pt at large

Antje Duvekot, singer/storyteller

Performing at Johnny D's, Somerville, MA - June 29, 2005
Photo taken by Shannon Duffy

Antje Duvekot brought two guitars, a banjo, and a folk rock sensibility to entertain local admirers at Johnny D’s in Somerville last Tuesday night. Like classic folk singers before her, Duvekot has mined the veins of her own experience to forge songs of surrender, survival, and sentiment. She has an engaging rock paper scissors stage style, with self deprecating comments, total sincerity, and truth stranger than fiction anecdotes competing for time between songs. Young and relatively inexperienced, she is the rare entertainer who can make her stage jitters an endearing part of the show, especially when coupled with her whacky sense of humor. Her stage patter is unforced. If you didn’t look around at the packed house, you might swear she was sitting across a table from you, sharing coffee and swapping stories after a cross-country trip from her digs in Brooklyn, a continent removed from her birthplace in Germany.

Duvekot’s songs are propelled by her sweet voice and soulful lyrics. Although she strays into hackneyed phrases from time to time, she’s penned many lines of compelling images. Her 90-minute set was too long for one sitting, even with a roomful of her fans, and the tempo and tenor of her songs too similar. Juicing up a set with more uptempo tunes is in order. Her one attempt at variety was a song she described as reggae, but no one in the house would ever confuse her with Jimmy Cliff. Her evening’s accompanist, Noam Weinstein, is a master of technique on the electric guitar but his duet singing, although earnest, was uncertain and not always in pitch with Duvekot’s.

Antje Duvekot has a way to go with learning how to play her acoustic and electric guitars but her attempts to learn by stretching it out in front of a live audience show the gumption of a performer learning in the spotlights. What she’s developing now is a repertoire and a style and she’s clearly on her way. To quote one of her lyrics, she’s a tea light on the way to becoming a forest fire.

http://antje.pattynet.net/

Hank Jones, A master teaches at Harvard

His hands were quite ordinary. Brown, probably a men’s medium glove size, with thin, average length fingers, short nails, nothing unusual. The man to whom they belonged was slightly built, maybe 5 feet 9 inches tall and looked a little lost inside his brown checked blazer, chestnut colored gabardine slacks and slightly scuffed black brogues. His step while navigating was careful, with the cautious gait of an octogenarian wanting to be certain each step was a solid foot plant, balanced and sure. With his close-cropped wooly gray hair, he could have been a retired tailor, accountant, or lawyer.

Hank Jones is far from retired. He’s merely one of the best jazz pianists in the world and can captivate an audience in the postage stamp sized Blue Note Jazz Club as easily as a capacity crowd at Carnegie Hall. At 86 years old, he plays the piano with the confidence and creativity of a grand master. His fingers glide up and down the keyboard with the dexterity of a man in his element, a man to whom the black and white keys are extensions of his imagination.

Photo: www.vervemusicgroup.com

Those ordinary fingers of his can stride, boogie, and ballad thousands of songs Jones has catalogued in his head, a virtual iPod of musical knowledge. Music is his livelihood. An artist and an artisan, his hands are his brush and his shovel. Having played professionally since 1947, his fingers have logged as many miles on the keyboard as Lance Armstrong has in his practice sessions for the Tour de France.

He still plays the Blue Note on West 3rd Street in NYC but on Monday, Hank Jones was teaching a Master Class in the middle of the living room of Harvard University’s Cabot House on Linnaean Street in Cambridge, MA. Baseball capped undergraduates, retired and current musicians, faculty members, and jazz aficionados had a rare chance to hear the man do the talking for his fingers as he engaged in a spirited question and answer duet with a Harvard professor.

Then, after listening to and critiquing two young jazz pianists, he launched into a duet with each of them, fingers to fingers, piano to piano. His ordinary looking hands were passing on knowledge, enthusiasm, and creative genius. And by the look on their faces, you knew that his pupils were getting the message.