An omnivore's delight

Funny how hearing what you don’t like clarifies what you do like.

In July, a bunch of us caravanned to Mineral Point for the most unexpected concert of the year — the great Brazilian singer Bebel Gilberto performing in Wisconsin’s forgotten southwest corner.

Hey, I’ve parachuted into New York to catch Gilberto at City Winery. And here she was 70 miles west of Madison, between gigs in Chicago and Minneapolis, playing an artsy small town of 10,000 at a jewel of a 1915 opera house.

The daughter of Brazilian musical royalty (guitarist João Gilberto is her father; the singer Miúcha her mother), Gilberto recorded three groundbreaking albums in the aughts. Bebel Gilberto, Tanto Tempo and Momento updated the classic bossa nova sound with a beguiling electronic sheen. It is summer music for the ages, still in seasonal rotation in my household.

But, oh my, Gilberto is a piece of work, as anyone can attest who saw her self-absorbed, lost-in-her-shit, show at Overture’s Capitol Theater in 2013. Management felt it necessary to give the audience compensatory free tickets. It was nonetheless one of my favorite shows of the year, because train wreck or not, Gilberto can be sublime.

But the Mineral Point show was tragic.

Once again Gilberto, backed by an impeccable acoustic guitarist, was in thrall to her whimsies and compulsions, talking way too much, drinking from two plastic cups (one of which may have held water), and just destroying the musical moment. And that’s what it comes down to for me. Thirteen years into writing this annual account of my musical adventures, I can tell you this: I want to be swept up by the music. I want to be lost to the moment. I want the communal experience of a great performance.

So skip the babble, Bebel.

In the course of 85 or so shows I saw in 2018, I found lots of moments of transcendence, revelation, pure joy, mindless boogie and dark insights into the crooked timber of human nature.

That’s to say, the music I like is more than notes. It’s more than entertainment. It’s also about casting a spell. Where time seems to be suspended. Where the faithful gather around the campfire to hear stories of danger and epic romance. Where the magic falls gently over us like a mist. I had those moments in 2018.

None more so than hearing John Luther Adams’ minimalist masterpiece Become Ocean performed on April 7 by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in the Basilica of St. Josaphat in Milwaukee. There was no more perfect match of music and setting than hearing the shimmering tidal-like movements in the glorious domed basilica. The music floated up and around and washed over the audience like the waves of an ocean before slowly receding. Lost in the experience? That was me.

Adams (no relation to minimalist icon John Adams) deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Become Ocean in 2014. The Alaska-based composer is mightily influenced by the experience of raw, overpowering nature. This is compelling yet humbling music that left me in a state of awe.

It was my favorite concert of the year.

For my tastes, the big music news in 2018 was the rise of the near east side jazz scene. Hanah Jon Taylor's Cafe Coda joined the North Street Cabaret and the Arts + Literature Laboratory in booking jazz, and suddenly a hotspot was born.

Hardly a week passed without gifted players from Milwaukee and Chicago taking an east side bandstand. A special shout-out goes out to the inaugural ALL Jazz Fest, which filled cozy Winnebago Street venues in early May with out-of-town talents Russ Johnson, Greg Ward, Mrs. Fun, Devin Drobka, Matt Blair and others.

But perhaps an even better measure of the prospering local scene was how busy and ambitious Madison jazzers were. Talents like Anders Svanoe, Michael Brenneis, Tony Barba, John Christensen, Rob Lundberg and Paul Dietrich all fed the jazz fire.

I hope the scene can sustain itself.

What follows — in crudely ascending order — are other notable concerts, great nights of music and assorted observations. They are a fan's notes (I am not a critic), and they include (because music fanatics are always up for a road trip) out-of-town shows within a few hours drive of Madison.

Let's dance!

Ginkgoa, McPike Park, July 15.

I’m the last person you’d expect to surrender to dance music. But Ginkgoa’s irresistible mix of club and retro-Paris swing from the 1930s totally captured me and a tent full of writhing Fete de Marquette celebrators. (I swayed guardedly and imperceptibly.) Vampish lead singer Nicolle Rochelle summoned the spirits behind a pounding electro beat knobbed by Antoine Catenet, mesmerizing the crowd as surely as Milwaukee Symphony conductor Yaniv Dinur did with Become Ocean. Worth noting: Musical transcendence and its emotional release come in many flavors.

His moment is now

Tony Barba, ALL Jazz Fest, Monona State Bank, May 4; Barba with Paul Dietrich and The New Breed, North Street Cabaret, June 5; with John Christensen Quartet, Cafe Coda, Sept. 28; with Michael Brenneis' Plutonium project, ALL, Nov. 17.

The tenor sax player, late of New York and Chicago and now of Madison, knocked me out more than once in 2018. During the ALL Jazz Fest, I was gobsmacked by his overpowering solo electronica performance. Barba was in deep Eno ambient mode. This music rumbled and roared as if it was made by the tectonic plates shifting beneath the continents. I closed my eyes and drifted into another world. (By the way, the bank building has marvelous acoustics for electronica. You might want to plan your next rave at the Monona State Bank.)

A month later I heard Barba in an entirety different mode — confidently playing the great Wayne Shorter charts from the ’60s in The New Breed’s tribute to the saxophonist/composer. His gigs with Christensen and Brenneis were just as solid. It added up to a great year for Barba.

The kids are alright

La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini.

University Opera with UW-Madison Symphony Orchestra conducted by Chad Hutchinson, Shannon Hall, Feb. 25.

I am an opera oaf. Stunningly ignorant but still deeply touched by the music, which allows me to blithely say that there is no better opera than La Bohème. Yes, the gorgeous arias steeped in tragic love are famous, but it’s the bohemian Paris setting that is instantly understandable — and relevant — to every generation of struggling young creatives.

In the space of a year I saw three wildly disparate stagings of this classic: the Paris Opera’s unbelievable (and silly) Lost In Space version, replete with an alien planet and a rocket ship; the newly designed Lyric Opera of Chicago mounting, where I paid big money for seats that required binoculars; and the UW-Madison student version, which touched my soul the most.

I’m a sap. No apologies. This is what happens when you get old. I tear up and cry at tragedy. And I do not lie when I tell you it was the University Opera's version of La Bohème that had me almost bawling when poor Mimi dies surrounded by her stricken friends and lover.

Sure, student performers are not comparable to the marquee singers I heard in Paris and Chicago. But what the students had is youth, passion and stars in their eyes, and that’s what Puccini’s opera is all about — until it ends in utter heartbreak.

A welcome throwback

Ken Page with pianist Greg Schweizer, Capitol Theater, June 7.

The Overture Center’s fine cabaret series (dinner with a singer/piano player hosted on the theater stage) has sadly drifted in recent years from featuring celebrators of the Great American Songbook to pop singers of much lighter fare. Ken Page, a veteran Broadway performer (Cats, Ain’t Misbehavin’, The Wiz) was a welcome throwback.

Steeped in backstage lore, Page told a personal story of struggle and success that perfectly set up the music of Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Stephen Sondheim and other worthies.

It was touching when Page paid homage to his Broadway friends who died of AIDS during the plague years. Great cabaret performers always summon moments of regret and loss into their shows. The ghost of mortality bonds artist and audience. That’s why cabaret is music for grownups.

Mission accomplished

Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' with a seven-piece band, Overture Hall, Aug. 8.

Just at the moment you think that the blues are in one of its cyclical death spirals, in walk two generations of bluesmen who totally kill. Big crowd, great band, dynamite songs, marvelous sound quality — this show hit on all cylinders.

Mahal, whose career dates to the ’60s, and Mo', who launched in the ’70s, had a great rapport. Both came up as blues revivalists, but what's sustained them is how they've moved the music forward. It's polished, got a groove, even an occasional Caribbean flavor. No surprise their collaboration TajMo won the 2018 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Great artists who inspire

Madison Symphony Orchestra conducted by John DeMain, with violinist Gil Shaham, Tchaikovsky's Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Jan. 29; and with pianist Emanuel Ax, Brahms' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra #2, Sept. 28, both at Overture Hall.

Classical music has more than its share of charismatic geniuses. Yo-Yo Ma tops my list. The heavens all but shine a celestial light on the cellist when he’s on stage. The big smiles and the joy he prompts in his fellow musicians tells you how well regarded he is. Violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Emanuel Ax are cut from similar cloth.

Their energy and spirit lifts everyone around them.

Both were confident virtuosi, and both were closely engaged with the orchestra. Highly animated, faces aglow, they watched the orchestral ensemble sections. These guys radiated energy and approval. It had to be a performance-enhancer for the orchestra. It certainly was for audience members like me. These were among my favorite MSO performances in 2018.

Honoring the elders

The Reunion Blues with Boz Scaggs, Ben Sidran & Tracy Nelson, Shannon Hall, June 15.

Ben Sidran’s 75th Birthday Salon for Secular Humanists, Arch Democrats and Free Thinkers, Majestic Theatre, Aug. 14.

Passing the Bass with Javon Jackson, Andrew Cyrille and others, Capitol Theater, Oct. 11.

Jazzmen Richard Davis, 88, and Ben Sidran, 75, are at different points in their goodbyes. Davis, the standout New York bassist who came to UW-Madison in 1977 to teach, was in the audience in a wheelchair at the well-planned Passing the Bass fete. Pianist Sidran, who stubbornly stayed rooted in Madison while touring globally, was a vibrant presence on stage. Madison jazz owes both a debt of gratitude.

Reunion Blues was the capstone to the successful ’60s reunion conference that Sidran spearheaded on campus. The concert with Nelson and Scaggs (Steve Miller was missing and unmentioned) showed that Madison’s "greatest generation" of musicians is still strong. Sidran remains the hipster with killer chops, Nelson still has a steeple-shaking voice, and Scaggs was the sly old dog with new tricks. He crushed on a couple of velvet-toned standards — “Salty Tears” and “How Long Has this Been Going On?” As for Sidran’s 75th birthday show, it was exuberant, in a word.

And Richard Davis? Indelible in my memory are the 2014 duets he performed on “Autumn Leaves” and “Motherless Child” with Chicago pianist Willie Pickens at the opening of Shannon Hall. Even then I sensed it was his good-bye performance.

Doubleheader!

Lise de la Salle, piano; and Christian-Pierre La Marca, cello; Shannon Hall, Dec. 8.

Johannes Wallmann Quartet with Wallmann, piano; Jamie Breiwick, trumpet; Devin Drobka, drums; Mitch Shiner, vibes. Cafe Coda, Dec. 8.

Boy, I love the acoustics of Shannon Hall. Sit up close like I do and you can hear the precise millisecond the bow scrapes the string. There was something so refreshing and cleansing in the cello and piano sound of Lise de la Salle and Christian-Pierre La Marca. It literally changed my breathing.

Their program — organized as music “from Paris to Moscow” — opened me to Faure for the first time. His “Elegie” was achingly beautiful. Then an intense Rachmaninoff sonata all but mesmerized me. Walking back home I just felt elevated, like I was cranking at a higher level. Drugs weren't even involved! Then I poked my head into Cafe Coda, and my evening got even better.

Johannes Wallmann, Richard Davis’ UW successor, was showcasing his new music with a band of top-notch Milwaukee players. Where was the bass player? But there wasn't any! Wallmann hit the sweet spot. This was complex, layered music — almost Swiss-like in its mechanics — but it still swung. And the solos of trumpeter Jamie Breiwick and vibraphonist Mitch Shine were sharp and bullet-like.

This was a big night for Madison music.

The singer steps forward

Charlie Hunter Trio, with Hunter, guitar; Dara Tucker, vocals; Damon Grant, percussion; The Backroom at Colectivo, Milwaukee, March 22.

Charlie Hunter Trio, with Hunter; Tucker; Derek Phillips, percussion; Stoughton Opera House, Oct. 5.

It was a good autumn for jazz guitar. The ever-inventive Julian Lage played the Stoughton Opera House on Oct. 4. Charlie Hunter showed up the next night. The much-honored Pat Metheny did a star turn at Shannon Hall on Oct. 14. But it was the dynamic Hunter who intrigued me the most.

Hunter performs with a novel eight-string guitar that allows him to simultaneously play a funky bass and a crystalline lead guitar. That’s mind blowing. But I also caught Hunter’s trio in the midst of a butterfly transformation, which was fascinating.

At the Milwaukee show, the music was mostly a jazzy improv between the flashy Hunter and his percussionist. I love that stuff. (Larry Coryell’s jams with Elvin Jones in the ’70 set the standard.) Tucker sang a few songs, including a gripping “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” It was a nice change of pace from the freewheeling jams.

By the Stoughton show, the band’s dynamic had changed. Tucker was front and center as the featured singer. Hunter still dazzled, but Tucker stood out as a torch singer with Broadway pipes. Her slow, sensual “Let The Good Times Roll” was a showstopper.

“The crooked timber of humanity”

Rodney Crowell with guitarist Jedd Hughes, Stoughton Opera House, April 20.

This show was mostly one dark tumultuous song after another. Long vanquished as one of the princes of Nashville’s Music Row, Crowell remains a towering poet of regret and betrayal. If you’re a guy of a certain age, his songs, gulp, cut awfully close.

On this night we didn't even get “Stars On The Water” or “Voila, An American Dream,” two of his early carefree anthems. But Crowell did sing “Reckless,” about a guy who dreams uneasily of being kissed by two girls in a hotel bar while his lover watches from a distant star. It’s a great song.

Crowell’s music is anchored, as a great philosopher once said, in an understanding that from “the crooked timber of humanity” nothing straight can be fashioned. Was it Johnny Cash or Immanuel Kant? I'm thinking it was The Man In Black, because once upon a time Crowell was his son-in-law.

As it happened, his ex, Rosanne Cash, played the Opera House a week earlier with her husband John Leventhal. Another great show. The two exs sometimes still collaborate. Life sure is complicated. Especially with love and its aftermath. Songwriters like Crowell build sturdy art from its twisted wood.

Well, okay

Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore with The Guilty Ones; Jon Langford backed by John Szymanski opening, Stoughton Opera House, Sept. 7.

Oh, how I looked forward to this show.

Alvin and Gilmore were touring to back their Americana collaboration Downey To Lubbock. Alvin is “the wild blues blaster from a sunburnt California town,” and Gilmore the “old flatlander from the great high plains,” as the title song says. Both are deep-dive chroniclers of forgotten America.

They are incredibly good, but not obvious matches. Gilmore is an ethereal west Texas bard with a pronounced gentleness and a great love of country classics. Alvin is the tough guy with a gruff whiskey-and-cigarettes voice and a killer reverb guitar. His sweeping survey of the American mythos in the album Eleven Eleven is magnificent. You must listen to it!

And then you have Langford, the Welsh punk rocker. Still a badass at age 61. Still an insurgent. Still a hero. He’s now a Chicago artist with a hard sardonic edge and a love of American roots music. “What's My Name?,’ his angry song about Muhammad Ali’s search for respect, was a high point.

So was Gilmore's earnest version of “Get Together,” The Youngbloods’ classic paean to an idealized countercultural harmony that never survived the ’60s. Not exactly a Dave Alvin kind of thing. But, hey, their mutual respect was obvious, which carried the night

King of drums

Broken Shadows with Dave King, drums; Reid Anderson, bass; Tim Berne and Chris Speed, saxophones; Arts+Literature Laboratory, June 17.

Dave King Trio with Matt Mitchell, piano, and Josh Granowski, bass; Trinity Lutheran Church, Dec. 16.

Dave King, one-third of the exalted Bad Plus, is a ferociously creative drummer. He reminds me of Roy Haynes. Always pushing the band, shifting the rhythms, darting down alleys, taking joy in the chase like a fox leading the hounds. King is the rare drummer who plays lead.

Here he was fronting two very different bands. Teammates Berne and Speed are great outside horn players who stop you in your tracks when they embrace the melody. Mitchell, a rising New York pianist, got the solo space in the trio. Where the bands overlapped was in their choice of challenging composers: Monk, Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill and others.

During Broken Shadows’ great set, I found myself scribbling: “50 years later, do we hear avant-garde music differently?” The answer for me is yes. Once it was music I found hard and difficult; now I get its beauty and logic. I suspect I’m not alone.

Beware! “Uncle Joe” is listening.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Emmanuel Krivine, with violinist Leonidas Kavakos, Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, March 9; and CSO conducted by Riccardo Muti, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, June 16; both Symphony Center, Chicago.

How much of it was in the music itself? How much of it was the power of suggestion from knowing its history? I dunno. All I can say is that Shostakovich’s music is haunted by the ghost of Stalin and his murderous ways. There might as well have been a huge Orwellian portrait of “'Uncle Joe” smiling over Symphony Center. In and out of political favor, Shostakovich surely trembled over writing his modernist works for fear of what the state’s vilification could bring.

That stark, lonely vantage point of the artist alone centered the opening of the violin concerto. Leonidas Kavakos was new to me, and a revelation. The cacophonous passages that followed seemed exactly like the “decadent” music Stalin’s enforcers would have howled over and denounced Shostakovich for. Risky, yes!

Three months later, his cello concerto summoned the same foreboding thoughts. It was another exhausting work. Somber, mournful, worrisome, lonesome — these passages sounded as if the weight of the world balanced on Yo-Yo Ma's shoulders. At other times, the piece was crazed and maniacal with Ma shredding in fury. Finished, he wipe the sweat from his brow as if he had been digging coal with a pickaxe. Like the violin concerto, this was defiant music conceived in the shadow of 20th century brutality.

The best jazz I heard

Lovano-Scofield, Turner Hall, Milwaukee, April 22.

Vijay Iyer Sextet, Lawrence Memorial Chapel, Appleton, May 11.

Road-tested New York-grade jazz groups like these two will pin your ears to the wall. Whew! I mean, these cats were monsters. They broke from the gate like quarter horses flying down the track, deftly navigated the most intricate arrangements, soloed with the precision of brain surgeons and then stopped on a dime with a nickel change.

Yeah, I'm talking both Iyer and Lovano-Scofield, though the bands are quite different. L-S was piano-less; Iyer is a keyboard phenom with stunning compositional chops. Scofield is a skittering, slashing guitarist with the name Miles Davis on his resume; Iyer had no guitarist, but did have three horns, including one of my fave trumpeters, Graham Haynes. What they shared were great roiling rhythm sections that kept both bands roaring all night long.

And Joe Lovano on tenor? A titan, of course. His fierce opening solo all but blew the doors off Turner Hall.

A spell is cast, a story is told.

Laurie Anderson, Shannon Hall, Feb. 9.

Decades ago, before the digital age changed everything, I remember how discombobulated I became hearing Laurie Anderson’s underground hit “O Superman” for the first time on WORT-FM’s morning show. The pulsating beeps, the altered voice, the banal phone message that transmogrifies into absurdity. Or was it profundity?

I was confused. Annoyed. Knocked for a loop. That's art for you.

To call Laurie Anderson a performance artist doesn’t quite capture it. She's more of a time traveler who dropped into late-empire America and became fascinated with the mindless small talk, cultural detritus and shared delusions of an unsettled people. This weird Trump thing — What does it mean? That was the focus of her latest cultural excavation. But I found something else revealing in this masterfully staged one-woman show.

The setting was dark and simple, with occasional seething Rothko-like color visuals, great lighting, impeccable sound bites and the ghost of her late partner, Lou Reed, drifting above it all. I hadn’t seen a show as perfectly conceived since Leonard Cohen's exquisite farewell concert at the Milwaukee Theatre in 2013.

Like Cohen, Laurie Anderson cast a spell. I leaned into it.

She told us “a story about a story.” About her normal Midwestern upbringing abruptly ending when she was 12 and took an ill-fated backflip off a diving board that broke her back. A long hospitalization and two years with a heavy back brace followed. A doctor warned her she would never walk again. He was wrong.

Imagine what this did to Anderson’s internal world as she lay alone in a hospital bed!

This was the story Anderson told people when they asked about her formative experiences. She told it time and again over the years until she realized she had blocked out a key element of her hospital stay: “The heavy smell of medicine. The smell of burnt skin. How afraid I was. And the way some of the beds would be empty in the morning.”

Anderson’s take-away was every bit as arresting as “O Superman” had been for me in the early ’80s. You shape your story. You give it meaning. “And every time you tell it, you forget it more.”

Cut to darkness.