pt at large

Sean Jones Quintet

Sean Jones Quintet
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA, October 25, 2006, first set

This young band is going places. Not every jazz lover will dig the group’s hard edge but they’ll recognize the great technique each musician brings to the table.  First and foremost, there’s Sean Jones himself. He’s young and has some serious musical credentials.

Jones’ first number, a cut from his “Gemini” CD, set the mold for the rest of the evening. A slow, melodic intro with piano, bass, percussion, alto sax and Jones’ trumpet outlines a melody, and then - everyone duck.

Photo courtesy of Jones's web site

Faster than you can say John Coltrane, fierce and frenzied solos blast from Jones’ trumpet and Brian Hogan’s alto saxophone.  A conversation between piano, bass, and percussion followed with an arrhythmic dynamic then Jones and Hogan returned to sock the song home. The audience, made up of lots of Berklee School of Music students and adventurous types like 'ptatlarge' was put on notice: this was gonna be a night to savor bop played by very cool cats.

Although this quintet could play sweet, soft,  even rhapsodic, music, they aren’t interested in playing it safe. They start with a melody, turn it inside out, pull it to shreds, then put it back together and check for burn marks.

Jones second piece, “Divine Inspiration”, from his new CD titled “Roots,”had its own roots in his childhood. “I was brought up in the church and had a very soulful upbringing,” he said, as he brought the trumpet to his lips. He blew a smoky, languid opening frame then slowly accelerated his phrasing and before long was hurtling through phrases, nimbly fingering the trumpet with lightning speed and playing at that high, thin level only a horn in good hands can reach. It's often hard to hear references to the introductory melody once the musicians take it for a cerebral ride in their solos but there's no denying how well they play. Once again, the group took the song apart and rearranged it like a rubik’s cube.

‘In Her Honor’ was named after a former band mate now playing with Beyonce and “earning several more zeroes at the end of her paycheck than she ever saw from me,” Jones chuckled. The rendition had a high Coltrane quotient, fast and furious, with the Berklee students roaring hosannas from their seats as Jones again played about 1001 notes per minute at impossibly high octane level. Brian Hogan's vigorous ‘Trane-like sax solo had Jones grinning like a schoolboy as he listened while leaning against the wall at the side of the intimate stage setting at the Regattabar. Like the lull after a violent thunderstorm, the piece ended peacefully with all five musicians playing a slow, swinging melodic thread.

Jones likes to riff with the audience, sort of like the host of the party checking in with everyone to make sure they’re having a good time. “This is a ‘feel the love’ tune. I wrote it for my nephew. I want you to think about humanity, not notes and chords which people don’t care about. There are a lot of educated people in this room. I want you to feel the music, feel the love.” He proceeded to play “BJ's Tune” as a quartet, sans saxophone.

This tune started out in Chet Baker territory, quiet brushwork from Obed Calvert’s drum kit, soft counterpoints from Orin Evans piano and Lou Curtis’s bass, then began to build momentum. If you’d been paying attention to the way earlier pieces were structured, you could sense the liquid intensity building and wondered how long it would last before it blew wide open.

Bam. Sean Jones’ extended solo flowed like lava from an awakened Vesuvius. Slowly rocking back and forth, bending his knees as he drew in mighty breaths, Jones blew steam from that trumpet. For several minutes, high, piercing, intense, trumpet notes full of passion and exhilaration, with Calvert rolling thunder all over his kit, Evans jamming chords on the keyboard and Curtis’s bass holding the line. His eruptive energy spent, Jones turned on his heel, leaned over the open piano box, and began to play into it. The piano wires began to reverberate like tuning forks, creating a soft, mystical, eerie lullaby - an amazing juxtaposition to the white heat that preceded it.  And slowly, BJ’s Tune trailed off, as softly as it began. Yes, Sean, we felt the love.

Jones played one more number, “Serpent”, but honestly, I couldn’t get “BJ’s Tune” out of my head.

Jones teaches at Duquesne University, has a Master’s Degree from Rutgers and has a classical trumpet performance degree from Youngstown State University. Myles Davis would be smiling from the great beyond to hear that Jones was inspired by Davis recording of  “Kind Of Blue,” which Jones recalls hearing when he was in fifth grade. He’s played with big-timers like Jimmy Heath, the Illinois Jacquet Big Band, Joe Lovano, Jon Faddis and the Louis Armstrong Legacy Band.

Someday down the line, a fifth grader might hear Sean Jones playing his horn and think, “That’s what I want to do, I want to play that trumpet.”

To check him out further,  see http://www.seanjonesjazz.com

The Waiting Room, by Lisa Loomer, disappoints

The Waiting Room, written by Lisa Loomer, directed by Janet Morrison
Brandeis Theater Company, Spingold Theater Center, Waltham, MA
October 12-22, 2006

‘The Waiting Room,’ written by Lisa Loomer, had potential. The themes - how standards of beauty dig into women’s psyches, how a largely male medical field lacks sensitivity toward women in crisis, and how profit and politics corrupt big time research hospitals - are a worthy trio of subjects that could be shaken into a powerful cocktail. Alas, what we’re served here is a cherry coke, a flat one at that.

Loomer’s attempt to cobble the themes together just doesn’t work. The play feels more like several sketches lifted from a playwright’s workshop. The setting, described in the playbill as “the past, the present, and often both at once” is awkward and often confusing. The three main characters meet in the waiting room of a hospital. Each woman appears to be from a different country - America (Wanda), China (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and England (Victoria) - and from different centuries.

What they have in common is medical men and husbands who don’t understand them or their medical plights. The subjects of breast cancer (Wanda), foot binding (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and hysterectomies caused by vise-like corsets (Victoria) are easy targets and have been mined thoroughly by other writers. ‘The Waiting Room’ doesn’t add any new insights to the subjects.

This production, recently mounted by the Brandeis Theater Company at the Spingold Theater in Waltham, MA, had a serious identity crisis. Its use of farce just didn’t gel with the play’s more dramatic aspirations. Dramatic impact was frequently diluted, if not entirely dissipated, by the attempt to inject sight gags into emotionally charged scenes. The second act, a shot at how "the bottom line" puts profits before patients in some research hospitals, seemed to be lifted from another play altogether.

Photo of the Waltham production
To add to the woes, the characters, with one or two exceptions, just didn’t have the acting chops to carry off either the dramatic or the farcical demands of the play. The four male actors lacked any sort of nuance; even comic sketches seemed out of their reach.

One thankful exception to the overall tepid acting was from Sara Oliva, as the American woman whose breast implants, all three sets of them, have probably brought about her breast cancer. When she swaggers in to the waiting room’, her “new tits” plowing ahead of her like the bow wake of a luxury liner, the play takes on life. The play sags every time it focuses on other actors.

Oliva’s characterization of Wanda, a working class Jersey girl, masks a life of ugly-duckling hurt behind outrageously vulgar humor. The pathos she invokes as she loses her breasts to cancer as the play grinds on through nearly two hours is a convincing tour de force of acting. Even her bravura performance doesn’t make the play worth the two hours spent witnessing ‘The Waiting Room’.

The Women, a play by Clare Boothe Luce

The Women, a social satire written by Clare Boothe Luce in 1936, runs for five weeks, thru October 21, 2006, in the Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston’s South End.

Guys, I’m warning you, this is not an equal opportunity play. It is of the women, for the women, and by the women. And by George, they make the most of it. All 20 of them. There ain’t a Y chromosome in the cast. But pay attention, it’s good fun and is instructive, especially if you think you’re the one in your relationship’s driver’s seat.

The core of the play revolves around several women, from recently married to long and unhappily married. Thanks to their husband’s wealth and power, they’re thrown together in a cement mixer called Manhattan high society.  The 1930s were before Eleanor Roosevelt made charitable work fashionable. One of the highest callings for these women is gossiping about infidelities and aesthetic tastes. “Yes, darling, that dress cuts your waist in half, (pause…) and makes your hips look twice as wide,” uttered by one woman of whom it is said, “If you’ve got Sylvia for a friend, you don’t need enemies.”

Plays like this are seldom performed any more. No gimmicks, no snazzy sets, no extravagant costumes, just clever dialogue that resembles machine gun fire. The socialites’ verbal bullets are uttered with their white gloves on but are a blood sport for the Manhattan socialites created by Clare Boothe Luce in her 1936 play, The Women.

The story hinges around a discovery that the husband of one of the happiest married women has strayed from the marriage bed and is carrying on with a, sniff, common salesgirl from Saks.

The Speakeasy Stage production’s actresses dig their ‘jungle red’ nails into their roles with gusto. Nancy E. Carroll, Aimee Doherty, Ellen Colton, Kerry Dowling, Alice Duffy, Anne Gottlieb, Amanda Good Hennessey, Maureen Keiller, Mary Klug and Sonya Raye aren’t into playing with nuance here.

It was hard to tell whether the play’s lead character, Mrs. Haines, was underplaying her role or was overshadowed by the unadulterated camp of her peers but that was a minor distraction. There are deliciously, sublimely catty, over the top performances up and down the line.

Photo: Clare Boothe Luce in 1935 (www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0010.htm)

Luce introduces social commentary in several scenes from the women who toil for these rich self-absorbed prima donnas. “Lady, you ain’t felt pain till you had your baby on a cold kitchen floor, make supper for your husband, then go to work the next day with your insides hanging out” says the nurse to one socialite matron who whines about her hard delivery while lounging in her comfortable hospital bed and nibbling on bon-bons.

Other commentary comes from unexpected sources. When the heretofore happily married Mrs. Haines asks her mother what to do about her husband’s infidelities, mother, who's been through it all, replies, “Nothing.”

“Stephen’s not tired of you, he’s tired of himself. When we get tired of ourselves, we go shopping. We redecorate the house. Men never think of something so simple. They want to see themselves differently in the mirror of another woman’s eyes. There’s nothing like a dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his own wife.”

In between these commentaries on class and caste, there are more catty one-liners than sequins on an evening gown. “Keep your chin up…both of them,” says one friend to another who’s complaining about her husband’s peccadilloes.

The two-hour play loses some steam in the second act. A certain fatigue develops after so many clever one-liners and over the top acting in the same style, no matter how outrageous. An exception to this is the play’s chief scene-stealer Mary Klug, whose larceny is worth the price of admission as she camps up her role as the Countess de Lage. To accomplish that in a company of such terrific actresses is quite a feat.

The play withstands the test of time fairly well. Today’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ is ‘The Women’ with the y chromosomes added. Our hunger for portrayals of gossip, infidelity, and bratty behavior seems insatiable. We need such guilty pleasure when the news on the front pages is so damn bleak.

These women dealt with the ethos of their time the only way they could. They may have savaged one another in the gossip trade but they never felt more comfortable in any other company but their own.

Westport Harbor forged by history, characters

Richard Hawes' roots run deep at Westport Harbor and he recently shared stories from this lively corner of town with a Westport Historical Society audience.

The phone rang at 4 a.m. one snowy February morning during Prohibition. "Bring Richard down to the beach club but don't say anything to anybody," said a friend of Richard Hawes' father.

"There were about 100 people on the beach, about 20 or 30 skiffs and a rum runner was ashore on the rocks," said Richard Hawes describing the scene. "The boss man was pacing the beach in a Chesterfield coat and a derby hat and all the other fellows looked like pirates, rowing out to the boat on the rocks and bringing in cases of booze.

"Trucks would come down and back up onto the entryway to the beach club and fill them with booze until they got the whole thing unloaded and everybody disappeared. The next morning, the beach club where they'd broken a few boards was all fixed up with beautiful new boards and there was a case of scotch in front of the door."

It got nasty, though, with shootings and mobsters. Mr. Hawes said he was relieved when Prohibition was over.

Mr. Hawes, who was born in 1916, recalled the goings-on in Westport Harbor in an interview conducted and videotaped by Jim Panos and Nancy Burkholder. About 50 people watched the video at a gathering sponsored by the Westport Historical Society on Sept. 21 at the Council on Aging.

In the comfort of his armchair, Mr. Hawes told stories about the Westport Harbor Aqueduct, a place called "The Casino," and the Howland House. He talked about night patrols in World War II to spot German submarines.

Mr. Hawes has a prodigious memory. His recollections of manners, mysteries, and occasional mayhem in his part of town were peppered with a sense of humor as dry as salt marsh hay. His clipped Yankee accent steamrolled the letter "r" turning it into an h (harbor, in Hawesspeak = "haabaa")

His stories tacked back and forth between his and his wife Anne's family roots in Westport Harbor. He recalled the social life of the times, the various incarnations of the Elephant Rock Beach Club - including its pummeling in the Hurricane of 1938 - the formation of the Acoaxet Club, and the provenances of many harbor homes.

At the time Mr. Hawes' father bought property and an 1811 farmhouse from George Brayton in 1926, the Harbor area was rolling farmland.

"My grandfather and some of the Tripp family, which is my mother's family, came to the Harbor area variously between 1885 and 1916 and a good many of their children and grandchildren are still living," he said.

Mr. Hawes said there were no houses then in front of the Howland House and few houses along Atlantic Avenue.

"I've been around a little bit from here to there but most of my life's been spent right here in Westport Harbor," Mr. Hawes said. His absences included four years in college, one in law school in Virginia and a couple of years "off to war in a Navy ship."

In 1930, he returned to live with his mother and father year round. His grandfather's house on Atlantic Avenue is still standing.

Anne Rogers Hawes was raised in a house perched on the shore at the end of Acoaxet Road. It was damaged in the 1938 hurricane but repaired in time to be the site of her sister's wedding in 1939. In Westport Harbor, it takes more than a hurricane to wreck plans for a wedding.

Mr. Hawes called the Elephant Rock Beach Club "a wonderful place for us to play in those summers. There were benches, a big porch with big roof, and outjuts on the seaside of it and individual bathhouses and a shower."

Since then, there has been a lot of damage from hurricanes but each time, the structures have been rebuilt. The hurricane of 1938 provided the first knockout and Hurricane Bob the latest. Mr. Hawes showed dramatic photos of powerful waves shoving the first club, called "the pavilion" onto what is now the parking lot on the other side of Atlantic Avenue.

The video presentation occasionally sounded like the History Channel with an echo chamber. Every time Mr. Hawes paused to recollect a name of place, someone in the audience would invariably pipe up with the information, moments later to be remembered by Hawes as if he'd heard. Occasionally, Anne Hawes got into the action as well.

While describing some of the older houses in the harbor, Mr. Hawes reminisced about summer parties and dances and the great view from the Howland House.

While detailing the succession of owners of homes in his neighborhood, Mr. Hawes said, "Tom Rogers' present house was owned by Charles Chase, his wife was a relative of mine. Everybody's a relative of everybody else around here."

That comment drew a round of laughter from the audience.

"The Acoaxet Club was formed by a group of people from my father's generation who came to Westport in the teens (1900s)," Mr. Hawes said. That's when they purchased a farm that had been foreclosed. Earl Charlton matched the money the men from the Harbor raised. Within a year they'd built a golf course. The original farmhouse is still part of the clubhouse.

Mr. Hawes called Westport plumber Everett Coggeshall, "the oldest living plumber in the United States when he died in 1996." His recollections of Mr. Coggeshall and other inhabitants of Westport Harbor depict a place with no end of colorful characters.

A eye out for UBoats...

Among Mr.Hawes' many anecdotes of life at Westport Harbor was this one from World War II.

"After World War II what was known as Harbor Inn was owned by the Macomber family. Charles Macomber's son-in-law Herbert Ogden and my father used to parade around at night on patrol," watching for German UBoats," Mr. Hawes said.

"One night he was parading around Howland Road and Herbert was parading around the Harbor House.

"Herb said, 'Why don't you parade here and I'll parade up there?'

"Why would I want to do that?" my father asked.

"Otherwise it doesn't seem like we're doing anything!" Herb said.

Wesla Whitfield sings The American Songbook

With its walnut paneling and subdued lighting, Scullers Jazz Club is the perfect setting for a chanteuse. When Wesla Whitfield wheeled herself into the limelight there last Tuesday night , many patrons who knew of her only by reputation rubbed their eyes in wonder. Wheelchair?

Ten seconds after Whitfield began singing, the chair and the puzzle about how and why she needed it all but vanished from consciousness. The woman’s voice has the range of an IBM missile and the precision diction that characterizes vocalists who like to sing big. That’s exactly what’s called for when singing pages out of the Great American Songbook. Whitfield owns the territory.

Her opening numbers, up-tempo versions of “I woke up singing this morning” and “It’s a most unusual day” sparkled with pace and pitch. She confessed to having battled pneumonia last February after her voice slightly cracked and betrayed a frayed pitch in her second song. Oddly enough, subsequent small imperfections in the timbre of her voice made listeners realize the extent of the talent they were witnessing.

Whitfield sang the opening verses to several songs a capella, her piano and bass accompanists listening carefully and chiming in right on time. Such was the case on “Let there be you”, which she introduced by blurting out “I love this song…” During one of Whitfield’s sustained high notes, I wondered how many wine glasses those notes would shatter when she was at full vocal capacity.

Pianist Mike Greensill and bassist John Wiitala, who traded elegant and spare solos all night, were perfect foils to her singing style. Greensill, her husband of twenty years, arranged many of Whitfield’s songs.

Wesla’s been around. A boomer from California, she’s performed at places as diverse as The Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, Garrison Keillor’s 'Prairie Home Companion', and been featured on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air.” She and Mike Greensill were recently guests with Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” radio show (I would love to have heard that).

“Once in a while (will you try to give one little thought of me…)” was one of many of the songs reprised from her sixteenth recording, “Livin’ on Love.” (High Note records, 2006)

The mystery of how a singer can melodically interpret the simple words of one song and evoke such a range of hope, reverie, pain, joy, and wistfulness is a rare experience. As her final notes to "Once in a while" faded, many in the audience could be heard sighing in dreamy silence before an escalation of applause and cheers erupted. The Great American Songbook isn’t much without great singers to interpret it.

“The gentleman is a dope” is an upbeat tongue in cheek refutation of a man whose main acclaim to dopeyness is not realizing that his current girlfriend “will never understand him half as well as me.”

“East of the sun, west of the moon,” and a Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini song “Whistling away in the dark” were followed by a tune introduced in theatric deadpan that went thusly: “Alright, we have to do a Cole Porter so here it is.”

And here came a zippy version of ‘Get out of town”, punctuated by solo gems by Greensill and Wiitala, who were models of how to be so damn good that their seamless playing was almost unobtrusive. Whitfield added a catty little reprise of “Get out of town” to the Bush administration that had every Democrat in the room roaring with laughter.

There are reasons the Great American Songbook has survived. One is the archived performances of legends like Ella Fitzgerald. Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae. (two of Whitfield’s favorites are Rosemary Clooney and Dean Martin).Another reason is that singers like Whitfield who were brought up with the music, understand it, and are passing it on to the next generation.

And of course there’s love. When simple lyrics like “In this world of overstated pleasures and underrated treasures, I’m glad there is you…” are transmitted to live audiences through the vocal pipes of performers like Wesla Whitfield, you are convinced that the Great American Songbook won’t be out of print anytime soon.

For more about Wesla Whitfield, and to find out about that wheel chair, visit http://www.weslawhitfield.com/index.html

This clambake is the real deal

With the sun beating down from the cloudless blue sky above and the makings of an authentic New England Clambake steaming underneath the canvas tarps, there was plenty of heat emanating from the Westport Fisherman’s Association 23rd Annual Clambake at the Sportsmen’s Club on John Dyer Road in Little Compton on Sunday September 17th.

The comforts of a well-established tradition were well in place. The 222 ticket-holders for the sold out event began arriving at noon to stake out their places on the three enormously long picnic tables set under the pavilion and getting in line for a serving of hearty New England Clam Chowder. Lively conversations about fishing, the fleet disappearance of summer, the collapse of the Red Sox, choices for the state primary election, and juicy tidbits of gossip were a backdrop for the spectacle of ‘the bake’.

Westport is blessed with opportunities to witness time-honored country traditions. The agricultural fair, complete with farm animals, crop and produce displays, and the hear-it-a-mile-away roar of tractors dragging their loads at the annual “pulls” is a gem in mid summer. Clambakes, often held in early fall or late summer, are another.

The crew gets ready...

There are few traditions in New England to match the building of a “bake”, an authentic production in which history intersects with appetite and community. A crowd gathered to watch the crew rake off the embers of the pyre of wood that had super-heated the round granite stones, then pile dense green rockweed atop the stones. With the rockweed already beginning to steam, the sweaty crew next piled on the trays holding over 200 mesh bags of food. The finishing touch was applied as the crew gracefully draped wet canvas tarps over the whole shebang.

then covers the steaming food with wet canvas tarps...

Some of the “veterans” involved in the yearly bake began learning as young men and are now elders.

Raymond Davol must be considered one of the deans of local Bake Masters. A fireman since 1963, and former chief of the Russell’s Mills Fire District 2, Mr. Davol remembers his mentor. “As a youngster in the 1930s I used to watch John Sheehan set bakes in Dartmouth, “ Davol said. He orchestrated his first bake in the 1960s and has been at it ever since, heading up 4 or 5 a year now.

There are a couple of young men on Davol’s crew who look up to him the same way he did to Sheehan. And the chief senses that it’s time to pass the torch. “I’ll be 76 in October,” he says, “and there are several young ones coming along now who are working their way into being a bake master. Next year might be my last.” In the meantime, the sturdily built Davol was in the hot seat again and produced a perfectly cooked ‘bake’.

While many men scale back when they reach age 65, Arnold Tripp joined the WFA crew of men gathering rockweed around the same time he got his senior citizen card. Now a spry 85, Tripp was one of ten WFA members who gathered 43 heavy bags of rockweed from the shores of the East Branch the day before the bake.

Mr. Tripp, like Mr. Davol, feels the march of time. “Jack Reynolds is the backbone of the whole group now and is an excellent leader. But these younger men who help out right now will carry us into the future”

By the time the canvas tarps had been pulled off the bake fire and the food piled high on the serving tables, the line of hungry people that snaked all the way down to John Dyer Road wasn’t thinking about the future. They were thinking the present - food, to be precise. And what a feast. Softshell clams, frankfurters, pork sausage, chourico, onion, potato, sweet potato, codfish, corn on the cob, dressing, brown bread, and, according to Cindy Reynolds, “lots of TLC”, went on to each plate. Plus a lobster for those bought the special. Whew.

and pulls the steaming trays out of the fire to bring to the serving tables.

Diners came from all over the southeast coast. “Clamboils are more common and I prefer clambakes. It’s a nice way to end summer,” said Ruth Niemczyk of New Bedford, who came with her husband Michael.

“It’s our signature event, an authentic tradition rooted locally,” WFA Project Coordinator Jeanne Girard said. “Our income is generated here and from our road race, membership drive, grants, and endowments.” The association’s programs include scholarships, a shellfish seed propagation program, a fisherman’s relief fund, maritime history project, and the MA Estuaries Project.

“We got lots of support from the community”, Girard said. Local businesses donated much of the food and thirty-five raffle prizes.

The grand prize, a handsome wooden Macomber 15’ Skiff built by Scott Gifford, was won by David Cole of Westport Point.

To some in the crowd, there’s another prize that we already have in our possession. “I like the tradition, the food, and the good cause for the environment and the commercial fishermen,” Paul Meagher said, Meagher immigrated to America from Ireland in 1978 and has lived in Westport since 1998.

“I’ve lived all over the world. Westport is my favorite place and I intend to die here,” he said. Many wouldn’t be quite so candid about it but share the same sentiments.