Kareem Sanjaghi Plays a Bit of Everything
Kareem Sanjaghi, who grew up in Brewster and now lives in Plymouth, has been playing the drums for 25 years and leading his own band since 2011. His lineup of musicians has changed over time. Currently it includes Sanjaghi on drums, Ann Austin on vocals, Peter Murray on saxophone, Fred Boyle on piano, and Ron Ormsby on bass. The band will play at the Wellfleet Public Library (55 West Main St.) on Saturday, Jan. 11 at 3 p.m.— their third performance at the library.
Sanjaghi’s grandfather, a music teacher, owned “every instrument you could imagine,” he says. “The one instrument he didn’t have was the drums, and that’s the one I chose.” Sanhaghi likes the physicality of the instrument. I was into sports growing up. The drums are definitely an athletic instrument.”
The band will play selections from the Great American Songbook — mostly jazz and swing standards — along with Latin tunes, pop songs, and rock. “A little bit of everything,” says Sanjaghi, adding that each musician in the band will be featured.
“The musicians all play with a great amount of energy,” says Sanjaghi. “I want everyone to come away saying, ‘Wow, we haven’t ever heard those songs played that way.’ ”
The concert is free. See wellfleetlibrary.org for information. —Eve Samaha
Exploring Site and Narrative in Landscape Architecture
This month, visual artist and retired architect Martha L. Rothman will begin teaching her fourth class on architecture at the Open University of Wellfleet, an organization devoted to sustaining and enriching intellectual life on the Outer Cape during the off-season through classes offered online and in person.
In her latest five-week course, Rothman will turn her attention to landscape architecture. “I got interested in the relationship of landscape architecture to climate change,” says Rothman, who began noticing how landscape architects were often at the forefront of design issues related to a changing climate.
In the online course, which begins on Jan. 22, Rothman will deliver a series of lectures and facilitate discussion focused on design projects that incorporate narratives. She will discuss the work of Sara Zewde, a contemporary New York-based landscape architect who studies intersections between the legacy of 19th-century American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, slavery, and architectural practice. Other classes will focus on topics including social spaces for movement, community-based design, and public memorials.
Among the other landscape architects and designers who Rothman plans to examine in the course are the late San Francisco Bay Area-based Lawrence Halprin; photographer, author, and landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn; and Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets, who created “augmented landscapes” using the “logics” of nature. Another of her subjects, architectural theorist and writer Charles Jencks, spent many of his summers in Wellfleet and was Rothman’s classmate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
The course fee is $60, and registration is required. See openuniversityofwellfleet.org for information. —Abraham Storer
Peking and the Mystics Bring the Beat Back
The name of their all-male a cappella group is “Peking and the Mystics,” but according to member Andrew Cranin there’s nothing mystical about them: “We’re like the guys next door,” he says. They’ll perform at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (60 Hope Lane, Dennis) at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 12.
The group was founded in 1973 by graduates of Tufts University. Three members from the original lineup remain in what is now a quintet; the other two are Tufts graduates, too. All five were members of the Beelzebubs, an a cappella group at Tufts, though none at the same time.
Cranin joined the group in 1982. In the fall of that year, the group took a trip to Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Taiwan. These days, with the oldest member of the group being 83, they don’t tour as intensely as they used to. But they still try to rehearse every week as they have for the past 52 years.
“We begin every rehearsal with a meal together,” says Cranin. Over pizza or sandwiches, they’ll discuss what’s going on in their lives, jazz and pop music happenings, and what the Beelzebubs are up to back at Tufts. Then they’ll gather by a keyboard — they rehearse in each other’s homes — and sing. Together, their voices meld in swinging vintage style. The lowest voices buoy the group; the highest lift the melody. It sounds like more than just singing. It sounds like fun.
David Pratt — “the youngster in the group,” having been part of it for only 23 years — calls the group “a semi-professional hobby.” The men all have separate careers: Cranin worked in marketing and communications, Pratt in IT and real estate. There’s also a banker, a lawyer, and an engineer.
As the group has aged, they’ve considered their legacy. “We thought, let’s create something,” says Pratt. So far, they’ve recorded five albums in styles ranging from jazz and Motown to rock ’n’ roll and pop.
But onstage, the only thing that matters is their music: “There’s a five-way brotherhood here,” says Cranin. Adds Pratt, “There’s an intimacy in our interactions. There’s laughing, smiling, a wink, a nod, a hand on a back, all of us leaning in at the same time. It’s not choreographed.”
The audience is invited to share that intimacy. “It’s less of a performance and more a shared experience,” says Pratt, one that is definitely about nostalgia. At one show on the North Shore, he remembers an audience member getting up and leaving halfway through a song. Afterward, the man’s wife, who was in her 70s, came up to Pratt. “She said, ‘I’m sorry my husband left. He was overwhelmed.’ The song we’d sung happened to be the song that was playing on the car radio when he asked her to go steady, some 50 years before.”
Tickets for the concert on Jan. 12 are $24 ($18 for museum members.) See ccmoa.org for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Kicking Off FAWC Fridays
This year’s program of FAWC Fridays — the Fine Arts Work Center’s seasonal gift of art, spoken word, and community engagement — begins with writer Paul Yoon and visual artist Judy Pfaff on Friday, Jan. 10.
Yoon is a celebrated writer of short fiction whose 2023 story collection, The Hive and the Honey, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Public Library. The book, Yoon’s fifth work of fiction, draws from the history of the Korean diaspora, the experiences of his own family, and the universal longing for roots and a sense of home. He plans to read the title story at this week’s FAWC Friday.
“I chose it because it feels wintry in the soul and in honor of the visual artists at FAWC,” Yoon says. “The piece was a kind of landscape in my mind before I sat down to write it and during the writing of it, too. I’ve always been drawn to the challenge of seeing how much I can build in that smaller space of a single story, how vast I can be. That’s really artistically rewarding for me.”
The power of Yoon’s minimalist prose derives from its emotional restraint. His sentences are taut, and dialogue is spare. At first glance, his work appears to be in sharp contrast with the exuberant, colorful creations of Judy Pfaff, a pioneer of large-scale installation art, who will appear with Yoon on Jan. 10. But the work of each artist is richly textured and layered, both on the page and on the canvas.
Pfaff, a British-born painter, sculptor, and printmaker, is best known for immersive mixed-media installations that take months or sometimes years to assemble: movable feasts of LED lights, steel wires, tree roots, colored acrylic panels, plastics, plaster, and other found materials. Her work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Tate Gallery, among others.
FAWC Fridays are designed to bring the community together in the cold months, says FAWC program director David Simpson. Each event begins at 5 p.m. with a reception featuring music and food, beer, wine, and nonalcoholic beverages provided by a local restaurant or vendor. Yoon and Pfaff will read and discuss their work beginning at 6 p.m., followed by a Q&A with the audience. Printshop and gallery activities will follow.
All FAWC Fridays at the Fine Arts Work Center (24 Pearl St., Provincetown) are free, and reservations are encouraged. See fawc.org for information. —Katy Abel
