THIS WEEKEND IN OMAHA: 04.11.14

It can’t be easy being in a family where everybody seems to be famous. There is Ellis Marsalis, Jr., who quietly, from the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, became the educator for an entire generation of jazz musicians, including Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Jr., and  Nicholas Payton. Ellis literally fathered four musicians as well. There’s trumpeter Wynton, who has managed nine Grammys in his career. There is saxophonist Branford, whose career included playing on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and leading the band on the Tonight Show. There’s drummer Jason, an NEA Jazz Master award-winner.

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.

THIS WEEKEND IN OMAHA: 04.04.14

I used to like to joke that my goal was to be a professional basketball player, and that I hoped to play for the Washington Generals. This joke never went anywhere, so I removed it from my repertory, but now seems like a good time to explain myself.

The Washington Generals formed in 1952, since then have only managed to win six games. They have lost 13,000 times and counting. As a bookish art critic with a diet that consists almost entirely of gruel, if I have a shot at playing for any professional team, it is for the Generals.

They are, of course, the foil to the Harlem Globetrotters, who will be performing their signature comedy athletics this Saturday at CenturyLink Center. And the Generals might not be the best place to even start a discussion about the Globetrotters – I could easily wax eloquent for 1,000 words about their theme song, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the extraordinary version used by the sports team by the unfairly obscure Brother Bones.

But by now you must have noticed that I can wax eloquent about just about anything for 1,000 words. Since I mentioned a jazz standard, let’s move on to a related topic.

Some are content to listen, but for those of you inspired by great music to make some of your own, there is a workshop in songwriting starting on Saturday at the 402 Arts Collective. The three-part class, called “Find Your Voice: Songwriting Series,” is led by Kait Berreckman. Educated at the Berklee School of Music, Berreckman’s own music, or at least what I have heard of it on YouTube, pairs intimate, confessional lyrics with exquisite, jazz- and country-tinted melodies; it’s frequently exquisite.

I’m a bit surprised to discover improv troupe TheWeisenheimers are still about, only because they've been around so long, and improv teams typically have the lifespan of a garage rock band. I attempted to produce a series of late-night performances by them at the Blue Barn Theatre more than a decade ago, which, due to miscommunication that I still feel badly about, fell apart. I later worked with one of the former Weisenheimers, and he seemed sanguine about the whole affair, but still. You want to support local artists, and sometimes things go pear shaped.

They’re at the Pizza Shoppe Collective on Saturday, still doing the sort of short-form improv they were doing when I first met them – it’s the sort of improvised games that “Who’s Line Is It Anyway” made famous, and is about the most inherently crowd-pleasing sort of improv comedy out there. It’s a style that benefits from a quick wit and a sudden sense of the absurd, which I recall the troupe having in spades.

I still know one of the performers, in the way everyone in the local theater scene sort of knows each other. Theresa Sindelar is a mainstay of the local acting community, and is something of a Playhouse superstar, having turned in a series of brash, comically outrageous performances on their stage in the past few years. She possesses a certain performative fearlessness, which is always welcome in theater but absolutely essential in comedy, and should be on full display this weekend.

WAYNE SHORTER

Sometimes it seems like everyone wants to tell me jazz is dead. People have stopped ending phone conversations with “goodbye” and instead quickly mutter “jazz is dead” and then hang up. Greeters at stores welcome me with a booming cry of “Jazz is dead!” Email spammers promise fortunes of African cash, all for me, if I only transfer them some money to assist in the movement of Krugerrands and, oh, by the way, jazz is dead.

Jazz isn’t dead. What dies? People die, but the things they make live on. Culture has its moment, and then seems to fade, and then suddenly arrives again, sometimes having gone underground and armed itself. The time of the hobo came and went, but there is still a hobo convention in Iowa and people still carve nickels as creative tramps once did. And so it goes, working its way back in time. Everything that had its moment still has its adherents, and will rise again. There are musicians making early classical music on antique instruments. There are poets writing in Old English. There are still painters whose primary media are earth pigments and cave walls.

Jazz is not dead, because Wayne Shorter is not dead. He is 80, or 80-something, and still tours and still puts out albums. He is a link to the past, but he is also proof that the past is still with us, still doing its thing, still biding its time until it can become the present again. Jazz will always be with us, singing old stories in our ears, and telling new stories to those who want to hear it, and one day, once again, there will be many who want those stories.

In the meanwhile, there are enough who still care to bring Wayne Shorter to Omaha and have him play at the Holland Center, one of Omaha’s premiere venues. And that is as it should be, and those of you who know Shorter already know this. His resume is too long to completely summarize, but it involves defining roles in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, and Weather Report, which is sort of like having played with Elvis, and then The Beatles, and then Led Zepplin.

Shorter is a man with a saxophone, which, for a time, coupled with the trumpet, were the instruments of jazz’s triumph. Jazz had been America’s pop music, but, after World War Two, it became the language of America’s introspection. Combos became small and wildly adventurous, and so you have the blues-driven hard bop of the Jazz Messengers, which dug deep into the African and rural American roots of jazz while still exploring the stratospheric possibilities of composition and orchestration. Shorter wrote some of the medium’s defining songs, such as “Lester Left Town," named after saxophone great Lester Young. There was Shorter, looking back at one of jazz’s legends while looking forward to the medium's possibilities. The song replaced Young’s unhurried sweetness of melody with startling chromatic runs, but maintained the musician’s swinging precision.

Jazz was ravenous then. There were no sounds that Miles Davis wouldn’t explore, and Shorter became one of his primary composers. There was “Nefertiti,” as an example, a soaring acoustic composition that moves at a funereal pace, consisting of an ambiguous melody that repeats itself for almost eight minutes as the rhythm section improvises wildly underneath. That was Shorter’s composition, dating to 1967.

And then, in the following year, Davis went electric with long, rock-inspired compositions. The album was called “Miles in the Sky,” a direct nod to The Beatles, and included a song called “Paraphernalia.” The song featured an angular, groovy guitar riff and ratatat drums underneath spacey horns, and that was Shorter too. It all culminated in 1970’s “Bitches Brew,” an album that magnificently combined Davis’ relentless ingenuity in arrangement (the band had two bassists, two to three drummers, two to three electric piano players, all playing simultaneously) with the sonic possibilities developed by rock and roll, especially the wild psychedelia of Jimmy Hendrix. Shorter was part of it, and wrote the final track on the album, ‘Sanctuary,” a mellow, soulful song that somehow seems to be all edges, the finish to the album that created jazz fusion and is one of its finest examples.

And then there was Weather Report, which everybody insisted on calling fusion except the members of the band itself. For 16 years, Weather Report explored a lot of territory on the musical map of the world, the band more or less continually improvising at every moment around songs that referenced Afro-Cuban sounds, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop, and big band. Shorter was there, often in the background, stepping in with his saxophone to add a needed harmony here, a improvised hook there. The band defined the restlessness of jazz in the 70s, its sense of being both unmoored in time and very much of its era. (Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass playing remains one of the sounds that best defines the 70s.) It was an era in which jazz seemed to stop declaring itself, and claiming that it could be anything, and instead seemed as though it was questioning itself, and asking “what am I?”

It’s a question the form is still asking, and Shorter is still there, adding nuance to the question and providing his own answers. He put out an album just last year, “Without a Net,” which All About Jazz described as “devoid of nostalgia and full of improvisational freedom.” These are not the words you use to describe a dead genre whose practitioners are living waxworks, recreating the sounds of a receding past. These are the words you use to describe a still-dynamic genre whose possibilities are only limited by the fact that, at the moment, it is slightly out of favor.

That moment will pass, and jazz will return. One hopes that Shorter is there for that moment as well.

Wayne Shorter appears at the Holland Center on April 2; go to Omaha Performing Arts for more information.

THE FAINT: DOOM ABUSE

I have a new wave story to tell. Years ago, when Peter Gabriel’s “So” came out, a song from it caught my mother’s ear. We were driving somewhere, and it was on the radio, and she asked “Is this Peter Gabriel?” And then she said, “We used to live by him.” 

Many years ago, my family lived in Bath, a ceremonial county of Somerset in Southwest England. Properly, we lived in Swainswick, a civil parish that is part of the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority, and I will demur from any more of these details, because the more you discuss the English countryside, the more Mr. Toad and Mr. Badger it all becomes. Let’s just say that I lived on the sort of little farm you see in movies, and my brother constantly fell in nettle patches, and there was a large hill out my back window that had a tiny little village on it called Woolley, and Woolley had an annual fair with hobby horses and Punch costumes and morris dancers.

So it was that sort of a place, and not the kind of place you expect to discover Peter Gabriel lived, as he was then making densely-layered, synthesizer-based art pop with a distinct international influence. Instead, you sort of expected to move a toadstood and find a bearded man in a newsboy cap playing a hurdy gurdy.

But there he was, in Woolley, and the hill it was on was Solsbury Hill, which became one of his songs. My mother was friends with his then-wife, who organized the Woolley festival, and, as it turned out, I went to a little 12th century church once in a while with his daughters, and it’s all turning Toad and Badger again. 

The reason I mention this is because I am writing about The Faint’s new album, “Doom Abuse.” I know everybody mentions new wave when discussing The Faint, and I know it must be tiring for them, although they have let on that they do listen to a lot of new wave, but let me explain why I once again am raising the dreaded specter of a moribund genre to discuss a contemporary band.

I was a new waver when I was in high school, and, in my heart’s private chambers, I still am. I had skinny ties, high tops, and that hairstyle that consists of longs bangs that drape across the eyes as though all the bleaching and all the dry look mousse had finally exhausted it. I was then a Minnesotan, and new wave appealed to me for a few reasons. Firstly, it had an art school worldliness to it, with its hits tackling such international subjects as The Metro, commissars, luftballoons, and the pop music of New York, London, Brussels, Munich. Secondly, especially with synthpop, it seemed very science fiction. I may have been a Minneapolitan, and, for a while, when I was very young, an English country boy, but as a fan of new wave, I was a citizen of the world, and it was the world of the future. 

As it turns out, Peter Gabriel’s Bath years aren’t unique. Tears for Fears also hailed from Bath, and, in fact, would borrow instruments from Gabriel. Aztec Camera came from suburban East Kilbride in Scotland. Bauhaus came from Northampton, 70 miles northwest of London. The Cure came from Crawley. Depeche Mode came from Basildon. Echo and the Bunnyman were Liverpoodlian. And on it goes like that, through the alphabet: Q-Feel from Southampton, Soft Cell from Leeds, XTC from Swindon, Yazoo from Basildon. All these cosmopolitan spacemen roaming the streets of tomorrow’s international cities hailed from farm towns, fishing villages, and coal mining centers. New wave was not an exclusively rural phenomenon, but it was largely a rural phenomenon, and perhaps that’s why it appealed to a boy who lived in a midwestern mill town, and perhaps that why it still has resonance in a midwestern train terminus and meat packing center.

Whenever I read about The Faint, they are asked about Omaha, perhaps with the same surprise that I felt in learning that Peter Gabriel lived on the same nettle patch that my brother used to fall into. And nobody really seems to know what to say about this once boom town, this dimmed and tarnished jewel of the Missouri, except that it’s cheap to live here and there’s a lot more going on than you might expect. But it’s the perfect place to be a new waver, or, at least, to be part of a band inspired by new wave. Because you can live anywhere and, if you have a synth guitar and enough mousse, you too can be a citizen of the future world, and the truth is, if you move aside a toadstool, you’ll find a new wave band.

Anyway, I have listed to The Faint’s new album a half dozen times in the past few days, and it’s terrific. It’s the first in a half-dozen years, years the band describes as ones in which they were rediscovering the joy of being a band. They set out to make this album fast and sloppy, so they wouldn’t get bogged down in the humdrum of precision production. They wanted to catch their music at the moment they discovered it, and they wanted to plug in sounds they discovered at the moment they were still excited by them. At least, that’s the sense I get from the few interviews and press statements they have put out about the album.

I love it. I love that their sense of fun involved really noisy machine sounds. I love that the album is repeatedly punctuated by guitar riffs that sound like somebody threw Prince down a well and the pelted him with garbage. I love that so many of the songs are about unbalanced psychological states, and that the sounds that excited them sometimes resemble the harmony parts from Styx’s “Mr. Roboto.” It’s a breakneck pile-on of an album, and it’s the product of people who have an awful lot of pop craftsmanship, and so even when they’re losing their minds, it comes out as hooks and bridges and intros and middle-eights. This is The Faint’s idea of fun, and it is my idea of fun, and I’m ready to break out the skinny tie again, put it around my neck, and then, inspired by the mania of this album, set it on fire. 

It’s great stuff, and it’s no surprise it comes from Omaha. Like Sussex, like Essex, like Wessex, like Devon and Dorset before us, we’re more than capable of strapping on our synthesizers and climbing through dirty old windows into a Metro of our mind. We may need it more, and we do it well.

THE LODGER

It is almost impossible to imagine Hitchcock before he became Hitchcock, back when he was the son of a Leytonstone greengrocer, just setting out to make his mark on the world. He had worked as an ad designer and written a few witty short stories. He was obsessed with German expressionistic cinema; when he began making films, this fact placed him at odds with his producer. The producer then tried to sabotage his career. It must all have been hideously frustrating, that moment when something is starting to come together and forces are conspiring to prevent it.

And we have that moment on film. It's from 1927 and is called "The Lodger," and bears the wonderful subtitle "A Story of London Fog." Everybody, once upon a time including Hitch, likes to point it out as the moment of Hitchcock's arrival, the moment he found his voice.

There have been hints of it here in Omaha throughout the past two months, thanks to Film Stream's presentation of BFI's restored versions of nine silent films by Hitchcock. His keen humor has been present, as well as his brilliance at framing a scene. He didn't really like some of these films -- "Champagne," for instance, he claimed had no story, and is, at best, a droll comedy of wild and privileged youth. But story or not, the film introduces a character with a shot that would make Wes Anderson simply fume with jealousy, as a young heiress deliberately crashes her father's plane into the ocean to figuratively crash a party on a cruise ship. The moment she steps out of the plane, dressed in vintage flying gear, her face black with soot, and then peels that off to reveal a party dress -- well, nothing in the film could live up to that moment. Nothing in life could.

And there was also "Blackmail," which Hitchcock saturated in expressionistic ambiguity. Everyone was sort of a heel in that one, but everyone also managed to be a flamboyant victim. There was a perfectly wonderful chase in the British Museum, but the most Hitchcockian element was that everyone went a little mad in the film; we all go a little mad sometimes.

But "The Lodger" was the one, it was the the moment when all Hitchcock's inchoate talent came together, and I shan't detail the many ways the films set the framework for Hitchcock's career. Others have investigated the blonde victims, the visual inventiveness, the director's cameo (his first!), the hints of impropriety and female pulchritude, and other cinematic ideas that would blossom into obsessions and then genius in Hitchcock's hands.

Instead, I want to mention one of the more hidden pleasures of the film -- the way Hitchcock pushed at the very limits of what was then possible in film. "The Lodger" was based on a rather unexceptional novel, but with a clever conceit: What if you realized you might be living with Jack the Ripper? And that might have been the basis for a perfectly satisfying thriller, which is what his studio wanted.

But Hitchcock wanted a film that spoke the language of cinema, and found the edges of the new medium. This is a silent film in which sound is of primary importance -- it opens with a scream, and most of the film's tangled narrative comes from people listening to the sorts of things other people do in secret. Hitchcock had to find a way to represent sound in a medium that could not yet reproduce it, and so he visualized it. Characters pull their hair away from their ears to hear better, toes splash silently in a bathtub as a possible murderer listens outside, and a cuckoo clock noiselessly chimes the hour when a psychopath may have crept out to slash a woman. Most famously, a chandelier rocks in its fixture as a man in a room upstairs paces obsessively, and the ceiling above suddenly become clear, revealing his feet as he marches fretfully in place.

This is also a film of great wit, and it is hidden in the mis en scene. Everything is all a little overboard -- our titular lodger may be a killer of blondes, and, when he is given his room, he discovers it is filled with portraits of blonde women. Down the street, a music hall plays a revue called "Golden Curls," whose lit marquee seems visible from every window, and whose showgirls wear enormous wigs of blonde ringlets. It's as though the entirety of London is a fair-haired buffet laid out for a monster.

The film makes relentless use of this sort of visual punning, especially delighting in triangles, which is the mark of the murderer. But a triangle also represents the relationship between murderer, police, and victim. And this may be the exact relationship between the lodger, the cop hunting him, and the cop 's girlfriend, who has a yen for the lodger. And did I mention that they live in the same rooming house? They do -- in another example of Hitch's witty exaggeration, it is a three-story rooming house with no tenants but for the lodger, the landlords, and their golden-tressed daughter, whose cop boyfriend is always present.

But there is one final way Hitch presses the boundaries of filmmaking, and it was something he did repeatedly. Hitchcock was given songwriter and matinee idol Ivor Novello as his lead, and it was an open secret that Novello was gay. He had a public rivalry with Noel Coward, he lived with his actor lover for three decades, and he is rumored to have slept with Winston Churchill once, which makes his possibly the gayest man in modern English history.

Hitchcock first brings Novello, as the lodger, into the film is a moment borrowed from Murnau -- Novello appears at the door, shrouded in shadow, swathed in elegant clothes, dapper chapeau, and a scarf over his face, looking like some sort of expressionistic vision of a high society anarchist. But from that point on, Hitchcock let Novello camp it up, although perhaps "camp" is the wrong word. The frankly gorgeous Novello lurks around, eyes rimmed in kohl, like a Charles Ludlam villain, sometimes seeming like a vampire, sometimes like an insect, and sometimes like a schoolboy who is very put out. He is deliberately eccentric, knowingly so, theatrically so, and it was the first of many times Hitchcock would cast gay actors or encourage actors to perform in a way that seems coded gay.

I won't speculate about Hitchcock's sexuality -- there's plenty of that about, if you want to investigate further -- but I would argue that he occasionally demonstrated what now feels like a queer sensibility. Although his gayest characters, such as Bruno in "Strangers on a Train," were troubled and troubling, there was a sly comic hysteria and droll intelligence to Hitchcock's storytelling that feels rooted in the gay underworld of the London theater scene. This was the same scene that produced Ivor Novello and which frequently acted as a backdrop to Hitchcock's silent films. By introducing these elements into "The Lodger," Hitchcock was straining at another boundary of early film-making, introducing another language into the world of cinema.

The film climaxes with a mob scene. Given the film's deliberate ambiguities, its misdirections and compounding emotional violence (mostly caused by gossips speculating on what happens in the private lives of men), coupled with Novello's deliberately arch performance -- well, to contemporary eyes, it feels like Hitchcock has staged a hate crime. This may not have been his intention, but it nonetheless makes the climax to "The Lodger" horrifyingly contemporary.

These Film Streams presentations have had a different musical group performing live with the film each week, and it has been one of the great added pleasures of the series. Recently "Blackmail" was scored by an avant garde collective, and it highlighted the real eccentric artistry of the film. "The Lodger" will be scored by Omaha musician Simon Joyner and a group that call themselves The Ghost Collective.

Many years ago, I infrequently performed on the same bill as Joyner when I was playing ukulele at coffee shops around town, being typically and preposterously twee, and Joyner was then, as now, an exceptional local talent. His music has frequently explored the most fragile and intimate human moments, often making use of just an acoustic guitar and his distinctive voice, and I will be curious to see what he comes up with for this film. It should be just right -- whatever wit Hitchcock brought to "The Lodger," it is nonetheless also about how fraught intimacy can be; how closeness can breed misunderstanding, and misunderstanding can lead to violence. This is precisely the sort of thing that Joyner has written songs about in the past.

"The Lodger" screens Thursday night at Film Streams.