The Buffalo News - Gusto

J.J. Abrams’ newest ‘Trek’ fantasy is worth the trip

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:04:47 -0400

You don’t have to be a Trekker to have a grand time at “Star Trek Into Darkness.” In fact, it’s probably better that you not be. Real, card-carrying Trekkers aren’t likely to be in love with all the liberties the prodigious J.J. Abrams takes in his newest prequel tale of life aboard the Starship Enterprise as it boldly goes places you and I would rather watch than go ourselves.

I’m deeply sorry if there are Trekkers out there who might want to string Abrams up for what he did to Gene Roddenberry’s earnest, precocious Hollywood progressivism (Roddenberry put “diversity” onscreen long before anyone knew what it was), but I think what Abrams did is rather brilliant.

It was the first time around too and is even more so in his follow-up, when he’s giving us his take on one of the best original “Star Trek” movies – “The Wrath of Khan.”

We’ve got a new Khan to replace Ricardo Montalban, former fancier of fine “Corinthian leather” in Chrysler commercials and possessor of the most formidable pecs of any senior citizen prowling the Fantasy Island of American moviedom.

The new Khan is Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sharply chiseled face and piercing wide-set eyes have made him a good new Sherlock Holmes (for the Brits and PBS) but are probably never going to lead to anyone casting him as a pediatrician or a kindly old math teacher. (His face, in its severity, reminded me a little of Robinson Jeffers, great American poet who was, I swear, once dismissed from a jury in California because his face was too cruel. If they’d read his poetry, they wouldn’t have changed their minds.)

Cumberbatch makes Khan a pretty good villain – a kind of space-prowling Superman who can practically take out a whole company of armed, attacking Klingons all by himself. He can crush heads with his bare hands too – as well as take a barrage of punches by James T. Kirk straight to his bladelike cheekbones, without even a flinch.

This Khan is not a guy you’d want carrying a grievance around – not even in outer space, where, presumably, those with bad personalities and nasty agendas have a lot of space to be off by themselves.

When you find out what his grievance is in this movie, you have to admit he’s got a point. Anyone suspecting that the script was written under the influence of administrative justifications of forays into Iraq and Afghanistan is right on the money, I think.

Bad guys come in all shapes, flavors and uniforms in this movie. And some of those uniforms are supposedly friendly.

So things are so messed up this time that James T. Kirk and Khan spend a lot of this movie fighting Klingons together and trying to get back at a guy who may be even worse than Khan.

All of which is lovely, but I must admit that what I love about these revisionist Abrams “Star Trek” fantasies is what he did to James T. Kirk, whose self-loving actorisms in his extraterrestrial football practice jersey were first brought to us by Priceline’s very own William Shatner, who, in old age, has settled into his own absurdity quite wonderfully.

Back when he was the original James Tiberius Kirk, though, he and Leonard Nimoy were sometime serious actors unmistakably condescending to the lines given to them both by the writer/producer they both obviously liked and endorsed but didn’t necessarily think was the equal of, say, the original Chekhov (the writing one).

Abrams’ re-creation of James T. Kirk is delicious – the best thing by far about these big new Abrams “Star Treks.” (Though, I must admit, all the big action, CGI and elaborate production design are quite good too in modern blockbuster style.)

Abrams’ idea of Kirk before he sat in the command chair with all the pompous confidence in his toupee that a human being could have is that before he got there he was a standard American wild boy, given to all manner of maverick reckless behavior.

The Kirk we see here is still liable to wake up in the middle of two beautiful women in the same bed. And when he gets bad news on the job, he’s quite at home sitting alone at a bar somewhere and quaffing rich, nut-brown fluids.

He’s a bit of a willful cocksure jerk but underneath all that wild boy affect is a guy with deep humanity and all the heroism you could ever want for any dire situation that presents itself.

And the situation that presents itself at the end is as dire as they come.

If he doesn’t risk his life, his “family” – the entire crew of the USS Enterprise – will be goners.

That’s when you know how badly the world needs its Jim Kirks. And that’s when you know how much the Spocks, Sulus, Boneses and Uhuras will put up with. (And that’s even when, as an older man, Kirk is the embodiment of all the toupeed Super Pomp a former Shakespearean actor can muster). And why they put up with it as well.

Abrams’ Jim Kirk is a better creation, I think, than Roddenberry’s. (Apologies to all Trekkers, sincerely).

And too I kind of love the idea that Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in Abrams’ revisionist Young Star Trek are having a thing. It’s especially droll this time when Uhura’s courageous, self-sacrificing humanity has to deal with Spock’s penchant for letting computer logic turn him into one giant toggle switch (ready to take peremptory action without – you know – talking it over.)

Everyone else in Abrams’ Trek is, as always, a colorful spear carrier. Anton Yelchin is a fine young actor but not exactly the young Chekov of anyone’s dreams. Simon Pegg plays Scotty like a movie actor with a fair amount of fancy credits James Doohan never had.

New besides Cumberbatch are the estimable Peter Weller as a starfleet admiral Dick Cheney might have liked and Alice Eve as his loyal daughter, whom Cheney’s loyal daughter Mary might have liked.

There’s a plot here that’s reasonably involving without ever being entirely serious. And there’s an awfully large amount of action thunder and even physical brutality. (This isn’t really for the little ones. A lot of “S” words float by too, in moments of extreme military consternation. It’s a star “fleet” remember?)

We need, I think, to stop taking for granted just how entertaining so many of these summer blockbusters are. They’re fun in a way movies had trouble being a few movie eras ago.

But then when I watched Spock and Khan punching and gouging each other’s faces atop fast moving car-like vehicles zipping through the air of a 23rd century city, it all seemed like our version of something Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson or Hopalong Cassidy might be doing atop a buck board or a stagecoach led by a bunch of out of control horses.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is just a big, brilliantly designed, smart aleck Saturday matinee from a fellow – J.J. Abrams – who has inherited in his generation the mantle that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg once wore.

It’s stunning how much movie technology has changed.

It’s even more stunning how little we in the audience have.

Movie Review

Star Trek Into Darkness

Three and a half stars (Out of four)

Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Pinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve and Peter Weller in director J.J. Abrams’ newest installment of the “prequel” tales of the Starship Enterprise. 132 minutes. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action, violence and some rough language.

email: jsimon@buffnews.com

BPO announces summer outdoor schedule

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:07:42 -0400

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s summer season will take the musicians to several of Western New York’s best public spaces and performing venues.

The BPO will perform 12 times, including several free outdoor concerts and the return of Summer Nights@Kleinhans.

• The summer season kicks off with the BPO’s return to Bidwell Park in the Elmwood Village on June 25 and Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora on June 27, each beginning at 7 p.m. These free, outdoor concerts will be conducted by Matthew Kraemer, and will feature a mix of Americana.

• At 7 p.m. June 29, the BPO will perform a concert at Old Fort Niagara in Youngstown. Matthew Kraemer conducts this concert of classical favorites, including works by Rossini, Copland, Dvorak and Beethoven, concluding with the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. The concert is free for children younger than 6; $10 for students and $20 general admission. A family four-pack is available for $49. All tickets will be available through the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra box office at 885-5000 or www.bpo.org. Tickets include admission to the park.

• The BPO’s second season of Summer Nights@Kleinhans will kick off at 7 p.m. July 6 with Tchaikovsky Spectacular, conducted by Matthew Kraemer. Audiences are invited to pack a picnic supper or sample the wares of the Buffalo food trucks and enjoy the grounds of the concert hall and its historic neighborhood setting.

Summer Nights@Kleinhans will continue at 7 p.m. July 19 with A Tribute to Dave Brubeck. The jazz composer and pianist, credited with introducing jazz to the Baby Boom generation, was 91 when he died last year. The BPO will pay tribute to his legacy with a performance featuring the Brubeck Brothers Quartet, formed by his sons.

JoAnn Falletta will take the podium for the final Summer Nights@Kleinhans concert, at 7 p.m. July 26. España features Spanish-inflected music by Chabrier, Falla and Rimsky-Korsakov. Special guest artist Celil Refik Kaya, who won the 2012 JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition, returns to the scene of his triumph with this concert. Tickets for Summer Nights@Kleinhans range from $19 to $49 and can be obtained by calling 885-5000 or visiting bpo.org.

• The BPO and the Bisons continue their Independence Eve tradition on July 3, when the Bisons play the Rochester Red Wings at Coca-Cola Field starting at 6:05. After the game, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will take the field, joined by the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and led by Paul Ferington, for a program of patriotic favorites followed by a fireworks display. Tickets are available at www.bisons.com.

• Over a two-day period, the BPO will share its best with Western New York through a series of free performances at Canalside.

The afternoon of July 13 offers audiences a chance to see what orchestra members do when they’re not rehearsing for a concert. Chamber groups, jazz quartets, and percussion ensembles featuring BPO members are all on the schedule.

At 7 p.m. that day, the orchestra will perform a Broadway-themed concert with soloists Gary Mauer and Elizabeth Southard. The Broadway veterans are also husband and wife, and have played opposite one another in major touring productions of Showboat and Phantom of the Opera, as well as many symphonic engagements. On July 14, the BPO will hold an afternoon of instrument demonstrations, workshops and a superhero-themed concert, with music from X-Men, The Incredibles, Spiderman, Batman and more.

• The M&T Bank Plaza summer noontime concert series is celebrating its 44th year, and the Buffalo Philharmonic will once again perform. Paul Ferington will lead the orchestra on July 16 in this free outdoor concert.

• Artpark is celebrating a milestone year, and for its 40th anniversary, the BPO will perform with a host of special guests at 8 p.m. July 25, recreating the park’s 1973 opening concert. Buffalo native turned Broadway star Michele Ragusa will sing selections from Phantom of the Opera, Music Man and My Fair Lady. Eminent pianist Norman Krieger, once the winner of the BPO’s Young Artists Competition Prize, will perform Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brilliante. Dancers from the Festival Ballet of Providence and Neglia Ballet Artists will join the BPO onstage, dancing to selections from ballets by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

All tickets for the concert will be available at www.artpark.net

For further information about the summer concerts, visit bpo.org/or call 885-5000.

It’s good to be Mel Brooks – especially these days

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:18:49 -0400

Tragedy is when I get a hangnail” said Mel Brooks in one of the more illustrative apothegms of our era. “Comedy is when YOU walk into an open sewer and die.”

That’s the way I’ve always remembered Brooks’ classic delineation since I first read it about six or seven presidents ago.

He says it, much less effectively, in reverse in Robert Trachtenberg’s documentary “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise.” Nor is that the only instance where a lifelong devoted scholar of Brooksiana (and you have to trust me, I’m all of that) will notice that Trachtenberg’s solid (if stolid) PBS documentary contains a slightly lesser version of an immortal Brooks line that was a good deal better the first time around.

For instance, in this Brooksian version of his film-by-film saga of filming his second movie, “The 12 Chairs,” Brooks says this about the local cuisine as they made it: “We ate wood. In Yugoslavia.” The version I’ve always treasured – and much prefer – is this description of how terrible was the Yugoslavian food during shooting: “One day they served us fried chains.”

Let us be kind and generous here: He has been so many people’s nomination for the funniest man alive for so long – and such a national institution since he soared back into the highest level of American idolatry with his Tony-sweeping Broadway version of “The Producers” – that he has been poked and prodded and interviewed almost endlessly by Brooks worshippers. If he has begun to repeat himself on occasion – and to lesser effect the second time around – let us, by all means, give him the sympathetic understanding he deserves 12 times over.

Brooks will be 87 on June 28 and even a wildly fertile comic genius and improviser like Mel Brooks has to fall back on a familiar trope or two sometimes. That is especially true now that everyone and his brother-in-law Bobby seems to be in the “We love you Mel” Brooks interview business. Brooksian scholars should nevertheless, by all means, not miss “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” when it airs at 9 p.m. Monday on Channel 17 as part of PBS’ “American Masters” series. It’s heartily recommended to everyone else too for its happily large quotient of both frequent hilarity and revelation.

The title of Trachtenberg’s portrait comes from Brooks’ explanation of why he became a drummer when he was a teenage tummler in the Borscht Belt: “I think I became a drummer because you made the most noise.” (A brilliant bit of insight from his lifelong friend and accomplice Carl Reiner: “He has rhythms in his head. His jokes are great structures of rhythm.”)

Here, in line with that, is an anecdote from my own family from a slightly later period – mid-’50s – among predominantly Jewish guests at a Miami hotel. At an amazing lunch there was at a very large nearby table what seemed to be half the comedians from that era’s television: Jack Carter, Buddy Hackett, and everyone on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows:” Caesar, Howie Morris, Carl Reiner. The laughter from that table was huge and constant. And it was all occasioned by only two men cracking the others up – Hackett and, especially, a man utterly unknown to the rest of America at the time even though he was the unquestioned comic czar of the Sid Caesar Writer’s Room. Everyone asked who that little man was that everyone else thought was so funny. “Mel Brooks,” they were told by the restaurant staff.

“Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” is a portrait of Mel Brooks from a documentarian determined to entertain but at the same time take Brooks with utmost proper seriousness. Trachtenberg doesn’t miss talking about a single film with him (some – “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” for instance – were decidedly missable). But he also reveals a lot more of the real texture of Brooks’ not-always wonderful life than has been commonly seen elsewhere. During the years of Sid Caesar’s weekly beauties, such was Brooks’ anxiety at producing under the gun constantly that, says Brooks “I was puking between parked cars” on the street.

And too, there’s a lot about his long relationship with his second wife Anne Bancroft, who died at the age of 73. She tells the camera that from the moment she met him “the man never left me alone – thank God.” (“He looked like my father” she says. “He acted like my mother.”)

In the ancient jazz musicians’ distinction that separates great drummers from good ones, documentarian Trachtenberg doesn’t really “swing” the way Brooks does but he certainly “keeps good time” in his watchable Brooks portrait.

In his mid-80s, Brooks’ self-defensive memory understandably gets a few things a bit wrong. His memory, now, is of getting a wholly bad review from the New York Times for his first film as writer-director, the classic “The Producers.” If you reread Renata Adler’s ultra-shrewd review of the film, she calls it “a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way.” Adler is hard on “The Producers” star Zero Mostel (so, in recollection, is Brooks) but thinks Gene Wilder is “wonderful.” (So does Brooks: “Everything Gene did was angelic and brilliant.”) And, bless Adler, she was smart enough to tell Times readers that “the first act of ‘Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarden’ is the funniest part of this fantastically uneven movie.”

It’s hard not to enjoy everyone who practically lined up to be filmed in the act of loving Mel Brooks: Joan Rivers (who confides that his intellectualism surprises people; later, Brooks correctly uses the word “verisimitudinous” in passing), Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Barry Levinson, Neil Simon, Tracey Ullman (“Mel Brooks loves women” she says, unlike so many comedians and comedy directors), Richard Benjamin, Richard Lewis, his Broadway “Producers” director Susan Stroman. And how can you resist a Brooks portrait as replete as this one is with clips from Brooks’ own films and the films about him? (One from 1981 was memorably called “I Thought I Was Taller.”)

When Brooks in fact won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for “The Producers,” he gave one of the great acceptance speeches. He began by saying “I want to thank the Motion Picture Academy of Arts, Sciences and Money.” He ended by telling his peers “I want to say what’s in my heart. (Pause). Ba-BUMP, Ba-BUMP, Ba-BUMP.”

I dearly wish that as long as Trachtenberg was determined to be thorough, he’d have given us more about the pre-”Producers” period when Brooks was the darling of New York City’s comic intelligentsia – the voice on Ernest Pintoff’s Oscar-winning short “The Critic” and the improv master Madison Avenue loved to pair up with the ultra-American Dick Cavett. (Bic’s new pen, said Brooks, was called the Bic Banana and not the Bic Prune because prunes, as everyone knows, are “wrinkled and dopey.”)

Mel Brooks’ final message to us during the closing credits of PBS’ portrait? Eat plenty of citrus fruit. It tastes sweet. And once it goes into your stomach “it knows what to do.”

email: jsimon@buffnews.com

BPO announces summer season

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:49:01 -0400

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s summer season will take the musicians to several of Western New York’s best public spaces and performing venues.

The BPO will perform 12 times, including several free outdoor concerts and the return of Summer Nights@Kleinhans.

• The summer season kicks off with the BPO’s return to Bidwell Park in the Elmwood Village on June 25 and Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora on June 27, each beginning at 7 p.m. These free, outdoor concerts will be conducted by Matthew Kraemer, and will feature a mix of Americana.

• At 7 p.m. June 29, the orchestra will perform at Old Fort Niagara in Youngstown. Kraemer conducts this concert of classical favorites, including works by Rossini, Copland, Dvorak and Beethoven, concluding with the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. The concert is free for children younger than 6; $10 for students and $20 general admission. A family four-pack is available for $49. All tickets will be available through the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra box office at 885-5000 or www.bpo.org. Tickets include admission to the park.

• The BPO’s second season of Summer Nights@Kleinhans will kick off at 7 p.m. July 6 with “Tchaikovsky Spectacular,” conducted by Kraemer. Audiences are invited to pack a picnic supper or sample the wares of the Buffalo food trucks and enjoy the grounds of the concert hall and its historic neighborhood setting.

Summer Nights@Kleinhans will continue at 7 p.m. July 19 with “A Tribute to Dave Brubeck.” The jazz composer and pianist, credited with introducing jazz to the Baby Boom generation, was 91 when he died last year. The BPO will pay tribute to his legacy with a performance featuring the Brubeck Brothers Quartet, formed by his sons.

JoAnn Falletta will take the podium for the final Summer Nights@Kleinhans concert, at 7 p.m. July 26. España features Spanish-inflected music by Chabrier, Falla and Rimsky-Korsakov. Special guest artist Celil Refik Kaya, who won the 2012 JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition, returns to the scene of his triumph with this concert.

Tickets for Summer Nights@Kleinhans range from $19 to $49 and can be obtained by calling (716) 885-5000 or visiting www.bpo.org.

• The BPO and the Buffalo Bisons continue their Independence Eve tradition on July 3, when the Bisons play the Rochester Red Wings at Coca-Cola Field starting at 6:05. After the game, the BPO will take the field, joined by the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and led by Paul Ferington, for a program of patriotic favorites followed by a fireworks display. Tickets are available at www.bisons.com.

• Over a two-day period, the BPO will share its best with Western New York through a series of free performances at Canalside. The afternoon of July 13 offers audiences a chance to see what orchestra members do when they’re not rehearsing for a concert. Chamber groups, jazz quartets and percussion ensembles featuring BPO members are all on the schedule.

At 7 p.m. that day, the orchestra will perform a Broadway-themed concert with soloists Gary Mauer and Elizabeth Southard. The Broadway veterans, husband and wife, and have played opposite one another in major touring productions of “Showboat” and “Phantom of the Opera,” as well as many symphonic engagements.

On July 14, the BPO will hold an afternoon of instrument demonstrations, workshops and a superhero-themed concert, with music from “X-Men,” “The Incredibles,” “Spiderman,” “Batman” and more.

• The M&T Bank Plaza summer noontime concert series is celebrating its 44th year, and the Buffalo Philharmonic will once again perform. Ferington will lead the orchestra on July 16 in this free outdoor concert.

• Artpark is celebrating a milestone year, and for its 40th anniversary, the BPO will perform with a host of special guests at 8 p.m. July 25, recreating the park’s 1973 opening concert. Buffalo native turned Broadway star Michele Ragusa will sing selections from “Phantom of the Opera,” “Music Man” and “My Fair Lady.” Eminent pianist Norman Krieger, once the winner of the BPO’s Young Artists Competition Prize, will perform Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brilliante. Dancers from the Festival Ballet of Providence and Neglia Ballet Artists will join the BPO onstage, dancing to selections from ballets by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. All tickets for the concert will be available at www.artpark.net.

For further information about the summer concerts, visit www.bpo.org or call 885-5000.

At BUA, a harrowing look at the birth of the AIDS crisis

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:27:48 -0400

During the 2011 revival of “The Normal Heart” on Broadway, playwright-provocateur Larry Kramer stood on the sidewalk outside of the Golden Theatre handing out copies of a letter he’d written. The letter contained a litany of facts about AIDS in America today, information meant to disabuse theatergoers of any false sense of security that the ravages of the disease were no longer a threat.

“Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague,” Kramer wrote. “Please know that no country in the world, including this one, especially this one, has ever called it a plague, or acknowledged it as a plague, or dealt with it as a plague. Please know that there is no cure.”

Kramer’s apocalyptic sense of urgency about the AIDS crisis, which was as much a public health crisis as a crisis of moral failure on a massive scale, has not faded one iota since he penned “The Normal Heart” in the midst of the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the early 1980s. The show, a local production of which opens in the Buffalo United Artists Theatre (119 Chippewa St.) on Friday night, was forged in the crucible of that movement and contains all its boiling rage, its terror, its sadness and its incremental triumphs. It is, for all the polemic bluster and seeming dramatic excesses it contains, one of the best pieces of literature written about the fight for survival in an indifferent and often vindictive time and place. This production, directed by Javier Bustillos, stars Brant Adamczyk, Kevin Craig, Kurt Erb, Timothy Patrick Finnegan, Dave Hayes, Matthew Crehan Higgins, James Mikula, Michael Seitz and Caitlin Coleman. Tickets are $15 to $25. Call 886-9239 or visit www.buffalobua.org.

– Colin Dabkowski

Discs: Bobby McFerrin, Iggy Pop and Jaga Jazzist

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:13:43 -0400

new music

Jaga Jazzist

Live with Britten Symphonia

[Ninja Tune]

Four stars

Most commonly described as an “experimental jazz band,” Norway’s Jaga Jazzist is in fact better labeled a contemporary music ensemble that acknowledges little in the way of musical barriers.

Certainly, elements of jazz appear in the group’s music, but just as often do classical motifs, rock instrumentation, glimmerings of the avant-garde, electronic dance music and whatever idiom one feels like stuffing the music of Steve Reich into. In short, the group is comprised of serious musicians who also happen to be seriously (and delightfully) twisted in their insistence on pushing boundaries, ignoring rules and stretching the envelope to accommodate both will and whim.

This new disc documents a recent performance in collaboration with England’s revered Britten Symphonia, and its nothing short of magnificent in terms of arrangement, execution and composition alike.

The disc opens with a riveting slow-build of a performance in the form of the title track from the group’s most recent studio album, “One Armed Bandit.” Beginning with an overture by the Symphonia, the members of Jaga Jazzist gradually fall into position in the ensemble, atop a pulsating bass motif. The tension built by the controlled increase in dramatic interplay as each instrument is added can be measured by the response of the crowd on the recording – when the full ensemble finally finds repose in a dynamic groove indulged in by both “rock band” and the Symphonia, the sense of relief and release is palpable.

The drama is ever-present in this weird and wonderful music, but there is more than enough room for light and shade, tension and release, sophistication and humor. You might find all of these in “For All You Happy People” or “Music! Dance! Drama!,” both of which are formal epics that allow for plenty of individual improvisation within their form. (That’s the “jazz” in Jazzist.)

It’s remarkable stuff, from start to finish, and has been immaculately recorded and lovingly mastered so that even in MP3 format, the concert sounds sublime.

Fans of Frank Zappa’s orchestral works, King Crimson, Snarky Puppy, Steve Reich and even Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” these notes are for you.

– Jeff Miers

Punk

Iggy & the Stooges

Ready To Die

[Fat Possum]

Three stars

Iggy Pop, James Williamson and Scott Asheton prove that you indeed can go home again. Even if you’ve largely stayed away from that home for some 40 years.

“Ready To Die” reunites most of the band that performed on the 1973 release “Raw Power,” the record held by many to be the crowning achievement of punk’s first wave, and the best album the Stooges ever made. (I disagree. The earlier “Fun House” gets my vote for top spot in the Stooges discography, but that’s a mere quibble. “Raw Power” is both raw and powerful, and it figures heavily in all heavy music that followed it.) Original guitarist Ron Asheton died in 2009, just as the Stooges were getting into the whole “reunion” thing. But Williamson, who has been working in Silicon Valley for decades, was persuaded to pick up his guitar, turn the distortion all the way up, and re-enter the fold. With the help of Mike Watt of the Minutemen, who adds some appropriately thunderous low-end here, the result is easily as delightfully sick as the Stooges prime period work.

What has changed? Not much, really. Williamson still excels at a disquieting form of electric guitar alchemy that is sometimes savage and sometimes refined and sometimes both at once. Pop is still an aural freak show, his voice as wiry and nimble as his seemingly made-of-rubber body. He indulges his baritone more effectively now than he did circa “Raw Power,” and his lyrics have become more cartoonish than frightening in the interim, but really, this is prime Iggy Pop.

What’s it all add up to? Well, it is not possible to re-create the milieu into which “Raw Power” was originally released, just as it is impossible to deny the fact that these guys are now all in their 60s. (With the exception of Watt, who is 55.) So “Ready To Die” cannot possibly change the world (for some of us, at least) the way “Raw Power” did. But so what? These guys already changed the world once. And as far as victory laps go, “Ready To Die” is a helluva fun one to partake in.

– J.M.

Pop jazz

Bobby McFerrin

Spirit You All

[SONY Masterworks]

Three and a half stars

It is a fact of American life that Bobby McFerrin can do no wrong. You can argue, if you like and say that’s a judgment call, not a fact. But ever since he emerged from a family of singers to become the most creative (and – no small thing – most entertaining) jazz singer of the past two decades, his charm has been total and his appeal has seemed utterly universal.

Oh sure, there may have been those who cast aspersions on the softheadedness of his greatest hit “Don’t Worry Be Happy” but to anyone who understood how sharp was the edge of his great reggae parody, he seemed in the great and diabolically clever territory of Fats Waller (than whom no more diabolically clever parodist of white mass cultural attitudes toward black culture ever lived).

All that musical impeccability, though, doesn’t mean that everything McFerrin does is uniformly great. His stints as classical conductor haven’t exactly been on the immortal level of his one-man condensation of the entire “Wizard of Oz.”

McFerrin’s new disc, the first in far too long a time, is meant to “honor the legacy” of his father Robert McFerrin Sr., the first African-American to sing a title role at the Metropolitan Opera (“Rigoletto”) and the voice of Sidney Poitier in Otto Preminger’s now-scarce version of “Porgy and Bess.” McFerrin Sr. was also famous for his renditions of spirituals, most notably on the 1957 LP “Deep River.”

Here, then, is his son in one of the most eagerly awaited discs in a long time – a very basic and extraordinary American musical repertoire performed by a singer whose originality and musicality are on the highest level.

While it’s true that as his co-producer and arranger Gil Goldstein said, that McFerrin “can take material we’ve heard 10 million times and filter it in such a way that we hear it fresh,” that doesn’t mean there aren’t trivializing moments here, too. What he does, though, to “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” and “He’s Got the Whole World” is both irrepressible and delightful.

“I like to play games. I like to have fun. I like to loosen them up,” he’s quoted in the notes. That doesn’t mean every song here needed to be loosened that much. Its very opening – “Every Time I Feel The Spirit,” sung with one of his two bassists, the estimable Esperanza Spalding – demeans it. On the other hand, what he does with “Psalm 15” is stunning. (“It’s got dirt set in it,” he explains. “It feels like it’s from the soul.” I’ll say.)

The freshness he brings to that modern spiritual, Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” as well as “Wade in the Water” helps epitomize the joyful virtuosity of what he does at his best. Wait until you year him alternate his falsetto and his ordinary voice on every other word of “Wade’s” outchorus. “The reverent vaudeville” of “When I Lay My Burden Down” is a little bit gospel choir, a little bit Grand Old Opry, a little bit 52nd Street bebop and all American, a joyous feast for the ears.

At this point, he’s a towering American musical figure who, for the most part here, takes very seriously how much of a responsibility that is – and he does it with the lightest of hearts.

– Jeff Simon

New play takes on struggles of a family feeling the economic crunch

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:08:53 -0400

The struggles of sustaining a family on a meager income – a plight known to millions of Americans trying to wade through this lagging economy – provide the dramatic fodder for a play premiering Friday in Buffalo East.

“Touched by an Angel,” by local playwrights and Alemaedae Theatre Productions stalwarts Phil Davis and Taura “Chyna” Stephens, brings audiences into the troubled household of a husband, wife and their 19-year-old daughter, Angel. Cheryl, the mother, works so much to pay for her own mother’s medical bills and her daughter’s college education that her relationship with her family suffers. When Cheryl’s husband George gets a job offer elsewhere in the country and Angel starts to cry out for her parents’ attention, the family undergoes even more drama and turmoil.

Alemaedae Theatre Productions has been a proving ground for many local actors and playwrights, especially Davis and Stephens, whose previous plays, written together and individually, include “So Fierce: Peter Williams,” “The Wonderful World of Peter Williams,” “Family Before Everything” and “Let’s Get It In” and “The Call.”

“Touched by an Angel” continues through May 27 in Buffalo East (1410 Main St.). Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. For info, 602-6253 or www.webjam.com/atp2008. – Colin Dabkowski

Dark Star Orchestra takes over Town Ballroom on Saturday

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:08:41 -0400

When the Dark Star Orchestra plays the Town Ballroom (681 Main St.) at 8 p.m. Saturday, it will most likely be the final time Buffalo audiences will see bassist Kevin Rosen with the band. After performing more than 2,000 shows with DSO, the band he founded in 1997, Rosen is calling it a day to spend more time with his family. Rosen will wrap his tenure June 1, following the yearly DSO Jubilee Festival. Various bassists will step in as DSO heads into its summer tour. (Read a note from Rosen regarding his decision to leave the band at Darkstarorchestra.net.)

It has indeed been a long, strange trip for Rosen, as the DSO rose from obscurity to prominence among the plethora of Grateful Dead tribute bands. Now endorsed by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead and hailed by the likes of Rolling Stone and NPR as the pre-eminent Dead repertory ensemble, the group sits at the peak of its popularity. The DSO has mastered the ever-evolving art form that is Dead music, and now commands a following as loyal as that of the Dead itself.

Tickets are $25 advance, $28 day of show (box office, Tickets.com). – Jeff Miers

Harmonia plans two concerts to end season

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:08:35 -0400

The vocal group Harmonia is ending its season with a concert full of what the singers describe as “famous choral song sets, unique pairings, and interesting twists.” The music is French and English and ranges from the Renaissance (music by Thomas Tallis) to music of the present day.

Highlights include Benjamin Britten’s “Five Flower Songs” and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Three Shakespeare Songs.” Also included will be selections by Orlando Lassus, John Rutter, Maurice Durufle, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

The concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus, and repeats at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Burchfield Penney Art Center (1300 Elmwood Ave.).

Tickets are $10 and are available at the door or on the group’s website, harmoniacs.org. – Mary Kunz Goldman

Tribute series continues at Duke’s Bohemian Grove Bar with ‘Being 2Pac’

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:08:32 -0400

Continuing with the “Being” series, the folks at Duke’s Bohemian Grove Bar (253 Allen St.) present “Being 2Pac,” a tribute to the music of the late rap icon, beginning at 10 p.m. Saturday. So far in the series, organizers have presented tributes to the Beastie Boys – and in particular, late MC Adam Yauch – as well as J Dilla and the Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls. The format allows seasoned professional MCs and audience members alike to grab the mic, rapping and freelancing over their heroes’ tracks.

In the case of 2Pac or Tupac Shakur, this is no mean feat – hip-hop aficionados consider him to be one of the greatest rappers to emerge from the idiom’s second generation, and one of the form’s pre-eminent linguists.

One of the event’s organizers is Damon Bodine, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and is now in remission. Bodine has since dedicated his energies to promoting awareness of blood cancer. For Saturday’s show, 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Admission at the door will be $5. Additional information is available via dtr45.com and Liveforacure.com.Boston’s John Brown’s Body recently released its 10th album, “Kings and Queens,” and man, it’s a righteous effort. Continuing the band’s tradition of carrying reggae music into the future by marrying it to elements of electronic music, ambient textures, rock, funk and dub (as opposed to dubstep), the album presents reggae as a protean form very much alive in the here and now. Just as the Clash brought punk sensibilites into a reggae-funk-R&B stew on albums like “Sandinista,” so, too, has John Brown’s Body stretched the envelope of what might legitimately be accepted as reggae-based music.

As strong as JBB is in the recording studio, it’s on the concert stage that the band truly shines. Last time the group passed through town to play at the Tralf Music Hall, turnout was surprisingly light, due in no small part to several big-ticket conflicting gigs scheduled for that same night. Now’s the time for a make-good. The group returns to the Tralf (681 Main St.) at 7 p.m. next Thursday. Tickets are $14 advance, $16 day of show (box office, Ticketmaster.com).EDM/electro-rock/jam outfit Jimkata returns to Buffalo for a show at 9:30 tonight in Nietzsche’s (248 Allen St.). Pigeons Playing Ping Pong will open. Tickets are $10, through MNMpresents.com.

Klear will be joined by Psychedelic Dragons and Breckenwood for a show at 7 tonight in the Forvm, Maple Entertainement Complex (4224 Maple Road, Amherst). Admission at the door will be $12.

Blues guitar royalty comes to town in the form of Murali Coryell, who takes the stage at 9:30 p.m. Friday in the Sportsmen’s Tavern (326 Amherst St.). Admission will be $15 at the door. Coryell, son of fusion guitar legend Larry Coryell, recently released a live album ably displaying his soul-blues prowess. You can check it out through Muralicoryell.com.

The Jony James Band brings its funky blues-rock-jam stew to Brunner’s Tavern (3989 Main St.) at 9 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free.

email: jmiers@buffnews.com

Nektar is a sweet escape for a night out

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:08:28 -0400

Sitting at a luxurious bar, martinis in hand and girlfriends at my side, I was ready to take advantage of the sweet summerlike night at an even sweeter hot spot on the Elmwood Strip, Nektar.

In Greek and Roman mythology, “nectar” is the drink of choice for the gods and goddesses. While soaking in the Mediterranean vibes at Nektar on Elmwood, you could almost picture the famed divine sipping their nectar on Mount Olympus.

The L-shaped bar inside of Nektar was comfortable and crafted beautifully, providing a very upscale appeal. Five dimly lit pendant lamps hung around the bar, giving off just enough illumination to see the long list of drinks on the menu.

Kim and I chose the Bellini, a heavenly cocktail made with orange-flavored vodka, Peach Schnapps and champagne. Cassey chose the Royal, a mouth-watering drink made with vodka, raspberry liqueur and champagne.

Martinis and cosmos cost from $9.50 to $12 and include the Euphoria, South Beach and Cherry Amour, all made with premium liquor. Later in the night, my friends and I wanted to try one of Nektar’s famous martinis, the Stavros Cosmo. This cosmopolitan is made with Grey Goose, lime, cranberry juice, Cointreau and fresh berries. The generous bartender, also the owner’s son, concocted the Stavros Cosmo in a giant martini glass for the three of us to share. This cosmo is definitely a must-try!

The wine and champagne list is also spectacular at Nektar. House wine – Reisling to Merlot, Pinot Noir and Malbec – is $8 a glass, $26 for the bottle. Other selections include La Grande Dame Rose, Dom Perignon and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Nektar doesn’t carry draft beers, but the bottled beer selection ($4 to $8) is strong and includes Blue Moon, Stella Artois, Labatt Blue, Dogfish Head and Rogue Dead Guy Ale.

While enjoying the warm Friday night, my friends and I almost felt as though we had skipped out on the Queen City and were enjoying the classy bar scene somewhere in regal Europe. Fancy cream-colored curtains lined the front windows, giving the bar an air of privacy from passers-by on the street. On the bar were tea light candles encouraging a more intimate setting.

As the night wore on, more patrons poured in and the lights inside became more faint, while the progressive house music became a little louder. Despite the larger crowd, the seating was still plentiful. Booths and tables near the front often are reserved for VIPs and bottle service parties. More tables, booths and benches line the side of Nektar and can also be found near the back of the bar. When the weather is nice, the outdoor patio is open with several tables. Live music is performed on the patio, too.

DJ’s spin on the weekends and there is no cover charge.

While Kim, Cassey and I were savoring our drinks, observing the crowd and moving to the music, a photographer came around and took our picture, contributing to the swanky scene and sense of notoriety.

Keep your eyes peeled for Nektar’s merge in its current location with former restaurant Ambrosia later this summer. Together, they will be renamed Ambrosia Taverna, meaning “nectar nights.”

Nektar is perfect for bigger groups and parties, couples, or just the gathering of a few friends. It’s an ideal escape from the typical sports bars and clubs in Buffalo, while still promising to provide just as much satisfaction.

If you’re looking for a posh night out on the town, Nektar is absolutely the place.

Nektar

Where: 451 Elmwood Ave. (881-1829)

Scene: Upscale and decadent, while maintaining a comfortable setting. Relax at the bar or enjoy VIP bottle service.

Atmosphere: Casual and classy. Ladies wore short dresses, long dresses, tight dresses and jeans; the gents sported button-ups or graphic tees.

Specials: Happy hour is 4:30 to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday with $5 appetizers and $5 drink specials. From 4:30 to midnight Thursdays, $6 margaritas.

Hours: Opens at 4:30 p.m. daily; closed Sunday.

Zinger packs a fresh blast at Ashker’s

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:05:52 -0400

Ashker’s Juice Bar (1002 Elmwood Ave., 886-2233) has become a dispensary of sorts to Elmwood Village denizens who get a kick from fresh-that-moment juices.

Since it opened at the former site of a Mediterranean restaurant, Ashker’s has tried to become a sort of neighborhood center, with activities – and pricing – aimed at making the place a part of customers’ weekly routines. There’s a boardroom in the store that’s available for community use, open mic nights and so on.

When it comes to the eats, “We try to do healthy, fast and affordable,” said owner Sarah Nasca, who runs the place with founder Angelo Ashker, her boyfriend. Breakfasts, like waffles and omlettes, are served all day, plus sandwiches, salads and more.

It’s $3.99 for 16-ounce cups of freshly squeezed juice blends. The proprietors aim to charge barely enough to stay in business, she said, “so you can come daily or a couple times a week instead of having it be a treat.”

Come they do, for offerings like Ashker’s flagship Zinger, which packs the flavor and nutrients of a whole peeled orange, a quarter lemon, hunk of ginger, two apples and three or four carrots. That’s pretty much hitting for the cycle on the FDA servings chart.

Another popular choice as the weather warms up is the Basil Rejuvenator, sporting fresh basil, apple, lemon and cucumber squeezings.

“We see people sometimes twice a day, if not every day, because we’ve made it so readily available that they can incorporate it into their daily diet now,” said Nasca. “People will use it as a meal substitute.”

FOODIE FIND: Food Truck Eats at Peller Estates Winery

A bonanza for food truck lovers, more than 20 food trucks will gather for ambitious mobile cuisine in a verdant setting Saturday and Sunday in Peller Estates (290 John St. East, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.). The $15 admission includes a glass of wine; food is extra. Limited tickets sold out last year, so buy tickets through peller.com before you make border-crossing plans.

The art of Asian lacquer draws hundreds to Western New York

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:05:35 -0400

Dozens of artists and scholars from around the world will converge on SUNY Buffalo State on Monday for a four-day symposium dedicated to the ancient art of Asian lacquer.

To accompany the conference, the Burchfield Penney Art Center will host “Asian Lacquer International,” an exhibition that explores artists’ diverse uses of lacquer – an expensive resin extracted from trees found only in Asia – in decoration, painting and sculpture.

Patrick Ravines, the director of Buffalo State’s recently expanded art conservation department and an associate professor there, described lacquer as “a dying art” and the conference as an attempt to bring together artists and scholars whose paths might not otherwise cross. The exhibition, he added, is a way to communicate to the public the “many faces of lacquer” throughout the centuries in a way that may surprise gallerygoers.

The show will contain traditional decorative pieces of the sort visitors might have seen in vitrines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it will also feature plenty of contemporary uses of the medium, such as the luminous paintings of Vietnamese-American artist Nhat Tran or the bulky, multisurfaced creations of German sculptor Heri Gahbler.

The use of lacquer through the centuries has evolved from one of necessity to one of aesthetic preference. Whereas primitive versions of paints were prone to growing mold or other problems in the high humidity of Southeast Asia, lacquer – a precious substance that often causes those who handle it to break out in severe rashes – was a substitute impervious to mold. Today, many artists use lacquer for its rich depth of color and its difficult-to-replicate texture.

For Ravines, who has been at the college for three years, organizing an exhibition around a single medium like lacquer provides an opportunity to bring attention to a living medium that too many ascribe to a distant era.

“You can do an artist and his different periods. You can do a medium like this and just show the expansiveness, but also that if you want to continue to see this, we have to preserve the craft,” he said. “It’s kind of a cottage industry that goes all the way back to the tree itself.”

The conference will feature more than 25 speakers, including three artists working in the traditional mode of “Urushi,” or Japanese lacquer: Kazumi Murose, Fumio Mae and Kunihiro Komori. It will also feature talks by Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Barbara Brennan Ford, as well as panels moderated by Ravines and Buffalo State College design professor and lacquer expert Sunhwa Kim.

The breadth and ambition of this first-of-its-kind symposium, Ravines said, is extensive.

“We’re bringing in art historians,” he said. “We’re bringing in lacquer artists, craftspeople, conservators, restorers, scientists and museum people, and basically anybody who has touched or is touching lacquer and hasn’t gotten a rash will be coming to talk to about it.”

preview

What: “Asian Lacquer International”

When: Monday through May 24

Where: Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave.

Admission: $5 to $10

Info: 878-6011 or burchfieldpenney.org

email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com

Deadline for summer festival guide is May 31

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:04:59 -0400

We love our summer festivals in Western New York. From large annual events such as the Allentown Art Festival, Music Is Art, Lewiston Art Festival and Canal Fest, to events centered around music and food, there’s something for every taste.

If you are an organizer of a festival open to the public that has activities, food and live entertainment, let us know. Send us the official title of the event; location and address; date and time; ticket and admission prices; and contact information that can be published. Also give us some details on live entertainment and family activities.

To be included in Gusto’s guide to summer festivals that will be published June 13, we need your information by May 31. Email the information to: gustocal@buffnews.com.

It can also be faxed to 849-3445 or mailed to: Summer Festival Guide, Gusto Calendar, Buffalo News, 1 News Plaza, Buffalo, N.Y. 14203.

Behind the Scenes

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:04:07 -0400

The Niagara Regional Theatre Guild will hold auditions for “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum” and the musical version of “Little Women” at 7 p.m. June 10 and 11 in the Ellicott Creek Playhouse (530 Ellicott Creek Road, Tonawanda). Those auditioning should bring a song; an accompanist will be provided. Call 284-6358 or visit www.niagaratheatre.com.

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The Buffalo Niagara Youth Chorus will hold auditions from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Tuesday and May 28 in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church (6595 E. Quaker St., Orchard Park) and from 4 to 6 p.m. Wednesday and May 29 in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (1080 Main St.). Interested singers in grades 3 through 11 are encouraged to audition. For more information or to schedule an audition time, email bnyouthchorus.org or call 864-1904.The Niagara Arts and Cultural Center is seeking submissions for the annual Beyond the Barrel Art Exhibition. The judge for the juried exhibit will be Anthony Bannon, executive director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center. The deadline for entry is June 10. The exhibit will run from June 21 to Aug. 25. For more information and submission guidelines, visit www.thenacc.org, call Bob Drozdowski at 282-7530 or email bob@thenacc.org.

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The McGee Art Gallery is accepting artwork for the group show “Beauty of the Summer: Small Works Exhibit,” which will run from June 8 to Aug. 11. The deadline for submission is June 5. For more information, call 481-8737, email cmcgeeart@yahoo.com or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to McGee Art Gallery, 10931 Main St., Clarence, N.Y. 14031.

Send submissions for Behind the Scenes at least 14 days in advance to: Behind the Scenes, c/o The Buffalo News, 1 News Plaza, Buffalo, N.Y. 14203; email gustocal@buffnews.com; or fax 849-3445.

– Evonne Austin

Just announced

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:35:30 -0400

Labatt Canal Concert Series. 6 p.m. Fridays. Puddle of Mudd, June 28; Theory of a Deadman, July 5; Kansas, July 12; Pink Floyd Experience, July 19; Jason Bonham and the Led Zeppelin Experience, July 26; Jonny Lang, Aug. 2; Kellie Pickler, Aug. 9; Rik Emmett, Aug. 16. Ulrich City Centre, 35 Chestnut St., Lockport. www.canalconcerts.com. Free, VIP tickets $22 advance, $27 day of show.

Rick James’ Original Stone City Band. 8 p.m. July 12. Tralf, 622 Main St. 852-2860. www.tralfmusichall.com. $25 advance, $35 day of show (box office, Ticketmaster).

sawyer brown. 8 p.m. Aug. 8, with Maddie Larkin. Buffalo.com Grandstand, Erie County Fair, 5600 McKinley Parkway, Hamburg. www.ecfair.org. Free.

Three Dog Night. 8 p.m. Aug. 10. Buffalo.com Grandstand, Erie County Fair, 5600 McKinley Parkway, Hamburg. www.ecfair.org. Free.

Rascal Flatts. 6 p.m. Sept. 7, with the Band Perry and Kristen Kelly. Darien Lake Performing Arts Center, 9993 Alleghany Road, Darien Center. http://darienlake.com. $45.50-$65.50 reserved, $30.50 lawn (LiveNation.com, Ticketmaster.com).

Michael BublÉ. 8 p.m. Sept. 24. First Niagara Center. 855-4444. www.firstniagaracenter.com. Tickets are $57-$102 and go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday (box office, Tickets.com).

Thursday at Canalside Concert Series. 5 p.m. Thursdays. The Hold Steady and Hollerado, June 6; Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, June 13; Steven Page, June 20; G. Love and Special Sauce and the Joy Formidable, July 11; Los Lonely Boys, July 18; the Fixx, July 25; Yonder Mountain String Band and Railroad Earth, Aug. 1; Halestorm, Aug. 8; an evening with Todd Rundgren, Aug. 15; Adam Ant and the Good, the Mad & the Lovely Posse, Aug. 22; and Lotus, Aug. 29. Erie Canal Harbor Central Wharf. www.buffaloplace.com. Free.

Buffalo Place Rocks Canalside: Bel Biv Devoe. 6 p.m. July 27. Erie Canal Harbor Central Wharf, Main Street. www.buffaloplace.com. Free.

Buffalo Place Rocks Canalside: Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo plus Eric Burdon. 6 p.m. Aug. 30. Erie Canal Harbor Central Wharf. www.buffaloplace.com. Tickets are $15 advance, $20 day of show and go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday (Buffalo Place, 671 Main St., www.Tickets.com).

The Chop Tops. 8 p.m. Sept. 5, with Blue Ribbon Bastards and Lower Town Trio. Tralf, 622 Main St. 852-2860. www.tralfmusichall.com. $10 advance, $12 day of show (box office, Ticketmaster).

World Blues. 8 p.m. Nov. 1, featuring Taj Mahal, Vusi Mahlasela and Fredericks Brown. UB Center for the Arts, North Campus, Amherst. 645-ARTS. www.ubcfa.org. Tickets are $27-$42 and go on sale at 10 a.m. May 24 (box office, Tickets.com).

Of Montreal plays the Town Ballroom on Monday

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:34:18 -0400

Since founding Of Montreal in 1996, Kevin Barnes has become the poster boy for the Athens, Ga., Elephant 6 recording company, while leading his band through the pastures of trippy psychedelia, cabaret-infused alt-pop, electronic music, and even the sort of Anglo-funk/R&B David Bowie invented. Like many of his Elephant 6 brethren, Barnes and Of Montreal brought an eclectic, nigh-on avant-garde approach to bear on sunny, succinct, infectiously melodic pop and rock. The band’s first high watermark, 2004’s “Satanic Panic in the Attic,” is as an ample primer in the Of Montreal sound – part “Sgt. Pepper” vaudeville, part electronic frippery that would not be out of place on an MGMT album, and the rest all Barnes and his ever-charming, elegantly wasted romanticism.

Of Montreal releases a new album, “Lousy With Sylvianbriar” in early fall. (According to a post from Barnes on the band’s site, it’s influenced by “Sylvia Plath, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers.”) Of Montreal performs at 8 p.m. Monday in the Town Ballroom (681 Main St.). Wild Moccasins open. Tickets are $16 advance, $19 day of show (box office, Tickets.com).

– Jeff Miers

Two Hallwalls exhibitions explore freedom and confinement, urban spaces

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:34:10 -0400

The strange ways in which we burden ourselves and the tug of war between freedom and confinement are two themes that emerge from the paintings of Buffalo artist Jason Seeley, the subject of an exhibit opening at 8 p.m. Friday in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave.).

Seeley’s work, Hallwalls curator John Massier wrote in a release, “explores the nuances within this freedom and imprisonment dichotomy, and the struggle to survive within society.” His illustrative paintings depict such odd situations as one figure improbably carrying around two others on his back and a self-portrait of the artist wrapped in a four-armed embrace with himself.

Also opening at Hallwalls on Friday is an exhibition of the Brooklyn-based and Venezuela-born artist Esperanza Mayobre, whose “fictive laboratory spaces” explore the problems of cities like Caracas, the economically struggling Venezuelan capital, and New York. With simple tools, Massier wrote, “she creates structures that are in continuous construction and de-construction.”

“Jason Seeley: Piles” and “Esperanza Mayobre: Nada Se Trata De Nada, Todo Se Trata De Mucho” continue through June 28. Admission is free. Call 854-1694 or visit hallwalls.org.

– Colin Dabkowski

‘Rockshow’ documents McCartney & Wings glorious 1975-76 world tour

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:33:41 -0400

The lights. The dry ice wafting across the stage. The double-neck guitar. The brain-walloping volume. The mullets.

“Rockshow” has them all. And there is no irony in their appearance. This was Paul McCartney and his band, Wings, smack dab in the center of the 1970s, giving it their arena-rock all. Now, finally, after lingering around for decades in lousy VHS dubs and various bootleg forms, “Rockshow” is getting the official, cleaned up, dusted down and cranked considerably louder treatment.

The film, which has never had a theatrical release – it ran on network television at the time, and then vanished – will premiere at the Screening Room Cinema Cafe (Northtown Plaza, 3131 Sheridan Drive, Amherst) at 7 tonight and 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Why care about a concert film from the dim and distant past? The reasons are abundant.

First off, this is McCartney at the peak of his solo prowess. In 1976, when McCartney and Wings arrived for the gig in Seattle which provides “Rockshow” with most of its footage, the former Beatle was riding a commercial wave that saw him dwarfing the sales figures of his fellow former Fabs. John Lennon was all but retired, fully ensconced in his “house husband” phase at the Dakota in New York City. George Harrison was about to release his lukewarm “Thirty Three and 1/3” album, but wasn’t touring on any grand scale. Ringo Starr was …. well, being Ringo, which means cute, charming and completely inconsequential, musically speaking, bless his heart.

But McCartney was moving from strength to strength with albums like “Wings at the Speed of Sound” and “Venus and Mars,” both of which charted high across the globe, and yielded hit singles. The “Wings Over America Tour” of 1975-76 marked his first U.S. jaunt since the breakup of the Beatles, and it was the biggest, most buzzed-about tour of the era. Significantly, it was also anything but a nostalgia trip. McCartney played very little Beatles material on the tour, filling the set instead with current songs culled from his solo albums and his Wings releases. So “Rockshow” was documenting McCartney at a peak based on his post-Beatles work.

“Rockshow” boasts an absolutely smoking set list, too. Opening with the arena-friendly “Venus & Mars/Rockshow/Jet” medley, McCartney and his band – and it was indeed a real band, with every member contributing to the sonic stew, and most of them getting a featured spot in the set for a lead vocal of their own – come out kicking. By the time they get into a torrid “Let Me Roll It,” it is more than obvious that McCartney was the only Beatle to fully comprehend the possibilities of arena rock. He took to it like a drunkard takes to drink, embracing the possibilities of the rock spectacle that in the years following the “Wings Over America” trek would become the industry standard.

There’s the whole issue of the Rickenbacker bass, too – no small matter. Though he is rightly revered for his songwriting prowess, McCartney is rock music’s first true electric bass virtuoso, and “the Ric,” as it’s known, is the bass he was born to play. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know he’s also pictured with his Hofner violin-shaped “Beatle bass,” but gimme a break – the Ric has the tone, not that flimsy old thing!) So “Rockshow” is all about the bass – McCartney’s playing was mixed incredibly high during this period, dwarfing even the electric guitars of McCulloch and Laine, and his playing is simply sublime here, a lesson in how to approach rock bass as a melodic instrument. And the Ric, coupled with McCartney’s “Ziggy Stardust”-like mullet and black silk outfit, is one of the most iconic images in ’70s rock.

I’ve watched “Rockshow” in dodgy bootleg form with terrible audio and even worse video quality so many times over the years that finally seeing it in digitally remastered rendition with pristine audio is a shock – like stumbling upon a video of yourself as a young child that you’ve never seen before. Now, 35-plus years on, we can see that Wings was the finest ensemble McCartney would (most likely ever) front in his post-Beatles life.

Even though Lennon is the one who has always been granted the street credibility, this film makes it plain that McCartney took his solo career far more seriously than did any of his fellow Beatles. Even Lennon.

So here it is, at long last. “Rockshow” is so strong that, by halfway through the film, you’ll be considering growing a mullet yourself.

ockshow

Four stars

Starring: Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Joe English, Jimmy McCulloch

Director: Jack Priestley

Running time: 141 minutes

Rating: Unrated, but suitable for all audiences.

The Lowdown: Long-awaited release of film documenting the 1975-76 American tour of Paul McCartney & Wings.

email: jmiers@buffnews.com

World premiere of ‘Two Weeks’ turns up the heat

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:31:53 -0400

“Write when the heat is in you,” once advised Henry David Thoreau.

Well, when Harold T. Fisher wrote his first novel, “Two Weeks Until the Rest of My Life,” a couple of years back, he must have been in the throes of a record fever.

If Fisher’s name rings a bell, know that he once was on-air locally in the late 1990s at WGRZ-TV as a reporter and news anchor before moving on to other venues, notably Washington, D.C./Baltimore where he now lives, working for Howard University Radio while just beginning to flesh out the plot of his second narrative.

While at Channel 2, Fisher was a colleague of Paulette Harris, now the artistic director of the African-American Cultural Center’s Paul Robeson Theatre. Fast forward to recently. Harris and the Robeson’s resident actress and singer, the award-winning Mary Craig, read “Two Weeks,” a book called a “sensual page-turner” by one reviewer, loved it and thought that the words on the page would be great on the stage. The astute Harris and the savvy Craig made the proposal to Fisher, and he agreed. Harris would adapt the novel into play form, with Craig at her side, and in time the Robeson would present a “world premiere.”

That time has arrived. The Robeson has opened the stage version of “Two Weeks,” with novelist Fisher in attendance for the first performance. Adaptor Harris looked harried; Craig, the play’s director, looked tired; Fisher looked pleased.

Let’s return to the topic of heat, part and parcel of this often very naughty “urban erotica-romance,” as Fisher describes it. The story introduces Denise Younger, a governmental worker in the nation’s capital. Denise is nearing the Big 4-0 and feels unloved and underappreciated. Over the years she’s sent a couple of loser lovers to the curb and she needs a break. Off she goes to New Orleans for a conference. Faster than you can say, “Where’s the French Quarter?” she meets Tyriq, many years her junior. He’s bright and suave and he’s a stud. After dinner and a couple of Mississippi Moonlight cocktails, an inhibition-loosening Delta concoction, it’s off to the sack for that night and the next.

Denise has next-day regrets, of course, but who is going to know? “I’m far from home,” she thinks. “It’s just a lark. A boy-toy for a few days. But, what was I thinking?”

There is spark despite the age difference. New Orleans, “the Big Easy?” This was “Too Easy.” They make plans, he’ll move, get a job, they’ll be near each other. About now, an uneasy feeling starts to pervade “Two Weeks Until the Rest of My Life.” What was a tale that was sassy, sexy and flip now turns edgy. Novelist Fisher and interpreter Harris both bring judgment, decision-making and consequences to the fore and the play slyly changes gears. Denise and Tyriq both thought they were ready to move on. There is a game-changing event, an unspeakable tragedy and also, fulfillment. Heavy-duty stuff.

The Robeson presents its best cast in some time; it’s a new benchmark for the company. Annette Christian is a superb Denise, sweetly frustrated but too late wary; Debbi Davis is scene-stealing gal-pal Bonnie; and Pete Johnson is an impressive, smooth but ultimately honest Tyriq. Dependable Sandra Gilliam is along; Tiaona Loman, as sex-kitten Saundra, stretches credibility but is excellent as a late-play voice of reason.

The cast also includes Chalma Warmley and Quanaejah McPhyrce, a charmer as hotel clerk Lisette.

This “Two Weeks” is a step beyond a “work in progress.” But, it could use some tweaking if it goes elsewhere, as planned. The story is told in a series of blackouts, too many of them interminable. Characters make far too many cellphone calls; they don’t move the action along and most conversations are inane and empty.

The plot may remind some of the Angela Bassett 1998 film, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” There are similarities. But, importantly, significant differences.

Two Weeks Until the Rest of My Life

Three stars

When: Through June 2

Where: African-American Cultural Center’s Paul Robeson Theatre, 650 Masten Ave.

Tickets: $25-$27.50

Info: 884-2013, africancultural.org

At Shaw: 3 stars for ‘Major Barbara,’ 3.5 stars for ‘Guys and Dolls,’

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:31:12 -0400

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. – As dramatic heroines go, Barbara Undershaft is a bit of a drip.

As a major in the Salvation Army intent on saving as many souls as possible, she practically glows with youthful idealism. But before the curtain comes down on George Bernard Shaw’s capitalist fantasia “Major Barbara,” which opened Friday night in the Royal George Theatre, all the doe-eyed naiveté has gone out of her eyes and been magically replaced with a hard-won pragmatism about the ways of the world.

Director Jackie Maxwell’s production of Shaw’s long-winded but monumentally engaging play about the tug-of-war between public and corporate interests sets out to rescue Undershaft from her status as a weak protagonist all too willing to mold her ideals to the arguments of others. Alas, despite Maxwell’s laudable efforts and a remarkable performance from the magnetic Nicole Underhay in the title role, the show fails to transform Shaw’s projection screen of a protagonist into a living, breathing human.

But that’s hardly a fatal flaw for this play, itself a kind of cobbled-together sounding board for some of Shaw’s more brilliantly crafted speeches and jokes. It hinges on the moral evolution of Major Barbara, whose appetite for religion and social justice is complicated by the fact that her father, Andrew Undershaft (Benedict Campbell) is the world’s most successful purveyor of war machinery to anyone who can afford it.

From the start, this is a compelling battle: the father’s merchant of death versus Barbara’s angel of mercy. Their journey, helped along by a bevy of minor characters each pointed in different directions on the show’s spinning moral compass, leads them inexorably toward one another. Or, at least, it leads Barbara inexorably toward her father’s dark vision of the world.

Along the way, we meet Cusins (the appealing Shaw Fest vet Graeme Somerville), a “collector of religions” who joins the Salvation Army only to woo Barbara; the sarcastic Lady Undershaft (in a hilarious turn from Laurie Paton), who is estranged from her wealthy, arms-dealing husband; and a host of other sisters and unfortunate street-dwellers.

Among the swirling, timeless arguments about the reliance of scrupulous charities on unscrupulous profiteers (see: Wall Street, Halliburton, et al.) and idealism’s collision course with rocky reality, there are lots of good jokes and memorable turns of phrase. “I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income,” a huffy Cusins at one point declares to Undershaft, who responds: “I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience.”

Most of all though, despite its dashed-off, impressionable protagonist and a preachy second act that drags too slowly, “Major Barbara” is worth watching for one riveting and disturbing speech by Andrew Undershaft in the third act about the nature of poverty. That speech, which reveals a dark undercurrent of Shavian thinking and as much chilling food for thought as any Shakespearean soliloquy, makes the entire experience worthwhile.

Major barbara

Three stars

When: Through Oct. 19

Where: Royal George Theatre, Shaw Festival

Tickets: $24 to $110

Info: (800) 511-7429 or www.shawfest.com

Damon Runyon lifted the title character of his short story “The Idyll of Sarah Brown” straight from Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” Some 17 years later, in 1950, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows did much the same for “Guys and Dolls,” their musical collaboration with composer and lyricist Frank Loesser.

Most of “Major Barbara’s” major baggage was dropped in both the story and the musical, making the virtuous (and conveniently corruptible) Salvation Army leader the ideal focus for a show about the colorful demimonde of Broadway in the early ’50s.

The Shaw Festival’s grand, no-expense-spared production of one of the most note-perfect musicals in the canon opened Saturday night in the Festival Theatre to ecstatic applause from the bejeweled and tuxedoed crowd. And the performers in this cast, talented singers and expert dancers all, earned every last clap.

“Guys and Dolls,” beloved of high school drama departments across the United States, is a perfect cartoon of a show with only a hint of a story and some of the better lyrics ever written for the stage. It’s a comic-book world of lovable gangsters and their even more lovable dames engaged in a joyful urban dance in an airbrushed version of New York City in the middle of the century.

The Shaw has become increasingly adept at producing the great old chestnuts of American musical theater with some connection to the Irish playwright after whom the festival was named. Its been on an upward swing since its expert “Mack and Mabel” in 2007, later turning fine productions of “Wonderful Town” and “My Fair Lady” (based on Shaw’s “Pygmalion”), among others.

For this production, directed by Tadeusz Bradecki with molecular fidelity to the original material and choreographed to within a millimeter of its life by Parker Esse, the Shaw has rounded up a phenomenal cast.

As Sarah Brown (read: Barbara Undershaft), Elodie Gillett brings far more charm, contemporary humor and romantic longing to the role than it probably deserves. She stumbles her way gloriously through the rum-soaked number “If I Were a Bell” and her performance of “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” is hilarious and heartbreaking in the same breath.

The comic romance between Nathan Detroit and the put-upon dancer Adelaide comes to shimmering life on the talents of Shawn Wright and Jenny L. Wright, who provide the bulk of the show’s quirky spirit and some of its sharpest pieces of humor and songwriting. His mastery of that Runyonesque combination of slang and formal language is spot-on. Her delivery of the sneeze-ridden “Adelaide’s Lament” is a model of fine-tuned comic timing.

As Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Thom Allson nearly runs away with the show with a nuclear-powered performance of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” that rocked the house.

The only false note here is Kyle Blair’s too self-serious portrayal of the dapper gangster Sky Masterson, whose entirely humorless delivery of the show’s most famous song, “Luck Be a Lady,” lands with a thud.

There’s something to be said, once in a while, for eschewing any egotistical desire to project some sort of contemporary vision on a modern classic. Sometimes it’s best to respect the original material, to stay faithful to the admittedly simple vision of its creators and to set about the difficult-enough work of reproducing it.

That’s exactly what Bradecki, choreographer Esse, set designer Peter Hartwell and musical director Paul Sportelli set out to do. And boy, did they succeed.

guys and dolls

Three and a half stars (Out of four)

When: Through Nov. 3

Where: Festival Theatre, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.

Tickets: $24 to $110

Info: (800) 511-7429 or www.shawfest.com

email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com

Hot fries and more at Cala’s Kitchen in Derby

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:28:50 -0400

If you’ve never been to Cala’s Kitchen, it might be easy to miss it. It’s the middle storefront of a fairly nondescript three-business strip and has its sign flat against the building. But keep an eye out for it, because the food is good, the price is right and you really should try the unexpectedly delightful Vinnie’s Original Hot Fries.

Like its exterior, there’s nothing too fancy about the main dining room of Cala’s Kitchen. The walls are painted a flawless soft sage green, and it is free of the usual decor items – no photos, no shelves, no knickknacks, no nothing. We learned later that the walls were freshly painted, but the effect is so clean and soothing that the owner is considering leaving them that way.

The perimeter of the room is lined with comfortable booths with tables in the middle and a counter set up with padded stools. A TV over the counter was showing a car race on the Sunday just after noon when we visited, but the sound was low and it was not intrusive. The second room, into which we peeked, held larger tables and would be perfect for a meeting or party.

Because the place does just breakfast and lunch, except for Fridays, the menu offers salads, soups, appetizers, wraps and quesadillas, sandwiches, subs and burgers, along with many kinds of breakfast foods. The Derby Morning, two eggs and toast, is a steal at just $3.29, and most breakfast prices hover between $6 and $7. If you want to splurge, there is the 10-ounce strip steak served with two eggs, toast and home fries ($13.99).

The lunch prices are similarly reasonable, with the high end occupied by the $9.99 charbroiled steak Cala’s salad, with mixed greens, three cheeses, egg, tomato, onion, chick peas, olives and croutons.

When I visited with John, Pat and John, two of us went for breakfast and two for lunch. But as we ordered, an item on the menu kept nagging me – “Vinnie’s Original Hot Fries,” a specialty of the owner, Vinnie Cala. Our server told us that they were french fries in chicken wing sauce and “really good.” She said, “People love them.” For $2.99, how could we not try them? She said she’d bring them out as an appetizer.

How good was that plateful of fries? Their preparation was perfect. They were taken out of the fryer, shaken in wing sauce and speedily delivered to our table. The thin, gloriously crispy fries were still steaming inside when broken open, and the wing sauce coated them without puddling beneath them or soaking in. The balance of heat and buttery richness in the sauce was superb and the overall effect was masterful. It’s funny to be so effusive about this simple dish, but both the price and the execution were excellent. Bravo, Cala’s!

The corned beef hash breakfast ($6.99) was served with two eggs, toast and home fries. The eggs were cooked exactly as requested, over medium. The pile of crisp-edged potato chunks were good and hot, and the corned beef hash was formed into a patty that was then browned on the grill, giving it some crunch and extra flavor.

The omelette called a Jambot ($6.99) draws its name from the Italian word “giambotta,” which can refer to a vegetable stew but is also given to an omelette made with sliced Italian sausage, green bell peppers, sliced jalapeños and potatoes. This was served with a side of toast. The jalapeños gave it zip, and the mixture was very good, although I would have added more of the tasty sausage. The thick-cut rye toast was a good complement, if a slight bit darker than well-done.

The chicken and cheese quesadilla ($6.99) was made with charbroiled chicken breast, an extra step that heightened its flavor, topped with melted jalapeño-jack cheese and served with salsa and sour cream. The flour tortilla was toasted and slightly crisp.

The sandwich selections are served with a pickle and a choice of chips, french fries, home fries, mashed potatoes with gravy, applesauce or soup. That’s a great range of choices!

Our final dish, the club melt ($6.99), was the star of the table. The thin-sliced ham and turkey that shared top billing with the bacon had both been grilled before the sandwich was made, topped with American and provolone cheese and a touch of barbecue sauce that added extra flavor without being overwhelming.

Cala’s Kitchen and Catering

Where: 6888 Erie Road, Derby (947-5211)

3.5 pennies

Hours: Opens daily at 6:30 a.m.; closes at 2:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, at 8 p.m. Friday and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Wheelchair-accessible: Yes.

email: aneville@buffnews.com