pt at large

The White Owls:Gritty Blues, Gritty Bar

White Owls Band
Sally O'Brien's Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Ave, Somerville, MA 02145
617-666-3589
Open 11 am - 1 am

If you’re looking for a launch pad to rocket your blues lovin’ soul into the work week, head over to Sally O’Brien’s Pub on a Sunday night. The resident rocker scientists, headed by Dennis Brennan, will put you in a feel good orbit that will have your feet tappin’ and bottom shakin’.

Brennan fronts the White Owls, a cover band that produces two liquid nitrogen-caliber sets of hardcore blues every Sunday. Sidemen Mike Dinallo (guitar), Dean Casell (bass), Steve Sadler (laptop steel), and Andy Plaisted (drums), rock like it's still Saturday night.

Blues is Brennan’s oxygen. He’s been writing, singing, and scratching out a career since 1992. If you can imagine the hardscrabble life of a musician perpetually just outside the gates of fame and fortune, you damn well know Brennan is pouring it out from his gut. After he grabs a down and dirty ballad or up-tempo number by the throat, there’s no way his bandmates can mail in their solos. They’re too proud and too good to do that anyway.

Tonight’s crowd was thin but Mike Dinallo and Steve Sadler played as if booking agents filled the place. While tipping their hats to the gritty bluesmen that preceded them (see Brennan’s set list below), they gleefully lay down their own inspired licks. Dinallo’s soaring, imaginative riffs had Sadler grinning as he plucked, thrummed and at one point induced amp feedback as part of a solo that careened deliciously into the rafters.

Sally O’Brien’s is one of a handful of Cambridge/Somerville pubs that serve great live music with the beer. Lest anyone lose sight of the bottom line, the two 42-inch HD plasma TVs set upon the brick wall behind bar are dwarfed by the Guinness sign. The ten taps halfway down the bar finish the motif and can wash down the authentic Irish, Mexican, Italian, and American foods on the menu.

A small stage set on a dias, a postage stamp dance floor, and a scattering of high cocktail tables are on the far side of the waist high wall that separates the bar from the lounge. On this night, a few dancers boogie, swing, and grind away. If you’re a dance and blues hound, find this place on mapquest.

The place is a local hangout. You will not see BMWs parked on the street outside. You will hear brogues still thick from the trip across the pond. And on most nights you’ll hear very American music. Check it out for yourself.

Partial list - first and second sets.
The music honors early bluesmen who blazed a trail while battling cultural bias and lack of means.

"Route 66", blazing treatment of 1946 Bobby Troup song
"Strange Things Happen', written by Percy Mayfield 1950 slow blues
'I Aint Mad At You', originally performed by Maggie Campbell, Thomas Johnson 1928
'Whole Lotta Rockin Goin On'
'Stranger Blues', The Crusaders 1960
'This Is The Last Time I Fool With You'
'Mona', written by Bo Diddley 1957
'That’s All Right', written by Arthur Crudup 1954
'I cant do it all by myself', Sonnyboy Williamson II 1955
'Somebody Got To Go', written by Gatemouth Moore 1945
'Fever', written by Little Willie John 1937

Spin

Spin
A play by Robert J. Sherwood
Directed by David J. Miller
April 18- May 10, 2008
Thursdays, Fridays 8:00 PM
Saturdays 4:00 and 8:00 PM
Sundays 3:00 PM

At the Plaza Black Box Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts
Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont St in Boston’s South End
Tickets: $35
Seniors & Students $30

The first act of Spin feels like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel. Profane dialogue whooshes by at a dizzying rate, most of it uttered by a gonzo campaign manager who would sell his mother if it would help his candidate win the presidency.

The play opens with Samuel Champlain’s campaign manager gloating over a fifteen-point lead in the polls before the final debate that will occur in two hours. Two minutes later, the adversary’s campaign manager breezes into his office and lights a fuse to a scandal she’s ready to use to derail Champlain’s aspirations.

Boy, do we need a zany play like this. We are numbed by 24/7 politics. He says, she says, she spins, he spins. How much distortion is tacked on to a kernel of truth? Is anything off limits? Does it have anything to do with the candidate’s ability to do a good job?

We get to ponder this as the coyote campaign manager hints that Samuel Champlain’s wife is compromised by something, described as “having to do with three letters, S E X”, that will blow her husband’s candidacy out of the water. The threat: Champlain must accept the VP slot or his wife’s secret is aired and his candidacy is toast. The decision must be made before the debate that occurs two hours later, conveniently the length of the play we’re watching.

While this is teased out, we get to see the kind of wild, numbers driven, information spinning, anything goes politicking that we suspect goes on behind closed doors. Steven Barkhimer plays campaign manager Jerry as a political operative of gleeful crackhead proportions. He speeds along on vats of coffee and has a mind that can reconfigure any fact into a coin of the realm for his boss - a coin that on one side buffs him up and on the other denigrates his opponent. He occasionally overacts but he’s got lines that will make you hoot. (“No promises! Give the impression of promises!” Jerry tells the candidate as he’s practicing for his debate.)

Packaged in this cocktail of a play are a Saturday Night Live spoof and a drama with topical relevance. It’s shaken and stirring. Jerry’s pollster (Melissa Baroni) is a numbers whiz for hire. She can mold a statistic into a roadside bomb or a comforter. The opposing campaign manager (Elisa McDonald) has graduated from the Machiavelli School of Political Warfare. She gives Jerry a sniff of the scandal she’s uncovered and baits him into confronting the candidate’s wife to determine if the ambiguous sex story is true - and how much spin he’ll have to contrive to offset the damage.

The candidate’s wife Alexandra (Christine Power) is as good at spinning her truth as the two campaign managers in the room. These four are playing for all the marbles. Loser is not a word found in any of their lexicons.

Peter Brown inexplicably underplays his role as Henry, the candidate on the cusp of victory. He’s a forty-watt bulb set amongst klieg lights. It would be a serious distraction if the others weren't so busy chomping the daylights out of their roles.

One doesn’t have to be a cynic to see where the production is driving us. In contemporary politics, the notion of truth, decency, character, and moral courage comes home in a flag draped box. We all want to achieve our destinies, our dreams. How much will we sacrifice to realize them?

There are probably some pretty heavy-duty rapscallions who serve us in congress or our communities. Did we elect them because they proved they can do a good job of running the show, or that (short of pedophilia) they are paragons of virtue in their private lives?

It’s two hours of scary fun watching the five characters try to get a grip on shreds of their humanity as the tornado of a political campaign rages around them. It’s even better that the fuse set at the outset of the play is still burning at the end.

Photo courtesy http://www.zeitgeiststage.com/

Benny Golson: Storytellng Saxophone Supreme

"A Musical Conversation With Benny Golson"
New College Theatre, 4 P.M.
10-12 Holyoke Street, Cambridge, MA
Thursday, April 16, 2008

Musicians just have different brains than we do. Maybe this is true of artists of all stripes - painters, dancers, writers, hell, maybe even reporters. Unlike the rest of us, who can’t recall what we ate for breakfast, their memories are accessible on demand. Benny Golson proved this today.

Dapper in a tailored black suit set off by a pink polo shirt as he sat facing the audience at the New College Theater a few steps from Harvard Square, he could have been a visiting entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs have a feel for what people want or need. Benny Golson has been doing just that for 62 years. The 79 year-old tenor saxophonist had arrived at Harvard for the college’s annual spring jazz residency. During the week, he’d teach students, be the subject of this ninety-minute “Musical Conversation With Benny Golson,” and have his music be featured in a tribute concert at Sanders Theater on Saturday night.

Steve Schwartz, WGBH radio host, asks, “You’re teaching students here at Harvard, do you present yourself as composer, arranger, musician?”

 “I create something that had no previous existence, something that reaches the heart with romantic melody, memorable for melodic content that will last.”

Schwartz cues up a two-minute sample of Golson’s music and asked him comment on it. Golson settled back in his chair, “I wrote that song in Boston, in Copley Square, in the downstairs of a club that was called…hmmmm,…Storyville, No one was in the club that afternoon, I wrote it in about twenty minutes.” The year was 1956.

Golson’s recollections began in the wax era with 78 rpm records powered by hand-cranked victrolas played in his mother’s living room.  When he and a 17-year-old friend were turned away from performing in his hometown Philadelphia, Golson’s mother said, “Don’t worry, some day they wont be able to afford you.” How true.

During the span of ninety minutes, the affable Golson was a one-man professor of musicology. He’s rubbed shoulders with every jazz great of the last fifty years. If you have the faintest idea of jazz, you’ll recognize names like Sonny Rollins, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, and Art Blakey.

Benny Golson remembers anecdotes about each of them and others, like Lucky Johnson, whom he heard when he was fifteen, and Bull Moose Jackson, with whom he played in the early days.

“Lucky Johnson made me sound conscious, his style evolved but his sound remained the same. He knew how to fill a sax up, fill and release it. In ballads, the way to prove your mettle is to slow down, there’s no place to hide. It's not how fast you play.”
 
 He chuckles when he recounts how Bullmoose Jackson would tell him exactly what to play and how he’d improvise, not to steal some of the leader’s thunder but simply because he couldn’t stifle the music genie within him. Performing with these unheralded bands, he made friendships with musicians who would emerge as the best of his generation.

Clifford Brown was one of these young lions. “I learned about Clifford’s death in an auto accident while on a break at the Apollo Theater on 126th Street,” Golson says. Shortly after, I wrote “I Remember Clifford,” a standard still played today.

Golson (R), with relative of Billy Strayhorn (L).

If you had time to drive from Boston to Baton Rouge with Golson, you’d be filled in on details describing fellow musicians, their style, manner of dress, and musical talent. The man is thoughtful, extroverted, and plays an audience as deftly as he plays his saxophone.

Google Benny Golson. I stopped clicking after forty pages of “Golson”. If you were to choose one of the entries and ask Benny, odds are good that he’d remember a story to go with the entry.

Psychologist William James summarized the fundamental principle of memory in a single phrase: "The secret is … forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain." Some authorities call that ‘chunking.”

Clearly, Golson cares about retaining. He must use all the strategies of chunking memories together, making patterns, visualizing them, probably associating them with melodies and images, and maybe even the cars he’s slept in on his trips around America in his early days.

His pal Jimmy Heath says, “There’s enough music in life for everyone,” Golson has made sure that means music for every taste as well.

Along with the 30 albums and 300 compositions he’s created, he’s written for Hollywood - M*A*S*H, Mannix, Mission Impossible, Mod Squad, The Partridge Family, The Academy Awards - and composed commercials for, Canada Dry, Carnation, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Clorox, Dodge, General Telephone, Gillette, Heinz Foods, Jack in The Box, Liquid Plum'r, MacDonald's, Mattel Toys, Monsanto, Nissan, Ohrbachs, Ore-Ida Frozen Potatoes, Parliament Cigarettes, Pepsi Cola, and Texaco.

He’s not done. “As I keep listening, I will hear dreams I haven’t heard yet,” he says. And we know he’ll play them for us.

Three Tall Women: Edward Albee

Edward Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. His fictional treatment of his early life is the play's undergirding. Questions raised about how we use or revise our memories to fit our identities will resonate with you long after you leave the theater.

Three Tall Women
A Play by Edward Albee
Directed by Spiro Veloudos, Set by Christina Todesco, Costumes by Molly Trainor, Lights by Karen Perlow, Music by Peter Bayne
Lyric Stage  Company through April 26
Tickets, $25-50,617-585-5678
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including one 15 minute intermission

Here are three good reasons to see Three Tall Women: Anne Scurria, Paula Plum, Liz Hayes.

Another reason to see the play is that Edward Albee wrote it. Forget what you’ve heard about the playwright being inaccessible. He poured his heart out (Albee-style) in writing this 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning play in which he fictionalized his upbringing.

The result is a touching, witty charmer that seesaws between broad humor and dark reality. The combination is odd but Albee is a master of making great stuff from unlikely premises.

Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. By the time he packed his bag, never to return, he left behind a trail of schools he’d been kicked out of and a painful broken relationship with his mother.

To reveal the play’s structure would take the wallop out of seeing it for the first time. One thing that must be revealed is that you don’t have a chance to see three high-velocity actresses play off one another that often.  The women, whom Albee named A, B, and C are played by three powerhouses: Anne Scurria of the Trinity Repertory Theater, Paula Plum, a fixture in Boston drama circles, and up-and-comer Liz Hayes.

Scurria and Plum are fully vested in their roles from the opening scene. The 92 year-old A (Scurria) shoots from the hip, not one PC bone in her aged body. Eighty one year-old Albee writes with the same rifle-bore directness.

As the shadow of death nears, do we re-imagine life’s losses and pleasures as they occurred or as we wished they had occurred?  On occasion, A’s attempts to remember accurately are like watching the proverbial camel fit through the eye of a needle. One wonders how much Albee struggled with the same question as he wrote this loosely autobiographical play.

Paula Plum’s Fifty something B, a cool breeze of mortality just beginning to chill her shoulders, uses her droll wit and deadpan black humor to ready herself for the trials of A, who might represent her own future. Liz Hays as twenty-six year old C is infused with the limitless possibilities of a life unfolding. Hayes, to her credit, inhabits her role more and more deeply as the play develops.

Albee’s preoccupation with the roiling themes of age, memory, relationships, and meaning are packed inside this freight train of a play. From the ABC of it to the XYZ of it, this is the best  production you’re likely to see in Boston this season.

Session Americana:Teeny Table, Big Sound

Session Americana

Lizard Lounge, Cambridge, MA
April 8, 2008

Ry Cavanaugh - guitar, mandocello, vocals
Dinty Child - mandocello, fiddle, banjo, guitar, accordion, keyboards, vocals
Billy Beard - drums, vocals
Sean Staples - mandolin, mandolincello, fiddle, guitar, vocals
Kimon Kirk - bass, vocals
Jim Fitting - harmonica, vocals

A bloom of oriental rugs, a few ancient church pews and assorted tiny tables and high backed chairs trademark the rouge-illuminated basement of the Lizard Lounge, the place that is a Petri dish for some of the most talented acts germinating in Boston.

The first thing you noticed tonight as you peered into the middle of this little hideaway was the teeny wooden table surrounded by a several chairs in tight formation and a collection of well-used instruments: guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, accordion, mandocello (ok, I had to ask someone about that one) and harmonica. On the perimeter were a no-frills drum set, a dowdy looking piano and an electric keyboard sitting on a case that appeared to have been
carted over mountains by mules.

Once again, the Liz has pulled a rabbit from the hat. Actually six rabbits, veteran musicians all, who stumbled upon a concept quite by accident 3 years ago and have become a cult favorite in the area. This would be Session Americana, currently in weekly residence on Tuesday nights.

The six guys crowded around the teeny round wooden table occasionally passed instruments around like chips with the beer. One by one they leaned into the omnidirectional mike to take their solos while the others sat back and sang choruses. For all the world it looked like six friends at their Wednesday night poker game, pints of beer perched precariously on the shared table.

The set list seemed spontaneous. “Let’s do ‘Sometimes I Forget,’” says Ry Cavanaugh. A cascade of banter ensues, then Cavanaugh leans into the mike and sets off, blazing the trail for tempo and feel of the arrangement he wants to try out tonight.

I have no idea of the titles of most of the songs they sang, save one or two like a catchy rendition of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame”, and a sweet Mills Brothers classic “You Always Hurt The One You Love.” The songs were plucked from some Great American Songbook In The Sky full of lesser known ballads, folk, gospel, and bluegrass titles.

What I do know is that the music was by turns rousing, uplifting, infectious, mournful, lilting, churchlike and profane. And the audience, some of them casually sitting around the floor near the musician’s table, apparently a custom at the Sessions concerts, was eating it up. Lurking somewhere in the intimate cellar was the spirit of the Grateful Dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to smell patchouli and see love beads for sale outside at some future concert. But I digress.

The audience became witnesses at a jam session between guys with prodigious memories, pumped-up musical abilities, and a profound ability to enjoy the hell out of each other’s singing and bonhomie.

They are singing from their hearts and from the seats of their respective pants. The hoohaaas and smiles are genuine as they end a song on the same beat with the same emphasis. Intuition and faith are running rampant here. The singers go for it, stretch lyrics, improvise, and feed on the creativity jangling all around the table. No one’s afraid of making a mistake. It would surely be greeted with a friendly guffaw, then turned into something beautiful or outrageously funny.

Three years ago, Cavanaugh, Beard, and Staples finished a set at a nearby Cambridge club. The next act was a no-show. Cavanaugh unpacked his mikes, set them on a little table, and the three of them, like Joplin’s Bobby McGee, sang every song they knew. Weeks later Session Americana was formed. They were nominated for ‘Best Live Act” in this year’s Boston Music Awards. Their website is http://www.sessionamericana.com/

These guys rock. Their catalog has amazing breadth. They are virtuosos on their instruments, and damn! - they know how to have a good time.

Next time they’re in town, check them out.

Dennis Brennan Band

Dennis Brennan Band
10 pm Show
Lizard Lounge, Cambridge, MA
April 9, 2008

Dennis Brennan is not easily intimidated.

A less assured bandleader would have turned out the lights and said goodnight after his pal, former J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, stepped in to electrify the tiny club with two R&B classics, the second being the popular “Give It To Me”, which would have rocked spectators in the last row of the Fleet Center.

Instead, Brennan, whose band is the regular Wednesday night gig at The Lizard Lounge, nodded his head, grinned “What a showman,” and carried on as if the interlude had been inserted by an upstart high schooler.

Brennan has zings. He kept the train chugging with an uptempo version of Lickety Split then sweetly brought it into the station with a mighty soulful version of “Living in a Fool’s Paradise.”

The man from Marlborough, MA, has been scuffling in the local music scene since 1992. Despite solid reviews, a firewall seems to surround his popularity, relegating him to regional fame. Maybe it’s just as well. Dennis is not an arena performer. He’s very persuasive in small clubs as an in-your-face rocker and balladeer. When he belts out a song, it’s from his gut and it’s for real.

Brennan has range. Don’t be surprised to hear twangy Merle Haggard covers of “You Don’t Have Very Far To Go” and “Skid Row” follow a blistering rocker.

The miking at the Liz made it hard to hear the lyrics of his rock‘n roll songs. It hardly mattered since most of the crowd that drifts in here every Wednesday knows the songs by heart. And when Brennan reaches back to gut out Sam Cooke covers like “Living In A Fool’s Paradise,” there’s an ample sampling of booty shakin’ in the standing audience.   

A self-described blue-collar rocker,  Dennis Brennan resembles an eastern version of Lyle Lovett, craggy, unassuming, understated. His sidemen Duke Levine (on one or the other of the collection of guitars near his feet), Kevin Barry on laptop steel and guitar, Billy Beard on his well-traveled drum kit, and bass player Andrew Mazzone are cream-of- the-croppers. They’ve appeared with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Paula Cole, and Patty Griffin. Several of tonight’s songs were from Brennan’s fifth CD since 1989, a 2006 CD “Engagement”, on which all tonight’s sidemen played.

All of these guys are part of the local scene and play gigs with other bands on a regular basis. Barry and Levine can and did play solos ranging from liquid thunder to poignant heartache. You’d dig listening to any band these four guys are part of.  Tonight I missed the first three songs of Brennan’s set. I wont make that mistake next week.

Partial set for Wednesday, April 9, 2007
“If you’re tryin' to break my heart you don’t have far to go” cover of Merle Haggard tune
“Skid Row”, cover of Merle Haggard tune, up-tempo
“Personal Assistant”, on latest album Engagement
“Miss  Maybelle,” upbeat Mississippi blues
“Sugar Falls”, on latest album Engagement
Three songs by guest Andrea Gillis
“Mother-in-Law Blues,” Junior Parker cover
Two songs by Peter Wolf, first title unknown, second “Give It To Me”
“Lickety Split,” (possible title?)
“Living In A Fool’s Paradise,” cover of Sam Cooke ballad

The Shining City on Oxygen

The Shining City and the Respirator.

The Shining City
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
BU Theatre - Mainstage, Huntington Avenue, Boston,MA
March 7 - April 6, 2008
Running time 1 hr 30 min, no intermission

We had terrific seats. First row, mezzanine. Smack in the center of the row.

Before curtain time, my companion tugged at my sleeve. “Look, aren’t they adorable. That’s the happilyeverafter relationship I want,” she said, The woman to her right was holding her elderly man’s hand, perhaps as she did the first time they’d witnessed a play together fifty years ago.

Lights dimmed, the house quieted to a religious silence. Lights came up for the first scene of “The Shining City”, a quiet tableau showing a therapist arranging his office before a patient’s visit.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

What was that? A sound from my right, then stillness for several seconds. A buzzer rings in the therapist’s office. He scrambles to put away an item on his desk.
Pffffttt…pfffftt from our right again.

The patient arrives up the stairs in a comically nervous entry scene.
Pffffttt…pfffftt. Like clockwork every several seconds.

Good Jaysus. Could this be what I think it could be?
Pffffttt…pfffftt.

Omigod.
Yes.
It is.

The man three seats to my right was using an oxygen tank. Loud pfffttting oxygen. And assuming the man was not going to die somewhere in scene one, the pfffftting was going to last the entire play. A play, I might add, in which there were zillions of pregnant pauses as, remember, this is taking place for the most part in a therapist’s office. And, you guessed it. No intermissions. Ninety minutes.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

My companion’s initial delight in ideal mature matrimonial bliss was disappearing faster than ice from the Arctic pack.

“We paid $70.00 apiece for THIS?” she whispered in dismay.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

We’ve all had experience with coughers, candy wrapper crinklers, cell phone boors, digital watch beepers, and the occasional snorer. But an oxygen tank?

How do you politely turn to a playgoer and whisper, "Say, would you mind turning off your life support for an hour or so while I and the rest of the people in your audio range can enjoy the play without that disconcerting Pffffttt pffffttting every few seconds?"

Righteous indignation was colliding fiercely with my customary tendency toward compassion. Indignation was in the lead. This was not one of my shining moments.

About forty-five minutes into the play, at the third of the five scene changes in which the lights dim for actors to scurry about to change scenery, we abandoned ship.

We scooped up our belongings and headed to the $25.00 seats in the nosebleed section of the Huntington Theater. The high five we gave each other after this guerilla move may have appeared unseemly to other patrons but never mind. The stage from there was like looking into a dollhouse but, ahhhhhhh, no more Pffffttt…pfffftting.

So here we are at the crux of the matter in our age of PC and everyone has the right to do what they please as long as it does not break the law. Rights can be defined by law but where is responsibility defined?

The man certainly had a right to be seated for the play. Did he have an obligation to forewarn his seatmates of the sound his oxygen canister emitted? Were he or his wife so inured of its sound that they didn’t hear it? Should he have asked the theater to place him where the sound would not disconcert his neighbors? Did I have an obligation to approach the couple after the play and tell them why we moved away in the middle of it?

Hindsight is always 20/20. I wish I had talked it out with them after the play. I don’t wish that they shut themselves off from culture or the community that produces it but engaging them about my experience of being jolted from the flow of the play by the sound of the oxygen tank while sitting next to them could have opened some avenues of solution.

I hope to be going to plays for years to come and lord knows what kind of medical gadgets I might need to do that. When I walk away from a performance, I want people to look at me with admiration for staying connected with the world, not wishing I’d stayed at home with a noisy machine that allows me to live.

The Shining City

The Shining City
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
BU Theatre - Mainstage, Huntington Avenue, Boston,MA
March 7 - April 6, 2008
Running time 1 hr 30 min, no intermission

Even if a play isn’t totally convincing, a good reason go is to see an outstanding performance by one of its actors.

The chief reason to see The Shining City at the Huntington Theater is John Judd’s performance as the patient of a first year Dublin therapist. Judd’s character John comes to therapist Ian because he’s beset by seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife.

John’s transformation from bumbling middle class widower into a man who’s faced down his demons is beautifully organic and credible. The downside of this is that there isn’t enough going on elsewhere in the play.

Three of the play’s five scenes show John coming to grips with his complicity in his failed marriage and inhabiting a new and improved psyche in the process. John uses gestures, facial expressions and terrific comic and dramatic timing to tell his story. He’d be an ideal candidate to bend your ear all night long over several jars of Guinness.

The scenes contrast therapist Ian’s slow unraveling as patient John gains traction in reality. Ian, played by Jay Whittaker, is as conflicted a therapist as you’ll find. An ex-priest, he’s just jilted the girlfriend who has borne him a child and is painfully attempting to get a grip on his sexual preference. His struggle is inferred, internal, and nowhere as clearly delineated as that of his patient. Many of his lines are “mmm” and “yes”.  We see him appear distracted as he listens to his patient verbalize. Ian knows he’s bedeviled but hasn’t the nerve to put himself on the couch.

John’s story is the stuff of sitcom entertainment. The more interesting but untold story is about Ian, his renunciation of his vows as a priest, and his struggle with sexual identity.

Judd is comfortable keeping his Irish brogue throughout the play; Jay Whittaker, Nicole Wiesner as his girlfriend, and Keith Gallagher as a hustler waltz in and out of brogue.

Banish a ghost from one person’s life and it re-appears in another’s. The Alfred Hitchcock ending is jarring and not a little “deus ex machina” but without it the play would be dead in the water.

What Ian does with his own ghost is the next chapter in his life. Maybe he needs a good shrink. It’s a shame it isn’t addressed in this play.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater

Jammin' in JP, Part 2

Jammin' in JP2

April 13, 2008
Jam sessions: Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian
Jamaicaway Books, 676 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, 617-983-3204
www.jamaicawaybooks.com

First things first. These guys have got the goods. Nevermind, they may never have played together, or that they may be playing a song for the first time.

Jam sessions like this are more likely to take place at 2 in the morning rather than at 2 on a Sunday afternoon. But an afternoon audience is exactly what the organizers want.

Musicians stroll in as the session unfolds, unpack their gear and step up to play. They might not know each other’s names but they speak the same language: tempo, major and minor keys, and feel.

This jazz is totally accessible. No dense Coltrane, no frenetic Ornette Coleman, just songs plucked from the thick Great American Songbook charts the guys pass around if they’re not familiar with the arrangement.

The afternoon has the intimate feel of a documentary film. Oblivious to us, one of the guys says, “Do you know Miles’ version of Time After Time?” They banter about the difference between Cyndi Lauper’s and Miles Davis’s versions, agree on what key to play in, decide on  “16 bars and a 4/4 intro” and light into the music.

For the casual listener, this is a primer on how musicians go about their business and how utterly at home they are no matter where they are. When vocalist Fulani Hayes says, “What’s your name?” to Earle Lawrence as she introduces the band not long after Lawrence tore the house down with his solo, you realize you’re witnessing a true jam session.

The Jam Sessions have been organized by Ms. Hayes and Cornell Coley. Both are driven by the desire to teach as well as perform. Hayes infuses her introductions to songs of the 20s, 30s, and 40s with anecdotes that reflect her pride in the African American men and women of Harlem, Chicago, and the Deep South who pioneered this music.

Coley has worked for 25 years in community development through the arts and education as a producer, coordinator, administrator, fundraiser, performing artist, writer, facilitator and mentor. This afternoon he’s the slyly entertaining man behind the drum kit.

Hayes says the first half of the afternoon is usually the regulars: Fulani herself, Cornell Coley, and standup bass player Larry Roland. The second half of the afternoon program showcases the people they’ve invited to come in and play.

This week’s lineup: Aurelio Ramos, software writer, today an assured keyboard player; Earle Lawrence, middle school teacher, today an imaginative soprano sax and flute player; and David Ehle, longtime jazz guitarist and friend of Coley’s, who plays the circuit from nightclub to senior citizen homes.

This being a musician’s world, schedules are often improvised and today is a providential example. Aspiring young bass player Dan Janis, who lives three streets away from the bookstore, happens to come in because he’s heard of the place. ‘Sent from heaven today,” says Coley, “our bass player cant come. Unpack your bass and step in.”

Toward the end of the afternoon a musician named Hilary steps in to man the congas and play a sensational flute. The miracles keep on popping up.

“The place didn’t always look this good,” says Hayes. “I rummaged around my own cellar found material for table cloths, objects to brighten up the place, bought the little baskets which we load with chips, and improved the lighting.”

“We want this to be intergenerational and educational,” Hayes continued. “With the arts being cut in school, we want to have place for young listeners to come and enjoy music that may be their heritage. We want to expose kids to jazz.”

Near the end of the jam, Hayes invites 7-year-old Marcel to the stage. Nearly dwarfed by the conga drums he sits behind, he gets a touch of stage fright.

“Let me start you off,” says Coley. After about 16 beats, little Marcel’s feet begin tapping and his hands get to work. “He’s right on the time!” Hayes nods approvingly. Marcel finishes, Hayes takes him by the hand to the center of the makeshift stage and tells him to take a bow. The people in the  basement of Jamaicaway Books cheer lustily.

This is exactly what the musicians want - spread the word of the gospel of jazz. and insure that this music is taught, nourished, and thrives in the next generation.

My bet is that Marcel will be there on the congas again next week. Maybe he’ll bring some pals.

Some of today’s playlist
Time After Time
Body and Soul
On A Clear Day
Summertime
Blues Bossa
All the Blues
Girl From Ipanema
Take the A Train
Watermelon Man
That’s All