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music

    INDIE PLAYLIST

    Songs for a Spring Awakening

    Musical picks from Independent staff and contributors

    By

    For this spring edition of the Indie Playlist, contributors chose songs traversing the genres of country, rap, disco, funk, blues, and rock. Many of them, though undeniably feel-good, express something deeper on closer examination. Listen on Spotify at tinyurl.com/4x6efzw2.

    “Pareidolia,” Buck Meek

    Pareidolia is the human tendency to see patterns where they don’t exist. As kids, we’d lie in the grass and look at the clouds, pointing out an animal here, a face over there. Texas singer-songwriter and guitarist Buck Meek opens his new album Two Saviors, released in January, with a song about this phenomenon. Easy and laid back, it sounds like sweet tea, or a dog running through a meadow.

    “Pareidolia,” uttered in Buck’s silky, twangy voice as the first lyric, comes out sounding a bit like a name. It’s as if he’s speaking to someone, the two of them lying in the “buffalo grass,” staring up at the sky. That theoretical “someone” is the real focus of the song — the symbols in the sky are only vehicles for their connection — vehicles for dreaming and reminiscing. The whole thing is hazy, as if there’s something unplumbed beneath it all — something magical and unconscious that Buck is only able to hint at over the course of the shuffling little tune. —Will Powers

    “Found Your Love,” Bosq

    Everyone needs a mood-boosting track to get them going once in a while. When I’m down, or in need of a little boogie to switch up my day, I throw on “Found Your Love,” by Bosq.

    Benjamin Woods, a.k.a. Bosq. (Photo Maria Fernanda Gonzalez

    A fusion of disco, funk, live instrumentals, and female vocals, the song is enough to get me off the couch and dancing with my vacuum. The simplicity of the lyrics, which are about finding love, partnered with an upbeat tempo, make this a song that appears on almost all my good-to-groove-to playlists.

    The best part? Bosq is Brewster native Benjamin Woods. Now based in Colombia, he’s an internationally recognized DJ, instrumentalist, and music producer. If you’re lucky, you might be able to get your hands on a Bosq 45, or even attend one of his rare live gigs on the Cape. —Emma Doyle

    “Anyday,” Derek and the Dominos

    “Anyday” is a lesser-known cut from the 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos, the short-lived rock band formed by legendary guitarist Eric Clapton, keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, and drummer Jim Gordon, who had met as part of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends.

    The entire Layla album is a collection of lovesick blues, and “Anyday” is a lush example, with indelible rock hooks that engage like pure emotion. Duane Allman was a guitarist on most tracks, and his and Clapton’s sweet, high-flying riffs create a resonance that rivals Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.

    Derek and the Dominos: from left, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, and Eric Clapton. (Photo courtesy Atco Records)

    The lyrics by Clapton and Whitlock are simple enough — “I know, anyday, anyday, I will see you smile” — but the musicians, drowning as they were in a mix of hard drugs and male-martyr myths, nonetheless connected with the closeted gay teen that I was in the early 1970s.

    Clapton, at the time, was pining away for his friend George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd. He descended into heroin addiction after Derek and the Dominos broke up, only a year or so after forming. The album, though not initially successful, evolved into a classic after the single “Layla” belatedly scored in 1973. The group’s pop-blues sound, growing out of the British Invasion, has long passed. But there’s an innocence to it that is timeless.

    In the dark days of Trump, and especially the horrific year of Covid, “Anyday” has served as a quasi-anthem to me. The song’s lovesick yearning is earthy yet ethereal, a heartfelt escape. —Howard Karren

    “Never Catch Me,” Flying Lotus (Featuring Kendrick Lamar)

    Whenever I hear this 2014 track, I am instantly transported back to my freshman college dorm.

    It starts with soft piano and pitter-patter percussion. The beat soon drops as the piano and drums become more pronounced and funky guitar complements Kendrick Lamar’s rhymes.

    Lamar enters the scene quickly, discussing his own existence in a firm tone. “Never Catch Me” is from Flying Lotus’s fifth album, You’re Dead! It’s themed around the mysteriousness of life and death.

    About a minute and a half in, the percussion speeds up while the piano stays the same. Lamar changes pace accordingly and starts rambling with his flow. Then, he lets loose with a barrage of fast-paced lyrics.

    I love how quickly things get serious. I remember that, the first time I heard this track, this was the moment I picked my head up and really paid attention. “I got mind control when I’m here, you gon’ hate me when I’m gone,” Lamar raps. “Ain’t no blood pumpin’ no fear, I got hope inside of my bones.”

    Two minutes in, the rapper’s verse is already over. He repeats “You will never ever catch me” in the chorus as the staccato percussion continues.

    The song completely changes course in the last minute and a half. The beat stays unique as the producer experiments with a cacophony of new sounds. —Ryan Fitzgerald

    “Daddy Lessons,” Beyoncé (Featuring the Chicks)

    Do you know how to two-step? Beyoncé and the (formerly Dixie) Chicks’ “Daddy Lessons” — six-and-a-half minutes of pure, swinging, Texas joy — will make you wish you did.

    This “Daddy Lessons” is a countrified remix of Beyoncé’s moodier solo track, released on her 2016 album Lemonade. Performed live for the first time at the 2016 Country Music Awards, the collaboration is all fiddle and boot stomp and belting twang. And if you don’t think yourself above country lyrics, these are a treat: “With his right hand on his rifle/ He swore it on the bible… He said girl it’s your second amendment.”

    Tucked into the second half is a quotation from the Chicks’ 2002 song “Long Time Gone” — specifically, the last verse, a three-line indictment of contemporary country’s soullessness: “Now they sound tired but they don’t sound Haggard/ They got money but they don’t have Cash/ They got Junior but they don’t have Hank.”

    The Chicks: from left, Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, and Emily Strayer. (Photo courtesy the Chicks)

    Months after the Chicks won a Grammy for “Long Time Gone,” lead singer Natalie Maines expressed regret to a London crowd about President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In an instant, the Chicks were over. Eighteen years later, the band is still a flashpoint for country music’s core audience — the same core that rails against Beyoncé’s “anti-cop agenda.”

    So, here, on “Daddy Lessons,” are four women (already radical in a country music context) with little in common but Texas roots and a knack for offending the right, breathing some life back into a genre desperate for a wake-up call. —Josephine de La Bruyère

    MUSIC

    An Indie Playlist for the New Year

    Musical picks from Provincetown Independent staff and contributors

    By

    For this new edition of the Indie Playlist, the focus was specifically on music videos and filmed performances. The result? “Radiated country music,” Dante pop, psychedelic Baroque, three harpists with super-high falsetto, and some good old rock ’n’ roll. Watch and listen at tinyurl.com/y3l3dru3.

    “Gretel,” Alex G

    Alex G’s music has something inexplicable about it. It sounds like post-apocalyptic America — a shimmering, overgrown wasteland. Or radiated country music. In the words of one YouTube commenter, it sounds like “working-class surrealist music.”

    In the video for “Gretel,” we follow Alex and two young boys (his kid cousins?) through the woods before arriving at a demolition derby. There appears to be documentary footage mixed in — shots of colliding vehicles, touching portraits of derby-goers, teenagers in camo leaning on American flag-painted cars with the windows blown out.

    The lyrics are deceptively simple: “I don’t wanna go back/ Nobody’s gonna push me off track/ I see what they do/ Good people got something to lose.” As in many Alex G songs, feelings of fear, loss, and gratitude coexist harmoniously. At a time of deep resignation about our country’s future, the 28-year-old songwriter humanizes and poeticizes the American landscape as only he can. —Will Powers

    La Vita Nuova, Christine and the Queens

    Filmed in Paris’s Palais Garnier opera house, Christine and the Queens’ 2020 six-track visual album is a collage within a collage. There is the opera house itself, a sumptuous composite of architectural styles: ceiling paintings, marble friezes, bronze statues. There is the fact that Christine (born Héloïse Letissier) sings in French, Spanish, English, and Italian — the album, named after the Dante text, falls into a lineage of queer art reclaiming the poet’s work. And there is, finally, the way Letissier juxtaposes her edgy aesthetic with that of the grandiose building. She runs down the Palais Garnier’s marble staircase, her white tulle dress parachuting behind her, fuchsia eyeshadow smudged all the way up to her eyebrows.

    Christine and the Queens. (Photo Camille Vivier)

    In the opening scene, Letissier dances on the roof of the opera house wearing an off-white pantsuit, the same hue as Paris’s skyline. There are garish scribbles of what appear to be magic marker on her face, a callback to a lyric in her 2014 song “Tilted.” She leans back off the roof, landing in the arms of a lithe dance troupe in one of the Palais Garnier’s rehearsal spaces.

    At the end of the video, having traveled down the various levels of the opera house, à la Dante’s Inferno, Letissier arrives in the building’s bowels. She stumbles upon a neon-lit, glitter-filled dungeon where she dances around in a purple patent leather suit. —Paul Sullivan

    “Scherza Infida,” Musica Sequenza

    Musica Sequenza is an “electro-baroque” ensemble founded by composer and bassoonist Burak Özdemir in New York City in 2008 and now based in Berlin.

    The concept: they combine Baroque instruments and music with EDM beats. This may sound bizarre, but it actually makes some sense. Percussion is relatively absent in Baroque music (though some instruments, like lute and harpsichord, can have a percussive quality). Adding an electronic beat fills a void and creates interesting textures.

    Musica Sequenza. (Photo courtesy Musica Sequenza)

    This particular track, part of the album Sampling Baroque Handel, is based on the aria “Scherza Infida” from Handel’s Ariodante. While the concept of sampling, of course, did not exist in the Baroque era, there was no copyright, so composers reused old material, or borrowed from others.

    The setting is halfway between a concert hall and a nightclub: the stage is illuminated by violet lights and psychedelic projections. Özdemir himself, standing behind a switchboard with his Baroque bassoon, is fun to watch; his Vulcan haircut adds to the sublime weirdness.

    My favorite moment is around the four-minute mark, when Özdemir plays a trill that yearns to resolve, but instead, he repeats and elongates it as the other musicians continue playing. —Saskia Maxwell Keller

    “Ball and Biscuit”/ “Don’t Hurt Yourself”/ “Jesus Is Coming Soon,” Jack White

    Jack White’s Saturday Night Live performance on Oct. 10 was a bright spot in an otherwise dull year. He took the stage alongside drummer Daru Jones and bassist Dominic Davis. The power trio performed, along with another song, a medley of “Ball and Biscuit,” “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” and “Jesus Is Coming Soon.”

    While White’s guitar skills are second to none — he visibly channels all his energy into the music — Daru Jones almost stole the show with his hyper-animated drumming.

    The best part about the performance: White was a last-minute substitute. Country artist Morgan Wallen was on tap for the second episode of the new SNL season, but was disinvited for not following Covid-19 protocols.

    With minimal rehearsal time, White, Jones, and Davis stepped in to provide one of the best SNL music acts I’ve ever seen — and they weren’t even supposed to be there. —Ryan Fitzgerald

    “Quarrel,” Moses Sumney

    “Enchanting,” “divine,” “ethereal,” and “majestic” are among the YouTube comments for a 2018 live performance of “Quarrel” by Moses Sumney at 99 Scott in Brooklyn. “This is the purest form of beauty,” reads another. I agree.

    Moses Sumney. (Photo courtesy Moses Sumney)

    Last New Year’s, in 2020, my partner gave me a gift certificate to a music venue in Asheville, N.C., where we were living at the time. He recommended we see Moses Sumney. But the night of the show, we were too tired, or couldn’t be bothered to dress up to leave the house. As it turned out, that was our last opportunity for live music in a long, long time.

    In late January, Sumney performed at the Mothlight — a venue now permanently closed. A couple of months later, we moved back to Provincetown. But artists like Sumney continue to give us hope, comfort, and moments of delight in these dark and isolated times. Sumney’s performance of “Quarrel,” accompanied by three harpists, is truly mesmerizing. And pay close attention to his lyrics — there’s far more depth to the song than the title suggests. —Tessera Knowles-Thompson

    MUSIC

    The Indie Playlist

    Musical picks from Provincetown Independent staff and contributors

    By

    Compiled and edited by Saskia Maxwell Keller

    Contributors to our first-ever Indie Playlist were given minimal instructions: choose a song or music video that you love and tell us about it. The songs and pieces they picked are varied in terms of genre and mood. Catch it on the Independent’s YouTube channel, under “Playlists”: tinyurl.com/y6tbob6y.

    “Take Me Back,” Sarah Jarosz

    I listened to Sarah Jarosz’s “Take Me Back” on repeat while driving cross-country this past summer. The song, with its harmonized vocals, is beautifully nostalgic. The lyrics evoke a wish to go back, to be somewhere else, which seems perfect for this time.

    Sarah Jarosz. (Photo courtesy Sarah Jarosz)

    She pairs these wistful lyrics with subtle chord progressions and virtuosic guitar. Over it, her voice is heard, thoughtful and distinct.

    Jarosz had a recording contract by the end of high school. In 2013, she graduated with honors from the New England Conservatory. While there, she has said, her “ear was stretched to consider more harmonic possibilities.”

    Listen to this track a few times, or a few dozen. You’ll begin to hear the careful way she has chosen her words, and the quirkiness of the accompaniment. Like all great songs, it improves with repetition. —Désirée Elsevier

    Camille Saint-Saëns, Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, 3rd movement, Julia Fischer and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie

    Julia Fischer. (Photo courtesy Julia Fischer)

    This electrifying performance is a revelation on several levels: the shamefully underrated Saint-Saëns at the peak of his Romantic powers, and the drop-dead gorgeous Julia Fischer nailing the finale with her impeccable technique, intelligence, and passion.

    It’s a mystery why the German-Slovak Fischer, only 29 in this recording, isn’t better known in the U.S. Perhaps it is because she is equally gifted as a violinist and pianist, and doesn’t fit into any neat category.

    The cameras capture many striking moments. One of my favorites is at around 3:30, when Fischer is not playing but reacting to the orchestra of young musicians surrounding her, who must have been thrilled by her presence. —Edward Miller

    “zombie girl,” Adrianne Lenker

    Adrianne Lenker writes her songs from a place we all know but inhabit only fleetingly. “Silence” is a good word for it, but Lenker supplies others: “heavy focus,” “emptiness.”

    In the “zombie girl” video, we catch glimpses of the secluded Berkshires cabin where she recorded her two newest projects, songs and instrumentals. A shaky camera walks us through the woods, zooming in on trees and purple sky.

    In the song, Lenker describes waking from a dream in which she’s visited by an ex-girlfriend. She interrogates the “emptiness” that follows her in the wake of the breakup. Perceptive listeners might hear Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the melody. Lenker shows us how to listen to our solitude, even the uncomfortable parts. —Will Powers

    “Solo? Repeat!” Anne Müller

    “Solo? Repeat!” is part of the album Heliopause, by Berlin-based cellist Anne Müller. Though classically trained, Müller crosses over into the pop realm, working with artists such as Nils Frahm and Agnes Obel.

    Heliopause is a solo album in the truest sense. It was composed, recorded, and produced by Müller. You can hear this in “Solo? Repeat!” as it loops and builds upon itself.

    The beginning is very vulnerable. You can hear the brushiness of the bow, and the tapping of Müller’s fingers.

    Then Müller begins playing a sequence of arpeggiated chords. Down in the depths, a beat comes in. On top, Müller floats a melody and adds layered harmonies.

    With each permutation, it gains momentum and, seemingly, confidence. Perhaps that is why it’s so satisfying to listen to. —Saskia Maxwell Keller

    “More Than My Hometown,” Morgan Wallen

    Authentic country music is about narrative — which is what Morgan Wallen, country’s mulleted wunderkind, serves up perfectly in “More Than My Hometown.”

    Morgan Wallen. (Photo John Shearer)

    Wallen’s small-town love interest wants adventure, bright lights, and paved avenues. He doesn’t: “You got a wild in your eyes that I just wasn’t born with/ I’m a same gas station cup of coffee in the morning.” He loves his woman more than most things — “More than a California sunset/ More than a beer when you ain’t 21 yet” — but his hook and heartbreaker: “This might be the last time I get to lay you down/ I can’t love you more than my home town.”

    Wallen’s guitar thrills; his voice soothes; his twang might take the cake as country’s thickest. But on the first, second, tenth listening, his lyrics are the showstopper: clever and light, with enough twists to justify that 11th replay, and enough longing to bring someone to mind. —Josephine de La Bruyère

    J.S. Bach, “Goldberg Variations,” recorded by Glenn Gould in 1955

    Glenn Gould, in the 1955 recording session for the “Goldberg Variations.” (Photo Fred Plaut)

    I first heard Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” — an aria, or theme, with 30 variations, commissioned by a German count with insomnia for a harpsichordist named Goldberg — at the New York City Ballet as a child. My parents had brought me to see Jerome Robbins’s ballet of the same name. At that performance, Bach’s composition was played on harpsichord — a keyboard instrument that cannot vary in volume — and, not surprisingly, my parents and I dozed off.

    As an adolescent, I bought an LP of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the variations, which offered an entirely different experience. I was hooked.

    The eccentric Gould, playing on piano — an instrument more expressive than the harpsichord — took a rarely recorded piece that resembled an étude in its simplicity, sped it up, pared it down (eliminating repeats), and turned it into something sublime. His playing can be as wistful as a birdsong, then trill with verve. —Howard Karren

    “Lingus,” Snarky Puppy

    In 2014, the Grammy award-winning ensemble Snarky Puppy filmed one of the most incredible music sessions of the decade — “Lingus.” The horn section, four keyboardists, three guitar players, two drummers, and bassist take you on a journey that is both planned and masterfully improvised.

    At the start, a dirty synth bass and hard-hitting beat lays down a foundation for the mountain of funk that ensues. And they don’t let you down.

    The band moves smoothly from a dragging funk section to an uplifting Latin groove. When the legendary organist Cory Henry delivers an out-of-this-world solo over the drumbeat, the beauty of live performance and improvisation is on full display. —Johnny Liesman

    CONCERT REVIEW

    The Joy of Watching A Far Cry

    Pieces by young women composers steal the spotlight from Mozart

    By

    A Far Cry may be one of the most democratic ensembles out there. This Boston-based orchestra is “self-conducted,” meaning that the players, who call themselves “criers,” take turns leading the group and make collective decisions on interpretation and repertoire.

    The group is relatively young, founded in 2007, but it has already made a name for itself, having received two Grammy nominations. There is also a Cape connection: Jae Cosmos Lee, concertmaster of the Cape Symphony, plays in the ensemble.

    The ensemble A Far Cry knows how to have fun. (Photo Yoon S. Byun)

    Last Saturday, “The Shape of Joy,” the third concert in their online season, was streamed. This prerecorded performance consisted of chamber music, played with masks worn and social distancing, in the beautiful Boston Athenaeum. You can watch it anytime on demand, at afarcry.org, with various streaming options from $8 and up.

    What’s streamed isn’t just a concert. There’s also an introduction by curator and violinist Megumi Stohs Lewis, interspersed interviews with the composers, and a live chat. Almost everything an audience needs to know is already there, making a reviewer’s job tougher.

    In her introduction, Lewis says that the concept for the concert was to evoke the feeling that the criers will have when they are able to play music, unencumbered, again. That is: pure joy.

    But in music, as in life, joy is rarely uncomplicated. It is almost always tinged with something else. The pieces on the program are joyful, to be sure, but they are also profound.

    First on the program was “Breathing Sunlight,” a duet for violin and cello by Akshaya Avril Tucker. It is inspired by Indian classical music.

    Robyn Bollinger plays the initial violin melody beautifully. It is tempting to call her sound plaintive, not joyful, but is that coming from a Western sensibility? After all, the piece has a variety of global influences. Perhaps contemplative is a better word.

    The violin oscillates between the same note played on adjacent strings, which becomes a motif in the piece, and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer joins in with plucked notes.

    “Breathing Sunlight” is filled with harmonics and dissonances between neighborly notes. There are slides that approach each other but don’t quite meet. At times, they almost sound like a plane taking off.

    The middle of the piece is faster and more energetic. But right after it reaches its peak, it returns to the contemplative mood of the beginning. Tucker says in the program notes that the piece, dedicated to her grandfather, is “about moments spent with those who will leave us soon.”

    Next is “Limestone & Felt,” a duet for cello and viola by Caroline Shaw, inspired by the soft and hard surfaces of limestone churches. It begins with Bartók pizzicatos, which are notes plucked so hard, they produce a snapping sound.

    Violist Jason Fischer and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer are perfectly in sync. Their concentration is so intense that they often don’t look up. But the communication is still there. The musicians also slap their instruments, for a percussive sound.

    The bowed section of the piece uses a lot of warm open strings. If you close your eyes, it sounds almost like a string quartet, even though there are only two players.

    The piece is perfect for the Athenaeum space. At the end, Fischer plays a series of furious pizzicato notes. They sound like someone trying to get in the last words in an argument. They end abruptly, echo, and fade.

    The last piece on the program, Mozart’s String Quintet No. 1 in B-Flat Major, was composed when he was only 17, in 1773. It was the first of his six viola quintets — that is, works for string quartet plus a second viola.

    Surprisingly, it is the least interesting piece on the program, though well played. It was also the most carefree and overtly joyful. In the first movement, cellist Loewi Lin introduces brief moments of tension and darkness, but these resolve quickly. Violinist Jesse Irons’s silvery tone was especially beautiful in the second movement.

    The greatest joy from the program, however, was to hear two pieces by young, female composers, who not only speak with insight and authority in their interviews, but whose work stands up to none other than Mozart.

    On Sunday, Nov. 29, at 7 p.m., violinist Jae Cosmos Lee and violist Jason Fisher will be sharing their favorite A Far Cry recordings in “Thanksgiving With a Far Cry,” a program on WCRB 99.5.

    MUSIC MATTERS

    The Cape Youth Orchestra Plays On

    One local ensemble persists in supporting the next generation of musicians

    By

    A dozen or so students watch, intently, as Paige Wayner, a flutist in the Cape Youth Orchestra, prepares to play Ernest Bloch’s Suite Modale in a master class for Zachary Sheets, principal flutist of the Cape Symphony.

    “Before you play, is there anything specific that you want to focus on or improve?” asks Sheets.

    “The dynamics,” answers Wayner, “and how to have more resonance and presence.”

    “That is kind of hard over Zoom, but we will do our best,” says Sheets.

    Since September, the musicians of the Cape Youth Orchestra have been meeting on Saturday mornings, via Zoom. Usually, they spend the session learning about music history and theory. Last week’s master class was a special event, and they are planning more of them in the coming months.

    Since the pandemic hit, the Cape Youth Orchestra has been meeting virtually on Saturday mornings. (Photo Blackmore Photography)

    “If we can’t have them playing together, the next best thing is to make them smarter, more informed, and help them develop their musicianship,” says conductor Mark Miller.

    Miller, who also conducts the Boston Youth Symphony Repertory Orchestra, took on the Cape position just last year. At the time, the orchestra had “melted away to almost nothing,” but he built it up, and they had a successful concert in January. Then the pandemic hit.

    “It was as if you just started the campfire and then there was a downpour,” he says.

    In spite of this, the Youth Orchestra currently has 15 members, mostly high school students, from all over the Cape. And they show up, week in and week out.

    “I know how hard it is to have kids stare at a screen all week, and then stare at a screen on a Saturday,” says Miller. But there’s something that keeps drawing them back.

    The Cape Youth Orchestra performs, all together, back when Covid wasn’t an issue. (Photo Blackmore Photography)

    The Youth Orchestra musicians, unfortunately, cannot play together over Zoom because of delays — it’s impossible to synchronize the sound coming from the different players. They are planning, however, to work towards a multitrack recording using the Soundtrap system.

    Numerous professional orchestras have been doing this, but staying together, and staying in tune, are challenging when multitracking, even for seasoned musicians. “Things that are effortless in the presence of other people suddenly become very difficult,” says Miller.

    Full disclosure: I was a member of the Cape Youth Symphony when I was in high school. It is probably one of the reasons why I stuck with music (I am a cellist and musicologist). It was so important to have that outlet, and encouragement, in a place that is fairly musically isolated like Cape Cod.

    For young musicians right now, that need is even greater.

    Cellist Paul Oggier during a performance, pre-Covid, with the Cape Youth Orchestra. (Photo Blackmore Photography)

    “It’s old saws, but there is truth to the things you hear about teamwork, repetition, memory, and academic skills,” says Miller. “It’s pretty much decided science that pursuing music is very good for people.”

    Furthermore, being in the orchestra “puts them in touch with people who play as well as or better than they do,” notes Miller. “People who are as weird as they are, the band geeks, who care about this thing that no one around them understands. They are around their own people … I suspect we have saved some lives.”

    With musical organizations like the Metropolitan Opera on furlough, and musicians around the world losing their incomes, the future of live music hangs in the balance. “By keeping some energy in this,” says Miller, “we are trying to keep something going in an art form that is now fragile.”

    And to kids thinking about pursuing music right now, Miller says, “Don’t give up. It’s not all over. Don’t lose time.”

    NATIVE TALENT

    Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor Won’t Let Covid Slow Him Down

    A Renaissance man from Mashpee and the Bronx

    By

    “I grew up in both the Bronx and Mashpee,” says Morgan James Peters, also known as Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor, in his recording studio, Polyphonic Studios, in Buzzards Bay. “My mom’s family was from Barbados, and my dad’s family was Mashpee Wampanoag.”

    Mwalim might be one of the most interesting people to regularly cross the Bourne Bridge. A violist, pianist, singer, and percussionist, he is a founding member of the GroovaLottos, the Grammy-nominated soul-funk-blues band that played downstairs at the Governor Bradford in Provincetown all summer in 2019. Among the other hats he wears: playwright, actor, storyteller, Freemason, professor, and human rights advocate.

    He started playing the viola at age 10. As a teenager, he played at Carnegie Hall with the Bronx Borough-wide Orchestra. His grandfather was his first piano teacher. “He was trained as a concert pianist,” says Mwalim, “but he got to this country and found there was no such thing as a black concert pianist, so he started leading a jazz band, and started doing arranging.” Mwalim went on to study piano with jazz legend Barry Harris.

    Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor stands in front of the door to his office at Polyphonic Studios in Buzzards Bay. (Photo Saskia Maxwell Keller)

    He first became interested in record production at the age of 16. “Foreshadowing,” Mwalim says theatrically of his precocious ambitions. “To be honest, the thing that really made me first interested in having a recording studio was an episode of The Brady Bunch. When you’re a kid and you’re listening to the radio, you think the band is in the studio performing.”

    Around this time, he asked to sit in on recording session at Planet Studio NYC in Manhattan. He happened to have lugged along his viola case. “They were doing string parts,” says Mwalim. “The guy looks at me and says, ‘Do you play that thing?’ I thought it was a weird question. I felt like saying, ‘Nah, I just carry it to look cool.’ ”

    The folks at Planet had him do some multitrack recording. “It was the first time I heard myself playing against myself,” says Mwalim. “Turns out, that was a recording session with a staff producer for [the record label] EMI. That technically made me one of the youngest session players in EMI history.”

    Mwalim received a scholarship to study music and composition at Boston University. While there, he was increasingly drawn to film and theater, specifically immersive theater. After graduating from B.U., he studied playwrighting at the New African Company. He traversed the Boston and New York City performing arts scenes before returning to Mashpee in 2002, after the birth of his son.

    All of these experiences shaped his artistic identity. “Coming out of classical and symphonic traditions allowed me to recognize parallels, see where lines crossed,” he says. “For example, a lot of people don’t think about how funky Bach was. Bach and Telemann, they were basically playing funk. That’s what fugues and themes and variation are.”

    In 2009, Mwalim founded the GroovaLottos with drummer Eddie Ray Johnson, who died just this year. “We locked immediately, musically, in terms of our sense of humor,” says Mwalim. The group’s music is influenced by funk, rhythm and blues, electronic dance music, hip hop, and symphonic music.

    The idea to start Polyphonic Studios came to him last September. Because its opening coincided with the pandemic shutdown, Polyphonic first focused on post-production work and mixing. Now, it’s allowing in-person recording, with proper precautions. “Recording studios, in general, see home recording as the enemy, and we don’t,” says Mwalim. “We see it as an ally.”

    For Mwalim, human rights and the performing arts have always gone hand in hand. “I came to recognize that the Cape, when it came to diversity and inclusion, was, and still is, way behind the rest of the country,” says Mwalim. “I went to one audition where they stopped me at the door: ‘We don’t have any black roles.’ They were doing Brigadoon.” He also says he has experienced casual racism when busking around the Cape.

    Mwalim currently teaches creative writing at UMass Dartmouth, hence the “Professor” in his stage name. He was also chair of the black studies department there for five years. He campaigned to change the department’s name from “African and African-American studies” to “black studies,” after surveying his students.

    Even that’s not enough to keep him busy: he has been a member of the Barnstable County Human Rights Advisory Commission since last January. “I’ve always been interested in human rights, equity, social justice,” says Mwalim. “It’s just kind of ingrained. It has always been an interest of mine.”

    Mwalim is featured in a short YouTube video promoting the Human Rights Commission, which is currently recruiting new members. It’s online here: youtube.com/watch?v=Zl_tWvU6Ado.

    ARTISTS

    A Show of Bill Evaul’s ‘Expressions of Life’

    The Cape Cod Museum of Art puts on a retrospective

    By

    “That’s the life force we get from being present in the moment, experiencing what is happening around us,” says Bill Evaul in his North Truro home, leaning forward in an elegant, antique armchair, his eyes alive with excitement. “The job of the artist is to let that energy flow through them without messing it up. If I can capture this in some way, that’s a big success.”

    Artist Bill Evaul plays the trumpet, guitar, and bass with a number of bands on the Outer Cape. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    Perhaps nowhere in Evaul’s work is this life force more evident than in his many studies of musicians performing and, more recently, dancers jiving to their tunes. A musician himself, Evaul says that when he listens to music, he can see, hear, and feel the raw energy emanating from the performance. His art based on music, he says, makes up “the largest body of work based on one subject that I have.”

    The space where music and art intersect has been an inspiration for Evaul since he was a young boy. Growing up first in Philadelphia, then in South Jersey, he and his sisters were often taken by his mom to museums. “I remember when I was maybe five or six years old and she took me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” Evaul says. “As we were leaving, I saw Picasso’s Three Musicians from the landing on the grand staircase. I was transfixed. My mother said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ but I couldn’t move. That’s when she realized that I loved art.”

    Now, the Cape Cod Museum of Art is celebrating Evaul’s artwork on the theme of music and movement with the retrospective exhibit “Song and Dance: Expressions from Life.” On view through Nov. 30, the show includes sketches, oil paintings, and Evaul’s renowned white line prints.

    Biggie, a portrait of the rapper Biggie Smalls, was painted by Evaul in 2005 and put away for 15 years. He added some final touches to it for the exhibit “Song and Dance” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. (Photo courtesy Bill Evaul)

    Each one of the white line prints is based on a number of sketches and paintings. Everywhere he goes, he fills sketchbooks with his impressions of “life as it unfolds before my eyes,” a practice he developed as a young artist inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Evaul stores his sketches and cutout images in what he calls his “morgue,” i.e., filing cabinets and boxes, until the right time comes along.

    Working from a vision or dream, Evaul will use the sketches to realize what he sees in his mind’s eye. “When I have a vision, the formal decisions have already been made,” he says. “I have all the laws of painting inside me. I don’t have to think about them. I just feel them and know them.”

    Just as Evaul is inspired by the energy of one captured moment, he likes to paint “as much as I can in one sitting,” he says. “When you work fast, your strokes are freer. So, you get a fresher, more spontaneous result.” One of the paintings in the Cape Cod Museum show, Club Dancers, was done in a fury of creativity during the days leading up to the opening. “The paint on it is still wet,” Evaul adds with a smile.

    He has been part of the Provincetown art community since the early ’70s. As a former director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, gallerist, educator, local musician (performing with the Broke Brothers at the Old Colony), and, together with his wife, Skipper Swords Evaul, owner of the Moorlands Inn, a North Truro bed and breakfast, his generosity of spirit and support of the creative endeavors of others is well known.

    Chorus Line (Dancing Draggers), an oil on canvas by Bill Evaul, is a tribute to Provincetown’s drag queens. (Photo courtesy Bill Evaul)

    As Evaul sees it, he’s just giving back what he has received. After dropping out of Syracuse University, where he was supposed to be pre-med but ended up spending all his time studying art, Evaul joined a friend on a night drive “to see the sun rise in Provincetown.” There, he met artist Ron Shuebrook, who got him to apply to the Fine Arts Work Center’s then-brand-new fellowship program. Evaul was accepted, spent two years as a fellow (from 1970 to 1972), and was hooked on the Outer Cape.

    In those days, money mattered less than community, he says, and young artists were welcomed by those more established. Evaul remembers invites to the home of Tony Vevers and Elspeth Halvorsen, and he counts Myron Stout; Fritz Bultman and his wife, Jeanne; Jim Forsberg; and Robert Motherwell among those who supported him.

    “It’s important to be there in your life, and to be receptive to the energy that’s all around you. That energy comes from other people, comes from situations, from nature, from the universe,” Evaul says. “You just have to be there for it, welcome it, and take it in without screwing up as much as possible.”

    Club Dancers is a last-minute addition by Bill Evaul to his Cape Cod Museum show. (Photo courtesy Bill Evaul)

    Top Billing

    The event: “Song and Dance: Expressions of Life,” an exhibit of artwork by Bill Evaul

    The time: Through Nov. 30, Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.; meet the artist, Thursday, Oct. 1 (and Nov. 5), 3 to 7 p.m.

    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis

    The cost: $10; seniors, 62-plus, $8; students, 19-plus with ID, and teenagers, 13-18, $7; children, 12 or under, free; meet the artist Thursdays: all day free

    LIVE MUSIC

    Thea Hopkins Creates Her Own Americana

    Her stark lyrics draw on imagist poetry

    By

    This Friday, singer-songwriter Thea Hopkins will be performing on the Payomet Performing Arts Center’s Drive-in stage, offering the rare pleasure, these days, of experiencing a live musician in concert on the Cape, especially one of such high caliber.

    “I grew up in the small town of Shrewsbury, Mass.,” says Hopkins. “I spent my summers at my grandfather’s house in Martha’s Vineyard, then moved to the suburbs of Worcester, which was all woods and beautiful.”

    Hopkins started writing poetry at a young age. Her mother, a commercial artist, was supportive of her artistic endeavors and had a vast collection of opera and musical theater records.

    “I was a strange little kid,” she says. “My favorite singer at the age of eight was Édith Piaf. I was really invested in listening to the opera Carmen when I was seven. I was in my own little world.” She played the violin in school, but a career in music wasn’t really on her radar.

    Thea Hopkins will perform live at the Payomet Drive-in on Friday. (Photo Ryuji Suzuki)

    “For everybody, there are turns of events that propel you in a particular direction,” says Hopkins. “I thought that, by the age of 30, I would have my doctorate in psychology and be a therapist. That was really what I was focused on. But when I was 20, I lost my best friend. That shifted my world dramatically. I picked up the guitar, because I had to find a way of expressing my loss.”

    Hopkins attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied composition. After that, she took a break from music and went into the corporate world. When the company she was working for was bought out, “it was one of those turning points,” she says. Taking a leap of faith, she decided to record her first album, Birds of Mystery. That was about 20 years ago.

    “I was very fortunate that Peter, Paul, and Mary came across ‘Jesus Is on the Wire,’ a song I wrote about Matthew Shepard, and they liked it enough to record it,” says Hopkins. They actually recorded it twice: first in 2004, then in 2010, with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. “I thought, maybe, this is a sign,” says Hopkins. “I’m going to do what I love for the rest of my life.”

    “Jesus Is on the Wire” begins with the lyrics “Run-down church, red clay/ River covered in a smoky haze.” The smoky timbre of Hopkins’s alto voice complements the words, while at the same time retains a bell-like clarity that brings out their assonance and sparseness. At the high point of the song, Hopkins’s blunt lyrics are heartrending: “They said that he slept with guys/ They said that he was gonna die.”

    “I love a lot of imagist poetry,” says Hopkins. “I love William Carlos Williams, I love Emily Dickinson, but I appreciate a lot of different writers. I was reading some John Steinbeck short stories last weekend. Really, whatever piques my interest. I love Leonard Cohen. He is one of my literary, musical heroes. I like the economical use of words. I try to keep things really concentrated.”

    When writing her songs, Hopkins says, sometimes they come together immediately, while at other times, disembodied melodies or lyrics float around until they are united. “I tend to like writing and rewriting,” she says. “I find that that’s where you really know when a song is completed, because there is a sense of closure.”

    Hopkins calls her music “red roots Americana” — Americana encompassing blues, country, folk, and bluegrass, and “red roots” for her Native American ancestry. “I’m a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe,” says Hopkins. “I am also Nottoway Iroquois, African American, Irish, and Portuguese.”

    Several of Hopkins’s songs are about her indigenous heritage, including “Tamson Weeks,” which is about her great-great-aunt, a medicine woman. And she doesn’t shy away from social issues. Her song “The Ghost of Emmett Till,” about the black teenager lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman, on her 2018 album, Love Come Down, contains a lyric that’s all too pertinent right now: “You can get away with murder, in this country still/ If the boy looks like Emmett Till.”

    While Hopkins has collaborated with a number of celebrated musicians in her albums, including Noel Paul Stookey — the Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary — and violinist Mimi Rabson of the Really Eclectic String Quartet, she will be performing solo at Payomet, offering an intimate live experience.

    “I will be doing some songs about my indigenous background, but I will also be doing some covers and songs that I happen to love,” she says, including those by Johnny Cash, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. “There will be some works in progress,” she adds. “And I’ll be doing at least one new song.”

    Red Roots Americana

    The event: Thea Hopkins live in concert

    The time: Friday, Sept. 18, at 6 p.m.

    The place: Payomet Performing Arts Center’s Ballfield Drive-in, Highlands Center, 29 Old Dewline Road, Truro

    The cost: Pay what you can, $25-$55, in advance at payomet.org

    BACH TO BASICS

    Get Ready to Baroque and Roll

    Music of the 18th century thrives in Provincetown

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Boston may be a mecca for it, but there is authentic Baroque music happening right here on the Outer Cape.

    Great Music on Sundays @5 is presenting two virtual “Beauty of Baroque” concerts on Aug. 16 and 30. The Aug. 16 concert will be music for trumpet and soprano, with Greg Gettel, Elise Groves, and Frederick Jodry. The Aug. 30 concert will be flute music by the Bach family, with Eric Maul and Jodry. Both can be streamed for free at ptownmusic.com.

    John Thomas, producer of Great Music on Sundays @5, says that the Baroque concerts, alongside the program’s Broadway events, are among its most popular. Spearheaded by Jodry, a harpsichordist, they have been happening since 2012.

    Frederick Jodry, Elise Groves, and Greg Gettel will perform for Great Music on Sundays @5 on Aug. 16. (Photo courtesy John Thomas)

    Though the concerts have usually taken place before a live audience in the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown, they’ll be filmed this season at the Provincetown Theater. In past concerts, musicians used historical instruments, but this year, they’re playing on modern ones: piano, modern trumpet, and modern flute.

    The Baroque period, roughly spanning from 1600 to 1750, was the heyday of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi. The biggest misconception about Baroque music is that it’s stuffy. It’s quite the opposite. Baroque is similar to pop music, in terms of its repetition and satisfying harmonies. During the counterculture movement of the 1960s and ’70s, an early music revival sparked renewed interest in performances of Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval music, often on historical instruments.

    Jodry got hooked on the harpsichord while in high school in the Midwest. His school was doing a production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and he thought the instrument would add ambience, so he borrowed one from a local university. “I immediately had an interesting, odd attraction to the sound,” he says. He went on to study the harpsichord at the New England Conservatory and found that “around Boston, early music is normal and prolific.”

    Jodry believes that a historic locale such as Provincetown is well suited for playing Baroque music. Though the U.U. church was built about a century after Bach, it still has an antique feeling. “There were people living in Provincetown during Bach’s lifetime,” he says.

    Groves, a Boston-based soprano who sings with the Handel and Haydn Society, says that Provincetown audiences are very receptive to Baroque music. She sees the value in performing it with modern instruments. “For so many of us, this is our first introduction to Baroque music,” she says. “It’s only later that we discover the joys of gut strings and early brass.”

    Maul usually performs on the modern flute, but his approach will be different for the Baroque repertoire. “If you play Bach the same way you play Beethoven, you are going to butcher it,” he says. “I think of Baroque music as softer, more like velvet.”

    He’s most looking forward to playing a sonata by Frederick the Great, who, in addition to being king of Prussia, was not a bad composer, having studied with C.P.E. Bach. Frederick was believed to have been gay and rumored to have taken Voltaire as a lover. “What I love about the sonata,” says Maul, “is it opens with a sicilienne, which was originally a very feminine song style.”

    Roxanne Layton and her trusty recorder. (Photo courtesy Roxanne Layton)

    Roxanne Layton isn’t slated to play in the “Beauty of Baroque” concerts this year, but she remains Provincetown’s queen of Baroque music. Layton started playing the recorder at six years old, initially Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, but she soon branched out into jazz and pop. She frequently performs with Zoë Lewis, and recently appeared on “Wake Up! In Provincetown” playing Vivaldi, among other things.

    She also tours with Mannheim Steamroller, the New Age, Baroque-inspired band whose name comes from a type of crescendo originating in 18th-century Germany.

    Layton says the way she joined the group was kismet. She was working at Von Huene Workshop in Brookline making recorders. Listening to the radio one day, she called in and won tickets to a Mannheim Steamroller concert that evening. Coincidentally, the trumpet player from the band wandered into the shop 20 minutes later and, after hearing she had won tickets, invited her to his rehearsal.

    One thing led to another, and she was allowed backstage after the concert, where she met the group’s founder, Chip Davis. After listening to a recording of her senior recital at New England Conservatory, he invited her to play Baroque sonatas on his next CD. “This was all within 24 hours of winning tickets,” Layton says.

    What could be more modern? Baroque, as Layton puts it, is “18th-century rock ’n’ roll.”

    ARTS DURING COVID

    Chamber Music Ensembles Attune to the Pandemic

    Breathing together, with and without a mask

    By

    Could this be a new age for chamber music? With small ensembles and limited audiences, chamber music certainly seems more Covid-friendly than, say, Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.” But what are the logistics of performing chamber music right now, and how are Cape ensembles adapting?

    Battle of the Instruments

    Greek mythology tells of a musical contest between the god Apollo, who played the lyre, and the satyr Marsyas, who played the pipes. Apollo won because of a few party tricks: unlike his hairy opponent, he could play upside down, even while singing — he didn’t need his mouth to play.

    This story captured the Renaissance imagination, especially the idea of a division between elegant string instruments and lowly wind instruments. And it has some added relevance today. When it comes to Covid, not all instruments are equal. Studies show that singing and playing wind instruments may expel more of the virus. These musicians also cannot perform while wearing a mask.

    That is why Gov. Baker’s current guidelines, which allow outdoor performances only, require singers and wind players to maintain more distance during a concert than string players and other instrumentalists. Singers and wind players must stay 10 feet apart and 25 feet from the audience, while everyone else must clear only the standard six-foot separation.

    Breathing Together

    Matthew Scinto, conductor of the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, says that higher expenses preclude live outdoor performances for his ensemble. Between finding an outdoor venue with enough cover — wooden string instruments do not like the rain — and hiring a sound engineer for amplification, it’s simply not feasible.

    Right now, “If you do a chamber music concert, it’s going to be virtual,” Scinto says. And that is indeed what his group is planning for late September. A reduced ensemble of about 10 string players will rehearse on Cape Cod and shoot a concert at Yarmouth’s New Church.

    The Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra rehearses in the days before masks and social distancing. (Photo Jean Kirby)

    Scinto emphasizes that “an orchestra is not a string quartet.” You can’t round up four orchestral players and expect them to mesh perfectly, since chamber music requires hours of rehearsal and getting to know each other closely. This is “subtle stuff for most listeners.”

    One challenge Scinto foresees is how the musicians will play with masks. “Such an important part of string playing is breathing together,” he says.

    Musical Communication

    Craig Combs, artistic director of Chamber Music for the Outer Cape, which is based at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, is similarly planning a live-stream concert for Aug. 20.

    It will consist of works by Fauré, Copland, and William Grant Still played by violinist Jeffrey Thurston; theater pieces performed by singer Halcyon Hurst; and Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, performed by Combs on piano.

    Combs says he hesitated to include a singer, as they “expel the virus more efficiently.” But all the instrumentalists will wear masks, and the singer will be positioned to face the double doors leading outside. Even so, “It’s quite difficult right now to rehearse,” he says.

    While a live-stream concert scratches a certain itch, it is not the same as an in-person performance. “In chamber music there is communication,” Combs says. “And when you have an audience, it is so much more interesting. You get feedback. You hear someone take a breath during a particularly beautiful passage. Normally, we are not very far from the audience, maybe five feet. They are right there with us — they are hearing us breathe.”

    Another Provincetown series offering chamber music is Great Music on Sundays @5, which traditionally had its spring-to-fall season at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House. On Aug. 16 and 30, the series will present live-stream concerts of baroque music performed by Greg Gettel on trumpet, soprano Elise Groves, Frederick Jodry on clavier, and Eric Maul on flute.

    A Question of Intimacy

    The Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, which brings world-class musicians to Wellfleet and around the Cape every August, announced they would be going virtual back in May.

    Jon Nakamatsu (left) and Jon Manasse of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival. (Photo courtesy Jon Manasse)

    Artistic directors Jon Manasse and Jon Nakamatsu will narrate three hour-long programs of archived performances from the festival. These will be released on the first three Tuesdays of August. There will also be a video event with memories, anecdotes, and musical clips by artists who have graced their stage.

    Originally, there was going to be a live recording session with musicians in New York City, but travel restrictions have made it unfeasible for the time being. Nakamatsu, who is from California, would have to quarantine for two weeks.

    “The basic tenet of chamber music is that it is intimate,” says Manasse. Though this can be construed as a positive, with fewer people, there is also an element of closeness that is currently unachievable.

    “If you’re reviewing concerts now, and they only allow 10 people in the audience, you can write ‘to a sold-out crowd,’ or ‘a packed hall,’ ” Manasse jokes.

    Manasse, who’s a clarinetist, says he played in a socially distant concert in Colorado in June, separated from his colleagues by plexiglass. “The string players were wearing masks, and we realized that there is so much subtle nuance to facial gestures,” he says. “Just the littlest thing can communicate direction, color, feeling, ensemble.”

    Nakamatsu agrees that communication in chamber music is subtle and mysterious, and he wonders how it will be affected by the pandemic. “When your artistic sense is so compatible and so attuned to each other, that goes beyond the mechanics of it,” he says. “It’s an aesthetic, almost spiritual thing.”

    PHASED AND CONFUSED

    Local Performers Are in the Dark on Reopening Rules

    Towns diverge on indoor and outdoor guidelines

    By

    Currently in Massachusetts, you can dine indoors at a restaurant, you can attend church and even sing there, but you’re still not officially permitted to attend an outdoor performance of any kind.

    Over the past month, Outer Cape performers, musicians, and restaurant owners have been confused about the rules for outdoor entertainment. Restaurants opened for outdoor seating on June 8 and indoor seating on June 22.

    The Pearl in Wellfleet canceled its outdoor happy-hour series after a false start with a concert by Jordan Renzi on June 13. (Management at Pearl could not be reached for comment.) Stewart’s Seafood Restaurant & Tavern in Eastham canceled scheduled outdoor gigs by the Grab Brothers and Steve Morgan and the Kingfish on June 25 and 27, respectively. According to its website, Stewart’s was advised by the Eastham Board of Health that live entertainment was not permitted. Yet Chapin’s Fish & Chips and Beach Bar in Dennis Port was still doing live music seven days a week when this article went to press.

    Jon Richardson and Peter Donnelly live-streaming from a private garden last Sunday. (Photo courtesy Live From Provincetown)

    One reason for the confusion is that Gov. Charlie Baker’s reopening guidelines are vague regarding the arts. Phase two guidelines for restaurants make no mention of entertainment. Arts and entertainment are under phase three; but the rules pertain to indoor venues like concert halls or theaters, not the performers themselves.

    Connecticut’s reopening guidelines, by contrast, allow outdoor performances at restaurants, specifying that performers maintain 12 feet of social distance.

    Massachusetts guidelines leave the specifics to be determined by local boards of health. As of June 27, Eastham’s coronavirus information page still had a diagram suggesting that outdoor performances were allowed in phase two.

    Steve Katsurinis, chair of the Provincetown Board of Health, told the Independent that live performances, whether indoor or outdoor, are not allowed by the state until phase three, which could begin as soon as July 6. But a local order prohibits indoor performances altogether in Provincetown, on top of the state advisory. This does not appear to be the case in the other three Outer Cape towns.

    Katsurinis said outdoor performances pose fewer risks than indoor ones, because they allow greater air circulation. “Situations where someone is talking or singing to the audience and the audience is laughing in response are particularly dangerous,” he said, citing a Centers for Disease Control study on a choir in Washington. “However, outdoor entertainment has its own challenges with regard to licensing and noise.”

    Indeed, there may be differences in infection risk between vocal and purely instrumental performances.

    Larry Grab, of the Grab Brothers, spoke with the Independent before his performance at Stewart’s in Eastham was canceled.

    “It’s like a symbiotic relationship between musicians and restaurants,” he said, comparing their mutual survival to the stingray and hogfish. Live music attracts restaurant-goers; freelance musicians get a venue. Grab has been brainstorming safer ways to perform, including the possible wearing of a wireless microphone under a plastic face shield.

    Jonathan Hawkins, who produces the virtual programming source Live From Provincetown, is working with the Provincetown Commons, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, and the Palette Fund to create the Provincetown Performing Arts Fund, to benefit performers who have lost their livelihoods. To raise money, he is planning several private outdoor concerts in people’s back yards with a handful of guests — allowed under state guidelines.

    Mackenzie Miller bends over backwards performing to a laptop screen in an empty Pilgrim House in Provincetown. (Photo Austin Tyler)

    “I have no idea what is going on now, or what will be allowed 10 days or a month from now,” said Jon Richardson, who is working with Hawkins on the fund. “The only comfort I have in that terrible feeling of uncertainty is that nobody else knows, either.” While he feels the Provincetown Board of Health has done a good job, the state has left everyone guessing.

    Ken Horgan, general manager of Pilgrim House in Provincetown, said he wishes performers and entertainment venues were getting the same level of guidance as restaurants and retail stores. He suggests that one reason for the lack of attention could be that performers are not unionized and don’t have an organized voice.

    “The town seems to be a little more unsure about what is ‘entertainment,’ ” Horgan said. “For example, is a drag queen lip-syncing ‘live entertainment’? Is someone playing the piano and not singing ‘live entertainment’?” Performances, with precautions taken, are not fundamentally more dangerous than eating out: “One of the advantages of entertainment is that the audience member is usually masked, while restaurant-goers are unmasked,” said Horgan.

    “Entertainment is such an integral part of the fabric of Provincetown culture,” said drag queen Mackenzie Miller. “While you do need to sing your heart out, you can do it with masks,” she said, also describing an idea to perform in a plexiglass box at Pilgrim House. “It may be smaller crowds, but our voices are just as loud.”

    MUSIC

    Something New From the B.J.Q.

    Bert Jackson and his jazz quartet release a soulful new album

    By

    One day a few years back, during a particularly snowy winter, jazz musician Bert Jackson sat on the couch in his Brewster home, picked up his guitar, and composed a song. A Latin-flavored instrumental in a minor key, “Light of the Son” was a blending of happiness and sadness, a remembrance of the joy of what once was and the regret for what is no longer.

    The piece came straight out of Jackson’s sorrow, a way of working through the feelings he had after learning that the son of a close friend had died from a drug overdose.

    Bert Jackson strums his guitar on the porch of the Red Inn in Provincetown, where he and his jazz quartet have played Sunday brunch for years. (Photo courtesy Bert Jackson]

    “I’d known the kid since he was eight, so it was a particularly challenging loss,” says Jackson. “This song sort of fell out as I was working things out.”

    Today, “Light of the Son” is the opening and title cut from the newly released album by the Bert Jackson Quartet, or B.J.Q., which features Jackson on guitar, Paul Lesniak on alto and tenor sax, Roe Osborn on bass, and Kareem Sanjaghi on drums. The album, the band’s second release (the first was Imaginary Journey in 2013), also includes guest appearances by Brazilian jazz pianist Fabiano DeCastro on two of the cuts. It’s available for download at bertland.com.

    “The principal recording of this was done a couple of years ago. It’s just taken me a while to get the odds and ends wrapped up,” Jackson says.

    Recorded at Brick Hill Studios in Orleans, the album was, with the exception of DeCastro’s contributions, done without any overdubbing.

    “We did multiple takes, but it was all of us in the studio, and that’s an important thing for jazz, because you react to each other,” says Jackson, noting that the aim was to come as close as they could to a live performance. “If you went to hear us play Sunday jazz brunch at the Red Inn in Provincetown, that’s what you’d hear,” says Jackson of their steady gig for the past eight years. “We wanted to capture that.”

    The live feel of the album is particularly welcome during these days of social distancing and self-isolation, when going out to a concert or club is not an option. During this time, Jackson has also been sharing his music through his Covid-19 project, a series of music videos he’s been creating weekly. They can be viewed on his bertland.com website.

    Light of the Son is the Bert Jackson Quartet’s newest album, released in April. (Photo Koa Media Group)

    A mix of standards and original material, Light of the Son includes the jazz classics “Willow Weep for Me,” “Nica’s Dream,” “September in the Rain,” “Tangerine,” and “Summertime.” The band did its own arranging, which resulted in some interesting touches, such as the intro to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” that Sanjaghi uses to kick off “Summertime.”

    Original songs include Osborn’s “Just the Wine Talking” and “More Than I Can Chew,” two numbers with a Mose Allison feel.

    Jackson contributed three tunes to the album. One, the Brazilian jazz number “Nunca Neva No Rio” (“It Never Snows in Rio”), also written during that hard winter, was inspired by Jackson’s daydream of being in a more temperate clime. Another, “Soul Plane Blues,” which features Jackson on vocals, was written by him close to 40 years ago.

    “It’s a blues song about where music comes from,” Jackson says. “Does it come from the soul plane? How does it come to us and how does it come into our lives?”

    Then, of course, there’s “Light of the Son.” The song, spurred by the opioid epidemic and created to bring comfort to those who have lost loved ones, is a salve to the soul for those in mourning and for everyone living now in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

    “It’s kind of meant to be more hopeful,” Jackson says. “We may have lost these people, but we have the memory of the fact that they were here and they were part of our lives. And the fact that they’re gone doesn’t mean they’re not a part of our lives anymore, because they’re part of our lives inside.”

    this week

    Arts Briefs & Listings for November 14 through 20

    exhibitions, music, theater, and other happenings on the Outer Cape this week

    By

    BRIEFS

    Badland Film’s a Fund-raiser for HOW and PFS
    It’s an interesting idea for a Western: a bounty hunter who goes after Confederate war criminals. Badland, a feature film starring Kevin Makely, Mira Sorvino, Bruce Dern, Wes Studi, and James Russo, will be preview-screened on Saturday, Nov. 16, at 1 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 17, at 6:30 p.m. at the Waters Edge Cinema at 237 Commercial St. (Whaler’s Wharf, 2nd floor) in Provincetown. Tickets are $20 at the box office or watersedgecinema.org, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Helping Our Women and the Provincetown Film Society.

    Art From Debris Enlivens Local Bounty Banquet

    The Center for Coastal Studies is hosting a fund-raiser for its Ghost Gear Recovery Project on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at CCS and St. Peter’s Hall. This sculpture by Orly Genger, titled “Red, Yellow, and Blue,” was installed in Madison Square Park in New York City about seven years ago. It was created from rope recovered from the commercial lobster fishery. (Photo courtesy Laura Ludwig)

    The Center for Coastal Studies will host a Local Bounty Banquet on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 5 p.m. (social hour at CCS, 5 Holway Ave. in Provincetown) and 6 p.m. (banquet at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church, 11 Prince St. in Provincetown). The event is a fund-raiser for the Ghost Gear Recovery Project, with the aim of raising matching funds in support of an ongoing effort to recover lost, abandoned, or discarded fishing gear from the ocean.

    At the banquet there will be a buffet, a presentation on the Derelict Fishing Gear Recovery Project, music by special guests, and an exhibit of artwork featuring marine debris contributed by diverse artists.

    Tickets are $100, $90 for CCS members at coastalstudies.org. At the website, click “Connect and Learn” and then “Special Events.” Also available are banquet T-shirts whether you attend or not.

    Critchley Unveils Revised Feminist Mayflower Compact
    As part of his ongoing project “Democracy of the Land,” in tandem with Provincetown 400, local artist Jay Critchley unveiled a pop-up installation now on display at the Provincetown Public Library of his revised and illustrated Mayflower Compact with all women signers, including Cher, Rosa Parks, Gertrude Stein, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sojourner Truth. The original was signed in 1620, almost 400 years ago. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    Radio Play Version of It’s a Wonderful Life to Open at Provincetown Theater
    Starting Thursday, Nov. 21, and running through Sunday, Dec. 8, the Provincetown Theater will feature Joe Landry’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, a version of the classic Frank Capra film adapted for radio, with live sound effects. Directed by the theater’s artistic director, David Drake, the show features a cast of 10 (in alphabetical order): Laura Cappello, Colin Delaney, Nicholas Dohr, Paul E. Halley, Beau Jackett, Alex Juchmejwich, Kenneth Lonergan, Racine Oxtoby, Julia Salinger, and Anne Stott.

    Performances are Thursday-Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Provincetown Theater at 238 Bradford St. Tickets can be purchased online at provincetowntheater.org or at the theater’s box office, weekdays 1-4 p.m. or call (508) 487-7487.

    Arts Listings

    CONCERTS
    Quartett Giocosa, “Macabre”: Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Moussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” and Saint-Saens’s “Danse Macabre,” Saturday, Nov. 16, 7 p.m. at Federated Church of Orleans, 162 Main St. $22.

    The Broughams, “Rock to Stop Homelessness,” Saturday, Nov. 16, 6 p.m. at Hog Island, 28 West Road, Orleans. $20 donation.

    Gregg Sullivan, Saturday, Nov. 16, 7:30 p.m. at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St. $15 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org.

    Peking and the Mystics, Saturday, Nov. 16, 3 p.m. at Wellfleet Public Library, 55 W. Main St. Free.

    OPEN MICS
    Kathleen Healy, featured act, Monday, Nov. 18, from 7 p.m. at Coffeehouse at the Mews, 429 Commercial St., Provincetown. $5 donation (cover).

    Feed Your Love Open Mic, Wednesday, Nov. 20, from 7 p.m. at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St. Free.

    PIANO BARS
    Jon Richardson, Friday-Saturday, Nov. 15-16, from 9 p.m. at Crown & Anchor Dive Bar, 247 Commercial St. in Provincetown. No cover.

    Tin Pan Alley, 269 Commercial St., Provincetown: Cassandra Marsh, Friday-Saturday, Nov. 15-16, 8 -11 p.m.; Gerald Goode, Sunday, Nov. 17, 7-10 p.m.; and Jim Brosseau & Friends, Monday, Nov. 18, 7 p.m. No cover.

    THEATER
    Something Rotten! book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, music and lyrics by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick: Tuesday-Thursday 7 p.m., Friday-Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. through Dec. 8 (no shows Nov. 26-28) at Cape Rep, 3299 Route 6A, Brewster. Tickets $35-$40 at caperep.org

    To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from the film by Aaron Sorkin: Thursday-Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday 2:30 p.m. through Nov. 23 at Eventide Arts, 713 Main St. (Route 6A), Dennis. Tickets $25 at eventidearts.org.

    DRAG
    Drag Karaoke with Dana Danzel at Governor Bradford, 312 Commercial St. in Provincetown: Friday-Saturday from 9:30 p.m. No cover.

    RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (on TV) With Thirsty Burlington and Bang: Thursday, Nov. 14, at 7 p.m. at Crown & Anchor Wave Bar, 247 Commercial St. in Provincetown. No cover.

     

     

    this week

    Arts Briefs & Listings for November 7 through 13

    exhibitions, music, theater, and other happenings on the Outer Cape this week

    By

    BRIEFS

    Sparky and Rhonda Rucker Perform at First Encounter

    Sparky and Rhonda Rucker — musicians, authors, and teachers — will perform a variety of folk songs, spirituals, and historical ballads on Saturday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.) at the First Encounter Coffeehouse at Chapel of the Pines, 220 Samoset Road in Eastham. Admission is $20 at the door.

    An Adam Graham painting
    The untitled work by Adam Graham pictured here is part of the series “Noir,” which will have an opening on Saturday. (Photo courtesy Adam Graham)

    Adam Graham’s ‘Noir’ at Seashore Point

    “Noir,” a show of new work by Provincetown artist Adam Graham, untitled black-and-white mixed media (charcoal, pastel, acrylic, and oil) paintings on paper, will have an opening reception on Saturday, Nov. 9, at 2 p.m. at the Residences at Seashore Point at 100 Alden St. in Provincetown. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

    Madama Butterfly Live From the Met

    The Metropolitan Opera’s exquisite production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, directed by the late Anthony Minghella and using Bunraku puppets, will be simulcast live in HD on Saturday, Nov. 9, at 12:55 p.m. at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater at 2357 Route 6. The performance will be conducted by Pier Giorgio Morandi, and features Hui He as the tragic Cio-Cio-San, Andrea Carè as Pinkerton, Elizabeth DeShong as Suzuki, and Paulo Szot as Sharpless. Tickets are $30, seniors $27, and students $12 at what.org.

    Provincetown Film Art Series Opens on Sunday

     The Provincetown Film Art Series, now in its 14th year, will have its Kickoff Celebration fund-raiser screening, of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), at 2 p.m. (1 p.m. reception) at Waters Edge Cinema at 237 Commercial St, 2nd floor of Whaler’s Wharf. The series, presented by the Provincetown Film Society and Provincetown Art Association and Museum, is curated and hosted by Howard Karren, arts editor of the Provincetown Independent.

    Bi-weekly screenings, which begin this Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m. with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, continue through May 13, 2020. Season passes for $185 (or $135 for PFS or PAAM members) can be purchased at paam.org or provincetownfilm.org. Individual tickets are $12, or $8 for PFS or PAAM members. Tickets to the Kickoff Celebration screening are $40.

    Dance on Film Series Comes to WHAT

    The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater will present Dance on Film, a series of screenings on four Fridays in November at 7 p.m., beginning on Nov. 8 with the 1948 classic The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a ballerina (Moira Shearer) and the shoes that possess her. The films will be introduced and followed by a short discussion led by Marc Strauss. Tickets are $12 at what.org.

    LISTINGS

    CONCERTS

    Ball at the Hall: A RAICES Benefit with music by Bittersweet, Sunday, Nov. 10, 7-10 p.m. at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St. Tickets $30 in advance at wellfleetpreservationhall.org, $35 at the door.

    Music Salon With Zoë Lewis, Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 1:30 p.m. at Provincetown Council on Aging, 2 Mayflower St. Free.

    Out Late With Diana Di Gioia, Saturday, Nov. 8, 3 p.m. at Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St. Free.

    Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, Saturday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m., at First Encounter Coffee House, 220 Samoset Road in Eastham. $20 at door.

    PIANO BARS

    Jon Richardson, Friday-Saturday, Nov. 8-9, 9 p.m. at the Crown & Anchor Dive Bar, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown: No cover.

    Tin Pan Alley, 269 Commercial St., Provincetown: Clare Hogan, Friday-Saturday, Nov. 8-9, 8-11 p.m.; Gerald Goode, Sunday, Nov. 10, 7-10 p.m.; Jim Brosseau & Friends, Monday, Nov. 11, 7-10 p.m. No cover.

    THEATER

     Crude: The Climate Change Musical, by Maureen Condon: Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. (last performance), at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre, 105 Division St. in Harwich. Tickets are $27, seniors $25, under 21 $15 at capecodtheatrecompany.org

    Mosquito Story Slam, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”: Saturday, Nov. 9, 7 p.m. at the Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St. $15.

    Something Rotten! book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, music and lyrics by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick: Opens Nov. 6. Shows Tuesdays-Thursdays 7 p.m., Friday-Saturday 8 p.m., Sundays 2 p.m. through Dec. 8 (no shows Nov. 26-28). Tickets $35-$40 at caperep.org

    OPERA

    Madama Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini, live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera, Saturday, Nov. 9, 12:55 p.m. at Wellfleet Actors Harbor Theater, 2357 Route 6. Tickets are $30, seniors $27, students $12 at what.org.

    DRAG

     Drag Karaoke at Governor Bradford, 312 Commercial St. in Provincetown: Thursday-Saturday at 9:30 p.m.: Dana Danzel. No cover

    RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (on TV) With Thirsty Burlington and Bang: Thursday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. at Crown & Anchor Wave Bar, 247 Commercial St. in Provincetown. No cover.

    music

    Harold López-Nussa’s Jazz Comes From the Heart of Havana

    His quartet will perform at Wellfleet Preservation Hall

    By

    Lopez-Nussa on the street in Havana
    Lopez-Nussa on the street in Havana

    When, in the 1930s and ’40s, Cuban musicians such as trumpeter Mario Bauzá and percussionist Chano Pozo introduced the American jazz world to Afro-Cuban rhythms, they kicked off a cultural cross-pollination that continues today with the Cuban jazz combo Harold López-Nussa Quartet.

    The group — López-Nussa on piano; his brother, Ruy López-Nussa, on drums and piano; Julio César González on bass; and Mayquel González on trumpet — will be appearing on Sunday at Wellfleet Preservation Hall in a late-afternoon concert produced by Payomet Performing Arts Center. The band has performed for Payomet in the past as a trio, but the inclusion of Mayquel González marks its first time touring the U.S. as a foursome. The Wellfleet show is just the second stop of a lengthy tour.

    “Mayquel and Julio are both my brothers from a different mother and father,” López-Nussa says in an email exchange from his home in Havana. “They are like family to me. We have been playing together for a long time, more than 10 years now.”

    As a trio, the band has recorded three albums. The most recent, “Un Día Cualquiera,” which loosely translates as “Just Another Day,” draws on López-Nussa’s classical piano training at the Instituto Superior de Arte, as well as the Afro-Cuban rhythms he heard in his Centro Habana neighborhood and the jazz influences he has absorbed from both sides of the Florida Straits.

    “My influences come mostly from my country, from my city, and the way that people live here in Havana. My family is a very musical family,” says López-Nussa, who is the son of jazz drummer Ruy López-Nussa and the late Mayra Torres, a respected piano teacher. “We are almost all musicians. Some of us are professionals, others just music lovers, but music is a huge part of who we are. And of course, I also have influences from great musicians and from musicians from my own generation. My friends from school still inspire me a lot.”

    He also cites, among many others, Cuban piano players Bebo Valdés, Frank Emilio Flynn, and Rubén González, and such American jazz pianists as Bill Evans, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock as influences. And then there’s the great Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés.

    “Chucho is one of my favorites,” López-Nussa says. “I’m still learning from him. He’s one of my heroes, and every time I hear Chucho playing, I enjoy him like a child. He was a big influence on my way to find my own voice.”

    For López-Nussa, jazz is about lifelong education. “I’m still learning how to play jazz,” he says. “I learn from recording, from the other great Cuban piano players, from my uncle Ernan López-Nussa, who is also a jazz pianist. I love to discover something new every day. Jazz is amazing.”

    A percussive pianist, López-Nussa brings rhythmic complexity to his playing. “Rhythm is very important in Cuban music,” he says. “Our country is rich in percussion. Rhythm is part of the life of the people, so this expression is inside.”

    Writing music, for him, is a solo endeavor. “It is a very personal process for me, and I enjoy making music in my small studio in Havana,” López-Nussa says. “But, of course, when I’m playing with other musicians, that is another thing. It’s much more exciting when we play for an audience. That is the final goal for me. I want them to love our music. This does not always happen, but when they really love it, it’s just magic. An audience could influence our music, of course. They can even change something every night. The relationship that we make with the audience is very important for me, and I always learn something from them.”

    López-Nussa says that it can be very difficult for Cuban musicians to obtain permission to tour in America. “Just getting the visa to work in the U.S. is something crazy,” he says. “I can write pages about that.”

    But that difficulty hasn’t tempted him to leave Cuba, which remains, for him, a source of inspiration. “The music that I’m listening to right now, as I answer your question, comes from my window — the building next door is under construction, and music is playing there very, very loudly,” López-Nussa says. “This is Havana: everyone makes his own party and wants you to be part of it. People are very friendly. Everyone says hello to you in the street. The children of my friends, they all are my nephews. Havana is a magic city for me. Even when politics and economics are sometimes a disaster, I just love living here.”

     

    [Factbox head] Cuban rhythms

    The event: The Harold López-Nussa Quartet in concert

    The time: Sunday, Nov. 3, at 4 p.m.

    The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.

    The cost: $23-$30 at payomet.org

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