Dianne Reeves| Beautiful Life

with Peter Martin, Romero Lubambo, Reginald Veal, and Terreon Gully
Friday, October 30 at 8 p.m., Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, Chamber Seating

$50, $45, $20; Five College, GCC and 17 & under $15, $12, $10

The lush vocals, unparalleled improvisation and skilled lyric interpretations of Dianne Reeves make her a powerhouse of jazz, and she has four GRAMMY® awards to prove it. Enjoy an evening of jazz as the legendary singer and her all-star quintet perform a rich program ranging from jazz to soul, featuring Bob Marley, Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye classics, as well as sumptuously beautiful jazz ballads. Reeves’ “intimate sense of a song has long made her one of the most compelling vocalists in jazz” Seattle Times

Dianne Reeves

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Doug Varone and Dancers

Tuesday, October 20, ReComposed, at 7:30 p.m., Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, Chamber
$35, $30, $20; Five College, GCC and 17 & under $10

Doug Varone’s kinetically-thrilling dances explore the complexity of the human spirit. From the smallest gesture to full-throttle bursts of movement, Varone’s work can take your breath away. The program will feature ReComposed, a visual dance creation inspired by American abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s pastel drawings, set to Max Richter’s newly constructed version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Doug Varone and his company have been hailed as “superb dancers…always worth seeing” by The New York Times.

Audience members are invited to stay for a post-performance talk with the company immediately following the performance.

Monday, October 19, Stripped (performance showcase stripped of costumes/lights)
7 p.m., Hampshire College Dance Studio

Hear from the choreographer himself as he reveals the creative process of dance. Acting as emcee, Varone offers an intimate glimpse into the construction of his works. Here, the dancers are dressed only in rehearsal clothes with simple work lighting, offering a behind-the-scenes look into how dance is created, and finishing with “stripped” performance excerpts from the company’s repertoryTickets are limited and are available beginning Monday, September 14 by calling or visiting the box office, 413-545-2511.
$10; Five College Students: Free, GCC and 17 and under $5

Doug Varone

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Tony Malaby’s TubaCello plays Holyoke

by Glenn Siegel

The times I like best are when I come face to face with the rich vastness of the music. When I’m around musicians who know the recorded history, who have the lived experience of interacting with the people who shape the art, who have reverence for deep theory and the practice of music, I’m in heaven. In moments like these, I am glad I have devoted my life to jazz.

Tony Malaby was in town on Thursday, performing with Bob Stewart, Christopher Hoffman and John Hollenbeck as TubaCello. Their Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert at Gateway City Arts was amazing, filled with nuance, texture, drive and feeling. Before, during and after the performance, it was clear they were serious about their music and their place in it. They were filled with joy at being part of the unfolding story.

At brunch the next day, we talked about players (Charles ‘Bobo’ Shaw, Abdul Waddud, George Braith) and their whereabouts. We talked about recordings, about gigs and concert producers, laid out in stories that invariably ended with a laugh. These itinerant musicians spend their lives criss-crossing the globe, spreading love and provocation, relying on guile and resourcefulness to get by. It was a treat to have them light down in the Valley for a day on their way to New Haven (Firehouse 12), New York (Cornelia Street Café), then Europe.

Over two sets, the band performed the five compositions that make up TubaCello’s recent inaugural release, Scorpion Eater (Clean Feed), plus three new pieces written by Malaby. I was impressed by Hollenbeck’s constant variety of sound and pulse. One minute he was rubbing a thumb piano on a tom-tom while plucking it and the next he was tapping the piano he had prepared with newspaper, drum sticks, cymbals and a folder to add color and harmonic ambiguity.

Bob Stewart performed at the very first Magic Triangle concert in February of 1990 with Steve Turre and Mulgrew Miller. I gave him a copy of Close to the Music, the book Priscilla Page and I put together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the UMass Series. There’s a wonderful photograph, taken by Ed Cohen, of Turre playing conch shell, with Stewart playing tuba in the background. Stewart had fond memories of the concert: the cool space (the black box Hampden Theater, now black), the enthusiastic audience, the unique instrumentation (tuba, trombone, piano), and the late Mulgrew Miller. “Some concerts, you just remember. We never got another chance to play together.”

Malaby put himself in elastic, Threadgill-like settings all evening, soloing over shifting grooves (marches, swing, open, ballads) laid down by Hoffman and Stewart. The evening had an arc; a story to tell.

Can we finally say out loud that Tony Malaby is one of the most dynamic soprano saxophonists of our time?

Split Knuckle Theatre

Created by Split Knuckle Theatre in collaboration with Nick Ryan
Friday, October 16 at 8 p.m., Bowker Auditorium

$30, $20; Five College, GCC and 17 & under $10

Trapped in Antarctica with no hope of rescue, the great British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton kept 27 men alive for two years in the most inhospitable climate on earth. Ninety-five years later in the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, Hartford insurance man Walter Spivey relives Shackleton’s story, struggling to justify his recent promotion and save his employees’ jobs. Can one of the greatest leaders in human history inspire him to conquer the corporate world? “…Wowing audiences with humor, innovation, and high-energy performances!” nytheater.com

Audience members are invited to stay for a post-performance talk with the company immediately following the performance.

Split Knuckle Theatre

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Rakugo: Comical Tales From Japan

Japanese Storyteller Motoko & Musician Masayo Ishigure on Koto and Shamisen
Wednesday, October 7 at 7:30 p.m., Bowker Auditorium

$20, $15; Five College, GCC and 17 & under $10

Two acclaimed Japanese women performers join forces to offer an evening filled with humor, charm and elegance. Award-winning storyteller Motoko shares hilarious and poignant tales from Rakugo, a storytelling tradition that originated in the 17th century. With accompaniment by shamisen virtuoso Masayo Ishigure, a featured recording artist with Yitzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma on the Grammy Award-winning movie soundtrack for “Memoirs of a Geisha,” you’ll be transported to the enchanting world of popular entertainment in Old Japan.

Audience members are invited to a pre-concert talk on the Japanese storytelling tradition at 6:30 p.m. in Bowker Auditorium.

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A Different Planet: William Parker & David Budbill

Pianist Miro Sprague was in the audience last night (Oct. 1) for the first Solos & Duos Series concert of the season at UMass. He recently came back from a jazz piano competition in Montreaux, won by a 15 year old Chinese kid. It got me thinking how far this “winner take all, virtuosity above all” mentality is from the core values of jazz.

On stage at Bezanson Recital Hall, writer David Budbill and multi-instrumentalist William Parker displayed grit, humanity, love and understanding, but little virtuosity.

Parker is one of the most important musicians to emerge in the last 40 years. His bass playing has anchored the bands of Cecil Taylor, David S Ware and Charles Gayle, and he has been leading various ensembles for decades. The jazz scene owes him (and his wife, Patricia Parker, who was in attendance) major props for the work they do through Arts For Art in New York. You can call him a virtuoso on bass, I suppose, but his music is not about that. He is self-taught on a number of other instruments, including the wood flute and pocket trumpet, both of which he played last night. But technique as an end in itself is not what drives him.

Similarly, poet and playwright David Budbill does not wow with fancy turns of phrase or elaborately constructed sentences. His language is simple, straightforward, powerful, with the self-contained profundity of a monk. His life is now compromised by Parkinson’s disease. His delivery is slower, his reading halting. He needs help moving. At one point in the performance, his lovely wife Lois had to come to the stage to hand him the water bottle that had fallen on its side.

The first set was devoted to “A Different Planet”, a new play of Budbill’s. It was an hour-long monologue that tells the story of the fictitious Edward T. Jordan, the first African-American chemist at DuPont and later a professor at Dunbar University. Told in the first person and based on Budbill’s experience as a professor at all-black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the work is an insightful look at racism in America. We might think we know about the effects racism has on its victims, but this piece bore into our understanding. During the wonderful Q & A after the performance, a young white man, presumably wrestling with racism’s profound effect, broke down while asking his question.

The second half focused on Budbill’s more recent poems, dealing mostly with death and aging. The simple, declarative poems looked squarely at the subject, made all the more poignant by the poet’s health.

The reading throughout was somewhat flat and labored. It was not virtuosic, but it was moving. And isn’t that the point?