Faculty Recital at Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

Only made it for the last 15 minutes, but what I heard I enjoyed. The photo shows a string quartet with a piano accompaniment. The piece was by Brahms.

Afternoon Bach Cantata at the University

Last Thursday's was the second performance for the semester. The first took place in one of the theaters, and although the seats were more comfortable I like the informality of this one's lobby setting which is what I'm used to.

Greg in concert at Metalfest

The largest U.S. festival of heavy metal music takes place annually in Baltimore over the Memorial Day weekend. This year Greg's current band, Inhumation, was chosen to be the opening act. An unknown photographer took this photo which Pam pulled off the internet:

Live music Saturday Night in Greenbelt

The brother of an old friend of ours has a rock band called Second Sole, and we have enjoyed their music many times over the years. When we heard they were playing at the New Deal Café in Greenbelt, we toke advantage of the opportunity to listen and dance to them once again.

Alan plays lead guitar and does most of the vocals. The drummer is new and is very good.

Student Jazz

Wednesday night I attended the chamber jazz performance at the University of Maryland.

 The students performed compositions by Wes Montgomery, Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and others.

 

For me the highlight was an original by one of the students written to honor the head of the jazz program, Chris Vidala, who died earlier this year.

Fellow students in performance

I have sometimes written here of my involvement in a program at the University of Maryland for retired people called Golden ID. Today I attended a Cabaret performance by another Golden ID student at the Clarice Smith Center for the performing arts.

Here she is on the right singing a duet with another student:

The songs were standards and many from musicals. Below are two students singing "Bess, You is my Woman" by George Gershwin.

An evening with Rosanne Cash

Last Friday night we saw her with her five-piece band at Strathmore in North Bethesda. Her husband, John Leventhal, plays lead guitar.

Rosanne wrote most of the songs, but she had some interesting covers including the folk standards "500 Miles" and "Long Black Veil," plus Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe," and one Beatles' number.

We enjoyed her performance.

A Sunday afternoon of Irish music

Pam and I went to an Irish bar in Bethesda yesterday because a friend of mine was playing there.

The band is Swampoodle, named after an Irish neighborhood in DC that once was in the area where Union Station now stands. The show was a fundraiser for next year's St. Patrick's Day Parade, and it was the band's first public performance. My friend Dan Costello is on the left playing the accordion in the above photo.

The afternoon's entertainment also included Irish dancers, and below is a shot of some of the younger dancers:

This last picture is another one of the band when Dan put down the accordion and played guitar. He sang on this song and also played harmonica on a few numbers. The songs were a mix of Irish and rock.

We were joined by some other friends: Dan Porter and Eric Rickford. The beer was good and the food acceptable. Everyone had a good time.

Bach Cantata at the University

For a semester or two, I've missed these afternoon performances in the lobby of the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, but today I hustled down there after my Art History class and caught about half of one.

Since I was late I didn't hear the particulars of what I was hearing, but the piece featured a duet:

There are few things in life that I find as uplifting to the spirit as these mid-day performances.

Neighborly Jazz

Neighbor Susan Mooring has started a regular gig singing at a restaurant which is five minutes from our houses. Friday she was joined by another neighbor, Paul Fuller on drums. The keyboardist is named Eric, but I don't know where he lives.

The three of them made a great jazz trio.

Student jazz at the University of Maryland

Last Wednesday evening I heard two student groups at the Clarice Smith Center of the Performing Arts. They played pieces by Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Horace Silver, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and others, plus a few original compositions by the students.

These are photos of the second group:

For the last two numbers they brought out a vocalist. One of the tunes was composed by her.

 

 

Some lyrics from the Jason Isbell song below

... Maybe time running out is a gift
I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn't me who's left behind.

It's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be gone.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - If We Were Vampires

New music venue in College Park

It's called the MilkBoy ArtHouse, and it's right on route one in a building that has housed many different restaurants and, many years ago, a bowling alley.

Last night my friend Stan and I went there, had dinner, and listened to a very fine jazz vibraphonist Warren Wolf and his quartet.

The Root Boy Slim All-Star Band

 

 

Friday night Pam and I went to The Blues and Jazz club in Bethesda for this tribute show. The crowd was loud and enthusiastic and included several people I knew.

How can I explain Root Boy Slim? Maybe I could say he was a unique product of a certain time and place. The time was the late 1970's and the place was Washington, DC. Root Boy's appeal didn't seem to transfer outside this area, but for some of us he was a local legend who we remember fondly.

He was born into a wealthy family and went to an Ivy League school, I believe, but the culture and politics of the 1960's took their toll on the Root Boy. Many of his songs were autobiographical, such as "I used to be a Radical" which tells how he tried to climb over the White House fence and "Dozing and Drooling" which describes the effects of the prescription drug he was later given (thorazine, I think.). Mostly though, Root Boy was about fun. "You Broke my Mood Ring" and "Boogie 'til You Puke" were probably his best known songs.

The band we listened and danced to Friday contained at least one former member of the original group which Root Boy named The Sex Change Band. Saxophonist Ron Holloway went from back-up to the Root Boy to a successful jazz career. He seems to still operate from this area because we saw him last year sitting in with Little Feat at the Warner.

Root Boy died a couple of decades ago. It was nice to see so many people who remembered him. We had a good time, and I was thankful that once again in my life I was able to call out "Root!"

Election night jazz

Rather than watch the coverage of the election results on TV Tuesday night, I decided to attend the chamber jazz concert at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Maryland.

Bob Dylan: Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Hearing the announcement a few days ago put a smile on my face for the rest of the week. When I was young it was common to hear that rock music was a trivial fad, and those of us who thought there was lasting worth were on the defensive about the sound and words we loved. Maybe I have continued to be haunted by this defensiveness because I finally feel vindicated by Dylan's official recognition in being awarded the Nobel.

Dylan's lyrics had an effect upon my life. I never questioned the segregationist environment of my youth until the civil rights revolution of the 1960's crashed into my suburban life, and Dylan's music was part of that soundtrack. "How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see" not only called attention to racial injustice but also redefined manhood. There must have been millions of other teenage boys who, like me, suddenly had an alternate measurement of what it was to be a man, a measurement more noble than physical toughness or sexual prowess.

Dylan's words also inspired and expanded our imaginations. I've been listening to this song for over half a century and the imagery never fails to grab me:

"Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy bench
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow..."

For those of us for whom Bob Dylan has been our Mr. Tambourine Man for most of our lives, we somehow feel that the Nobel Prize award was for us too.

Old Folks Boogie

When the band Little Feat first recorded this song Pam and I had just turned 30, and being "old folks" seemed a long way off. We saw them live at about that time, and I doubt that we considered the possibility we would be attending a Little Feat concert again almost 40 years in the future. But there we were at the Warner Theater Monday night with our friend Stan.

Entering the theater and passing by the busy bar downstairs, we noted that most of the crowd seemed in our age bracket. When the band came on stage and ripped into the opening song, "Rocket in my Pocket", all us old folks cheered and whistled and absorbed the power of the music for the next two hours. Many of the songs brought the audience to its feet dancing to the band's infectious rhythms. The crowd was enthusiastic, bordering on rowdy (fueled possibly by that busy bar), and that's the right atmosphere for rock and roll. I was proud of my peers for retaining that spirit.

I recently read a book review of a biography of rock pioneer Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records which was the first to record Elvis Presley. Although it sounds like an interesting book, I was most struck by reviewer Louis Menand's description of the early days of rock and roll and his grasp of the music's appeal:  "Rock and roll feels uninhibited, spontaneous, and fun. There's no show-biz fakery coming between you and the music." What he says about the early days still strikes me as essentially true even though beginning in the sixties there became exceptions: "Rock and roll did not have a message, unless it was: 'Let's party (and if you can't find a partner, use a wooden chair)'."

That concert certainly was uninhabited fun, and it's power has stayed with me even two days later. Although death has taken some of the group's founders and some current members have troubling medical conditions, Little Feat remains a great live band.

The joy of rock and roll

Last Saturday Pam and I went to hear live music in Gaithersburg where a band headed by a friend was playing. The band, 2nd Sole, is a classic bar band that plays covers of tunes by the Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, Van Morrison, and many others. The turn-out was good and the crowd enthusiastic. Generally speaking, women like to dance more than men which is why they often dance with each other, but Pam and I are the exception because I like dancing more than she does. She's a good sport, however, so she and I danced to a few songs, both slow ones and fast ones.

When we sat out numbers, I enjoyed watching other people who varied in age from  the 20's and 30's to those in our bracket and everything in between. Many danced and others who didn't kept time to the rhythms of the music with their hands or feet as they stood or sat. Many were heavy or otherwise not classically good-looking, but despite what you see on TV commercials it's not just the beautiful people who have a good time. You could see the good times in peoples' smiles.

It was during a Bruce Springsteen song "Pink Cadillac", a party song more about sex than cars, that the thought occurred to me of the joy that rock music brings to people. This joy has proved to be enduring and spans generations because many of the songs go back before the births of some of the men and women enjoying the band that night. The history of rock and roll now goes back about sixty years, and based what I hear and see it will continue for many more. It's a great gift America has given to the rest of the world.

Two road songs: Thunder and Copperhead

When I'm doing my morning exercises I like to have the TV on, and Thursday I saw some of an old movie called "Thunder Road." I had seen it before, but I remember the title song much better. It was sung by Robert Mitchum who starred in the movie and was such a favorite in my neighborhood that the boys all sung it on the junior high school bus.

That part of the DC Maryland suburbs was full of families who after WWII moved there from small towns and rural areas, often in the Appalachian Mountains, and the story "about the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol" (as the song lyrics go) was like a folk epic to many. We loved certain kinds of outlaws, and in the car culture of the 1950's and early 60's transporting moonshine in a hot car was about a cool an outlaw as we could imagine. Bruce Springsteen later wrote a song with the same name, and I've read that he took the name from a poster he had once seen of the movie.

Driving to the dentist a few minutes later, another song by Steve Earle came on the radio. "Copperhead Road" tells a story about a young man who could have been the son of the main character of "Thunder Road." He sings that his father and grandfather made moonshine, but after two tours in Viet Nam his plan was to grow marijuana in the same area of the surrounding Southern mountains- Copperhead Road. Having "learned a thing or two from Charlie", he warns, "you better stay away from Copperhead Road." He was ready to protect his illegal crop just as his father and grandfather had protected their whiskey still in the same woods.

I think I've observed before that Americans have often made folk heroes of criminals, going back to Jesse James after the Civil War, Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930's, and the continued popularity of the Godfather movies.