And then there is trombonist Delfeayo, who perhaps followed
his father’s lead most closely, and will be at the Holland Center
on Saturday, thanks to Omaha Performing Arts. Delfeayo has done a lot of work
as an educator, cofounding the Uptown Music Theatre in New Orleans. He’s also a producer who has had
an enormous amount of influence in the way contemporary jazz is recorded, with
its focus on the sounds of acoustic instruments.
This Saturday will see the opportunity to see Delfeayo as a
performer and,
unsurprisingly, he is superlative. He doesn’t record often, with his last album
dating back to 2011, but it’s a good sampling of what he is capable of. Called
“Sweet Thunder: Duke and Shak,”
it was a new recording of music composed by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn,
inspired by William Shakespeare. Delfeayo interpretation both respected the
original work – he recorded with an octet, as Duke did – but added elements of New Orleans hot jazz to
Ellington’s stately swing.
I’ve never met Delfeayo. I met Branford briefly in Minneapolis. I wandered
by a church, and there he was, inside, speaking about the importance of
studying civics in school. I mention this by way of segue, and I realize it is
an odd one, but segues are never fun when they are invisible.
And so, here it is, the segue: I also have never seen “War
Horse,” now at the Orpheum, but I once took a class in puppeteering from the people who created the
titular horse. They are the Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa, and they were at the Walker Art
Center with a show called
“Zeno at 4 a.m.” This was based on writing by Italian author Italo Svevo, and
consisted of a distressed puppet in a bad bedevilied by troublesome dreams, or
perhaps hallucinations, that the troupe projected behind him. These were
abstract and nightmarish objects engaged in confounding motion, and were
created from scissors and bottles and other things you might find in a rubbish
bin; these were manipulated on a nearby table and filmed lived, forming the
projection.
I’ve also seen Handspring’s production of “Woyzeck on the Highveld,” which set Georg Büchner’s tragic play in South Africa, acted out by
appropriately mournful seeming puppets. So they have a particular talent in
taking literary works and bringing them to life with objects, and it’s no
wonder they were tagged to create the life-sized horse puppet that stars in
this adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel. The story tells of a
workhorse purchased to work on the front lines during World War II, perhaps
humanity’s ghastliest war, and the horse witnesses the worst of it.
This is the sort of thing that puppetry is
especially good at. The play’s horse, Joey, is a metonym for the human
experience of war. He must be our witness, and yet be enough of a blank for us
to project our own experiences onto him. And yet, still, he must be a
believable horse, despite visibly being made of steel, leather, and
aircraft cables and having live puppeteers visible onstage operating them.
From the sound of things, they accomplished this task
admirably. I base this in part on reviews for the show, which have burst with
praise, and from the throngs of playgoers I see downtown emerging from the
play, who look gutted. Usually people don’t have much of an emotional reaction
to aircraft cable, much less sobbing at the fictional adventures forced on the
cable. Sometimes puppetry is so very like magic it’s indistinguishable.
It’s actually a bit too much to take in all it once, which
is how I like my art. I am a notoriously fast gallery attendee, speeding
through with just a darting glance at each piece of art. It’s usually because I
am making a bee line for the wine table, and I typically return to investigate
any art that intrigued me.
But I never feel this is the way to get to know a piece of
art. Admittedly, unless the artists goes for especially complicated
composition, there’s often not a lot of immediate information to get from, say,
a painting – years ago I interviewed Steve Joy, then the curator for the Bemis Center,
and he opined that painting is a shallow medium. I don’t know that it always
is, but it can be, and so sometimes it seems like a glance is enough.
But I am a lifetime museumgoer and have my own art
collection, and if there is one thing I have repeatedly found, it’s that seeing
a piece of art for years, especially by living with it, changes your experience
of the art dramatically. Favorite pieces fade, while works that seemed oblique
or awful become comforting and prized. And it’s not just that we change over
time, and so our tastes about art change.
It’s that art changes us. It may be a shallow medium, but a
shallow culture of Clostridium botulinum can still produce enough botulism to
do you in. And it is often the art that seemed least interesting or most
alienating that carries with it the strongest poison. Stare it for an hour and you
might find youself liking what you previously hated. Stare at it for a week and
it may change the way you think about art. Stare at it for years and it might
change who you are.
I’ve had it happen to me. When I first saw Gedi Sibony’s
art, I was a rooster in a top hat who people through coins at to dance on a hot
plate. Look at me now.
The Joslyn
Museum is offering a
similar opportunity to experience the long-term effects of art this Saturday,
part of a national movement called “Slow Art Day.” The setup is simple: Look at
five or more pieces of art for 10 minutes or more, and then discuss. It really
doesn’t seem like that much of a challenge, but 10 minutes can have its effect.
I expect when people meet to discuss, the art will have had its effect.
I expect they will be gutted.
That last sentence was something we call a “button” in the
writing game – just a little phrase that ties everything together and makes a
piece of writing feel like it’s deliberate and crafted, rather than a sort of
typed form of babbling. Usually you don’t highlight the button, but leave it
there without comment and congratulate yourself on once again using the tricks
of writing to punch up your column.
But I say what’s the fun of a button if it’s invisible.
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