In the Neighborhood

From the Food Vault Dept.: We look back twenty years to a Schenectady neighborhood (and a bit beyond) where the city’s Italian heritage was culinarily honored. But there have been changes since I wrote this piece. Garofalo’s closed in 2018, when an internecine family dispute led to its demise. La Gioia Deli closed in June 2022, but a niece of the founders reopened it four months later, so it’s still there to keep you stocked in Italian specialty items. Saddest of all, Cappiello closed its retail store in 2022, after 101 years in business. Perreca’s thrives, however, and Maria Papa not only opened a restaurant next door but also took over management of nearby Cornell’s, a restaurant at 39 North Jay Street.

                                                                                                

SCHENECTADY HAS AN AMBITIOUS REVITALIZATION PROJECT on tap that seeks to throw money at various parts of the city to see if magic beanstalks grow. Like the Jay Street pedestrian mall, Center City and the moat around Proctor’s, it probably looks good on paper. But no amount of fancy construction has created a downtown that can sustain a fine-dining restaurant. That’s because there are no people to support it.

A fresh Perreca's loaf emerges
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Schenectady’s strength has long been its neighborhoods and sense of family, cultivated when the city was a one-company town, now eroded into tiny pockets of such cohesion. One such pocket is the North Jay Street area, now targeted to become the city’s Little Italy.

In truth, it’s been that for a while, although shifting population centers have depleted the neighborhood. The Sons of Italy is headquartered nearby, but what really give life to the area are the markets.

Begin at a small storefront at 33 North Jay St., easy to recognize by the many bread loaves in the window. Inside, if you visit early enough in the day, you’ll be drenched in the yeasty aroma of the emerging batch. Breadmaking technology hasn’t changed much over the past centuries, and part of Perreca’s success is its simplicity: a couple of ingredients, hand-formed loaves and a trip through the coal-fired oven.

Iberian Melodies

From the Concert Vault Dept.: 81-year-old Jordi Savall is still going strong, still exploring corners of the musical world typically neglected by the classical, folk, traditional, jazz – you name it – worlds. He ties together ancient musical trends in an attempt to remind us that peace and harmony are the default pursuits of the human race. He should have won a Nobel Peace Prize decades ago. Here’s my 2007 review of an appearance he and his ensemble made at Tanglewood.

                                                                                         

THE FLORENCE GOULD AUDITORIUM is a lovely, lively venue in handsome Seiji Ozawa Hall, itself overlooking one of Tanglewood’s lush lawns. Folks in the very full house were obviously pleased with the performance, but this wasn’t really the place for the program presented by Jordi Savall’s Hésperion XXI.

Jordi Savall and members of Hésperion XXI

“The Sephardic Diaspora” gave us a rich series of songs, both instrumental and vocal, from one of the richest musical melting pots of antiquity – 15th-century Iberia. The songs are plaintive, sometimes sarcastic, always deeply affecting, characterized by a melisma-rich minor-key modality.

Which is why this concert should have been given in a blues club. And when percussionist David Mayoral got two or three drums going, his fingers a blur over the different-sized skins as in “Nastaran,” a song from Sofia, we’d clearly settled into a boozy, late-night groove.

In a Terrific Jam

NINE CONCERTS; 31 jazz legends; 86 different songs; twelve hours of music on ten CDs. The statistics are staggering. These are the long-neglected 1950s Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts that Norman Granz presented, by then following a well-worn formula that had served him since 1944. That’s when he conceived the idea of putting his favorite jazz musicians on stage in a jam-session setting, which proved successful both in concert and on record.

As John McDonough’s exhaustive liner notes point out, the initial six years were documented in a 10-CD set issued in 1998 by Verve (a label Granz founded). It’s out of print, but a decent copy won’t bankrupt you. Once a Mosaic set goes out of print, however, the price tends to skyrocket, so if you have neither, I’d start with this one. True, you won’t have Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker or even Charlie Ventura, but ‘40s JATP veterans Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Shavers,  Bill Harris, Illinois Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and Jo Jones are all here. And Oscar Peterson, who was just dipping his toe in the JATP water in 1949, plays his butt off on most of the sessions in this Mosaic set.

The recordings are drawn from nine concerts given at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl. As the box-set title reminds us, these are “Classic,” not “Complete,” a distinction that gives Mosaic latitude to cherry-pick the best of a bunch. And ownership issues prevented including all or part of some of the 1950s JATP concerts. Granz originally issued much of this material on labels he created but ultimately sold, and those sales seem to have gone every which way.

Over the Moon

From the Food Vault Dept.: Against all odds, this unique little restaurant endures. It’s a world unto itself, offering creative vegan and vegetarian food choices in a place where you will like as not end up chatting with your table-neighbors – if you’re not digging the live music that’s a regular feature. Not a lot has changed since I wrote this piece 15 years ago except the prices. Check them out at this website.

                                                                                           

SHORTLY AFTER WE ARRIVED, a spirited discussion broke out at the counter about personal philosophy, reminding me that it’s been a dog’s age since I’ve heard any self-definition beyond “I’m a Mets a fan” or “Yeah, I’m a Democrat. Wanna make something of it?”

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

This discussion soon veered towards food, a natural segue both because of the good food served at Moon & River and because there’s something ’60s-enough about the vibe here that it should inspire one to recall that “you are what you eat.”

Moon & River Café opened three years ago at what was long ago a shabby deli on Front Street in Schenectady’s charming Stockade area. It’s been refurbished to a fare-thee-well and appointed with living room-like furnishings that should remind some customers of a place called Mother Earth Café that once thrived in Albany.

That’s because they’re the same furnishings. “I put them in storage when I closed Mother Earth,” says Richard Genest, “and now they’ve found a new home.” This means that you can sit at tables, at a counter, in an armchair; you can play board games, read the paper. You can observe, as we did, the darkening skies of a summer thunderstorm while nursing a good beverage (my own cup of tea was appropriately soothing, but my daughter’s cup of creamy, aromatic chocolatl ($2, styled as “Aztec hot cocoa with sweet spices”) seemed more appropriate to the changing weather.

The Goose Hangs High

From the Opera Vault Dept.: The Berkshire Opera, in its earliest years, aspired to a Glyndebourne feel. And there were some eight summers of truly marvelous productions in a former chapel on the grounds of a posh resort before the company had to scramble to find venues. Productions remained good, but that Glyndebourne magic was gone. Here’s my review of a double-bill from the company’s second summer that included the first professional production of a Mozart one-act. And you can find the wonderful soprano Maureen O’Flynn mentioned over here as well.

                                                                                                

STOCKBRIDGE NATIVE MAUREEN O’FLYNN, now a soprano with the New York City Opera, returned home in glorious voice Tuesday night. It was the opening-night gala of the Berkshire Opera Company, a 2-year-old group whose quality work should herald many more seasons. The audience braved squalls and felled limbs to make it to the Pierce Theatre, where two one-act operas comprised the delightful bill.

Maureen O'Flynn

Mozart’s The Goose of Cairo" is an under-performed gem, complete with father-frustrated lovers and uppity servants and a mechanical contrivance, the titular goose, that threatens to steal the end of the show. This production easily could have been titled “Road to Cairo,” thanks to stage director Thomas Lee Rindge’s Hope-and-Crosby-ish irreverence.

Comic opera is a challenge for the director: how much can be added to the humor of the music and text? Rindge was not afraid to take risks and was probably 90 percent successful.

The plot gives us lecherous old Don Pippo, grumpy papa of Celidora (O’Flynn). As played by Adrij Dobriansky, he has the funny befuddlement of Hugh Herbert, the “woo-woo” man of the old Busby Berkeley films.

Even as he prepares for his wedding to the young Lavina (Judith Gray), Don Pippo flirts with his maid, Auretta (Karen Smith). Naturally, this enrages Auretta’s sweetheart, the servant Chichibio (Vaughan Fritts), whose puffed-out chest seems to achieve more buoyancy the more he gets upset.