitz concerto gives the opportunity both for virtuosity and some exquisite slower stuff; the orchestra was rock-steady and unobtrusive.

Switching the two works listed for the second half, Galway began with Mozart's Concerto No. 2 in D Major. Here there is room for more interplay between soloist and ensemble, and it was fascinating to see how the flutist cued the section leaders with his instrument, playing to the different sides of his center-stage solo area.

Everything he does is tasteful. His playing never embraces virtuosity for its own sake: the music is always there, sometimes treated with whimsy. His cadenzas were never out of keeping with the piece. And his interpretive style as a conductor, while rather on the safe side, shows promise of originality.

Mozart's Symphony No. 36 closed the program and found the orchestra in superb shape. A crisp tempo and nice articulation combined with the kind of overall picture of the first movement (and the subsequent three) that leads to a dramatic finish were indications of a conductor who knows and loves his Mozart. My only quarrel was with Galway's tendency to lay it on heavy with the trumpets and tympani in the second and third movements. The finale was as exciting as if he had played it on his flute.

James Galway, flutist and conductor
The National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada
Proctor's Theatre, May 5

– Schenenctady Gazette, 7 May 1986

Big Bands are Victorious

2026-04-03T22:04:00.002-04:00

THE FIRST BATCH OF V-DISCS shipped to military fighters overseas on Oct. 1, 1943. Less than two years later, we won the war. Many other elements contributed to this victory, of course, but let’s not short-change the power those records must have had.

Mosaic Records celebrated this unique catalogue category with the release in 2024 of a massive set of V-Disc small-group sessions and the promise that a big-band set would follow. It’s here. It’s ten CDs of excellent-sounding music by top-flight bands and a few who never gained that category but should have.

Right off the bat what invites celebration is the restoration quality. Those discs were meant to be played beside bunk and rack and even out in the field using the spring-wound phonographs that were shipped with the discs (along with packets of extra steel needles). And you got a lot of music: These discs were cut with more grooves per inch than usual to allow for up to six minutes of music on a 12-inch side.

The program continued until May, 1949, at which time the companies producing them destroyed all of their discs and masters. Service men and women were forbidden to bring them home, but with over eight million of those platters circulating overseas, many were bound to find their way back. There are stories of scofflaws having their collections confiscated, and at least one offender did jail time.

Now we can thank those rebels. The record companies and musicians’ union decided to waive copyright on V-Discs on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, prompting a flurry of CD issues. I bought a bunch of them. They sounded mediocre to terrible, obviously sourced from whatever discs the issuing producer had at hand, and with varying success at audio restoration. Mosaic’s sets have been subjected both to scrupulous programming choices – no sappy vocals or Mickey-Mouse bands here! – and a search for the best-sounding originals which then were audio-restored by the best in the business.

To underscore the shrewdness of choice in the presented selections, let me begin by celebrating the three selections from Kay Kyser’s outfit. Being as Ish Kabibble-phobic as I am, I would have passed this band by, but it turns out that by 1943, Kyser was fronting a gang that could swing, with personnel that included clarinetist Rosy McHargue and Noni Bernardi on alto. Mind you, what we have here are three selections culled from a session of 14.

Then there’s the discovery of Musician First Class Sam Donahue and the Navy Dance Band (or, in 1948, Sam Donahue and His Orchestra), who recorded on two consecutive days in 1945 and waxed a single session three years later. When tenor sax-man Donahue was drafted in 1942, he joined Artie Shaw’s aggregation and was tapped to take over when the exhausted Shaw got invalided out in 1944. Donahue changed some charts and personnel and successfully toured throughout Europe before returning stateside for his first V-Disc sessions.

These recordings are beauties, in excellent sound, and include two takes of Donahue’s arrangement of “C-Jam Blues,” two of “Dinah,” two “Bugle Call Rag”s, a Benny Carter arrangement of “My Melancholy Baby” – and those are just from the first session. “Sax-o-Boogie” is the single cut chosen from the 1948 session, by which time Doc Severinson was in the band. The 20 Donahue tracks included here take up the entirety of Disc Nine, and well deserve the showcase.

Count Basie gets more real estate in this collection than anyone else, because he was an enthusiastic supporter of the V-Disc program, recording frequently and not lousing up his selections with sappy vocals. He and his band held four sessions between 1943 and 1945, with 24 cuts deemed Mosaic-worthy.

The two songs from the 1943 session (Basie originals “Yeah Man” and “Rhythm Man”) are a last aural glimpse of the famous rhythm section trio of Freddie Green, Walter Page, and Jo Jones. But the following session, in May 1944, which took place between sets at the nearby Hotel Lincoln, features the brief return to the band of Lester Young. You’ll hear him briefly in two takes of Dicky Wells’s “Kansas City Stride,” and at greater length in the “I Got Rhythm” inspired “Playhouse Stomp No. 2,” unissued until a 1991 CD release on the Vintage Jazz Classics label.

Count Basie

Jimmy Rushing is in excellent form, not only in Don Redman’s arrangement of “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” but also revisiting “Sent for You Yesterday” and “Jimmy’s Boogie Woogie,” again summoning memories of the ‘30s Basie band. And there’s an inadvertent Easter egg as well, as Thelma Carpenter’s vocal on “Call Me Darling” is noted in the big booklet but not in the CD’s discography or label. And then there’s a vocal that may give you nightmares – “Aunt Hagar’s Country Home,” sung with sincerity by alto sax-man Earle Warren but with lyrics almost as cringeworthy as “Old Folks.”

Woody Herman and His Orchestra are represented by four sessions, beginning with a powerhouse band of 18 players and enjoying its way through arrangements by the likes of Neal Hefti and Eddie Sauter and a couple of vocals by Frances Wayne when Woody himself wasn’t showing his vaudeville roots by singing some novelty refrains. A generous eighteen selections and two alternate takes include Herman originals like “Apple Honey” and “Your Father’s Mustache,” standards like “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Lover Man,” and penned-for-the-occasion songs like “ Jones Beachhead” and Irving Berlin’s “There Are No Wings on a Foxhole.”

We even get an unexpectedly straight vocal from Martha Raye on “He’s Funny That Way,” recorded during Herman’s August 22, 1945 session after Woody took off for the night and turned the band over to his bass player, the irrepressible Chubby Jackson. Trumpeter Pete Candoli takes songwriter credit for another Jackson number, “Meshugah (They Went That-a-Way).” They sure knew how to give crazy titles to songs back then.

Ever want to hear Glenn Miller cuss? Now’s your chance. Okay, few of us would think of it as cussing, even in 1943, but Miller’s first session begins with a breakdown during his initial intro. If you’re new to the V-Disc world, performers were encouraged to add a brief personal message at the top of each set, and they range from the cursory to the endearing, with Miller decidedly among the former.

In any event, he’s here with his Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra, which we know as the Army Air Force Band. Three years ago, I confessed in these pages my secret affection for the Miller band even as the hardcore jazz lovers I knew tore him to pieces for the sin of sounding sweet. There was a lot of Miller issued under those V-Disc labels, but most of it was drawn from commercial recordings and broadcasts. In this set is the result of the band’s three actual V-Disc sessions, to which no jazz-lover should object.

The first session produced the recording most associated with wartime Miller and the V-Disc program: “The St. Louis Blues March.” With a 32-piece band under his baton and a high-stepping arrangement by Jerry Gray, this piece swings right from the top, as a big brass fanfare introduces two drummers (Ray McKinley, who helped with the arrangement, and Frank Ippolito) to lead us into a familiar tune that never sounded like this before. The idea was to give soldiers something more exciting to march to. Some of the brass hated it, but the open-minded ones saw the sense.

Sousa’s “El Capitan” gets a similar treatment, and the service itself is celebrated in the quotes-laden “The Squadron Song” as well as Johnny Mercer’s witty “G.I. Jive,” sung by Ray McKinley sounding very Mercer-esque. Some twenty strings were added for the ballads, as you’ll hear in “Stardust” and “Stormy Weather.”

Wartime can be a time of strange bedfellows, and two who probably shared a boyhood room reunited for a V-Disc session in 1945, prompting Sy Oliver to pen “Brotherly Jump” for the occasion. Jimmy Dorsey brought 19 players to the session; so did Tommy. The combined forces certainly raise the roof on Liederkranz Hall, but it’s the quiet finish, with the brothers trading fours and playing together in easygoing harmony, that makes the piece.

Woody Herman

Several Jimmy Dorsey selections (from an earlier session) follow, highlights being a revamped “John Silver” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Grand Central Getaway,” showing Jimmy’s versatile, somewhat up-to-date chops. Tommy and his band had nearly 80 V-Discs out there, but most were drawn from existing recordings. Two unreleased numbers are in this set, both Sy Oliver originals, both of them giving Charlie Shavers impressive solo time.

Should this be enough to keep your ears busy for quite some time? Sure. But let’s be greedy, especially with so many more bands on tap. Charlie Barnet’s seven selections include “Skyliner” and a blazing “Blue Skies.” Several Goodman alumni are on tap, including Harry James with eleven tunes, Lee Castle with two, Lionel Hampton with nine minutes of “Flying Home,” alongside four more killer-dillers. Gene Krupa’s band bulges with strings at one of his sessions; his second boasts the more-than-welcome return of Anita O’Day, who, saddled with a pair of dumb songs (“Jose Gonzales” and “Ooh, Hot Dawg”), nevertheless dignifies the material in her trademark fashion.

Krupa shares a CD with Buddy Rich, and Rich really goes to town on his twelve numbers, especially a pair of arrangements by Neal Hefti. One of them, a George Auld tune titled “Daily Double,” clocks in at nearly six minutes, which was the maximum time a V-Disc could hold. Usually more than one song was put on a side, but Rich takes over another one with over five minutes of “Nellie’s Nightmare.”

Among Yank Lawson’s four sides is Bix Beiderbecke’s “Davenport Blues,” and another fine trumpeter, Charlie Spivak, fronts an underrated band on three songs, putting his horn to good use on Jimmy Mundy’s “The General Jumped at Dawn.” Both Jimmie Lunceford and Don Redman had new bands when they entered the recording studio in 1945 and 1943 respectively, but the first strains of “For Dancers Only” proves that Lunceford was in excellent shape – ditto Redman, who leads his band both in playing and singing the effervescent annoyance “Pistol Packin’ Mama.”

You’ve got the idea, so I’m just going to list the remaining bands included in this set, with the number of numbers you’ll find for each. Thus we have Glen Gray (3), Tony Pastor (2), Les Brown (6), Stan Kenton (6), Randy Brooks (2), Hal McIntyre (10), Mal Hallett (2), Clyde Lucas (3), and Ted Fiorito with one nutty Sy Oliver tune, “Don’t Get Stuff in Your Cuff.” Boyd Raeburn has five, including a sinuous “Begin the Beguine” with an English horn intro, four years before Sauter-Finegan would do such things. And Bill Heathcock ably represents the west coast with four numbers.

And there are some military bands, such as the U.S. Maritime Service Training Station Band under the direction of Warrant Officer Si Waronker (who would go on to found Liberty Records), USMC (3), the Army Service Forces Dance Band, directed by Sgt. Johnny Messner (1), the 344th Army Service Forces Orchestra (2), and the completely unknown Majors & the Minors, their personnel a mystery but their work on “Whispering” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” deserving of praise.

I’ve saved Claude Thornhill for last only because he was the last, recording “Easy Does It” (by Trummy Young and Sy Oliver) in November 1948 and sent out, as V-Disc 900, in the last package of discs. David J. Weiner speculates that the alto soloist is Lee Konitz, which lets me segue into praise for Weiner’s program notes for this set. It mus have been exhausting pursuing personnel and analyzing recording sessions before distilling it all into a beautifully written essay that adds tremendously to the listening enjoyment this set provides. It’s been playing fairly continuously in my house for the past couple of weeks, yet I’m only being asked for more.

Classic V-Disc Big Band Jazz Sessions
Limited Edition Box Set (#284 – 10 CDs)
mosaicrecords.com

– The Syncopated Times, April 2026

Honey and Steel

2026-03-27T21:46:00.004-04:00

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Again (as with last week), going back twenty years, I wrote about two back-to-back concerts that included an orchestra appearance at Proctor’s Theatre, something that now rarely happens at that venue. In any event, the violinist within me was thrilled. I’m a lousy player but a keen fan of the repertory.

TWO MAGNIFICENT VIOLINISTS appeared within two days of each other in Schenectady, in two significantly contrasting settings of music and hall. Young Arabella Steinbacher blazed through the dazzling Khachaturian concerto surrounded by a large orchestra and witnessed by some 2,000 concertgoers at Proctor’s; Jaime Laredo, a renowned artist with decades of performance credit, played the three autumnal Brahms sonatas in an emotionally riveting partnership with pianist Leon Fleisher in the more intimate setting of Union College’s Memorial Chapel.

Arabella Steinbacher
Photo by Peter Rigaud

Laredo played like honey, Steinbacher like steel; both knew how best to approach the works they’d chosen.

Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto is a big and brassy trifle, replete with modal characteristics springing not only from the composer’s Armenian heritage but also with a fascination for Oriental sounds that found its way into music by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff, among others.

Written in 1940 with lots of advice from violinist David Oistrakh, its fast outer movements are busy – the concluding Rondo is a feast of pyrotechnics – while its middle, an Andante, displays the lyricism that has attracted Khachaturian’s ballet music to hip filmmakers (the love theme from “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for example).

Steinbacher’s bow arm is astonishingly versatile: she already has bested all of the big challenges. A supple legato is little challenge, yet she summons a creamy tone from frog to tip. When she sets it in more detached motion, for a staccato or bouncing spiccato, each note resounds clearly. And this concerto demands several long sequences of broken chords with a bouncing bow, which she articulated beautifully.

Otherwise, the piece is a lot of sound and fury, with a heart-on-the-sleeve sob story in its middle movement that needs to be played with the utmost conviction to avoid falling into parody. Perhaps, in that regard, it’s a young person’s work, and Steinbacher chose this vehicle well.

You can’t get more heart-on-the-sleeve than Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a work that pushed him dangerously close to self-parody. Where the Fourth is a lyrical and fun, this one all shades of gloom, like being trapped in a bar with a garrulous, self-pitying drunk.

Jaime Laredo
Photo by Christian Steiner

Former BBC Philharmonic principal conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier stepped in to replace the ailing Kurt Masur, and brought a splendid dynamic range to the Tchaikovsky symphony. His tempos were a hair on the slow side, which, with a repetitious piece like this work, can keep you in your seat for several extra minutes, and I missed the subtleties of phrasing that add life to a work like this one. But the overall sound of the orchestra was glorious, helped by a generous set of acoustic clouds.

This symphony demands taxing work from woodwinds and brass, with extended passages for solo clarinet and solo horn. Never was a note out of place, and Tortelier singled out the soloists and their sections for well-deserved bows.

The enthusiastic audience, nervous about applause, applauded any time the music stopped or even paused (as at the Tchaikovsky symphony’s false ending). I’m all for spontaneous displays of enthusiasm, but sometimes the continuity of a piece is ruined by the outburst. Too bad this kind of thing no longer is taught in schools, but, then again, no child will be left behind, right?

The first movement of Britten’s “Simple Symphony,” which opened the concert, was a little ragged, which I suspect was the result of trying to get the sound right in a large, almost-full hall, something you can’t achieve during a sound check; with the second movement, marked “Playful Pizzicato,” everything coalesced.

So the orchestra was primed and ready when Steinbacher took to the stage for her concerto. Khachaturian is not shy about answering a solo violin passage with a blast from the brass, and Tortelier saw to it that the violinist was never obscured and the work danced along with appropriate ferocity.

Ferocity is about the last term you’d apply to the three violin sonatas by Brahms. Written after the violin concerto, when the composer was in his mid-forties to mid-fifties, they are – especially the first two – quiet, meditative works that call for a skilled interplay between violin and piano.

Jaime Laredo is a virtuoso who is also one of the best chamber music artists on the scene, and is thus a generous collaborator. And to have Leon Fleisher as a partner is to have one of the shining lights of the keyboard, an artist whose career was derailed for decades by focal dystonia.

Leon Fleisher

Both artists approached this program – a tough one for a public seeking more fiery displays. It wasn’t until the Sonata No. 3, on the second half of the program, that we got anything approaching the sparkly, Hungarian-inspired rhythms often characteristic of Brahms’s work.

But what a compelling journey it was to get there! These sonatas are sinewy, well-crafted works. Not surprisingly, the composer borrowed from his own songs for thematic material – because the violin is the most singer-like instrument, and the best works for it are wordless arias.

Laredo has a sweet, Oistrakh-like tone; his slides up the strings reveal their motion with a small sob; his phrasing throbs with a momentous vibrato. Fleisher approaches the piano as if it’s a wild animal from which he needs to coax calmness; he studies the keys with a Brendel-like look of bemusement as he draws from them a richness of sound so ripe for Brahms. This was a perfect lesson in chamber music-making, a thrilling experience for this area.

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Yan Pascal Tortelier, conductor
Arabella Steinbacher, violinist
Proctor’s Theatre, March 21

Jaime Laredo, violinist
Leon Fleisher, pianist
Union College Memorial Chapel, March 23

– Metroland Magazine, 30 March 2006

Gambling on Dining

2026-03-20T21:19:00.002-04:00

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Twenty years ago, I reviewed a restaurant in Saratoga Springs that seemed destined for a long run, but didn’t make it very far off the back stretch. After eight years, owner Tim Meaney put the business up for sale, telling the Times Union that winters were a struggle, and it was time to move on. As near as I can figure, the address was next home to a tapas bar calling itself “62 Beekman”; currently, it’s an Italian eatery called Taverna Novo.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a friend of mine ran a drop-in center for kids in a storefront on Saratoga’s Beekman Street. Although he was doing good work, offering a place for teens to engage in meaningful activity, he wasn’t particularly welcomed by the neighborhood. After the program fell apart, he encouraged his board of directors to hang on to the building, predicting that the neighborhood would develop a more artistic identity. They unloaded the building anyway, for a sum they must these days deeply regret.

Because Beekman Street is doing just as my friend predicted, spawning galleries and eateries and attracting a clientele happy to get away from the busy downtown. The Beekman Street Bistro is in a building that, not too long ago, was condemned; its owner, a construction engineer, crafted its reconstruction with ideas and input from Tim Meaney and Dan Spitz, who decided to take a chance on this burgeoning neighborhood and commit to a fine-dining restaurant.

Unlike Lake George Village, the burg just up Route 9 that swells into life each summer with throngs of vacationers, Saratoga is the place to go to lose money in games of chance. Both cities have struggled to attract the kind of tourist happy to drop some coin on a fancy dinner, but Saratoga’s demographics have eased it ahead in that race.

Owner Meaney and Chef Spitz met while working at the popular Flying Fish in Lake George, but the restaurant went away and left them considering options. The partnership was a good one and Saratoga beckoned.

“We opened last July, on the 14th,” says Meaney. “I couldn’t open until the new sidewalks went in. They were poured on the 12th, so we were able to start serving two days later.” They did so with no fanfare, but were able to attract word-of-mouth attention during track season. “By the end of those six weeks, we were doing a good business, and it persisted through the fall.”

Business was light when I paid a recent mid-week visit, but it was steady and included many good-to-see-you-again welcomes from the staff as regular customers arrived. The building sits beside an art gallery, and is itself hung with a regularly changing artwork display. Which may be the most striking aspect of the space when you enter; the dining room itself is a comfortable, calm, discreetly lighted space.

Service throughout the evening was easygoing and we had attention when it was needed, but we, as newcomers, were given far less attention than those who’d been there before. Both chef and owner took time to talk with others; neither stopped by our table. It’s a dangerous practice to pay too much attention to anyone in the room just for this reason, and the virtuoso restaurateurs know how to spread the table-stops around.

Our server also succumbed, for too-lengthy periods, to the lure of conversation with an adjoining party. It’s tempting to linger when you have friends in the house, but a good server has an inner clock that allows only a few seconds of chat before she excuses herself and shimmers away.

What she bears to the table, however, makes up for a lot, because this certainly is virtuoso cookery. Dan Spitz has developed a coterie of farm-based purveyors for meat and produce, and builds his menu around what’s fresh. “When we get a pig, for example,” explains Meaney, “we put it all on the menu. Pork loin one day, then the shoulder, the ham, and so on.”

So it is with rabbit as well. They have a new supplier, which they celebrated by offering rabbit three ways – three different preparations on one plate. Previous offerings included rabbit hind quarters braised in olive oil with stewed artichokes and black truffles ($25), and the same meat braised in pork stock with leeks and cream, bacon and thyme ($20). I enjoyed a somewhat simpler preparation of braised rabbit over soft polenta ($19), scented with a piquant mixture of herbs.

Seasonings suit the ingredients well here; potato and leek soup ($7), was not the traditionally creamy variety, and was livened with pepper; a starter of PEI mussels, generously topping the bowl, sparkled with the flavors of chili and fennel ($9).

“I’m surprised at what we’re able to sell,” says Meaney, citing the sardines with bruschetta ($7) as an example. I sampled the dish, or rather, the fish – the dish itself was a long, handsome platter on which three large, fresh sardines awaited my attention as I easily scraped the meat off the bone. You’ll never go back to the canned stuff after this.

Oxtail is another neglected item, usually the basis of a soup. Here it was stuffed with tasty breading and served, lightly sauced, over polenta ($18) – very moist, and rich with delicious fat, tasty enough that my wife, who usually bitches about such things, finished it all.

Grilled quail has its own strong flavor, so if it’s going to be marinated, it needs the strength of balsamic vinegar to accomplish anything. This dish ($19) is served over creamy mashed potatoes and adds the fun of eating with your fingers.

With a vegetarian friend in tow, we sampled a pastry shell packed with porcini mushrooms and ricotta, among other savory ingredients ($15).

Desserts are made in-house, and a chocolate-and-figs tart ($6) was unusually enough flavored to give my daughter pause; even as she passed it around, though, she decided it was good enough to reclaim. A $10 fruit and cheese plate was a disappointment; no crackers, little fruit, and no explanation of the items. Also, with the arrival of warm weather, I’d like to see some vegetables on the plates.

The menu and the servers here need to stress the local origins of the products: there’s no better place to preach the gospel of local harvests than where you can taste the stuff, and the philosophy of this restaurant – supported by an extraordinary kitchen. For Saratoga dining, this place is a safe bet.

The Beekman Street Bistro, 62 Beekman St., Saratoga Springs, 518-581-xxxx. Local meat and produce gets extraordinary cooking in this off-the-track eatery, located in a burgeoning arts district. Be sure to try the rabbit. Serving dinner Tue-Sat 5-9. AE, MC, V.

– Metroland Magazine, 23 March 2006

2026-03-13T23:57:00.002-04:00

I‘ve Got a Secret

RED NORVO STARTED HIS JAZZ CAREER playing xylophone, which isn’t a very shouty instrument, but he was forward-thinking and harmonically inventive enough to enhance any ensemble he joined or led. In keeping with his instrument, he also was quietly rebellious. He made most of his rebellious statements through music, as his 1933 trio recordings of “Dance of the Octopus” and Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” attest, but in 1942 he initiated a different kind of rebellion: He made a (technically) illegal recording.

He’d made many recordings before this date, but they were officially recorded and officially released. But at midnight on July 31, 1942, the official recording industry was shut down by a musicians strike called by union president James C. Petrillo.

Petrillo was a firebrand, so renowned and feared that his name became the punchline for popular radio comedians – and every listener knew who Petrillo was. His argument was that the radio industry was robbing his musicians through a lack of royalty payments on the recordings they aired. And he believed that recordings themselves wiped out some 60 percent of in-person gigs. The strike would end only when the major record companies – RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca – signed agreements to pay into a special fund.

The comanies eventually caved; the strike was settled in November 1944. But in August 1942, just as that strike went into effect, Norvo wanted to record his current septet.

It was an easygoing, swinging outfit, one of his best, Red believed. But it was wartime, and the military was grabbing musicians left and right. Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson, among many others, broke up their bands because of this attrition. The writing was on the wall. And just as Red was getting ready to make this recording, the strike hit.

According to the stories surrounding this event, Red or one of his musicians cajoled an engineer to sneak them into a studio. They laid down ten tracks in a single session. It was more of a souvenir than a commercial release, because nobody was about to issue a platter by strikebreakers.

Much mystery remains about the travels of this recording, but trombonist Eddie Bert grabbed a set of acetates. Those are discs made (during wartime) by coating a base of glass with nitrocellulose lacquer, and recorded on the spot with a cutting lathe. They’re heavy and fragile and audibly deteriorate each time you play one. This I know because I paid about $40 for an acetate transfer of a very out-of-print record I desperately wished to acquire, and I heard my investment being eaten away before I thought to transfer it to tape. This was in the ‘70s, and, lacking money, the best machine I had was a cassette recorder.

Eddie Bert a similar experience. According to “Secret Session” executive producer Jo Bickhardt, Bert had a friend who persuaded him to transfer his acetates to cassette. If you’re working with superior equipment for playback and recording, you can end up with an excellent result. But there are many technical variables that will creep into the process, including playback stylus and whether the cassette deck head is properly aligned and cleaned. But who thinks of these things when you’re in your home music room enjoying the cassette deck you got for peanuts from, say, Sears?

Bert’s cassette is the source for this CD. Although up-to-date restoration techniques were brought to bear, the sound is a little muffled, a little gritty. And you’ll hear the kind of studio noise that suggests just how casual this session was.

The lineup is impressive, even if not completely known: Shorty Rogers is on trumpet, alongside trombonist Bert, Aaron Sachs on clarinet and alto sax, and Clyde Lombardi and Specs Powell on bass and drums. The pianist is guessed to be Hank Kahout. And of course, there’s Red, swinging his butt off.

The session kicks off with a Norvo original, “One Note Jive,” a bluesy up-tempo 32-bar number that’s tightly arranged and loosely swung. The horns cascade in right at the top, then Bert offers a wah-wah effect as part of his opening chorus, keeping that titular single note at the forefront. Piano and clarinet are then featured, and Red holds forth with two mallets (as he does throughout the session).

I suspect the medium-tempo “Speculatin’” was named to honor Powell, although it’s not a drum feature. Red starts by punishing his xylophone with piano behind him as the horns give a broad-notes backing. I’m guessing this is one of those head arrangments that got titled in the heat of the moment. It’s followed by another medium-tempo swinger, “I May Be Wrong,” written by Henry Sullivan and Harry Ruskin. Red recorded it at least as far back as 1938 with his then-wife Mildred Bailey taking the vocal chorus. Here it stretches into a satisfying seven minutes, giving our mystery pianist time for fleet solo that’s sparing and Teddy Wilson-like in its use of runs.

“Keep Smilin’” is a novelty that must have been popular in the club as it exhorts us to “just keep smilin’” in an increasingly insistent vocal refrain. “Rose Room” is the 1917 standard by Art Hickman and Harry Williams, and this one clocks in at eight-and-a-half minutes. Sachs takes two choruses on clarinet, with a lengthy tombone solo on his heels. Here’s where you hear what Red could do with a harmonically inviting song. Horns ease in on chorus two as Red’s playing grows more fleet. Muted trumpet follows – Rogers was a master of that sound – before another Wilson-esque piano chorus takes us into the finish.

Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby” begins with a slow horns and sax chorale with bowed bass, then Red comes in with a perky solo over a repeat of the chorale. The mood shifts slightly when Sachs takes a clarinet chorus, turning this into a beautiful rendering of a neglected semi-standard.

“Bugle Call Rag” always invites an ensemble to horse around with its possibilities, and after Red gets through swinging at the top, Rogers (appropriately) gets solo time with Specs filling behind him. Of course there’s a quote from “Please Go 'Way and Let Me Sleep” – I believe that was legally required for any recording of this number. Specs goes to town on “Slender, Tender, and Tall” (Hughie Prince and Mike Jackson), although the offhand vocal is also off-mic.

Norvo’s “Optical Illusion Pt. 1” gives us a refreshing dose of bass and muted trumpet, with a hint of a feeling of “Shortnin’ Bread” as it lopes along in an easy tempo. And “Liza” finishes the session with vigor, beginning with Red’s top-of-the-song solo. It’s a tight arrangement that makes the septet sound like a 15-piece band, and everyone gets a solo shot before the high-stepping rideout.

Chonologically, we’re at the birth of bop. You won’t hear it in the improvisational lines, but the arrangements sport unexpected harmonies. Of course, you hear those in Red’s ‘30s, recordings, too. “I believe I’ve moved with the times, somehow,” he told interviewer Les Tomkins. “Actually, I’ve never been aware of this; it seems like people who listen are much more aware of it than I am.”

Following this session, Red gave up on small groups for a while. Although he professed himself happiest when working with only a few others around him, his subsequent stints with Woody Herman and Benny Goodman found him featured both in the big bands and more intimate ensembles. But even his work with the band is outstanding: Listen to the nifty effect he creates on “A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine” with Herman’s First Herd, and “Panacea” showcases his effortless busy-ness under a ballad, giving a Bach-like effect. This is also when he switched to vibes, which he found more effective in a band setting.

He hit pay dirt when he met guitarist Tal Farlow. They shared virtuoso chops and an eagerness to expand the harmonic language. With the addition of bassist Charlie Mingus, they put together a program of standards and Novo orignals that was successful in clubs and on recordings, although Norvo insisted that the recordings failed to capture the magic. They’re magic enough for me.

And this became the pattern for the rest of his career: a few big-band stints, usually with Goodman, and a lot of small-group work. He made recordings for labels like Famous Door and Concord; I got to see him perform with the house rhythm section at Schenectady’s Van Dyck restaurant in the early ‘80s, where his talent was undimmed by age.

He took an unlikely instrument, a novelty vaudeville mainstay, and brought it into mainstream jazz. “The Secret Session” captures him at a unique point in time, both in terms of jazz history and in his own career. It’s nice to share a compelling secret like this.

Red Norvo Septet
The Secret Session
Dot Time Records

– The Syncopated Times, March 2026

Dick Baker's Cat

2026-03-06T23:39:00.004-05:00

Mark Twain Dept.: It was the fashion, over a century ago, to entertain the public with dialect stories, which could range from the affectionate to the racially savage. This was a characteristic that ranged from stage performers like Chic Sales to writers like Mark Twain (who also took to the stage). Here’s a fine example of Twain’s facility with the genre and familiarity with the mysterious wisdom of cats.

ONE OF MY COMRADES THERE — another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes—was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-Horse Gulch. He was forty-six, grey as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light—than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Drawing by B. Kliban

Whenever he was out of luck and a little downhearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it—maybe even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once. He said:

"Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which you'd 'a' took an interest in, I reckon—, most anybody would. I had him here eight year—and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see. He was a large grey one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense than any man in this camp—'n' a power of dignity—he wouldn't let the Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him.

"He never ketched a rat in his life—'peared to be above it. He never cared for nothing but mining. He knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man I ever, ever see. You couldn't tell him noth'n' 'bout placer-diggin's—'n' as for pocket-mining, why he was just born for it. He would dig out after me an' Jim when we went over the hills prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile, if we went so fur. An' he had the best judgment about mining-ground—why you never see anything like it. When we went to work, he'd scatter a glance around, 'n' if he didn't think much of the indications, he would give a look as much as to say, 'Well, I'll have to get you to excuse me,' 'n' without another word he'd hyste his nose into the air 'n' shove for home. But if the ground suited him, he would lay low 'n' keep dark till the first pan was washed, 'n' then he would sidle up 'n' take a look, an' if there was about six or seven grains of gold he was satisfied—he didn't want no better prospect 'n' that—'n' then he would lay down on our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, an' then get up 'n' superintend. He was nearly lightnin' on superintending.

"Well, by an' by, up comes this yer quartz excitement. Everybody was into it—everybody was pick'n' 'n' blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on the hillside—everybody was putt'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the surface. Noth'n' would do Jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n' so we did. We commenced putt'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to wonder what in the Dickens it was all about. He hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say—he couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way—it was too many for him. He was down on it too, you bet you—he was down on it powerful—'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out. But that cat, you know, was always agin new-fangled arrangements—somehow he never could abide 'em. You know how it is with old habits. But by an' by Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never pannin' out anything. At last he got to comin' down in the shaft, hisself, to try to cipher it out. An' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel kind o' scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted—knowin' as he did, that the bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent—he would curl up on a gunny-sack in the corner an' go to sleep. Well, one day when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we had to put in a blast—the first blast'n' we'd ever done since Tom Quartz was born. An' then we lit the fuse 'n' clumb out 'n' got off 'bout fifty yards—'n' forgot 'n' left Tom Quartz sound asleep on the gunny-sack. In 'bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, 'n' then everything let go with an awful crash, 'n' about four million ton of rocks 'n' dirt 'n' smoke 'n' splinters shot up 'bout a mile an' a half into the air, an' by George, right in the dead centre of it was old Tom Quartz a-goin' end over end, an' a-snortin' an' a-sneez'n, an' a-clawin' an' a-reach'n' for things like all possessed. But it warn't no use, you know, it warn't no use. An' that was the last we see of him for about two minutes 'n' a half, an' then all of a sudden it begin to rain rocks and rubbage an' directly he come down ker-whoop about ten foot off f'm where we stood. Well, I reckon he was p'raps the orneriest-lookin' beast you ever see. One ear was sot back on his neck, 'n' his tail was stove up, 'n' his eye-winkers was singed off, 'n' he was all blacked up with powder an' smoke, an' all sloppy with mud 'n' slush f'm one end to the other. Well, sir, it warn't no use to try to apologize—we couldn't say a word. He took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, 'n' then he looked at us—an' it was just exactly the same as if he had said—'Gents, maybe you think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that ain't had no experience of quartz-minin', but I think different'—an' then he turned on his heel 'n' marched off home without ever saying another word.

"That was jest his style. An' maybe you won't believe it, but after that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz-mining as what he was. An' by an' by when he did get to goin' down in the shaft ag'in, you'd 'a' been astonished at his sagacity. The minute we'd tetch off a blast 'n' the fuse'd begin to sizzle, he'd give a look as much as to say, 'Well, I'll have to git you to excuse me,' an' it was supris'n' the way he'd shin out of that hole 'n' go f'r a tree. Sagacity? It ain't no name for it. 'Twas inspiration!"

I said, "Well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining was remarkable, considering how he came by it. Couldn't you ever cure him of it?"

"Cure him! No! When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was always sot—and you might 'a' blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never 'a' broken him of his cussed prejudice ag'in quartz-mining."

– Mark Twain, from Roughing It, Harper and Brothers, NY, 1899.