Hop on the Local!

As my ability to walk and even stand continues to deteriorate, I dreaded the process of putting together this year's Thanksgiving meal. And I didn't have to, because my daughter took over in order to implement her wish to keep as much of the component ingredients local as possible (revisiting a concept I used for our 2006 dinner). The resultant menu is below, and here's a link to the menus from our previous 24 years at this address.

Cascading into the End of Time

From the Musical Vault Dept.: The Cascade Soloists, as a group, is no more, but clarinetist David Shifrin continues a distinguished career on the faculty of Yale (among other schools) and as a longtime part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Violinist Ik-Hwan Bae was an enthusiastic chamber-music performer as well as concertmaster of South Korea’s Hwaum Chamber Orchestra, while pianist William Doppmann was a composer as well, winning two Guggenheim Fellowships in that capacity; both died over a decade ago. I can find no recent internet trail of cellist Warren Lash. But we’re going back 40 years now (as we did last week) to revisit a wonderful concert performed by the four of them in Schenectady.

                                                                                       

Cascade Soloists is a charming name for a chamber music ensemble, and their performance at Union College’s Memorial Chapel on Friday night was a charming concert. The music was well chosen and received the kind of sensitive ensemble playing that is usually the result of many more years of collaboration than the few the Cascade Soloists have racked up.

The quartet comprises David Shifrin, William Doppmann, Ik-Hwan Bae, and Warren Lash playing, respectively, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello. That makes Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” a natural selection, and it concluded Friday’s concert.

First performed in 1941 while the composer was held prisoner in Germany, it combines a bleak sense of those surroundings with a bold tribute to the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation.

There is a pastoral aspect to the piece in two senses of the term: the religious underpinnings are topped with a setting of birdsong, and this awareness of nature informs much of the work.

An Andean Flavor at a Mexican Restaurant

From the Vault Dept.: Tahuantinsuyo, a trio or quartet of musicians specializing in indigenous music of South America, was founded in the 1970s and endured at least until 2012. Their website no longer exists, however, but their recording “Tahuantinsuyo: Music of the Andes” is available at various online music sites. After reading the review below, which I wrote 40 years ago, I just might buy one.

                                                                                                  

BOB PHANEAUF, soon-to-be former chef of El Loco Mexican Café, is offering the Albany area a nightspot with good food and an impressive lineup of musicians, all in a comfortable atmosphere reminiscent of the folk clubs that proliferated in Greenwich Village 25 years ago. The question is: Will the area support such a place?

Based on the performance by Tahuantinsuyo, a quartet of South American musicians which appeared at the club Sunday night, there is an audience that appreciates such fine (if eclectic) music. The house (performances are given at the eba Chapter House at the comer of Lark and Hudson Streets) seats about 200 and most of the seats were taken.

Spokesman for most of the musical numbers was Pepe Santana, from Ecuador. Like the other three (who are from Bolivia and Peru), be plays guitar, mandolin, pan pipes, pennywhistle and drums, and sings. He explained that “Tahuantinsuyo” refers to the area that was once the Inca empire; it literally translates as “four corners of the world,” and refers to an area that now covers most of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, and parts of Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.

The House of Pharoah Heard

YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT GOING TO like this set. But I don’t want to underestimate you. To make the critical balancing act worse, I don’t want to oversell you, either. I do this all the time in my house, praising to the skies a movie or a recording that my family then confesses didn’t at all live up to my encomium. 

Pharoah Sanders took the tenor sax out of the hands of John Coltrane, so to speak, and proved that its previously understood limiting factors could be stretched unimaginably further. He got all manner of sound out of its bell, many of them not immediately pleasing to humans and probably harmful to pets. 

While in his early 20s, Sanders and his horn settled in New York City, where he went from occasional homelessness – often crashing with Sun Ra – to gigs with the likes of Don Cherry. By 1965, he was part of John Coltrane’s ensemble. You’ll hear his early work on the Coltrane albums “Ascension” and “Meditations.” But if Coltrane was playing “anti-jazz,” as downbeat opined in 1961, Sanders had further to go.

Post-Coltrane, he continued releasing albums on the Impulse! label, with a few side-trips to Arista and Strata-East, but in 1980 he signed with the young Theresa label, beginning an eight-album association that lasted through 1986. 

"Good Luck"

Guest Blogger Dept.: Robert Benchley takes a gamble here to write about luck, our conceptions of which we can safely characterize as superstitions. If we’re lucky. Benchley portrait by Gluyas Williams.

                                                                                   

AND NOW they are trying to take away our superstitions from us. First they tax us until it is cheaper not to earn any money at all, then they force us to drink beer, and now they come along and tell us that we mustn't believe that if your nose itches you are going to have company.

I am not a superstitious man myself, but no Columbia University professor is going to sit there and tell me that if an actor (or anybody) whistles in a dressing room it doesn't mean bad luck for the person nearest the door. That's a scientific fact.

Neither will I be told that I must throw out all the little odds and ends of clothing and currency that I have accumulated during the past quarter of a century, each one of which has been certified by the United States Bureau of Standards as a definite good luck piece. I have proved their worth time after time (chiefly by not having had them with me when I had bad luck). I have an old green tie which I have worn so much that it now looks as if I were being led out to be lynched, and has that ever failed me? Never! I may not have always had good luck with it on, but it was because I forgot to wrap this long end around twice while tying it, or because I didn't have the ends even. The tie itself is sure-fire good luck, and I'll let no crack-brained theorist tell me different.

Backing Up, No Beeping

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Another of those mystery pieces that leap into my lap from time to time, in this case as I searched for something else in the depths of my computer archives. I would say this dates from about 2002, but I’m not going to go nuts finding out if it ever was published or not and if so, where. It’s about a technology that had its day, and caused a bunch of those oddball backup tapes to accumulate until the hardware went bad and orphaned my data.

                                                                                     

THE CENTURY TURNED, the lights stayed on. Your computer shrugged off the date change and you’re going to be sipping bottled water for a long, long time. How about backing up your data now?

What an unsexy subject! With all the inventive, colorful and just plain silly stuff out there competing for our time and money, backing up computer data is boredom itself. Unless you thought to shell out for the proper hardware when you bought your system (and it’s not a popular option), you have to pony up extra bucks for equipment that takes up space, requires costly media, gets in your way when you’re up late finishing a project, and then does nothing.

Until you lose a hard drive.

The question, as one backup software developer once put it, isn’t if your hard drive is going to fail – it’s when. You don’t get much warning, if any. And when it happens, you’ll enjoy an unbelievably sickening feeling as you realize just how much data – data you need! – was sitting on that hard drive. 

The Music Comes Round and Round

YOU WILL COME AWAY from this book with no doubt about Alex M. Stein’s love for his favored music. In fact, no matter how fervent a music-lover you may think yourself, the 40 essays contained herein may cause you to question your own depth of passion.

Stein’s talent has been realized and honed through years of professional writing and theater-making. He often performs his stories before an audience, and I’m guessing it’s this that gives his prose appealing contours of rhythm and an engaging mellifluousness. He uses judicious repetition of words and phrases which, along with such tools as assonance and alliteration, reveal the poetry lurking within these pieces.

There’s a commonality among those who obsess early on about music. At least those of, as we say, a certain age. Physical possession was important. If your obsession began in the LP days, you stockpiled records, both latest releases and elusive antiques. Your ears, ever-alert to nuance, treasured the differences a single song could display across a number of performances, even (or especially) by the same ensemble.

But most profound are the emotional associations created by the confluence of song and event. Stein’s musical universe, inadequately defined as “rock ‘n’ roll,” is far enough away from mine that I feared I’d have no commonality with his book. Until I read, in the Introduction, “If you’ve ever been dumped by someone and found you can no longer stand the music you associate with them, you’re definitely my people,” and realized that, no matter the music, we have grounds for bonding.