Vegging Out

From the Vault Dept.: Here’s a cookbook roundup I wrote for Albany’s Metroland Magazine seven years ago. I’m still consulting some of these book as I try to broaden my kitchen repertory.

                                                                                         

YOU’LL EASILY FIND COOKBOOKS among this year’s crop that are exclusively vegetarian, but I’ve discovered some that have such good meatless offerings among the varied recipes that they’re worth considering for more than just recipes. They offer compelling insights into the whole world of the vegetarian meals you make.

The garden gets more important every year. The biggest luxury of just-picked fruits and vegetables is a quality of flavor that typically doesn’t survive the trip to the supermarket, but there’s a comforting presence about backyard comestibles. This attitude has resonance in whatever the farm-to-table movement might be, but it has roots in an approach to food sparked in the 1970s by two pioneering cookbook-writing restaurateurs: Mollie Katzen and Alice Waters.

Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, published in 1977 and a steady seller since, showed us that vegetarian cooking could be tasty and rewarding, particularly if you added a lot of fat-rich extras.

Waters didn’t get around to writing a cookbook until 1984 (Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, Calzone), but her restaurant proved hugely influential. Any chef you’ve ever heard of who emphasizes fresh ingredients these days acknowledges one or both of them. And both have new books out this year, both offering a healthy, practical approach to working with what the garden offers.

A Lickpenny Lover

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome the debut on this blog of O. Henry, pen name of the dipsomaniacal jailbird William Sydney Porter, whose stories celebrated the bustle and irony to be found in life at the dawn of the 20th century. “Lickpenny” was a term for anyone or thing that blew through a lot of money; as for the ending, if you’re not familiar with the vacation spot in question, I refer you to Harold Lloyd’s movie “Speedy.”

                                                                                                  

THERE WERE 3,000 GIRLS IN THE BIGGEST STORE. Masie was one of them. She was eighteen and a saleslady in the gents’ gloves. Here she became versed in two varieties of human beings—the kind of gents who buy their gloves in department stores and the kind of women who buy gloves for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Masie had acquired other information. She had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other animals with cunning.

O. Henry

For Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde, with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you looked again you wondered how she had come by Minerva’s eyes.

When the floorwalker was not looking Masie chewed tutti-frutti; when he was looking she gazed up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully.

Get Your Goat!

A CHEF WHO WAS TEACHING ME to make bread regarded my kneading practice with dismay. I was using the opportunity to inflict imaginary violent revenge on my enemies, accompanying my pulls and punches with angry mutterings. “Never put hate into your food,” the chef advised. “If you want to get love out of it, you have to put love into it.”

Photo by B.A. Nilsson

I’ve never seen this better exemplified than at Nettle Meadow Sanctuary Farm and Cheese Company, a peaceful rural complex just outside Johnsburg, NY, in the southeastern Adirondacks. A variety of buildings inhabit its 50 acres, with a variety of animals to go with them. You may come for the cheese – it’s sold in a small retail space on the property, which you’ll visit while masked and practicing proper distancing – but you’ll be tempted to stay for the animals. Because most of the non-human population comprises animals being tended because of injury or age.

This wasn’t the mission when Lorraine Lambiase and Sheila Flanagan bought the place in 2005. At that time, they were making goat’s-milk cheese in California, and both were full-time lawyers. “We were living in Oakland,” says Lambiase, “where we had a third of an acre – which out there is huge – and we bought four Nigerian Dwarf goats. One of them was milking, and we were able to make tiny batches of cheese.”

Airlines Travel

FRENCH COMPOSERS HAVE CELEBRATED the flute more vividly than any others. Berlioz was a flutist himself, and never spared the instrument in his monumental works; Debussy sounded a quiet clarion for 20th-century music with his “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.”

Alexander Desplat is a flutist-composer whose music is more often heard in the movie theater than the concert hall. He won Academy Awards for his scores for “The Shape of Water” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and has racked up numerous other awards for his numerous other scores.

“Airlines” is an album of Desplat’s music for both genres, all with the flute (and flutist Emmanuel Pahud) front and center. The title track, written for flute alone, is a technical exploration of the instrument disguised as a pleasant rumination that Pahud performs with nonchalant ease.

The rest of the recording adds an orchestra to the mix – the Orchestre National de France, with the composer conducting – to present music from five of his motion-picture and a concert piece. “The Shape of Water” is the kick-off piece, a three-movement suite fashioned from Desplat’s score for Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film. Nothing suggests undulation more persuasively than the time signature 6/8, and that’s the count for the haunting opening, with the combination of flute and accordion giving it an insistent yet friendly timbre. And the flute becomes the undulator itself in the second movement, “Watching Ruth.”

What Was Brewing on the Web

From the Computer Vault Dept.: I just found another piece I wrote for the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life (they lurk in old hard drives), probably in late 1997. As with other contemporaneous website roundups, most of the recommended sites are gone. I offer this for its nostalgic value, and its slight thirst-inducing quality.

                                                                                            

SOMETHING’S BREWING ON THE WEB. Amidst the clamor of many beer-related sites, ranging from commercial giants to elite microbreweries, the homebrew movement is developing a Web presence to gather and distribute recipes, labels, and lots of other information. Beer bubbles in the homes of over a million and a half ambitious souls who find a special pleasure in creating this important foodstuff. The experienced brewmaster will find a good range of support info; if you’re just getting started, check out these sites for the equipment and the right ale recipe for that first batch. Salud!

The Best

breWorld Home Page  * * * *

The opening page boasts that you’ll find “everything related to the world of beer and brewing,” and as near as I can figure, they’re not kidding. It’s a brewer intensive site with well-designed pages, including a helpful tour that introduces all of its facets -- “suitable for off-line viewing.” A general index of info can be full-text searched, and we’re talking about a fantastic amount of data stored at the site. The “Can You Help” page puts brewers in touch with one another, and you’ll even find a page of job listings. BreWorld will even help you establish your own Web presence. Whatever your brewing experience, you’ll find this a fascinating site.

In Memoriam: Julian Bream

MY TWO MOST MEMORABLE concert-going experiences both were recitals by guitarist/lutenist Julian Bream. It’s difficult to describe what made them so special. The music, of course – he had impeccable taste in programming – but there also seemed to be a spell that fell over the audience as he held us in thrall to his elegant way with the pieces he chose. Bream died today at the age of 87 at his home in England. He had been retired since 2002 – he once said that he gave up performing when faced with the prospect of lugging along merchandise to sell – but performed privately until 2011. His influence on the guitar and lute, in terms both of appreciation and repertory, is inestimable, and there’s plenty of info on the internet to pursue. I’m paying tribute to his memory today by offering my review of the performance I saw at the Troy Music Hall in 1992.

                                                                                                

TROY CHROMATICS DID IT AGAIN: they scooped the rest of the area’s presenters to give us one of the most gifted and sublime artists on the concert scene. Julian Bream hasn’t performed in the Capital District in a decade, and his return was every bit as sparkling as that earlier gig.

Julian Bream

One of the distinctions Bream brings to his concerts is a deeply-felt and (dare I say it) intellectual approach to programming. He has commissioned a number of major works for his instrument. He presents off-beat, underheard pieces. In doing so, he has enlarged the guitar’s repertory and continued the work Segovia started in ensuring its place as a vital part of the classical music world.

All of which was exemplified by last week’s concert.

A fairly chronological pair of sets spanned some four hundred years, beginning with 17th-century pieces by Frescobaldi and de Visée. Although the program booklet provided good notes on the piece, Bream broke the silly tradition of performer mumness and commented, work by work, on most of his program. It’s a nice practice when a performer can pull it off, and sure helps diminish classical music’s high snob quotient.

Making Up for a Lost SPAC Summer

From the Musical Vault Dept.: One of the most engaging artists to have emerged from the long-running Martha Argerich-hosted summer fesitvals is Gabriela Montero. She made her Saratoga Performing Arts Center debut in 2011 with a pair of concerts that – well, you can read my contemporaneous thoughts below, following an interview piece that sought to sell the events to what remains, in New York’s Capital Region, at least, a largely impassive audience.

                                                                                    

IMPROVISATION IS A BACKBONE OF THE ARTS. Making it up as you go along is a stalwart of theater and jazz, and it had a huge place in classical music a couple of hundred years ago, when improvising performers worked their magic in well-known forms, Beethoven and Mozart among them.

Gabriela Montero

Although there are contemporary artists who have brought back the technique of making up cadenzas (pianist Robert Levin chief among them), Gabriela Montero has made improvisation an essential part of her concert appearances.

The Venezuela-born pianist will make two appearances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center during the coming week. First is a recital (8 PM Tues., Aug 9) as part of the Chamber Music Festival, then she returns two nights later to play Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero.

Speaking from her home near Boston, the pianist explained that her Tuesday appearance, like her other recitals, will be in two parts. “The first half tends to be traditional repertory, while the second half is completely improvised.” And, as with theatrical improv, her creations are truly spontaneous. “I ask a member of the audience to sing theme I can use, which they then can follow in the improvisation. It’s a wonderful way to create a sense of access. Usually, I’m transforming themes that are well-loved, so it becomes very interactive and unpredictable. And very collaborative.”

Devilish Reaping

From the Vault Dept.: Advances aren’t nearly as interesting as reviews, but this piece looks at a theater piece with dance that presented a fascinating meditation on the Shaker heritage, which is part of the Albany area’s history. I saw the performance that the piece below tried to persuade you to attend, and I recall a small house with an embarrassingly inattentive audience – but there’s no review in my files. We shall content ourselves with this.

                                                                             

SHAKER LEADER ANN LEE, who emigrated from England in 1774 with eight followers, was known to her flock as “Mother Ann,” an ironic designation when you consider that she never cared for sexual activity and had children only as the result of a forced marriage – four stillbirths and four kids who lived to be no older than six.

Production photo by Rob Strong

Her community, based in New England and, locally, not far from Albany, took its name from the vigorous shaking that members performed in the throes of spiritual ecstasy, which was as close as they (officially, at least) came to getting laid. This tension between carnal asceticism and the sexual imperative is at the heart of “Angel Reapers,” a theater piece with dance written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Alfred Uhry and renowned choreographer (and Piloblus founder and MacArthur Foundation award-winner) Martha Clarke. It plays a single performance at Proctors Theatre at 8 PM tomorrow (Friday).

“Alfred approached me about the project in 2005,” says Clarke, speaking by telephone from her home in Connecticut. “He said he’d become obsessed by the Shakers. I looked at him as if he were somewhat cracked. But I have so much admiration for his work that I agreed to do it.” The piece had its first workshop at Lincoln Center not long afterward, “but it was in a very different form, more of a traditional play then. Now there’s much more dance, and I think of it as a tone poem on the Shakers.”

Olde Bryan’s Bill of Fare

From the Food Vault Dept.: The Olde Bryan Inn in Saratoga Springs has a venerable history, which includes two review visits that I paid during the course of my Metroland tenure. Here they are, beginning with my first visit, early on in my restaurant-reviewing career, in 1986, and a follow-up eight years later.

                                                                                       

LEGEND HAS IT THAT AMERICAN INDIANS, several centuries ago, discovered the healing properties of the strong waters at High Rock Spring, now the site of Saratoga’s Olde Bryan Inn. It was here that Sir William Johnson was carried in 1771 after being stricken, and his remarkable recovery brought notoriety to the place.

The strong waters are of a different variety today as the Olde Bryan continues to flourish as a tavern in a building more than 200 years old. You may, in fact, sample the strong waters inside or out: summertime finds a small outdoor bar area in full swing.

And the restaurant features a menu that should satisfy the gustatory needs of any situation, before or after concert or track.

Our party congregated at an outdoor table while waiting for a table within. The restaurant takes no reservations, so there may be a wait when it’s busy. But it is a large-capacity house, laid out and lighted for an atmosphere of intimacy.

The main dining room’s pre-revolutionary look is accented by stone walls, rough-hewn beams, and a shallow fireplace at one end. On the walls hang antique cookingware along with period paintings; red-globed fixtures shroud the lights.

Fontaine Fables Foibles

From the Musical Vault Dept.: Monday’s post recalled a warm Saturday night when I enjoyed a program at Robert Conant’s Greenfield Center (NY) studio of music for lute and theorbo. I was back the following day to review another concert there: this one.

                                                                                       

REMEMBER THAT SCENE in the movie “The Third Man” when Joseph Cotten is watching a play in Vienna, in German, unable to understand a word and looking surprised when the rest of the audience laughs?

Jean de la Fontaine

It could have been like that at the Festival of Baroque Music concert in Greenfield Center Sunday afternoon, when the French Art Theatre presented selections from the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, performed in costume and in French, a language fairly mysterious to me. But it wasn’t.

These three actors were terrific and, with a little help from English-language synopses provided in the program, the meanings were nicely transparent.

It’s an unusual kind of presentation to find on a program of Baroque music but this eclecticism characterizes the work of Robert Conant’s enduring festival.

James Lewis has a dignified but expressive James Mason kind of face that looked just right beneath his long, curly wig. As he began the tale of “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Ellen de la Torre seated herself by an imaginary stream and became, with wide eyes and a moue, the woolly animal, while dark-bearded Julio de la Torre assumed the guise of the predator, in a delightful fable that illustrates that might does, in fact, make right. A chomp on the neck proved it for us.

Baking before the Baroque

From the Music Vault Dept.: It was good and hot at the end of July 1986, and the temperature in a small studio out in the woods on a hot day can seem oppressive. But good music-making took the edge off, as recalled in my review of a long-ago event.

                                                                                         

HOT, HUMID FRIDAY NIGHT wasn’t a good evening for lutes and theorbos (a lute is a gourd-shaped guitar, used through the baroque era. A theorbo is a long lute with many extra strings – sort of a cross between 12-string guitar and electric bass).

"The Attributes of Music" by Anne Vallayer-Coster

At Robert Conant’s Festival of Baroque Music concert at his studio in Greenfield Center, it seemed as if there was as much tuning as there was playing and singing. There wasn’t, of course, and to sit through the tuning was a small price to pay for the splendid music making.

You’re smack In the middle of the woods out there, off Wilton Road, in a specially designed studio that seats no more than a hundred. So there is intimacy and a close association with Nature, two important characteristics of the music of three centuries ago. With the bonus of no royalty hanging around (early-music composers found their best support in the palaces) to steal all the attention.

The Ensemble Chanterelle made its fourth appearance with the festival in a program of songs and instrumental music from 17th-century Italy, France. and England. The trio comprises soprano Sally Sanford, Catherine Liddell on theorbo, and Kevin Mason alternating on theorbo and lute.

Twelve

Guest Blogger Dept.: One of the best-selling novels a century was Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a collection of stories in the popular genre of Peck’s Bad Boy that was partly inspired by the behavior of his own nephews – and which inspired two sequel books (and one orphaned short story). Here’s a chapter celebrating a boy’s twelfth birthday, very much of its time and yet timeless in many ways.

                                                                                      

THIS BUSY GLOBE which spawns us is as incapable of flattery and as intent upon its own affair, whatever that is, as a gyroscope; it keeps steadily whirling along its lawful track, and, thus far seeming to hold a right of way, spins doggedly on, with no perceptible diminution of speed to mark the most gigantic human events—it did not pause to pant and recuperate even when what seemed to Penrod its principal purpose was accomplished, and an enormous shadow, vanishing westward over its surface, marked the dawn of his twelfth birthday.

To be twelve is an attainment worth the struggle. A boy, just twelve, is like a Frenchman just elected to the Academy.

Distinction and honour wait upon him. Younger boys show deference to a person of twelve: his experience is guaranteed, his judgment, therefore, mellow; consequently, his influence is profound. Eleven is not quite satisfactory: it is only an approach. Eleven has the disadvantage of six, of nineteen, of forty-four, and of sixty-nine. But, like twelve, seven is an honourable age, and the ambition to attain it is laudable. People look forward to being seven. Similarly, twenty is worthy, and so, arbitrarily, is twenty-one; forty-five has great solidity; seventy is most commendable and each year thereafter an increasing honour. Thirteen is embarrassed by the beginnings of a new colthood; the child becomes a youth. But twelve is the very top of boyhood.

Winter Jazz Journey

THERE’S A SCHUBERT SONG known as Ständchen (D. 957 No. 4) that Liszt transcribed for solo piano; a simpler transcription became a very popular parlor-piano piece back when the music-category lines were far more blurred. So it’s no surprise that it was also picked up by pop-music groups: It became “Shivaree” in a 1920 recording by the Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone sextet, and (as “Serenade”) in 1939 by the John Kirby Sextet. Which is only to note that Schubert is among the many classical composers whose music has made its way into jazz.

Madre Vaca’s “Winterreise” may be the most audacious such journey yet. This Florida-based jazz ensemble has recorded ten of Schubert’s 24 heartbreaking songs in arrangements by drummer Benjamin Shorstein that prove that, with a little bold inventiveness, these songs can flourish in any setting. And the selections certainly hit the melodic and mournful highlights of the cycle.

Here’s the lineup, recorded at the end of May 2019 at Shorstein’s Jacksonville home: Juan Rollan, saxophone; Steve Strawley, trumpet; Lance Reed, trombone; Jonah Pierre, piano; Jarrett Carter, guitar; Mike Perez, bass; Milan Algood, percussion; and Shorstein on drums.

The cycle here begins and ends as Schubert’s does, so we start off with “Good Night,” depicting a lonely man’s weary trek through the snow as he abandons a vigil of his beloved’s house. Pianist Pierre takes the first solo, establishing that this is jazzland, not Vienna. Trumpeter Strawley then gives a little bit of New Orleans before saxist Rollan smooths things a little. Behind them, Carter adds the vintage sound of banjo strumming. It’s a collective sound created specifically for this song, which is also the opening one of the Schubert cycle.

Badge of Honor

RON CHERNOW'S MIGHTY BIOGRAPHY of Alexander Hamilton stares at me, unread, from a nearby bookshelf. I’m also unfamiliar with the massively popular Broadway musical. What I know of our colonial statesman was gleaned in history classes, and suggested that Aaron Burr was a far more interesting character.

Two things are quickly apparent about Jack Casey’s new novel Hamilton’s Choice: It’s challenging to draw a compelling portrait of a textbook hero when that hero is up against so fascinatingly dissolute a character as Burr – and Burr comes off sounding an awful lot like Donald Trump.

I don’t know how long Jack Casey spent working on this book, and I’m suspecting that the Burr-Trump connection wasn’t deliberately intended. We’re simply dealing with two narcissistic sociopaths. As to the first point, Casey succeeds admirably in giving us a flesh-and-blood Hamilton by using the tools available to the novelist. It’s very evident that the book was scrupulously researched; in addition, we’re given scenes and dialogue invented around those kernels of history.

That’s what brings the novel to life. We’re inside the heads of these dynamic characters. Burr, of course, is shooting sparks all the time as we follow his inner rage into the tragic climax of the story. Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth (née Schuyler), comes to life through the dialogue and inner monologues. And it’s especially helpful for Hamilton himself, who can come off as too much of a goody-good without the credible speculation of his thoughts and ambitions.

Working from Home

MY HOUSE, which was roomy as can be back in February, has dwindled to something the size of a city apartment. It’s an old farmhouse with four bedrooms upstairs, a couple of large rooms downstairs that function as living room or dining room depending on the time of year and where we place the tables, a decent-sized kitchen, an office, a storage room, and a bathroom and a half. There’s an attic that accommodates storage of tax papers, trunks, outgrown toys, and those suits I swear I’ll fit into again. And a basement where the washer and dryer share space with a workbench and tools, furnace and water heater, and root cellar space.

My days here have been spent largely alone. I work in the office, and my daily commute consists of trips to and from the kitchen to relieve the tedium of pretending to work. This is a schedule where getting the mail becomes a high point of the day.

Since early March, however, my wife has been working from home, a process that the nature of her work easily accommodates. Since mid-March, my adult daughter has been here, too. She fled Manhattan, wisely reasoning that she was safer in our rural upstate village than on the Upper West Side. So we’re all here, all day, every day, trying to develop routines in which we won’t get in each other’s way and won’t get on each other’s nerves. The latter is the more difficult.

On the Road Again

THE HEART AND SOUL of David Bromberg’s latest recorded offering, “Big Road,” is an eleven-minute version of “Diamond Lil.” The song, a Bromberg original, first appeared on his second album, “Demon in Disguise,” in 1972. It’s a mainstay of his live performances. But the version that appears here is slower, more deliberate. The refrain, a chant of “A man should never gamble / More than he can stand to lose” carries an unusually high degree of poignancy as the bandmembers join Bromberg in harmony. And then they stretch out into solos that aren’t all that solo, with pairings and back-and-forths deepening the song’s melancholy nature.

Watch the YouTube video – which is also on the DVD that’s part of the retail package. Watch the interactions among the six players during the give-and-take that characterizes this number. Pianist Dan Walker takes the first solo, a spare, wistful survey of the mood that Bromberg’s first vocal chorus set. His second chorus has deft intrusions of Mark Cosgrove’s guitar, and Walker switches to organ as Cosgrove and Bromberg trade guitar licks, embarking on a conversation that builds in quiet intensity, and it’s Walker who underscores the third verse. But violinist Nate Grower is getting antsy, and there’s a surprising pairing of him with electric bassist Suavek Zaniesienko that manages to be wistful even as it builds on what came before. Behind it all, driving it all, is drummer Josh Kanusky, who keeps things languorous even while pursuing the bluesy drive of the song. And then we’re near the end. A final verse and chorus, and the song slips away.

Nothing Is Something

“I ACTUALLY READ WOODY ALLEN’S MEMOIR” is the headline for Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Woody Allen’s new memoir in “The Atlantic.” She bravely attempts an objective look at the book, but she has a Point of View, and eventually crumples beneath it. Her article has worthier substance than many of the other reviews of the book I’ve read, but she remains in thrall to the #metoo-inspired disgust with the venerable writer and filmmaker.

Apropos of Nothing, as you know, had a rocky start. Its original publisher, Hachette, bowed to pressure from Ronan Farrow to drop the book, and ultimately dropped a print run into the shredder. Arcade picked up the title. Despite the many indignant, pearl-clutching reviews in major publications, it turns out to be a delightful memoir, in the main. The trouble is that there’s a large detour as Allen recounts the circumstances that have led him to suffer a baseless accusation and the ensuing unwarranted condemnation.

Many critics accuse the book of being tone-deaf, if not completely out of step with the present, which leaves me wondering what they expected. If you’ve read any of Allen’s excellent short pieces that used to pepper The New Yorker and other worthy publications – and have been collected into book form – you have a sense of his tone of voice and his sense of humor. He’s what I suppose should be termed an old-school comedian, meaning that he was influenced by the likes of S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, and Robert Benchley, who were the best of the early-20th century school of humorists.

There’s no contemporary equivalent. What passes for humor these days is a comedy of cruelty, because the writers have only television as a reference, and television writing, once we left behind the days of Sid Caesar, deteriorated into too-familiar sitcom tropes, churned out, factory-style, to satisfy the relentless demands of advertiser-driven scheduling. There are significant exceptions, of course, but in the main we find predictable meanness.

The Community Masque as a Substitute for War

Guest Blogger Dept.: And who better than Robert Benchley to help us through this traumatic summer? Drawings by Gluyas Williams.

                                                                                              

WITH WAR AND LICKER REMOVED from the list of “What's Going on This Week,” how will mankind spend the long summer evenings? Some advocate another war. Others recommend a piece of yeast in a glass of grape-juice. The effect is said to be equally devastating.

Robert Benchley

But there is a new school, led by Percy Mackaye, which brings forward a scheme for occupying the spare time of the world which has, at least, the savor of novelty. It presents the community masque as a substitute for war. Whenever a neighborhood, or county, feels the old craving for blood-letting and gas-bombing coming on, a town meeting is to be called and plans drawn up for the presentation of a masque entitled “Democracy” or “From Chrysalis to Butterfly.” In this simple way, one and all will be kept out in the open air and will get to know each other better, thus relieving their bellicose cravings right there on the village green among themselves, without dragging a foreign nation into the mess at all. The slogan is “Fight Your Neighbors First. Why Go Abroad for War?”

The community masque idea is all right in itself. There certainly can be no harm in dressing up to represent the Three Platoon System, or the Spirit of Machinery, and reciting free verse to the effect that:

“I am the Three Platoon System. Firemen I represent,
And the clash and clang of the Hook and Ladder Company.”

Sax in the City

WHEN DAVE BRUBECK disbanded his very successful quartet in 1967, saxophone star Paul Desmond had spent sixteen years with the ensemble, achieving million-seller status with the album that featured his composition “Take Five” and acquiring a reputation as a witty, thoughtful player who seemed to know every song and solo ever recorded.

Brubeck was heading in a different direction; Desmond decided to take it easy for a while. “Desmond vacationed briefly in the Caribbean,” writes Doug Ramsey. “Back in New York, he took retirement with reasonable seriousness. Eventually, though, he succumbed to the blandishments of the Cantarino family, whose celebrated Half Note club had recently moved ... to 54th Street in New York’s midtown.” Part of the lure was the fact that Desmond lived a block away. This gig also featured guitarist Jim Hall, an old friend, with whom Desmond made a series of celebrated recordings in the early 1960s for RCA.

They were issued by Mosaic Records in 1987, in long since sold-out LP and CD sets, and have seen light of day on other labels since. They’re worth having both for the music itself, putting together a pair of cool players who interact like twins, and as a baseline from which to appreciate Mosaic’s latest contribution to the Desmond canon: The Complete 1975 Toronto Recordings.

Summer Serenade

From the Musical Vault Dept.: During the peak of my concert-review years, I enjoyed many visits to the various spaces in habited by L’Ensemble, a group run by soprano Ida Faiella and vioinist Barry Finclair, with a fairly regular group of other instrumentalists rounding out each program. The one reviewed below also feaured double-bassist Jon Deak, whose B.B. Wolf was issued on a recording (“Symphonic Tales”) last year on the Naxos label.

                                                                                       

AMONG THE BEAUTIFUL HILLS OF CAMBRIDGE, in the midst of farm country, an old red barn is the summer home of L'Ensemble, a group that divides its time between here and Manhattan.

Jon Deak

It’s like a Peter DeVries set-up: You could imagine the locals, chores done, deciding to go on over to the barn ‘n hear some Shostakovich. But DeVries would be startled: this group has avid local support, and draws an audience from the Capital District as well as wetsern Massachusetts and Vermont. From the inventiveness of a program played last weekend – and the skill with which it was played – this support is well justified.

The centerpiece was a newly-written work by Jon Deak, principal double bass with the New York Philharmonic, titled ‘”Owl in Love’” and based on a Haitian children’s tale. As the composer himself explained, the story is a cross between “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Ugly Duckling;” the owl of the title falls in love with a girl named Rose Marie (Haitians, like the inhabitants of Bloom County, have no trouble mixing humans and beasts in their stories), but the owl must first come to terms with his perceived ugliness.

The piece is scored for soprano, double bass, flute, and string quartet, but the instrumentalists are called upon for much more than merely playing. Not only must the instruments imitate the animal world -- the players must do so, too. The soprano, while giving the narration in English, uses a variety of languages all invented by Deak to represent the principal characters. It sounds much more complicated than it looks and sounds, and this was the result both of the talent of the performers and the wit of the piece.